Horror Library, Volume 5

by Boyd E. Harris R. J. Cavender

  “And I listened.

  “Most of what she said seemed nonsensical at first, end of the world stuff mostly. Something about an ‘invasion’ and how God had forsaken her. I’d heard this kind of talk before from crazies on the subway, so I wasn’t surprised. But then another voice responded…in between her rasping breaths. It was deep–like a man who had been smoking his entire life. But it was off somehow, like it had been synthesized to sound human–but wasn’t quite right.

  “The woman was turned away from me, so I assumed she was making the second voice too, as people with mental illness often do.

  “When her stop came, she practically raced off the train. I caught a glimpse of her face as she passed and there was terror in her eyes. I started to take down some notes about the experience, when something stopped me cold.

  “The rasping sound–the breathing I’d heard before–it was still coming from the empty corner of the subway train. There was no one else even close to us. I stared at the corner, feeling my heart thudding in my chest, when suddenly I heard that deep voice again. But this time it was some kind of alien language, a series of grunts and chirps.

  “I didn’t wait around to find out what it was. I got the hell off that train.”

  The level of detail in Mason’s story stunned Sara. As she looked into his fearful eyes it was clear that he believed every word of it.

  “As I researched more about schizophrenia and all of its various types,” Mason continued, “I discovered that there has been a steady increase worldwide since the 60s. There is plenty of speculation and controversy over it; some say it’s environmental, others say it’s genetic, and it’s been linked to everything from drug use, to nutritional deficiencies, to vaccines.

  “I suppose there may be truth in all of it, but only with classic cases of schizophrenia. What I’m saying is that the worldwide increase is due to these goddamn voices driving people mad–not chemical imbalances. Hell, for all we know, driving humans mad is the whole point.”

  Sara said, “But not everyone who hears voices goes mad. Some people are able to manage the illness.”

  “With drugs, yes–if you mean traditional schizophrenia or psychosis. But I’m talking about sane people like you or me, driven to madness by the voices. Nakamura’s research showed that some are highly susceptible to the voices–others aren’t. But even the most peace-loving person can be driven to violence–all humans are capable of it.”

  Sara was almost afraid to ask the next question. “What do they…you know, the ‘voices’… say to you?”

  Mason looked away, as if suddenly self-conscious. “Deviant things. The kind you think about, but would never actually do. Revenge fantasies, that sort of thing. Much of it better left unsaid.”

  Sara didn’t like where this was going. There was something hidden beneath Mason’s vulnerability–something malicious. She thought about their break-up five years ago; it had been ugly to say the least, some might even say hostile.

  It was clear now that he was schizophrenic, but was he also psychotic? She moved uncomfortably on the loveseat, suddenly aware of Mason’s proximity as he faced her. Her body language gave her away.

  “Don’t worry, Sara. I would never hurt you. They’ve tried and failed to convince me to hurt others. But now they’ll stop at nothing to kill me because I have proof of their existence.”

  “Proof?”

  Mason nodded solemnly. “I’ve been recording them for a while now. I sewed a mini-video camera into my coat. Sometimes I hide the camera in strategic places and just let it record for hours, particularly in places where the homeless congregate. I’ve captured the intruder’s voices on videotape, several where you can see a person talking to thin air, and a disembodied voice responding. This isn’t the first time people have recorded bodiless voices. There are entire books and countless websites dedicated to it. Parapsychologists call it ‘electronic voice phenomena.’ But they mistakenly think the voices are ghosts or spirits.

  “Sometimes they speak in English and other times in some unknown language. I took my recordings to a specialist and was told that it would be physically impossible for human or animal vocal cords to create some of the sounds.”

  Mason touched Sara’s hand, startling her. He said, “Do you want to see it?”

  Sara’s cheeks blanched. “What do you mean? The videos?”

  Mason looked at her as if she’d asked him the most ridiculous question in history. “Of course. I keep the masters with me–there’s nowhere safe to hide them. They’re always watching me.”

