Horror Library, Volume 5

by Boyd E. Harris R. J. Cavender

  “They say a woman was murdered in there. My brother reckons she was a witch!”

  “I suppose your brother killed her too, did he?” Ritchie spat.

  “He thinks she collected bones from dead children. Reckons she even killed her own kid!” Bobby held the light below his chin, casting eerie shadows across his face. “Bet you’re too scared to go in.”

  “The rocket base isn’t that far. Let’s keep going,” Ritchie said.

  “Chicken, eh?” Bobby’s face gleamed in the light.

  Ritchie took a step forward. “I’m not chicken!”

  “Prove it,” Bobby demanded.

  Without looking back, Ritchie leapt over the fence. “Scared, Bobby?” Ritchie dared from the other side.

  Bobby climbed over the wrought iron posts. “You guys coming or what?”

  Mike and Pete shook their heads.

  “I’m not going in,” Mike said.

  “I’m heading home.” Pete stepped back.

  “Jack?” Ritchie called.

  Jack’s heart beat faster, sweat caked his brow and he looked up at the dark patch at the edge of the Milky Way. He didn’t see the emu or the grey stubbled shaman. Instead he saw a tiny point of light, an unflickering star moving through the darkness.

  The rocket!

  Like a thread through the eye of a needle, the star moved through the dark patch of night. It looped into a knot that appeared to pull tight. Jack no longer felt connected to the bearded man or the hovering emu. It seemed to him the gap in the sky that allowed the Dreamtime to peer down to his world had been stitched closed. He still felt connected to the land, but somehow it was different. A vibration rose into his feet and moved through him. It pushed him forward, towards the graveyard.

  Jack, he heard a voice whisper. It was soft and alluring.

  “Jack c’mon, hurry!”

  * * *

  Over the years Gran’s warnings had mingled with rumours to instil in Jack a fear of the cemetery, so he understood why Mike and Pete had chosen to go home. But once he climbed over the wrought iron fence, he wasn’t scared at all. The cemetery was nothing like what Jack had expected. It was quiet and peaceful.

  “This place is creepy.” Bobby ran his light along headstones as he walked, throwing shadows deep and long against the darkness.

  “Thought you weren’t scared?”

  “I’m not. I said it’s a little creepy here, that’s all.”

  “Hey, what’s that over there?” Ritchie pointed towards the centre of the cemetery.

  A glow like a lingering campfire illuminated a squat and twisted boab. Leafless branches reached into the night resembling desperate arms from a grave. The tree’s trunk had the bloated look of a pregnant belly, the middle split, a caesarean-cut. Surrounded by a wall of broken tombstones, a dusty film of grey smoke rose and traced a line into the sky.

  Jack felt a prick in his chest, as though one of the branches had reached down and pierced his soul. He became aware of the tree’s vast system of roots beneath his feet, and felt trapped.

  Bobby leapt onto the wall, kept his balance, and stood proudly above the other boys. He shone his flashlight past the base of the boab and peered over the edge. “Get a load of this!”

  A thick black sludge swirled around the base of the tree. It bubbled and smoked as though heated from the churned bowels of the earth. Black ash rose like the inside of a decaying snow globe and merged with the darkness.

  Ritchie leapt up beside him. Under the extra weight, rubble crumbed from the wall. Jack kept his distance, but he followed the tumbling pieces with his light. He realised what fell from the wall weren’t pieces of tombstones at all.

  Bones! Small, broken bones!

  The earth below Jack’s feet suddenly cracked, as the roots of the boab worked their way to the surface. At the base of the tree, sludge spat and a dark shape rose from the depths.

  A naked woman. Her skin was dark and her belly bloated like the trunk of the tree. A noose looped her neck, the other end of the rope wound around a branch and winched the woman higher. She pointed a finger towards Jack. Help me, she mouthed before stretching her fingers into an open palm. Beneath Bobby and Ritchie’s feet, bones began to shift.

  “What the hell?” Bobby yelled.

  “I can’t move!” Ritchie screamed.

  A single gunshot ripped through the night.

  Jack dropped to a crouch. Ritchie and Bobby remained exposed.

