Ten Open Graves: A Collection of Supernatural Horror

by David Wood

  He slowly inched his head around. He had no answers for what he witnessed. The dark globs had resolved into vague human shapes, their inky blackness replaced with an incandescent glow and a static that buzzed in orbs shaped like eyes.

  He remembered a documentary on the National Geographic channel of a Papua New Guinea tribe that set no boundaries when it came to body modification. The program revealed tribesmen and tribeswomen sporting earrings, nose rings, tongue studs and hundreds of piercings covering their entire flesh.

  However, not the NatGeo show or anything else could have prepared him for the horror that stood before him. The two creatures’ modifications were the most extreme William had ever set eyes upon. Even the atrocities at Sodom’s Sideshow paled in comparison.

  Every centimeter of flesh from head to toe sported studs, captive bead rings, barbells and plugs. From most of the rings hung chains varying in length from three to six inches, each ending in a jagged hook. Tiny pieces of mottled flesh hung from the hooks like bait on the end of a fishing line. The stench of rotting meat overwhelmed the air.

  He fought the urge to run. Straightening to full stature, he faced the unnatural beings, defensively positioning himself in front of Kelly.

  “What do you want?”

  “The girl,” the closest wraith said, its vocals scratchy and tinny like old LP recordings played back on a 1925 Victrola.

  “You can’t have her.”

  “Oh yes we can. She summoned. We came. We do not intend to go back empty handed.”

  The second speaker stepped closer and the putrid smell from the dangling chunks of meat forced William to take a step backwards. His legs hit the reclining chair and he fell into Kelly’s lap.

  The two pierced specters converged on William, their flimsy wraithlike hands grabbing him and throwing him across the room. He crashed into an equipment table, sending needles, ink guns and jars of disinfectant to the floor.

  Dazed, he stared through the preternatural twilight. The turbulent air made it difficult to discern the next sequence of events.

  It looked as if the pierced wraiths swirled around Kelly’s slouched figure, their velocity increasing with each revolution. As they circled the chair, their luminescence began to flicker like fireflies on a summer night.

  William stumbled to his feet, fighting the onset of vertigo. Shaking his head, he took a step forward. Before he could formulate a plan of action, the flickering stopped. Shadows returned. He strained to see beyond the murky air to the chair, but to no avail.

  He broke into a run. The chair sat empty; no signs of pierced wraiths or Kelly.

  “No!” he shouted. “No. This can’t be happening.”

  The twilight lifted, returning the tattoo shop to the natural gray of a late Portland autumn afternoon. Even so, the emerging light did not reveal Kelly’s presence. She had vanished with the pierced freaks, and William had nobody to blame but himself.

  He shuffled to the desk and flopped into the chair. He pulled out the Woodford Reserve flask and drained it in three large gulps.

  Kelly’s little trepanning trick worked. Her disappearance confirmed it. She had pierced through. He had no idea what would happen next.

  Heart heavy with regret, he leaned back in his chair, enjoyed the numbing sensation from the whiskey and waited. At the moment he could do nothing more than wait.

  Chapter 14: Into The Shadowed Forest

  Kelly stirred. Sharp pain from two fixed areas on her skull brought her mind into focus. She remembered the sound of the drill as it bore into her cranium with a shrill buzz and the stench of metal on bone.

  Before slipping into total unconsciousness she recalled seeing a strange display of fluorescent shapes swirling around her head. She had glimpsed odd piercings, short chains with hooks and the oddest eyes. The lifeless orbs contained no pupils. Instead, they emitted a white radiance that danced with tiny black dots. It reminded her of staring into static on a television screen. Moments later she had slipped into oblivion, not feeling afraid, but rather comforted by her self-fulfilled prophecy.

  The comfort gave way to unease as she swam upward out of the grogginess and opened her eyes. Nothing but black met her vision.

  “William?” Her voice sounded like a pip with no resonance, swallowed by darkness too thick to allow the travel of sound. The dark felt stuffed, almost smothering.

  “William?” she called again, her open eyes not able to fix on anything but inky shadow. “William, what happened?”

  Her voice sounded like a bird chirping under water, distorted and lacking substance. A reply came her way, but died before it reached her ears, as if a gust of wind caught it and slapped it in a different direction. The sound came again.

  She listened harder and this time she could make out a faint moan, or rather a series of moans. As her ears adjusted to the thick air, she perceived groaning and crying from all points of the compass. She concentrated hard to hear the muted voices, straining as if she was trying to catch the last reverberation of an echo.

