Baby Teeth: Bite-sized tales of terror

by Rabarts, Dan

  I turned to yell at the boys to stop fighting, for God’s sake. It was a second. It was a pulse. Cassie’s kicking toes brushed my leg and if they hadn’t, I might never have looked back. That was how it had happened before. I remembered. It was the one-year anniversary and we’d all decided to celebrate with the re-enactment of Cassie’s drowning. I knew all of this in the long second it took for me to turn my head in the high-pressure air, the ocean of it resting down on every curve of me, pressing against every surface of my body. I knew she was leaving us – when would I find her? – there she was. Under the second skin of water at my waist. Not the water we yelled through, but the water that filled her lungs. My lungs.

  Simon!

  I tried to shout, not questioning why I’d change my daughter’s name. See the terror in her bulging eyes, wonder at her panicked slow motion flail. Breathe! Her entire existence focused on that lone, lost piece: Breathe the warm, dry air! Please, God, just once more! Cassie looked at me. Give anything for just once more. Her wide-eyed glare drifted from me.

  She was dead.

  My arm swung out as I woke. My knuckles slammed against the hardwood floor. I sat up, sucking in breath, heart beating faster than I thought a heart could. Dripping hair dragged along the back of my neck, and my nightgown stuck wet to me in places. I looked to my right. ‘Cassie,’ I said, under my panting breath. I placed my shaking hand against her ribs, held them there until I was certain of the gradual crest and trough of the slow breath of sleeping children. She slept, even as the air mattress rolled with my frantic movements.

  The boys slept in their bags. The glow of the nightlight shone off Dylan’s cheek and nose. Jeremy snored. He’d found a golden cord with tassels at each end in one of the upstairs bedrooms and hadn’t stopped fooling with it since. It lay across his chest and my irrational fear saw him strangling himself with a turn sometime in the night. One end of the cord lay across my foot. I pulled my leg up but the cord seemed to fall away slower than it should have, its fringe brushing my sole like a probing spider’s legs. I had to get a grip.

  Red’s tail swung high, though her body hadn’t moved. I reached back to touch her face and her warm, wet tongue lapped my fingers. I lay back, slowly, trying not to study the shadows in this strange new living room. Everything was fine. Cassie was alive. Red’s long, damp sigh warmed my scalp. Overhead, a century and a half of stained plaster loomed. I took long and deliberate breaths, savouring the hot, musty air. My head and chest still rang with my heartbeat.

  *

  The furniture was late. The morning had been about getting some air into the house and getting the dust out. I still had the boxes from the van strewn across the front hall and wondered where to start. Dishes, flatware, books, clothes.

  Red leapt to her feet from the edge of the boxes. Her sudden, echoing bark shattered the quiet of the big old house. She looked up to the top of the grand staircase and so did I. The kids stood at the top of the stairs, backs to one another, with that tasselled cord tied around their waists like one giant belt. I couldn’t see more of Cassie than her legs behind those of her older brothers.

  ‘Careful up there!’ I shouted.

  ‘It’s fine,’ all three of them said at the same time. I smiled.

  ‘Jinx!’ I said. ‘Red, will you shut up? You’re gonna fall down those stairs if you don’t back up!’

  ‘I won’t fall again. Ever,’ they said together as if they’d rehearsed it. Now it was weird.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked, to throw them a curve.

  ‘Simon,’ they said, in unison. A cold electricity shot through my body. They ran toward the steps.

  ‘No!’ I screamed. I ran toward the staircase, arms out to break their fall. Neither of the boys faced the steps head on; they were both forty-five degrees askew and Cassie’s back was to the descent. By the time I realised they weren’t falling, my whole body prickled with goose flesh. They flowed down the stairs, bodies and limbs coordinated like a single six-legged creature.

  I stepped backwards, tripped over a box. Red backed away, too. Her barking had become a high-pitched shriek and the boys reached into the box that contained the cutlery as if they were one. They pulled out carving knives and closed on the dog, slowed only by their sister, who fought to get to the box herself. Her larger brothers dragged her farther from her goal; the three of them strained the rope that bound them to its limit in their quiet struggle. I scrambled to stop them. My hands and feet were ice. My own screams fought with those of the dog. Cassie’s expression burned into my belly in the moments before I reached them. Those same bulging eyes, the same swinging arms. Terror peeled her face back. As desperately as she had fought in my nightmare for one final breath, Simon fought to touch her own killing knife.