  “Kala, let the children go.” Gran stood behind Jack, gun aimed.

  Kala?

  “Mum?” Jack whispered at the woman in front of the tree.

  Kala edged away from the boab but the noose tightened and she thrashed violently.

  “Jack, here, spread this around the wall, it’ll stop her.” Gran tried to hand him the jar, full to the brim with dark potion, but he didn’t respond. The old lady turned back to her dead daughter-in-law, hate on her face, fear ripe in her eyes.

  Jack faced his Gran. “You killed her, didn’t you? You killed my mum!”

  “Jack, if I’m to save your friends I’ll need you by my side. We’ll talk about it later. Here, take the jar. Go on, take it.” Gran’s voice was calm.

  Still hanging from the noose, Jack’s dead mother thrust forward, and the wall around her began to crumble.

  “Shit Baker, do as she says…please!” Bobby yelled from the wall.

  “Jack, listen to me. This gun might slow her but it won’t stop her. I need you to spread this liquid.” Gran kept the rifle aimed but turned her face towards her grandson. “Jack please, your friends will die otherwise!”

  Jack felt a connection. His mother’s emotions–raw and aggressive, dark and fighting for survival–flooded Jack’s mind. He turned to Gran. “They aren’t my friends, and I hate you!”

  As though gaining strength from her son’s words, the dead woman raised her arms and clenched her fists. The wall of remains gave way. Bones tumbled. Bobby and Ritchie fell into the foaming sludge. Their frantic splashes slowed in the thick, bubbling black.

  The gun bobbed up and down as Gran tried to unscrew the jar’s lid. Her fingers slipped against the glass. She glanced up. The dead woman loomed above the liquid grave. The splashing below ceased.

  “Jack,” Kala whispered.

  Jack stared at his mother as she tilted her head towards the old woman, and then nodded.

  “Jack, stay where you are.” Gran kept the gun pointed at Kala while she continued to work the jar.

  “You killed my mum!”

  “Jack, you don’t understand. We did it to save you!”

  Jack looked at the bloated belly on his mother’s slender frame.

  “You killed her before I was born!”

  “We had no choice. She was a murderer, a witch! I saw what she did to those other children, to your brother! You were all I had left of your father. I wasn’t going to let her kill you too.”

  Brother?

  “He was four days old when he disappeared. Other babies went missing too. It was over a year before we realised it was her. It would have broken your father’s heart had he known it was his Kala who killed his own. We found her with the bones!” The whites of Gran’s eyes were veined red. A tear slipped down her cheek.

  Brother?

  Jack turned to his mother. Help me, she mouthed.

  “I’ll kill her again to save you!” The old lady cocked the rifle.

  Jack lunged, grabbed the rifle barrel and tried to wrestle it from his gran. The jar fell from the old lady’s hand and smashed at their feet. The potion drained along the grey, carved stone. It sizzled as it seeped into the earth, and when it touched the tree’s exposed roots Kala screamed.

  “Jack, please!” Gran begged.

  They struggled. Jack kept a grip on the long black barrel and managed to point it away from his mother.

  “You don’t understand! She was breeding you for your bones!” Gran tried to aim the gun back towards Kala. “If we let her live she would have come for you,
her own flesh and blood. Jack–”

  The rifle fired.

  The old lady clutched her stomach, and Jack found that the rifle was in his own hands. Gran dropped to her knees and fell on her side in the dirt. As she convulsed, Jack felt the weight of all the stars in the sky bearing down. “Gran?”

  The potion made from the remains of feral animals sunk deep into the soil. Kala screamed something Jack couldn’t understand.

  He grabbed Gran’s hand, stroked her face as she bled. When her convulsions ceased, her skin became ice-cold.

  Jack stared up at the mother he’d never known. She was silent now, smiling and curling a finger, motioning him towards her.

  Jack shook his head.

  Kala’s face contorted like the twisted braches of the boab. Again, she screamed incoherently.

  Roots as thick as a man’s wrist whipped from the ground and bound Jack’s ankles. The rifle fell from his hands.

  “No!” he yelled. The tree tugged at him, dragging him towards the bubbling black.

