Dark Tales: 13 New Authors, One Twisted Anthology

by Vincent V. Cava (Editor)

  At times, I could have sworn I smelled the homeless man’s nauseating aroma as I ambled around the campus. I feared he would be waiting for me every time I turned a corner, shouting accusations at the top of his lungs like he had that night at the bus stop. To anyone watching, I must have looked like quite the nut, peering over my shoulder every ten feet or so, keeping an eye out for the invisible boogeyman.

  Then there were the things that weren’t in my head. Over the course of the day, I would catch people giving me the most judgmental, scornful looks – two girls whispering to each other and pointing in my direction as I walked by, a professor shaking his head when I turned in my test, even the barista in the coffee shop turning her nose up at me when I stopped in to get a mid afternoon pick-me-up. I was beginning to feel the paranoia seeping in. The way everyone was glaring at me, it was as if they knew what I had done to Donald.

  I ducked into the library to get away from the judgmental sneers and disapproving stares. I needed a quiet place to think and clear my head, but the coffee I guzzled down hadn’t given me the caffeine boost I was looking for and I quickly found myself nodding off at a desk in the computer lab once I settled in. My nap was far from restful though. The vividness of my nightmare saw to that.

  The warmth and safety of the library faded away only to be replaced by the last place on Earth I wanted to be. I barely had time to realize I was back at the lake again, treading along the surface of the icy water I had dumped my brother in when I felt myself begin to sink. I tried to swim, but no matter how hard I kicked and paddled I couldn’t free myself from the water’s pull. It began to envelope me, slowly but surely swallowing my body whole. I took one last desperate gasp of air as my head submerged under the surface of the lake.

  Ten feet under water and sinking fast, a sense of hopelessness began to overwhelm me. I stopped trying to fight my way to the surface.

  When I reached forty feet, I could feel the pressure in my ears and behind my eyes start to build. It felt like my head was being crushed in a vice.

  One hundred feet and plunging deeper, my lungs felt as though they were going to burst. No longer able to stand the pain, I opened my mouth to scream and felt the lake rush down my throat just as it had when I dove into the water the night I killed Donald.

  Deeper I descended into the darkness, suffering, drowning, a victim of the water’s merciless onslaught when I saw something waiting for me at the lakebed. Dread shot through my already agonizing body when I recognized what I was being pulled towards.

  My brother’s bloated corpse was sitting at the bottom of the lake – his body hanging halfway out of the tarp I had rolled him in. Days of water damage had turned his skin a sickening greenish white. The fish had reached him by then and a few of them were still feeding on the exposed flesh of his face as I touched down to the lake’s floor. His eyeballs were gone. They’re always the first to be eaten; it’s the easiest part of the body for the fish to digest. I read that somewhere once. We were now face to eyeless, partially consumed face. To my horror, his puffy swollen lips began to slowly move. He was speaking to me and somehow under hundreds of feet of unforgiving, freezing cold water I could hear him.

  “They’re not dead,” he said to me in a wheezy croaking voice. It reminded me just how hard I had squeezed his throat that night. “You can’t get rid of them.” He stared at me through the empty sockets of his face with the same disdain that I had once viewed him with. “They want to make you like me.”

  I wanted to respond, but the freezing water gagging and choking me prevented any sort of retort. A smile crossed his decaying, half-eaten face and I could tell that he was pleased by this. I’d even go as far as to say that he was laughing at my plight.

  “You’ll be theirs,” he said. “You’ll be theirs or they’ll ruin you!”

  A deep low hiss began to flood my ears. If the lake hadn’t already collapsed my lungs I would have been shrieking at the top of them. The hiss grew louder and louder as my brother began to open his mouth. Once more the noise had become deafening. Donald’s mouth had stretched far too wide (as if he had unhinged his jaw) making his horrible face even harder to look at.

  Then in an instant, I was back in the library – my cheek flush against the desk I had fallen asleep on. I had woken up. It took a second for reality to settle in. I took a few hurried gasps, trying to remember what breathing felt like. The dream had felt so real. Once I got my bearings back I sat and reflected on it for a while. Donald’s words had sent a chill down my spine.

  They want to make you like me. He had told me. You’ll be theirs or they’ll ruin you!

  I looked up. The librarian, a pretty undergrad, was scowling at me from behind her desk. Everyone I was coming in contact with seemed to hate me. There was only one possibility; it had to be the bugs! I found myself contemplating the plausibility of that idea. Sure it was crazy, but what other reason could there have possibly been for my recent status as a social pariah? After all, the little bastards had demonstrated that they had the ability to communicate. Perhaps they were talking to others, revealing to them my dirty secret. Maybe that’s what they meant when they said they would ruin me.

  My brother was most likely right. There was no way some stupid fogger I purchased at the hardware store was going to kill off those things. They had some sort of (I know it sounds nuts) supernatural abilities that extended way beyond resistance to insecticides. Their motives had become clear to me: either I gave into their whims, or they were going to rat me out. A feeling of desperation started to brew inside me. I needed exterminate them once and for all.