  Tarantella Moon

  Dan Rabarts

  It was said, long ago, that Wnvoctia, mother of all the spiderling races, fled into the sky and there laid her final egg to hang over the world, so that her brood might one day hatch and spill into the shadowed places, there to lurk and hunt and feed. It was said, around smoking fires surrounded by cavern walls painted in clay and blood and ichor, that the brood’s return would be anticipated by spools of web drifting down between the stars. The children would then cower away from the stars, which glistened like tiny raindrops caught in the joins of a vast, invisible web, and would watch for falling strands.

  But in time children grow old, their stories forgotten, and they forget why they watch the sky, remembering only the fear of something waiting, watching; something which they might go dreading to their graves.

  —The Book of Wnvoctia.

  *

  ‘Daddy! I hear lightning!’

  ‘Yes, darling.’

  Harmon stared past the procession of dirty plates swimming through bubbles onto the dish rack.

  ‘Daddy! A UFO!’

  ‘Great.’

  Work sucked, and home wasn’t much better. Not only would Marilyn find a way to blame the baby’s screaming on him, but he was out of beer. Gonna be a long night.

  ‘Daddy! A shooting star!’

  ‘Have you got your jammies on?’

  He pulled the plug, looking for a dishtowel.

  ‘Look, Daddy. It’s lighting up the whole sky!’

  ‘Boy, what’d I—’

  Harmon’s voice caught as he stepped into the lounge. Little Jordan was hopping up and down on the couch in his underwear, gleefully reporting on the unlikely happenings beyond the window. The sky was a lavender shade, and the hills roiled with a pale, sickly light.

  Harmon knelt on the couch, craning to see the source of the unearthly light.

  ‘See, Daddy, a shooting star. It’s coming from the moon.’

  ‘I don’t know what that is, but it’s no shooting star.’

  Something somewhere scuttled, a skittering noise like dozens of tiny feet scratching over dead leaves.

  ‘Get dressed. I’m going to get your mother.’

  ‘Are we going to see the shooting star, Daddy?’

  The dogs chose that moment to start in with the howling.

  ‘Just get dressed.’

  Harmon hurried down the hall. Baby Trudy added her caterwaul to the dogs’. In the nursery, Marilyn’s scowl was a thunderstorm. ‘Go shut those dogs up.’ Her tone indicated that the canine ruckus was unequivocally his fault, and his responsibility.

  ‘Honey, we need to go. Something bad’s happening.’

  ‘Yes, it is. I have a baby who won’t sleep and a husband who isn’t helping deal with that.’

  ‘Seriously, something’s going on. Maybe it’s aliens. I dunno. But the sky’s gone a weird colour and things are falling off the moon.’

  Marilyn’s gaze could’ve frosted a hot pizza.

  A door slammed.

  ‘Jordan?’ Marilyn’s eyes widened.

  Harmon’s stomach lurched as he ran from the room. ‘Jordan!’ he yelled, throwing open the front door. A small figure in bright yellow gumboots and green dinosaur
pyjamas was running across the paddock. Harmon sprinted across the driveway, leaving the circle of the porch light as he hit the grass, the iridescence of the moon’s falling tendrils lighting his way.

  ‘Jordan! You come back here!’

  A child’s laughter carried over the baying of the hounds, which was drawing closer. Harmon glanced back. The dogs were loose. Teeth and drool and gleaming eyes flickered white in the awful light.

  ‘Abrams! Sherman! Heel!’

  The dogs didn’t heel. Dogs could smell fear, and the moon had driven them mad. Harmon reeked of terror, terror of the sky, terror for his son. He ran harder. In the instant before his ankle caught in a hole and he hurtled, twisting, to the ground, he saw Jordan’s silhouette against the silver tendril that hung from the moon like a glob of snot hangs from a toddler’s nose. The gossamer thread shimmered, its surface crawling, as it kissed the earth.