  “Let me go!” His ankles snapped, the ends of his feet bent like broken twigs. He howled. The tree’s roots gripped higher, shattering his legs. Splinters of bone lodged in the dirt like tiny spears. Jack screamed, fought, gouged at the ground, but the boab hauled him waist-deep into the sludge.

  Half submerged, Jack looked around for something to grip. All he could see was his mother’s face, large and looming. He sank deeper into her grave. Still fighting, Jack tilted his head back, took a final breath and stared up at the sky one last time.

  The rocket moved at the edge of the Milky Way, near the place some claimed to see an emu, others, the head of a watchful shaman. Rising foam bubbled around Jack’s face.

  Darkness.

  The glow around the boab faded. Kala too, sank into the liquid mess at the base of the tree. The black sludge stilled.

  High above, sparks showered the darkness before the light faded, then the night sky too became still.

  Mark Farrugia is the author of the vampire comic series “Allure of the Ancients: The Key to His Kingdom” and the short story series “Seeds” (honorably mentioned by Ellen Datlow), set in a dystopian version of Melbourne. Mark’s other writing credits include the blood n’guts dragon fantasy “A Bag Full of Arrows,” (also honorably mentioned by Ellen Datlow) and the story “Single Mother of None.” His fiction has appeared in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine (ASIM), Midnight Echo, Borderlands, Eclecticism and AntipodeanSF. BestScienceFictionStories.com declared Mark’s flash fiction amongst its favorites of 2009 and 2010.

  Mark edited Midnight Echo Issue 8 (with Amanda Spedding and Marty Young), ASIM Issue 46 and ASIM Best of Horror Volume 2 (with Juliet Bathory). He is currently involved in adapting some of Australia’s most obscure colonial fiction into comics for Midnight Echo’s “From the Vault” project.

  He tweets occasionally @mark_farrugia.

  -Ambrosia

  by Dev Jarrett

  In Little Italy, he stood beneath the open window of a walkup. A man and a woman screamed at each other over every perceived shortcoming. Her sleeping around, his loss of last week’s paycheck at the OTB, and their mutual incipient alcoholism gave them so much to criticize. Oliver inhaled the bouquet of their anger, and sipped the free-range resentment from the atmosphere as it sank through the air past his mouth.

  In the Village, he stood across the street from a guitar player. The musician’s case was open on the cracked pavement before him, the red felt lining littered with crumpled, small bills and splashes of chump change. The guitarist despised the people who listened without giving a donation, and barely tolerated the ones who dropped a little currency. Their watery smiles confessed that their money was given only in charity, not in appreciation.

  While his feelings for his patrons held a particularly spicy flavor for Oliver, the true delicacy to be savored was the musician’s rising desperation. The coins were few and the bills fewer, and Oliver tasted his sharp anxiety. Busking and plasma donations were the only way the guitarist could pay his rent, and the last twenty he’d gotten for plasma had been spent already on some second-rate weed. The musician’s spite and desperation swirled in the air, stirred by passing vehicles and sweetened by each pedestrian’s free-floating anxiety. Oliver drank every drop.

  Further up Fifth Avenue into Midtown, he stood at the mouth of an alley, while back in the shadows a Hispanic streetwalker gave a blowjob to a barfly. Her hatred, both of her customer and herself, was delicate and sweet, while her customer’s feelings of racial superiority, coupled with lust, complemented her hate perfectly. The flavors drifted on the fetid evening breeze. The heady brew was intoxicating.

  He entered Central Park as twilight blossomed into full darkness. The façades of the Upper East Side loomed overhead, backed by thin clouds and invisible stars, while the warm, soft wind hissed in the treetops. The belching roar of a lion sounded from the distant zoo.

  Oliver raised his nose to the wind, scenting his dessert like a predator on the prowl. He smelled fear, and was pleased. Such an emotion was rich and multilayered, born of ignorance and paranoia, feeding on itself and growing until it eclipsed all else.

  He concentrated, allowing his viewpoint to soar high above the park. The source was farther north. He returned to his body and moved closer, that he might partake of this decadent concoction at its source.

  There she was. A walker in the darkness. A young woman. Why she was out alone was a mystery. Oliver had seen such things before, but he’d never understood the odd human need to prove oneself brave or capable.

