“They had been slaughtered in ritual murders every month, and left to dry in large, nitrogen-rich coolers near the produce the Poroth family sold to passersby,” said Ashley Winters, head of the investigation.
Steph’s heart raced. She stared at the photo of the arrest.
Three people were caught in the flash. Two defiantly faced the camera with wide eyes and sneering, feral mouths. Their crooked teeth were exposed; their dirty patchwork shirts hung off them like sails as they stepped forward and as they partially shielded the face of the third figure, who walked between them with an air of evident, uncanny calm. The figure was a young boy.
He looked like Josh.
A wave of nausea surged within her. The boy stared at the camera as if looking into the future, peering right at her through the lens. She dropped the book and jumped to her feet, half crouching, head swiveling, soaking in her surroundings.
“God.”
She was here. She was with him!
Behind the conveyer belt, barely lit by the receding pallor of the rain-shrouded afternoon, she spotted a large wooden sign. The red lettering was faded and hard to see. She hadn’t noticed it before. But now she recognized it. Two moons hung in the sky behind a cityscape of crumbling architecture, and over the image hovered three big, red words:
ENJOY POROTH FARMS
She backed away, looked left and right, into the absorbent darkness. This was it. This was the place. And Josh was– She was–
Her peripheral vision caught something. She turned to peer through the windows and saw a distant glimmer of orange light outside.
A torch.
She sucked in a breath of relief. Help. Help was coming!
Another torch appeared behind it, and two more, three more, clustered in the shifting tapestry of rain.
A chill ran through her.
More flames appeared, coming up the road, and now she could see the figures holding them aloft.
They wore hooded rain slickers, all identical; long, bulky and black. Their faces were disorganized assemblages of angles and blocks, sunken pools of darkness hidden in ridges of tangerine light, but they were becoming clearer with each step.
And she had seen them before.
At the party.
Steph backed away from the window, recognizing Frederick Smith and his wife, the others who had smiled at her so warmly, seeing now an otherworldly hunger and focus in those faces, as they marched off the road and into the driveway of the stand.
A tsunami of truths swept over her, too powerful to sort. She knew why she was here. The breakdown hadn’t been accidental. Josh had researched her, choreographed everything before they’d even met. She felt it deeply–a chord echoing through time. She knew Ashley Winters had fought to save people like her. And she knew she needed to hide. The darkness and cold were behind her, and so might be Josh. But the torches came closer, toward the entrance of the stand, and those carrying them represented more than a human threat. They represented a force, eternal, malevolent, and confidently revealing itself.
Steph could feel it coming closer, hungering for her, sensing her somewhere in their path. The torchlight shone on the rough slats of the stand.
Her legs touched the treadmill behind her, and she realized hiding wouldn’t be enough. The orange hue invaded the work area, the flames dimly illuminating the ceiling in front of her. They were coming toward the door. She raced away, quiet and swift, feeling the torchlight almost touch her, like the breath of a hungry animal, praying it didn’t bathe her, that she receded naturally. She needed to disappear, to sink into the void beyond the reach of their searching eyes and leaping flames. Because she had clarity–terrible, horrible clarity. This was an end-game. She was their end-game. And she had to find a way out.
Shadows and shapes loomed around her as she ran, cut right, and ducked into the short passage Josh had shown her earlier.
The handle of the walk-in cooler gleamed in the darkness. Would it have an exterior door? She had no choice. She was cornered. Her trembling hands grabbed the long latch and lifted, causing a metallic “clink” and a sucking sound like that of rubber being pulled from rubber.
She fought the inertia of the door, tugged harder. Something moved behind her, beyond the corner of the hallway. The torch-holders were closing in. She could hear their robes shifting, their footsteps shuffling on the concrete floor.