  Then the dogs were upon him.

  Harmon rolled, yelling and punching.

  Jordan reached for the tendril. Sherman thundered towards him. ‘Jordan! Run!’

  Jordan touched it.

  Harmon, his arm bleeding, hurled Abrams away and staggered forward. ‘Sherman! Heel!’

  Jordan turned, arms crawling with light, as the dog bounded on top of him.

  Harmon screamed.

  Sherman howled and rolled away, flailing.

  Jordan stood. He was giggling. ‘Silly dog. Look, Daddy, the shooting star landed in our paddock! And there are—’

  Harmon nodded. ‘I see them, son,’ he said, fighting the urge to run the other way as fast as he could.

  ‘So many spiders, Daddy. They tickle!’

  The glowing white things swarmed over Jordan head to foot. Sherman, thrashing, was rapidly dissolving under a glowing, scrabbling blanket. The wave flowed towards Harmon.

  Abrams whimpered, and fled.

  ‘Jordan,’ Harmon croaked. ‘Leave the nice spiders, darling. Time for bed.’

  Jordan smiled wider. ‘We can’t go yet, Daddy. The spiders want me to come up to the moon with them. Are you coming too?’

  Harmon backed away. ‘I ... I ... son ...?’

  Jordan was floating, a foot off the ground, two feet, as the strand began to retract moonward. Tiny clusters of light continued to spill from the tendril as he rose, ever higher, always grinning. ‘Come on, Daddy!’

  ‘Harmon!’ Marilyn’s voice from the porch was shrill, panicked. This, Harmon thought, was definitely going to be his fault.

  He ran into the light and jumped for the tendril. It caught him in its sticky embrace.

  ‘Daddy?’

  ‘Yes, son?’ Harmon tried not to look down. He hated heights almost more than he hated spiders.

  ‘You shouldn’t have cut yourself. The other ones like blood. The black ones.’ Jordan pointed up. ‘Those ones.’

  Harmon looked up into millions of multi-faceted eyes refracting the moonlight, the swarm of black legs flowing down, pincers wide and hungry. He tried to let go, but the web held him fast. He screamed.

  Around them, strand after strand of white criss-crossed the night sky, and the moon at the centre of her web beamed down as Wnvoctia’s children woke, and hunted, and fed.

  Backyard Gardening

  Jake Bible

  ‘Oh, sweetie, what have you done here?’ Janice asked as she knelt by her eight-year-old son, Malcolm. ‘You’ve dug up half the backyard. Is this a garden?’

  ‘No,’ Malcolm replied, setting the shovel aside and wiping the sweat from his dirt-caked brow. ‘A cemetery.’

  ‘A what?’ Janice asked, standing up, placing her hands on her hips. ‘A cemetery? Why?’

  ‘Here,’ Malcolm said, handing his mother a hand-lettered wooden sign nailed to a short post. ‘It’s a pet cemetery.’

  Janice looked at the misspelled words on the sign and sighed. ‘This is because your father let you watch that darn movie,’ she grumbled. ‘Well, no more digging, young man. I’m going to speak to your father. He’s going to help you clean this up today!’

  Janice stomped through the grass to the back door of their modest house. She shoved open the glass slider and let her eyes adjust to the gloom inside.

  ‘Ted!’ she called out to the cool, dark house. ‘Ted! Get out here right now! Ted! Do you hear me?’

  She slipped off her dirty flip-flops and started to search the house.

  Bedroom? No.

  Bathroom? No.

  Den? No.

  The TV was off and she didn’t hear the baseball game on the radio in the garage.

  ‘Ted?’ she yelled. ‘Dammit, where the hell are you?!’

  She scrunched her face in anger and walked back outside. Malcolm was dragging a chair from their deck, setting it up beside the ‘cemetery’ he’d created.

  ‘Malcolm, baby, have you seen your father?’ Janice asked.

  ‘Yep,’ Malcolm replied, settling into the chair, his hands on his knees.

  ‘OK, sweetie, where is he?’

  Malcolm didn’t say anything; he just stared at the overturned dirt before him.

  ‘Malcolm, where is your father?’