  Sara’s chest tightened uncomfortably. She noticed that her glass was empty and didn’t even remember drinking from it. “I really need another one,” she said. “You want a refill?”

  Mason shook his head. “You don’t believe a word I’m saying, do you?”

  “I believe that you believe it, and that’s all that matters right now.”

  Mason reached into his backpack and pulled out a pen and paper. “It’s time for me to go. I was able to lose them temporarily, but they’ll find me soon enough–they always do.”

  Sara felt a pang of guilt, letting someone she once cared about leave in such a state…and yet, she knew she’d be relieved when he did.

  “Listen,” Mason said, writing furiously. “I’ve backed up my videos and uploaded them to a secure storage database. I’m writing down the URL, my username and password. I want you to look it up after I’m gone. Just don’t use your home IP address. Use a computer at a public library or one of those Internet cafés.”

  Sara just stared at him, unsure of what to say.

  Mason finished writing down the information, folded the paper and handed it to her. “All I ask is that you watch the videos. If you think there’s something to it, and I live long enough, maybe you can help me. I have a few government contacts that might know what to do with the evidence, but I can’t get to them while I’m on the run. Just watch the videos, Sara…please. Don’t let me die for nothing.”

  A loud thump came from above–something on the roof.

  What the hell was that?

  “Oh Jesus…” Mason said, frantically collecting his things. “Physically, they’re intangible, but they can make susceptible people do whatever they want. Right now there’s a whole group of crazies hunting me.”

  A large shadow moved across the window next to the front door. Sara held back a scream. She raced to the kitchen counter and yanked a butcher knife from the rack, then thought better of it and grabbed the meat mallet.

  “Call the police!” Mason yelled.

  He started toward the door, but never made it. His left cheekbone was crushed instantly by a metal hammer. Screaming, he fell back through the glass coffee table–smashing it in half.

  He tried to raise his hands defensively, but it was too late. The hammer came down relentlessly…again, again, and again–pulverizing his face, until it looked like it had been run through a meat grinder.

  And then, as quickly as it had overtaken her, the rage began to drain from Sara. It was as if a valve had been released inside her and she was suddenly purged from the pain of that traumatic breakup five years ago.

  As she stared at the blood pooling around the remains of Mason Tanner’s head, it dawned on her that despite years of therapy, she had never really forgiven the bastard.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she said. “Everything is going to be fine now.”

  And then one heart-stopping moment later, she realized that the voice that had spoken wasn’t hers.

  Taylor Grant is a professional screenwriter, author, multiple award-winning copywriter, filmmaker, actor, editor and publisher. His work has been seen on network television, screened at the Cannes Film Festival, performed on stage, as well appeared in comic books, national magazines, anthologies, the Web, newspapers and heard on the radio.

  As an author, Taylor has shared pages with some of the most critically acclaimed and bestselling authors in the horror industry, with stories in publications s
uch as the Bram Stoker Award® nominated anthology Horror For Good and multiple award-winning magazine Cemetery Dance. Taylor is currently the Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of Evil Jester Comics, and has written comic book adaptations of celebrated works by authors such as Jack Ketchum, Jonathan Maberry, Ramsey Campbell, and William F. Nolan.

  -The Boathouse

  by Stephen McQuiggan

  It was in ruins now, a skeleton by the riverside. Rats scurried through a minefield of empty beer cans to breed in the stagnant pools under its broken floorboards, and bloated spiders spun thin webs in its rotted frames. Glue bags, their releases sniffed dry, sprouted like pale fungi in its damp corners, and spent condoms bloomed through the cracks. Everyone in town still called it the Boathouse, even though its days of storing canoes and oars and the summertime dreams of local college boys were long since gone, carried downstream with the rest of the past. Once, according to his mother, it had a brief but fondly remembered fling as a dance hall. She filled his head with balloons and bobby socks and teenage romance, but now only the smell of cheap whiskey remained. Through its time-smeared windows he could feel eyes watching him, hear laughter as the river lapped the banks like an eager pet.