The door was too heavy. She wanted to scream, but resisted. She bent her back and knees, feeling the barrier suddenly move with her. Air caressed her from out of the darkness, and a yawning void opened up. She raced in, found an interior handle, and pulled the thick door closed. Another click and a thud, and she was enveloped in cloying black. Desperate for light, she thrust up her hands, tracing the line of the door to its hinges and the wall. She couldn’t afford to move slowly, they would be upon her in moments. She needed to get to the other side, to find a way out.
Her palms touched cool, smooth porcelain, and she got a sense from the echoes of her footfalls that the ceiling was high. Was it empty, or were there obstacles to trip her? She kept moving, left hand out, searching and shielding, right hand touching the wall. The air smelled rank and moldy, unnatural and metallic.
Move.
Ten feet, twenty. Who knew?
Keep going.
But the wall was cold, and, she realized now, slick in spots. She felt water on the tiles, or some kind of slime.
Something brushed her face–something soft and damp that left wetness on her cheek.
Ducking, she remembered the lighter stashed in her pocket. She grabbed it, her thumb flicking fast.
Blue sparks. Blue sparks. Flame. Yellow fire rose. The room appeared.
And she realized she was in a box of horror.
Like barely lit planets, dead beasts hung upside-down in the shadows. Eyes and wings and legs and paws dangled throughout the space, fixed to long lines that originated somewhere beyond her field of vision. Blood ran and coagulated down the sides of gutted dogs, their tongues lolling as if they had just been running in fields. Terrible, huge bats and owls spun slowly, their teeth and beaks sharp and vicious. Cats hung limply, whiskered faces seeping red onto the floor. She realized she could hear the drops, like rain, and that she could detect something else, floating in the rancid air.
Some of them were still barely alive. Some of them were still panting, still whimpering, still softly crying out the wordless testimony of their pain.
She had to lean against the wall to remain standing in the face of the charnel assault. It paraded proudly, announcing itself as handiwork, a kind of preparatory celebration of something final and arcane. She heard voices beyond the door and glanced back.
Then she saw it all. The walls and the door were festooned with huge, livid smears of blood. Beside her, the porcelain was wet, with a symmetry of designs, with vast circles, almost Celtic in appearance, but somehow different. They interlocked. They wrapped around pentagrams and other geometric images, and each was tied to the next by crimson smears, as if created in some bizarre script. Glistening lines connected the circles to the pools on the floor where the animals’ blood had been shed.
The freezer latch clicked and the door swung open. She turned away from it, saw something shining on the opposite side of the chamber. Another door.
Steph raced toward it, the flame of her lighter fluttering, the torchlight dwarfing it as her pursuers entered. This time, she was visible, they could see her, and they cried out with laughs and grunts as they closed in. The heads of the gutted beasts slapped her face and hair, spinning wildly in the dim light and casting terrible shadows on the walls.
She had to reach the exit before they had her, before the fate that Ashley Winters had predicted came true.
She dove at it and hit hard. The latch released with a sharp bang, and she stumbled out, beyond the horrors, into the cold and wet and the earthy smell of the backfields.
The rain doused the flame of her lighter, making the darkness almost complete. S
he dropped it and ran from the building into the blackness. Lightning flashed in the clouds, revealing the rows of a sodden vegetable field, and what looked like apple trees and a river beyond. She chose an open lane, raced into it, but the path was littered with rocks and roots, each step a hazard. She couldn’t be certain of her footing, couldn’t run at full speed. The door behind her opened. She could hear them emerge and spread out. Her breath became labored. Her legs propelled her as best they could.
Strange lumps and shapes slipped by in the rows beside her; the lightning lit them briefly, hinting at things slowly taking shape under the glistening mounds. The book jacket returned: …something growing in the fields of Poroth Farms.
She hazarded a glance back. Torches were spreading out, the bearers running swiftly, trying to circle her.
She stumbled, regained her balance. Something caught her attention. Something slimy. Emerging from the row–
“Help!”
Don’t look back!