  Her steps were quick. At each branch of her lit pathway, shadowy figures stood and blocked the walker’s path to freedom. Their presence herded her deeper into the park, farther from the relative safety of the street-side area of Central Park East. She dared not forsake the lit, paved path in favor of a sprint through the trackless unlit warren of trees. That way would almost certainly end in tragedy. Oliver saw her hand in her purse, and he could feel the slippery perspiration of her palm on the tiny canister of pepper spray. At each turn, her terror grew more profound.

  He knew her fear intimately. The fright was so strong it made her stomach clench and her mouth dry. Beneath that, Oliver also sensed the hungry anticipation of her tormentors. Their scents, like their intentions, were obvious. They stalked the young lady, then planned to brutally have their way with her, each in his turn.

  Over his many centuries, Oliver had tasted the emotions associated with rape. Admittedly, the victim’s abject fear, pain, and shame were quite filling. On the other hand, the emotions of the transgressor were thin and puling. There was hate, to be sure, but it was overwhelmed by inadequacy, and an inflammatory need for power.

  The rapist’s need for power, in the end, was simply ambition’s ugly stepsister. As such, it was bitter, and lingered unpleasantly on the palate. The best Oliver could hope for was to drink in the girl’s fear until she was caught. The mix of emotions in the assault itself would only dilute the girl’s fear and pain in a vinegary mélange of her captors’ feelings, and certainly wouldn’t prove worthy of Oliver’s consumption.

  Was it the best he could hope for?

  Oliver considered for a moment, then smiled.

  He had a brilliant idea.

  In the darkness of the trees, he extrapolated her path. He saw that in two turns, she would come to a dead end, and when that happened, she would become a victim several times over. He whisked through the benighted hummocks of the park, arriving at the dead end before the girl.

  He opened his mouth and drank her hot, thick panic from the air. It was so sweet, so tasty. He could hear her panting, and from its rhythm, he knew she was running now. Oliver heard at least six other sets of feet padding in her wake: the herders were right on her heels.

  At the crest of a low hill, her path was blocked one last time, and she turned toward the dead end. Toward the leader of this team of rapists. Toward the site of the impending crime.

  Also, towa
rd Oliver.

  She saw the leader of the group as he stepped from the shadows, and she skidded to a halt.

  “You lost, bitch?”

  She removed her hand from her purse, brandishing the pepper spray with one hand while she reached again into the purse with her other. She withdrew a cell phone.

  “You stay away from me! I’m calling the cops!”

  Two thick arms reached around her, one of the herders squeezing her wrists until she dropped both the phone and the spray. Her slender arms were pinioned behind her. Oliver felt her terror explode. It was dazzling, and beautiful, and delicious. It had reached its peak. Oliver opened his mouth and inhaled deeply, drawing in all he could.

  “You ain’t calling shit. I’m making the calls now.” The leader of the group sneered at her.

  Oliver could feel the rapist’s acidic emotions rising, and he stepped out of the gloom.

  “Have you ever truly been afraid, you stupid troglodyte?” Oliver said to the leader. He waved toward the girl. “Like her?”

  “Yo, fuck you, old man.”

  “No, no, no. Not even close. Here, try this.”

  Oliver stepped close to the thug, and exhaled the girl’s fear into his face.

  The young man’s jaw fell slack. His eyes opened so wide they threatened to fall from their sockets. His lips moved, and a string of saliva unspooled from one corner of his mouth.

  “No, no, no, no, no–” he mumbled.

  Fear grows as it feeds on itself.

  “–no, no, no, no, no–” His voice rose.

  It keeps growing, until it eclipses all else.

  “NONONONONOO!!!”

  The young man’s screams lost coherence, and he turned from Oliver, running in blind panic into the Central Park night. The screams echoed, and the fear was mouth-wateringly savory. It was even better than the girl’s original fear. Oliver sucked it in deeply.

  The terror’s flavor was transcendent. Better than hate, better than desperation, and far better than resentment.

  Oliver turned to the herders. Two held the girl, and five others bunched behind them.

  “What about you? You want some, too?”