  Malcolm slowly turned his head and looked into his mo-ther’s eyes. ‘He’ll be back soon. They always come back.’

  Janice looked from her son to the dirt and back. Then she noticed the head of the shovel by Malcolm’s feet. Peeking from under the layer of wet dirt were dark splotches that she had thought were rust stains.

  The scream caught in her throat, while Malcolm sat in the chair, casually waiting for his father to come back.

  Because I Could ...

  Celine Murray

  The first time I cheated on a test was when I was in intermediate. I know I wasn’t the only one: I saw the others do it too. Now I think it’s common practice, but back then it was new. The trouble was that two kids from my class, Cameron and Scott, were caught sneaking the answers to each other on bits of scrap paper. Our teacher hauled them out in front of the class to humiliate them and to set an example for the rest of us. She asked us why we thought a little test was worth sacrificing our morals for, her eyes narrowing as she looked us over one by one, the weak turning their eyes away like cowed dogs. I kept my eyes open wide. She didn’t look at me for long – I don’t think she expected such ‘deplorable behaviour’ from someone who reads as many books as I do. In the end, she gave Cameron and Scott a detention and a disapproving note on their report cards, and that was that. But after that she took to stalking silently around the classroom whenever we did tests.

  The thing is, I don’t really know what the teacher expected. She wanted us to get good marks; she was always saying how important it was. She only had a problem when she figured out how we did it. It was fine up until then. Well, that year I swore I was never going to get caught, and I cheated on every test I could.

  Because I could.

  It was a revealing year, that intermediate year. The summer came, and I buried myself in my novels while my sister got hooked on murder mystery shows. She watched them every night, and practically went mad drooling over the actors. The funny thing is, all her favourite characters seemed to be bad guys: Loki, Hannibal, Moriarty. The crazy ones, you know? One night she dragged me out of my room, bouncing like a puppy, and insisted I watch Sherlock with her. She told me if I looked closely I’d see that Moriarty had feelings; that he cared. He wasn’t that different from anyone else. It’s just that he was a genius. Brilliant and bored. Couldn’t I see it?

  I watched Moriarty carefully after that, and I could see what she meant. It was in the way his false identities were always so sweet, and how he liked to leave his adversaries a way to win, as if he wanted to lose. It was in his voice when he promised to burn Sherlock’s heart out. And I guess I understood. I watched murder mysteries with my sister every night for the rest of the summer. I also spent a good part of that summer burning the hearts out of ants with a magnifying glass. I gave them a chance to run away, although none of them ever made it. It made me feel �
�� powerful.

  When the new year started, I read A Clockwork Orange during my lunch breaks. My teacher recommended it to me. He said it was great that I was reading such advanced literature; you don’t usually study Anthony Burgess until high school. The author, Burgess, wanted to make us think about free choice and how it made you human, but the most remarkable thing was that his main character had done every evil thing you could do – even murder – by the time he was fifteen. In Alex’s head, I learned that being bad is just as natural as being good. It’s a choice. It doesn’t matter what you do as long as you feel alive. And I liked him because he didn’t have a reason for what he did – he just wanted to be evil.

  Because he could.

  All that was last year. I’m nearly thirteen now, and I’ve moved on since then. I killed the dog next door the other day. Because I wanted to. It took me a while to make up my mind, but in the end I poisoned it – fed it all the chemicals I could find in the garage. There are plenty of ways a dog could die from poisoning, and half of them are natural. I’ll think of something better next time. Dogs are just small and stupid anyway. But it’s a start. I’m going to the library tomorrow, so I’ll see what I can find. You know, books always make it sound like the act of killing would make you feel something. And it does – it’s not cold and calculating at all, not even in the planning stages. It’s burning hot and wild and fascinating.

  I watched the dog die twitching and crying. And I felt alive.

  End of the Rainbow

  Jenni Sands

  Jonny’s feet hurt. His sandal straps were cutting in and the soles were hard on the undersides of his feet. It was much colder than when he’d set out from the back garden. He stopped and looked back. There was nothing behind him but rocky grey path. He had long ago lost sight of his house. Jonny sighed; there was nothing for it, but to keep walking.