  ***

  My fears were confirmed when I heard the hiss coming from my apartment before I had even made it halfway down the hall. The Big Bug Bomb had performed about as well as a quadriplegic in an Ironman competition. It didn’t matter. They might have been able to fend off the noxious fumes of the fogger, but I had a new plan. If the pesticide didn’t work, then maybe fire would do the trick. In my back pocket was a case of matches, in my right hand was a can full of gasoline, and in my mind was the unrelenting desire to finally rid myself of those little black bugs.

  They weren’t hard to find when I opened the door. The little buggers were everywhere! I locked the door behind me and quickly began splashing the walls of the living room with petrol. Again that terrible hiss started to buzz through the apartment and I knew that the bugs were assembling – preparing for war. Unlike before though, I found the sound encouraging. The bug bomb didn’t even frighten them enough to warrant a reaction. The fact that they were stirring made me think that I had them on the ropes a little bit. I knew that I needed to work fast. It would be important to hit every room so the bugs wouldn’t have a place to run to once I set the apartment ablaze. For once they were afraid and I was reveling in it.

  “You like that you little bastards!” I shouted. “I’ll teach you to snitch on me!”

  After I finished in the living room I ran to the kitchen, where those awful things had first bitten me – the hiss followed close behind. Once more the appalling sound assaulting my ears began to form words.

  “You can’t do this! You’re ours now!” I ignored their threats and continued to paint the walls and counter with gas. “Stop this!” the hiss commanded. I started to laugh out loud.

  The bathroom was next. By the time I got in there, bugs had begun seeping out of the showerhead, trickling from the sink, even crawling their way up from the drains. I ran the faucets in an effort to drown as many of them as possible. Somehow I kept my composure long enough to spill some gasoline on the wall next to the toilet.

  “STOP IT, STOP IT, STOP IT!” the nasty things screamed out at me.

  I staggered out of the bathroom like a drunk girl in a nightclub and bumbled my way down the hall towards Donald’s room. Even with the stench of gas spreading throughout the apartment, I could still smell my brother’s distinctive funk when I entered his lair (for all I knew, it would manage to linger even after the room had been red
uced to ash and embers). I had just begun dousing his bed’s disgusting, bacteria riddled sheets when a sudden thud caught me on the back of the head, knocking me to the ground and causing me to drop the gas can. I felt my vision blur and my head become as light as a balloon – two obvious signs that I likely experienced a concussion. Blood started to dribble from back of my head where I had been struck, spilling down my neck and onto the floor – an even more obvious sign that I likely experienced a concussion.

  Woozy, but still determined, I willed myself to wobbly feet. The blow to the back of my skull had raised more than a few questions in my aching head – questions that were answered as soon as my eyes began to regain their focus.

  It was standing in the doorway. At first I thought it to be some sort of hallucination – an image of delirium brought on by my recent head trauma, but the longer I tried to convince myself that what I was looking at was imaginary the more I realized it wasn’t. Its shape was vaguely anthropomorphic. I say vaguely because it seemed to be trying to mimic the human form, but failing miserably at it. The figure had arms, legs, and a tiny bump where the neck should be that looked like a sorry attempt for a head. It was black as soot. So dark in fact that I didn’t realize at first that what I thought was its skin was actually moving. But moving it was! You see this lone, dark figure that had apparently struck me wasn’t a single entity at all. No sir! It was an assemblage of those little black bugs! Millions of them all converging together like Voltron.

  I scrambled for the gas can, but the abomination tackled me back down to the floor. A multitude of tiny insect legs tickled my skin as the monstrosity pinned me to the ground with its makeshift hands. It was extremely strong; I squirmed and tugged as hard as I could, but I couldn’t break its grip. The hiss of the bugs was so loud at this point that I was positive my ears were going to start bleeding.

  “You’ll be ours! You’ll be ours right now!”

  The figure pinning me to the ground suddenly began to disperse as the little black bugs, thousands at a time, launched into an attack. I was swarmed with them and not just externally. They invaded every orifice of my body. I could feel them crawling up my nostrils, maneuvering in and out of my sinuses. They traveled down my trachea, using it as a tunnel, and scurried along the inside walls of my lungs. I tried to cry out, but my screams were stifled by the thousands of bugs flooding my mouth.

  That wasn’t the only place the nasty things decided to violate though. They entered me through every part of my body – even making themselves at home in my digestive tract and my... urethra. The pain was immeasurable. The last thing I remember was passing out in agony – that horrible hiss drowning everything out as the world faded to black.

  ***

  I wish I could tell you that the bugs were gone when I came to or that I somehow found a way to expel them from my body, but I’m afraid that I would be lying if I did. You see, they attacked me a day ago and haven’t actually stopped since.

