And how did I know he was a man? All angels are men. Even this kind, aren’t they? The scythe, by the way, has to be one of those urban myths. His hands get busy, you see. At intervals for instance, one would break free from the eating process for a stretch of nose picking. And although the nose couldn’t clearly be seen, the catch would be dragged out and proudly displayed, before itself being noisily guzzled down.
My impatience at his delaying tactics was outbidding my disgust of his nasty little games. After all, I had, I presume, left my earthly body as I opened the door at his pounding–not the first jolt with the old ticker–which is how I suppose this routine usually goes. I had assumed, for one terrible moment, that it was the police again. So in a way I was relieved. But all this stalling was just getting silly. Just silly.
“May we please leave now?” I demanded. “I get the point. I insist, in fact, that we do leave, immediately.”
I tried to stand but found myself somehow rooted to my chair, as if over many unaccounted years, I had grown out of it like a cyst.
There followed the last response from him that I ever remember receiving. Mr. Dark twisted my fork around in his mummified fingers and with it pointed to my cloud-smeared window where his message was clearly etched:
We are already here.
His enthusiasm for the cake never wanes. I can hear him now, ‘clack, clacking’ away, although I can’t always see him. Because, quite often, the bugs settle on my face. And as much as I loathe them, their contact has become essential to me. Sadly, I can always see the filth, even through the smallest chink–the putrid, dripping globules of it, because, like the bugs, it has a distinctive glow about it. Not a pleasant candle-like glow, such as what can cheer up a room–no, more the melted haze that hangs around nuclear waste. My chair has collapsed–did I say Chippendale? Hard to tell nowadays–under the weight of my own excrement. What my treacherous bowels find to evacuate is a mystery. I never eat–and why on earth, I ask you, would I want to? And yet, there I go again–regular as the post. One could set the clocks by it. It is my only connection with time in fact; the light here is always the same, you see–this nothing light. I would like to lose my sense of smell, should one thing be granted me in time. And if I could just have a conversation, just a chat–that would be, dare I say it, a Godsend. Even one with Mr. Dark would be preferable to the sounds that plague me. I do so miss my little chats. Particularly with my dear, dear companion. The girl, whose name slips my mind.
Janine-Langley Wood is from Leeds, England. For twelve years she has taught Creative Writing to foundation degree students and prison inmates. Her work has been published in literary journals and anthologies such as Even the Ants Have Names, Diamond Twig Press, Lyrical Laboratory, Forward Press, Braqemard, Hasty and Krax magazines. During 2012-13 her stories have appeared in The Screaming Book of Horror, Noose and Gibbet Press, and in the 2nd edition of Corvus. Her story Relentless will be in Bite Sized Horror 2, also Noose & Gibbet, around October 2013. Baby-Trap, which featured in Screaming Book of Horror alongside the likes of Charlie Higson and Robin Ince, recently made it onto Ellen Datlow’s longlist for Best Horror of the Year–Booyah!
Back in 2003 Janine received a Northern Promise Award (Northern Arts) and mentoring by author Sara Maitland for a novel in progress. In 2009 she had a short play read at The Courtyard Theatre, West Yorkshire Playhouse. Her first play A Minor Catastrophe was shortlisted for the BBC’s national comedy-script competition Falling About. She has completed her first horror novel, MELT, and is adapting her Northern Promise Award novel, Perfecting Beverly, into a horror novel too.
Thank you for purchasing Horror Library Volume 5. Be sure to look for other great Bram Stoker Award® nominated Cutting Block titles at www.cuttingblock.net, or on Amazon.com, or wherever quality horror books are sold.
Table of Contents
-Blown by Pat MacEwen
-Jerrod Steihl Goes Home by Ian Withrow
-The Immolation Scene by John F.D. Taff
-A Body at Rest by Lorne Dixon
-By the Time I Get to Five by J.S. Reinhardt
-Notes for an Article on Bainbridge Farm by Bentley Little
-Noise by Sanford Allen
-Almost Home by Kevin Lucia
-Pillars of Light by Michael A. Arnzen
-Footprints Fading in the Desert by Eric J. Guignard
-The Vulture’s Art by Benjamin Kane Ethridge
-Activate by Boyd E. Harris
-Snow Globe by Adam Howe
-Intruders by Taylor Grant
-The Boathouse by Stephen McQuiggan
-Bath Time by Jeff Strand
-The Happiness Toy by Ray Garton
-The Oldest Profession by Tracie McBride
-The House That Sang by Andrew Stockton
-Bad Seed by Anne Michaud
-Gourd by P. Gardner Goldsmith
-Silent Stones by Steve Vernon
-The Emu in the Sky by Mark Farrugia
-Ambrosia by Dev Jarrett
-Follower by Danny Rhodes
-Catacombs by Kristin Dearborn
-Whispers in the Wax by Tonia Brown
-The Mirror Box by Charles Colyott
-The Local Haunt by Janine-Langley Wood
Horror Library, Volume 5 Page 39