  Perhaps its brief tenure as a hop joint had saved it, for many of the townspeople had met their sweethearts there, kissed them to the gentle murmur of the water as the swans glided by. It was where his parents had met. It stood (barely) as a reminder of golden youth, a scaffold erected around the past. No one had the heart to tear the old place down; it would have been like tearing down something within themselves, something they still clung blindly to, though they were unaware of it.

  It existed, slowly rotting, rattling ill-temperedly in the wind, gradually crumbling into the dark water. No one seemed to notice. It was just the Boathouse.

  But Oliver noticed.

  Its rickety silhouette was etched on his dreams. In class he doodled it constantly, his math book tattooed in its strange jutting angles. He felt himself drawn there more often since Benny died.

  He was working on one of his latest sketches of it when Billy came in. It didn’t bother him that his little brother didn’t knock before coming into his room, or that he ran his sticky little paws over his computer and his comics, although once these things seemed important. He did not even register his presence until Billy began pestering him.

  “What’re you doing?” Oliver could feel hot breath panting against the nape of his neck, little warm daggers of curiosity, as his brother peered over his shoulder.

  “Drawing.”

  “Well duh! Why’d you always draw that old thing for? Why don’t you draw me something? Draw me a clown!”

  “Why don’t you go into your own room and find something to do?”

  “I want to play with you.”

  “Well I’m busy. It’s not my fault you don’t have any friends.” It was a low blow but Oliver didn’t care, he just wanted peace to draw the Boathouse. Billy didn’t seem to notice the slight anyway. He was rummaging amongst his brother’s drawings and stood transfixed by one he found halfway through.

  “Who’s she?” he said, holding up a sketch of a pale woman with star-deep, mineshaft eyes.

  “I don’t know,” admitted Oliver, stopping what he was doing and looking at the picture as if for the first time. “I think I made her up.”

  “She’s real beautiful,” Billy said, and she was.

  Beautiful as the Medora River that ran by the Boathouse, its sleek curves and gentle song arousing him in ways he did not understand. Yet for all its beauty, he knew the Medora was deadly as well. The danger of the river had been drummed into him for as long as he could remember; perhaps that was part of the attraction.

  He had heard his mother talking to his father only last week, using that wheedling tone she always used when she was upset. A drunk had drowned the night before and they had fished him out that morning. His parents spoke loudly, the way they always did about “important” things, because they thought he was too young to understand.

  “Betty told me his eyes had been eaten out,” his mother said.

  To Oliver the river was akin to a serial killer, and that thought terrified him, for how could you ever lock up a river? There were countless tales of fishermen and suicides who had succumbed to its icy lure. His dog Sandy, due her first litter, had jumped in and never got back out again, though dad said he’d done his best to save her. Once a school bus had careered off Keel Bridge and plunged straight into the Medora and everyone on board had drowned. That was over twenty years ago, but they still said prayers for them every April in assembly.

  “Don’t you ever go down there to play,” his mother constantly warned him. “It’s far too dangerous.”

  Dangerous, and beautiful; he went as often as he could. After Benny died, that was every day.

  He had played the game himself, leaping across the cavernous holes in the belly of the Boathouse, feeling the air rush up to him in a seething hiss from the darkness below. Benny Watson had been too ambitious, or too clumsy, and they said it was nearly a minute before he hit the bottom. For the last two weeks there had been an empty seat beside Oliver in class, and that vacant space gave birth to stories, half-remembered and vague, of other boys who had met their ends in the old derelict’s depths.

  “You can have it,” he told Billy, folding up the portrait of the cold lady with the scary eyes. “I’ve lots of others. Now leave me alone, I need to get some sleep.”