  I woke up on the floor of my brother’s room in even more pain than when I had passed out. My skin is on fire from the millions of bites I’ve suffered since they started swarming me. The slew of bugs crawling up and down my throat makes it feel like I’m breathing through a straw. I swallow them by the hundreds, but more just keep coming to replace them. They’ve probably laid their eggs inside my intestines by now.

  It’s ok though because I’ve won and they know it. That’s why they called the cops on me. Even when they invaded my body, I refused to cave to their demands. I refused to become my brother and they hate me for it.

  Pretty soon the little bastards won’t be able to torment anyone ever again. My father’s revolver is sitting in my lap as I write this and I have every intention of using it before the police come crashing through my door. But it gets better! The carpet is still soaked in gasoline and I sure as hell don’t plan on going out alone. It should only take one match to turn this whole apartment building into a scene from Backdraft.

  So Adiós world – and a very special goodbye to those little black bugs. I suppose we’ll meet again in Hell. I’ll be smiling when I see them though…because I know the score.

  ***

  From the Miskatonic Times,

  October 22, 2013

  6 Dead In Student Housing Fire

  Police Investigating Possible Arson

  Six people were killed in the tragic fire that occurred at a student-housing building located off the University campus late Tuesday night. Many of the building’s tenants were able to evacuate the scene. The building was reportedly engulfed in flames even before first responders had arrived. Witnesses say they were awoken by a gunshot coming from the apartment that the fire is believed to have started in.

  “The fire spread fast,” said Fire Chief Bill Marshall. “The death toll might have been much higher if the gunshot hadn’t alerted many of the building’s residents.”

  The shot is thought to have been fired by third year student, Donald Miller. Both the fire and the gunshot are suspected to have emanated from his apartment. Miller lived alone and those who had met him, described the junior to be “extremely introverted”.

  “I didn’t know him too well,” said one of his neighbors who survived the fire, “but he was always so hard on himself when we did speak. He really seemed to have self-esteem issues. It was strange, he was constantly cleaning his apartment and complaining about how dirty it was. I never saw the inside of it – I don’t think anybody did, but I couldn’t imagine it being as bad as he said. It seemed like every other day I would see him walking to his door with a shopping bag full of cleaning supplies.”

  Miller’s mother and father declined to speak to the Miskatonic Times about whether or not they believed their only son was responsible for the fire, but have offered their condolences to all of those who lost loved ones in the tragic event.

  Miller’s body was one of the six recovered from the fire. The coroner’s report states that he died from a fatal gunshot wound to the head shortly after the fire started. There were no drugs or alcohol present in his body at the time of his death. However, some of the coroner’s findings have raised questions about Miller’s death. According to the report, even though he was not badly burned his body was recovered with severe skin damage. These injuries do not appear to be inflicted from the fire and may possibly have been caused by insect bites. His body has been transported to St. Joseph’s Medical Center so more tests can be run.

  The Miskatonic Police are currently investigating Donald Miller’s role in the fire.

  The Skinless Man

  Greg Fox

  When I was a kid my parents were constantly fighting. It wasn’t your typical marital bickering – they’re arguments often resulted in objects flying across the room. Sometimes the fights would get so bad that my mother would leave the house, disappearing for days before returning. They seemed to hate each other and worst of all, my little brother, AJ, and I were often caught in the middle their heated squabbles.

  AJ was almost five years younger than me so he didn’t really understand what was going on. When my folks started shouting at each other, I would take him to our room and cover his ears with my hands until the commotion died down. I often found myself lying in bed at night, praying for the endless quarreling to end so we could all be a happy family together. It never did end though – not until the night I met the Skinless Man.

  The fighting was particularly bad that night. My father even struck my mom in front of my brother and I. It sounded like two slabs of meat slamming together as he threw the full weight of his fist into her face. I panicked and ran to the safety of the bathroom, where I could lock myself away. I cursed myself for my cowardice. Before I shut the bathroom door, I had seen AJ duck behind the couch – it was his usual hiding spot when my parent’s arguing got serious and his big brother wasn’t around to protect him. But his big brother was around. I was just too big of a chicken to go back, grab my brother, and rescue him from the madness that was occurring on the other side
of the door.

  Tears began to well up in my eyes as the sound of my mother crying in the other room caused my young body to shake with fear.

  "Please,” I begged to no one in particular, “I'd give anything for the fighting to stop!"

  What sounded like a distant echo resonated from the sink. I ignored it, chalking up the peculiar noise to old house pipes, but just when I had begun to forget about it and turn my focus back to my parents, something strange happened, that even to this day, causes the hair to stand up on the back of my neck when I think about it. A voice arose from the drain.

  "What would you give, little boy?" the voice rasped. Baffled I looked down in the drain, but saw nothing but blackness. Again, the gruff voice echoed from the drain, "I see you, little boy."

  "H-how do..." I stopped myself. Talking to a sink was crazy. I was sure I was losing my mind.

  "What would you give, little boy?"

  My parents were still fighting and I could hear my mother’s muffled cries for help. I knew AJ was out there, probably watching the whole thing.