The smell of fresh-tilled earth mixed with something else, something that turned Teddy’s guts inside out. It was like a match had been blown out. He opened his eyes and saw flames licking up from the forest, low and pulsing.
His mother’s mangled corpse appeared, walking up the path toward him. Her legs swollen and bruised, her entrails dragging in the dirt. Teddy’s guilt weighed heavy on his shoulders, so heavy that his feet sank into the earth, and he wanted to go deeper.
The fire flickered bright, casting shadows that weren’t shadows, but fingers reaching up at him from the mud below his feet. His mother’s broken hand dug into his shoulder.
He stepped forward, one, two, three, four. By the time he got to five Teddy was consumed in a searing fire that he knew wouldn’t end. All he could see was his mother’s shattered face in front of him.
All he could feel was her disappointment, her anger, her blame.
Her scornful gaze welcomed him into Hell.
J.S. Reinhardt is a two time Gross-Out Contest winner, has several short stories published, and a novella on the way from Blood Bound Books. He lives and works in the heart of the Headless Horseman and Rip Van Winkle country. Visit him on Facebook and at www.jsreinhardt.com
-Notes for an Article on Bainbridge Farm
by Bentley Little
SETTING:
Rural Wyoming. Flat plain. Other houses visible in distance, all abandoned. Day: overcast and drizzly. Cold. Windy. One-lane dirt driveway, no sign or mailbox on road. Poplar trees lined up on one side of the house and adjoining buildings for a windbreak. Birds in the sky, black against the gray clouds. Vultures? Ravens? Check.
Deep rut bisects driveway a quarter mile in, cutting off access to farm. Cars/trucks cannot go all the way to house. Looks natural, water-carved, but could be manmade. Vehicles must be parked here and visitors walk rest of the way. USE THIS: To the right, old windmill sits in weedy field next to metal tub. Windmill creaks as it turns, the sound loud on the wind. Bush or shrub next to tub looks like old lady. Wind makes bush bend over so she seems to be drinking. Eerie.
House = Typical one-story farmhouse w/ screened porch (rusty), peeling white paint. Metal chimney pipe. Power lines down, ends lying in dirt. Windows dusty, covered by torn shades on inside.
Garage = Unattached. Newer than house but still in disrepair. Looks homemade. Several holes in roof, unpatched. Bird flew out of one at approach. Door warped, leaving gap at bottom. Animals probably living in there.
Stables = Long, low structure w/ unpainted boards, weather-damaged. Flat roof, tarpaper hanging off south end. Black open doorway, no door. The bodies were found here. Don’t like the stables. Incorporate impressions into atmospheric opening graph?
BACKGROUND:
1) Murders occurred while Senator Bainbridge was in Washington, voting on appropriations bill. Nothing tying him to deaths except farm. So why did he commit suicide? Check again if D.C. police found note.
2) Farm originally bought by senator’s great grandfather, Edson Bainbridge, from Norwegian immigrant whose wife committed suicide after son was stillborn. Norwegian built the stables. House and garage came later. Original house burned down. Check Norwegian’s name & spelling.
3) For past 75 years, all Bainbridge family members have died at farm. Cousins, second cousins, great uncles, great nephews, everyone. Except Sen. Bainbridge. Describe, add details.
4) Four years ago, wells went dry on all six adjoining properties. Sen. Bainbridge offered to share farm’s water rights, but other property owners opted to sell land or move rather than use Bainbridge farm water. Why?
VICTIMS:
Harold Sandowski–Gas station attendant from town. No car on site. Reason for being at farm unknown.
Lenore Hetfield–Ex-wife of Loren Hetfield, closest neighbor, although both moved away three years ago, after well went dry. WHY WAS SHE HERE?
Thomas Miller–Commodities trader from Minneapolis. No business in Wyoming, no relatives or friends nearby. Flew to Cheyenne, drove 140 miles to farm. Notebook left in rental car filled with info on Bainbridge and farm. Everything misspelled. Was naked, clothes not found.
Tad Thiebert–Boy from town. Fifth grade. Rode bike out. Told parents he was going to play with friend. Last one killed, according to coroner.