  He awoke later with the crust of dreams still thick in his eyes and the siren song of the Boathouse ringing in his ears. He dressed in the dark stillness and stole from the house, blown by the wind and anticipation down to the nesting place of his dilapidated obsession. The river lay before him, a bright and sickly green, luminous under the star-scarred night. He gagged on the rising stench of sulphur, but he did not turn back. He was meant to be here.

  He turned at the sound of murmurs mingling in the reeds, whispers from the riverbed itself. He saw a plank that stretched out across the water’s putrid glow, and though it looked too flimsy to hold his weight, he began to cross it.

  Benny urged him on.

  Oliver watched him float slowly upwards through the water’s surface, dripping its green fire from his ragged clothes. With one gliding motion he was on the makeshift bridge, calling to Oliver, beckoning him ever closer. Somewhere in Oliver’s mind he knew that this was wrong, that it simply could not be, but Benny sure didn’t look as if he knew he was dead.

  His hair was thick with slime and mud, and his eyes were bleeding and flyblown. When he smiled a decayed, toothless leer, his jaw cracked loudly and hung loose, wavering in the breeze that gathered with the whispers by the riverbank. As Oliver moved toward him, Benny held out a cold, shriveled hand in welcome.

  “Come,” he said, the word oozing from his gaping maw, his leathery lips not seeming to move at all. Oliver felt his clammy grip, and then the whispers turned to screams as Benny pulled him down into the water, where the hunger of the river was all-consuming.

  On and on, deeper and deeper Benny dragged him, until the screams turned to bubbles and all was silent and all was dry, and Oliver found himself strewn upon a wasteland of rubbish.

  She sat high above him, the woman with the star-deep mineshaft eyes, her dress flowing as if it too were a part of the river. She was serene, and just as beautiful as he had tried to draw her. She wore a crown of lilies, and the light–which shone down from the Boathouse floor–fell directly into her eyes, dancing a thousand different shades of black, each colder than the last. She smiled down at him from her throne of broken children and twisted, fish-mouthed corpses, and Oliver thought his heart would break with love for her.

  “I am Medora.”

  Her voice was fathomless, the splash of wild sea on jagged rock, yet the murmur of an ancient stream. Every gesture she made filled the cavern like the onslaught of a coming storm, every smile hung in the shards of light above, mocking him.

  “You will be
another flower on the crown of the River Daughter, my love.”

  She moved elegantly down the mound of charnel, her dress pulsing eldritch green, her every step punctuated by the crunching of skull and bone beneath her pretty feet.

  “Kiss me little one. Kiss eternity.”

  Her mouth was stretched by the exaggerated fullness of her pointed tongue; it poked through her blanched lips like an accusing finger. He felt her icy hand, the cold black nails, bite into his neck as she pulled him close, his feet trailing in the soft mud beneath.

  Her tongue filled him, choked him. He could taste the rotten core of her demented heart. The fetid stench of her breath expanded his lungs to bursting, but salvation was all he could feel in his soul.

  The dim green light that swamped his vision slowly receded, and for a time he was lost in the murky soup between worlds. He was bitterly cold, but he was happy, and as his vision cleared, so too did his confusion. He had a purpose now, a calling. He added his voice to the roar of the Boathouse’s song.

  He watched from the riverbank as the boy darted to and fro on the old towpath. He knew the boy’s name was Billy, and that he was once his brother. He marveled at this knowledge; how trivial it all seemed, how petty and distant. Such things meant nothing beneath the river. The boy saw him and was approaching with all the eager caution of youth.

  “Oliver? Olly, is that you? I knew you’d be here! Where have you been? Mum’s been so worried.”

  He smiled at the boy, his heart filled with love for him. He could hear the whispers in the reeds getting louder.

  “Will you play with me?” the boy said. “I’ve been all on my own since you left.”

  “Yes,” Oliver said, “and I know so many new games.”

  He reached out for the boy, and hand in hand, they walked down into the water.