She was almost at the far side of the field, almost free. Another crack of lightning, and she saw a scarecrow hanging like a hay-filled mockery of Jesus; instinctively knew that once she got past it, she would have them beaten. She could escape in the orchard or the river–
Something snagged her right foot, filling her ankle with pain, pitching her forward into the slime. Mud smothered her body, her face, her hair, and the sky flashed blue and purple, searing the instant into her mind. She saw her hands before her, willed them to move, caught glimpses of unnatural lumps in the rows, heard the hollers of the cult and their sloshing footsteps closing in. She lay exhausted at the base of the scarecrow, ankle throbbing, arms cold and slow. But she had to move, she had to bend her knees and push, to make herself rise.
Get up!
She couldn’t. A sudden geyser of pain shot up her leg.
She fell to her knees, sobbing, overwhelmed by a flood of frustration and helplessness. The thunder clapped louder and her tears mixed with the rain and mud, smearing her view of the nightmarish landscape even more. She glanced at the scarecrow looming over her on its cross, and closed her eyes.
For a moment, silence ruled. Then she heard them once more, closer now, and she collected every scintilla of strength to push again. She crawled on, focusing on the river ahead. If she could reach the raging water, she could float herself away from this–
An enormous bolt of lightning flashed on the figure attached to the cross.
And then the scarecrow moved. Its masked face rose from its sunken chest, and its arms came down off the cross in a fluid motion. What had been limp, thin, and lifeless was not, and in its eyes she recognized something.
She saw it bend and tilt its head quizzically.
It moved until their faces were mere inches apart.
Then it smiled.
That quirky, silly smile.
And it grabbed her wrist.
And it said, “Got ya.”
P. Gardner Goldsmith is a US/UK based television writer and author who has worked in the Script Departments of the network television series Star Trek: Voyager and Showtime’s The Outer Limits. His short stories have appeared in Naked Magazine (UK), and the anthologies Chiral Mad (US) and Epitaphs (US). His novella, “Bite,” will debut at Scardiff 2013, Cardiff, Wales, with a follow-up debut at the World Fantasy Convention, in Brighton, England, over Halloween Weekend, thanks to the good folks at Pendragon Press. In early 2014, Bad Moon Books of California will publish his second novella, “Gorge.” His non-fiction book Live Free or Die was published in 2007, and subsequently selected as a “Book of the Month” by the Freedom Book Club.
-Silent Stones
by Steve Vernon
It was one of those natural cathedrals in the woods where you could hear the crickets and peepers and leaves gossiping with the wind. A thicket of alder clustered around the clearing like onlookers at an accident scene. A slumber of cool green ferns and dew-fattened moss masked the dirt with an inviting patch quilt.
I took my boots off. I wanted to make no impression on the dirt, no sign that I had been there, no trace of my existence. The moss felt comforting and welcome on my bare feet. It gave the whole clearing a soft, muted quality and helped me find the gentle grey amnesia I yearned for. I could sleep on moss like that, better than any hotel mattress.
I was an expert in the field of hotel mattresses these days. Six weeks ago I’d come home to an empty house, everything swept away but a few random dust bunnies and a popped brown button lying on the faded green rectangle of carpet where my marriage bed had once stood. Her brother’s cube van had swallowed everything. She was gone. She left the marriage certificate and a broken book of matches. I used the matches on the certificate and walked away, not even waiting to hear the red roaring sirens howling out.
It was over and I wanted to find out what came next.
The last six weeks I’d been wandering, hitching down the highways, grabbing the occasional Greyhound bus as the mood moved me, and spending a lot of time wondering why everything had disappeared. I told myself that sometimes life happens that way. Things up and vanish when you don’t expect them to go. Something was there and then it wasn’t.
I learned to live on the road, spending nights in funky little motels and hotels along my path. Not the Travel Lodges or the Holiday Inns, but the flea pits and mom and pop dives that hunkered down on the highways to nowhere worth mentioning. I kept expecting to meet Norman Bates and be massacred in a spectacularly bloody fashion and dumped in a nearby swamp. No one would find me. No one would remember me. Maybe I’d like it that way.