OBSERVATIONS:
The house reminds me of something I’ve seen before. Can’t remember what it is. Movie? Dream? Something fictional, not real. Porch of the house wraps around the building, with rickety stairs in front and back. Rear screen door is missing. On north side of porch, pile of paint cans leans against the house, some sort of wooden animal trap on top of it. Next to the rusty screening sits an old car radiator, a cracked iced tea glass on the dusty wood beside it. Try to look through the windows of the house, try to peek through holes in the torn shades, but it’s too dark inside, can’t see anything.
The house seems very familiar.
I see a person standing by the corner of the garage but he/she is in shadow. I call out, but the figure moves around the corner. Slides. Was it my imagination? I walk around the garage, see nothing, no sign of anyone. Can still hear creak of the windmill. This far away, the bush looks even more like an old woman.
Afraid to go in the garage. Hear a thump. Might be bobcats or coyotes in there.
Head toward the stables, where the killings occurred. Feel uneasy. Still don’t like the building.
The stable is old and oddly shaped. Inside, it is dark. Some light enters through irregular slats in the wall, but there is only the one door and no window openings. Could this have been built for animals? Doesn’t seem like it. But why have stables if not for livestock? The interior looks bigger than the exterior, with sections opening onto each other around sharp corners, only one visible at a time.
The first room of the stable is empty but the second is filled with hay, which is grouped into high piles that appear to be deliberately shaped. One of them reminds me of something. I can’t think of what it is, but it makes me nervous.
The smell in the stable is not of hay.
This is where Miller’s body was found.
Around the corner looms a cobweb-covered cotton gin. Cotton has never grown here–this is a ranch, not a farm–but the machine sits incongruously before me, its antiqued bulk somehow threatening.
I DON’T LIKE THE COTTON GIN.
I hurry past. This should be the end of the building, but it’s not. The accordion-like rooms continue before me, a seemingly endless maze, the spaces wide, narrow, big, small, square, rectangular, triangular, completely illogical, illuminated only by cracks in wall and roof. I have lost track of direction.
The mind behind this is unsound.
There is a noise up ahead, a banging. Wood against wood, maybe. Or fist against wood. There is something organic to it. More of a thumping than banging. I know the noise but can’t quite place it. The sound ebbs and flows in volume but does not stop, does not pause.
I see a sort of pen, with dried blood soaked into the dirt floor and splatter stains on the plank fencing. Was this where one of the victims was found? I can’t be sure.
The thumping continues. Frustrating. Maddening.
Another room. This one the size of a barn and empty save for a goat skeleton in the center. Next to it is what appears to be a mummified ocelot and a recently murdered crow.
I want to leave. I should not have come here alone. But I am more afraid to go back than go forward, and I cross the barnlike area and exit through the narrow door in the opposite wall, hoping it will lead outside.
Another room, narrow as a hallway, with a hole dug in the dirt in the middle. Step over it. Through the next door.
And the next.
Something has happened but I don’t know what it was or wen exackly it happened. Sumthing is difrent all of a suddn. My hed herts. I feel weerd.
My shadoe is not conekted to me.
Is getting darkr. Lowder.
I cant see to rite. I shood tern bak but I haf to
go forwurd.
The noys is close now
I can heer it
lowd
the thumping the thumpng the thmpg th thmp
Bentley Little is the angriest man in the world. He hates everyone he has ever met.
-Noise
by Sanford Allen
A sharp, staticky hiss–like a radio adrift between stations–grew behind Rachel as she knelt, locking her bike to the rack outside Permanent Records.
She figured it to be the leakage from Rat’s headphones, stuck as they often were on some near-unlistenable racket, volume cranked to a paint-peeling level. Rat was supposed to be unlocking the store, a duty that fell to him when Phil, its owner, was scouring for inventory across the river in Jersey.
She’d already checked the door, and Rat was late. Why did she bust her ass to be on time when the bosses couldn’t be bothered? Rat and Phil were middle-aged kids. Fifteen years her senior, but kids just the same.
Rachel snapped the lock around her bike frame.
“You know, Rat, it’s a wonder you’re not deaf yet.” She shouted to be heard over the noise.
A smell enveloped her–the reek of sweat, piss and decay, barely masked by a sickly sweet smokiness like head-shop incense. She realized she wasn’t speaking to Rat.
Rachel looked down at the bony hand that suddenly clamped her shoulder, plague-pale against her black hoodie, above the Buzzcocks patch she’d sewn there. A dark half-moon of grime packed each long fingernail, and a U-shaped tattoo, blue-black and muddy, marked the flesh at the wrist.
She jerked back her elbow, feeling it connect with the hand’s owner. The aluminum water bottle in her backpack clanged against the bike rack as she scrambled to her feet.
“Back the fuck off.” She had uncorked her tough-bitch voice.
The man, wrapped wraith-like in a tattered brown jacket, didn’t move. Only the lower portion of his gaunt face showed under the jacket’s hood. Oozing, red sores stippled his bare feet, and he clutched a blaring transistor radio with a bent antenna–the source of the static that had announced his arrival.
Rachel dug into her pocket, curled fingers around her keys, ready to jab them into Radio Man’s face. She backed up as far as she could, penned in by her bike and the rack. The guy was probably just a homeless nut job, oblivious to the rules of personal space. But in Bushwick–one of the few Brooklyn neighborhoods not yet scrubbed clean by gentrification–one didn’t take chances.
“I said, back off.” The hair on the back of her neck prickled.
Radio Man stood his ground. He slipped a folded piece of paper from his jacket and thrust it at her.
“Something for you,” he mumbled, shaking the paper. His bottom lip hung loose, showing a jumble of paper sack colored teeth. “It’s tonight.”
Rachel yanked the keys from her pocket, tines jutting between whitened knuckles. The man shambled back. He opened his grimy fingers and the paper drifted to the sidewalk.
“Tonight,” he said again, cocking his head. One of his eyes showed beneath the hood, pupil black and cavernous like he was tripping. It seemed locked on something beyond her.
Radio Man turned, took a few jerky steps, and continued down the sidewalk as if his limbs were on strings pulled by an unskilled puppeteer. Rachel closed her eyes and gulped in air, realizing then that she’d held her breath through the encounter. Had he smelled that bad?
The static faded and she opened her eyes. The man had gone as abruptly as he had appeared–a phantom of the streets.
“Waiting long?”
Rachel jumped at the voice that sounded just to her side. She whirled to see Rat smiling, his silver-streaked black hair tousled into the shape of a chicken comb, a Lucky Strike behind his ear. He jangled the keys to Permanent Records.
“So you stood there watching that whack job violate my airspace?” Rachel straightened her bike, clanging it noisily against the rack. “Asshole.”
Rat looked around, visibly confused. “Jeez. What’d I do this time?”
“You didn’t see that homeless guy up in my face?”
“Did he try to grope you? I’ll have a word with that jagoff.”
Rachel exhaled. Now she felt bad for going off. Rat had probably rounded the corner after it happened.
“He’s gone now,” she said. “He didn’t grope me, just tried to hand me that.” She nodded to the paper on the sidewalk.
Rat squatted and unfolded the crinkled page. She hoped for his sake that whatever had left sores all over Radio Man wasn’t contagious.
“Opening the Pale Gate: A Ritual of Noise and Rebirth,” Rat read aloud, and held up the black-and-white photocopy for Rachel to examine. “A flyer. Some kinda performance art thing maybe.”
The page was artless and utilitarian, like an ad for an all-ages punk show. Crooked block letters surrounded a slightly off-center photograph too blurry to make out.
Rat folded the flyer and slipped it into his pocket. “Sure you’re okay? You’re shaking.”
Rachel turned, looking for Radio Man. No sign. A delivery truck bounced by, sputtering exhaust.
“The guy was freaky,” she said. “He reeked like death.”
That had been the smell. Death.
Rat unlocked the shop’s graffiti-scrawled rollup gate. White lettering across the back of his worn leather jacket proclaimed “DESTROY MUSIC.”