Later on, as my money situation looked a little more dubious, I invested in a tent and a backpack and a sleeping bag. I leaned south, figuring that the good weather and a fool’s luck would see to my needs.
I wasn’t heading anywhere in particular, you understand. I was just sort of following the declining law of entropy, allowing my road to dwindle down into a vanishing point, at which I’d either figure out how to start over or maybe just evaporate into pointlessness.
I’d left a job and the memory of a marriage that just hadn’t worked out. I would look up at night and the stars seemed to echo that smile that I’d fallen in love with, that smile that broke my heart. Sometimes I wanted to climb up into that sky and find the gift of amnesia and the hope of possible extinction in those dark quiet spaces that stretched between the stars.
This is what happened to the dinosaurs, I think. It wasn’t comets and it wasn’t global warming. They died of loneliness and a lack of photo albums. Trees fell and no one heard them. Memories scattered and blew like leaves in the wind.
I lived on canned beans, because they were cheap and easy to prepare. The fibre kept me regular and the gas warmed my tent. My newfound flatulence seemed a kind of banal poetry, a tuba solo heard by none, which drifted upwards into the night. It didn’t matter if I stank up my sleeping bag. There was no one here to share it with. Besides, I liked beans.
Some nights I’d lay in my sleeping bag listening to a coyote howl or the screech owls shriek. One night I heard a bear rummaging around my campfire ashes and I thought about heading back anywhere north of this damn fool place. Then in the morning I checked my arms and legs and found myself still intact and un-bear-eaten.
Why change?
It was a kind of self-imposed disintegration; a slow, grey unproductive exile. Maybe I’d just wander until I came to the South Pole. Maybe I could talk to the penguins, or meet Morgan Freeman. I followed no road map. No sextants or compasses were my guides. I trusted my feet and learned nothing.
And then I found here.
Here is a funny place, isn’t it? Here is wherever you find yourself. Here is where your feet are. Here is what you’re looking at. Walk as far as your feet will carry you and you’ll find yourself right back here.
Right now, here was one of those quiet spots you find in the woods when you’re wandering alone. A hush of trees clumped around a bit of a clearing, as if the woods had yawned too hard and
swallowed themselves. Maybe no one else in the world had ever seen this spot. Maybe a whole safari of badge-hunting Boy Scouts just trooped through here five minutes ago, but if they did they were already somewhere else.
Of course somebody had been here before. There were stones to witness their passing; ancient grey tombstones, probably centuries old. Or perhaps they were some sort of unambitious Stonehenge, reared up by a mystical Masonic tribe of midgets.
If gravestones, I wondered how old they were. How old could they be? How long had men lived on this world? Columbus found us in 1492. I remembered that from school days. I knelt and looked at the stones, rubbed clear beyond the reach of any pencil-rubbing technique known to Ticonderoga. How old were these stones? How long had they rested here? Who slept beneath them, and who had tucked these anonymous bodies into their final goodnight camping ground?
It was far quieter and more desperate than any ghost town imaginable. These stones, so far from any sign of life, clustered in the shadows of this quiet little mossy hollow like a fungal fairy ring.
I knelt down in the moss, peering at the mute granite placards before me. I could not see a trace or shadow of identity. The history of this forgotten little graveyard was obscured beyond recollection. I envied it. It looked heavenly to me. So peaceful and so unremembered; each stone seemed to smile up at me.
I pushed my hands down deep into the moss, half expecting to feel someone’s hands reaching up towards me from out of the ground. That was impossible, of course. Beat a thousand voodoo drums and shout a million Hail Mary’s and it remained futility. Any bodies buried here so long ago had surrendered any hope of re-composition. Rot and decay had eaten them down into nothing more than a cradle-grave-hole stacked full of accumulated belly button lint.
Horror Library, Volume 5 Page 28