“You ain’t in Williamsburg anymore, Dorothy,” he said. “When you moved to Bushwick, you swapped high rents and trendy idiots for crack, crime and the most colorful homeless in the five boroughs.”
Rat had warned her about the neighborhood when he’d hired her, and again when she found her broom closet of an apartment near the shop.
Permanent Records didn’t pay much, but it beat the string of temp gigs she’d endured after drifting off the rolls at NYU. And the new apartment got her out from under crushing rent and roommates with an endless supply of pills and coke.
Rat flicked on the store’s lights and staked his claim for first shift on the stereo. Rachel winced as Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, Rat’s latest noisy fixation, screeched through the store.
“How can you listen to that crap?” she called over the wash of static and hiss.
“Same way you can listen to all that boring three-chord punk rock.” Rat cracked a roll of quarters into the register.
She walked to the bulletin board, looked for out-of-date flyers to tear down. Someone had scrawled “Cancelled” across the poster for Amnesia Moon’s upcoming CD release show. The magic marker letters cut across the picture of Jimmy Strauss, the band’s frontman. He clutched his Fender Strat like a weapon, dark eyes penetrating under his spiky hair. A row of small silver hoops ran the entire length of his left ear and the word “Brooklyn” spidered across his neck in gothic tattoo script.
“Amnesia Moon cancelled? They’ve had that show booked for six months.”
“Jimmy pulled a disappearing act.” Rat leaned over the counter. “Thought you’d heard by now. Seeing how you’re smitten over young Jimmy.”
“I like his band, but I’m hardly smitten.” Rachel rolled her eyes.
“Band guys kept hoping he’d show, but no dice. His sister even flew in from the Midwest, says she’s worried he OD’ed somewhere.” Rat shrugged. “He probably high-tailed it to Cleveland or some other place where trust-fund hipsters haven’t sent rents through the stratosphere.”
Rachel stepped back from the bulletin board, sniffed and realized Radio Man’s death-stench still clung to her. Fighting her gag reflex, she peeled off her hoodie and hurled it into an unused record crate. Looked like tonight was laundry night.
* * *
Rachel wasn’t sure why Phil insisted on keeping the store open until ten. They hadn’t seen a customer in an hour.
Rat smoothed Radio Man’s wrinkled flyer against the counter. The last scraps of a gyro–his late dinner–sat on yogurt-smeared foil.
“There’s not even a club listed, just an address,” he said. “Consi
der me intrigued.”
Rachel squinted at the blurry image in the middle, a grainy photo of something fleshy, maybe an animal tongue or a spineless sea creature. The bad copy made it impossible to tell.
“I don’t get why some homeless guy was handing them out. And why to me?”
“Probably found it under a windshield wiper. He forgot his foil hat this morning and you happened to be transmitting the right wavelength.”
Rachel peered at the bug-eyed Felix the Cat clock over the store’s stereo. Closing time. A perfect out to the discussion. Holding her breath, she wadded her hoodie and jammed it into her backpack.
“Rach, this is so weird we need to witness it.” Rat waved the flyer. “I’ll even pay your cover so I can educate you in the aesthetics of unlistenable noise, help you understand Metal Machine Music.”
“Oh, I understand it. I understand it’s a prank Lou Reed played on his record company and pretentious dorks like you.”
She shrugged into her backpack and headed for the front door. As she reached for the handle, her eyes fell on the bright yellow “No U-Turn” emblem amid the patchwork of band and label stickers plastering the door. It had been there since she’d started the job, but tonight it took on an eerie new significance.
For a second, her mind flashed to the blue-black tattoo on Radio Man’s hand. She tasted his reek, so strong he could have been standing beside her. Bile burned her throat.
The smell faded.
Christ, where had that come from?
There were what, tens of thousands of homeless in the city? Why had this one shaken her to the point that she was hallucinating his smell?
She lifted her hand away from the door and took a deep breath.
“I’m serious about paying your cover,” Rat said.
Rachel opened the door. She’d have to be crazy to risk seeing that scabby psycho again. “See ya.”
Horror Library, Volume 5 Page 8