  A flash of insight brought with it a stabbing twinge of fright. She realized she no longer sat in the chair at Inkenstein. She had been transported elsewhere and that realization came with a price, the price of suspecting she had been cheated, or more aptly, tricked.

  This couldn’t be the result of piercing through, could it? She had wagered that piercing through would offer more than a simple escape from the world where her stepfather had locked her in his sexual radar. Secretly she had longed for some kind of miracle, perhaps a transformation of sorts. Even something as sappy as the Garden of Eden would be preferable to this suffocating dark and its unnerving choir of anguish.

  Not knowing what course to take, and hindered by the dark, she attempted to assess the situation. First, her wounds. What if the bore holes still bled? She reached up but her hand stopped a few inches short of her head. She tried again. The same result. She vigorously shook her arms and heard the sound of rattling metal.

  No way. This can’t be happening.

  She tried to take a step, but her right leg, fixed in an awkward position, only moved a few inches before it met resistance like a dog reaching the end of his leash. Like that dog, she appeared to be tethered by chains. However, the chains were not attached to her through collars or cuffs. Rather, they ended with something sharp that dug into the deep tissue of her flesh, perhaps hooks or sharpened plugs.

  The chains did not hamper only her arms and legs. Every body part, no matter how small or insignificant, met restraint. Chains and hooks linked her forefinger to her middle finger. Chains ran from one inner thigh to its opposite. Chains ran from the bottom of her chin to the fleshy area just below both sides of her clavicle. Chains ran from forearm to chest, from nipples to navel, from lips to earlobes, from the upper spinal region to the sides of her cheeks, from the lower part of her calves to the back of her knees; every part of her anatomy linked to another part.

  It dawned on her that whoever had done this had done so with the intent of making her hold a certain position. The chains limited her movements to mere inches no matter what direction she tried and no matter what part of her body she attempted to move.

  She had once suffered through a yoga class at the behest of Trish. She knew this position; the cat pose which was performed on one’s hands and knees. In yoga it helped relieve tension and stress. However, in her current circumstance it produced the opposite effect, creating fear and apprehension.

  Refusing to remain tethered like a pet, Kelly tested the strength of the chains. She thrust her forearm away from her body. The multiple chains linking her forearm to her chest tightened with a fierce tug. Pain ravished her nerves like gloating demons. It would take one mighty heave to tear her arm free. The pain would be significant.

  For now she would bide her time, sit in her crouched position in the clogging darkness and hope for a clearer plan.

  What had she done, not only to herself but to William?

  She had treated him like dirt. He
was, and always would be a tattoo purist. She had coaxed him into performing the trepanation even though it betrayed every principle he stood for. Because of that, she knew he suffered too. She pictured him enduring another night of insomnia at Inkenstein, wondering what his actions had cost her.

  “Oh Willy, I’m alive. I wish I could at the very least let you know that.” She spoke her thoughts even though she knew William was nowhere near this bizarre darkness.

  A pillar of light stirred in the dark. Although the chains held her head in a downward angle, she had a few inches of freedom to turn to the side, providing her with a good view of the emerging radiance.

  In fact, several illuminating pillars floated closer, filling the black void like stars in a newly formed galaxy. It afforded Kelly the opportunity to see her surroundings. What she saw more than disheartened her. It plunged her straight into the icy depths of despair.

  She had never bonded with religious doctrine; the concepts of heaven and hell a glove only worn by the mindless masses. Now she had second thoughts.

  From her perspective it looked as if Hell had created a new version of the game Twister. An intricate confusion of links, chains and hooks held thousands of naked bodies together like a tower or wall of human flesh. As far as she could see in every direction there were configurations of bodies chained to each other in various poses.

  As the floating lights neared, the bodies forming the tower stirred. The cries and moans, interspersed with the rattling of chains, fought to reach Kelly’s ears through the thick muddled air.

  A woman descended from above, using the chains and bodies as a ladder. A white robe covered her nakedness. She scrambled down the tower too fast, scrabbling for purchase. One of her hands slid off a length of chain. She slipped to the side, her chest bouncing off the back of a squatting man before she hurtled out into the empty space.

  Gasping, Kelly watched the body fall towards her. The woman’s mouth opened but her scream became a faint whisper in the oppressive air.

  Kelly had been rooting for the woman’s escape and felt a poignant sadness as the dark swallowed her plummeting body.

  More movement above drew her attention. Another figure climbed down the intricate network of chains and bodies. Like the lady who had just fallen to her death, this person wore a robe, not white but dark. He moved down the human ladder with an ease the previous woman lacked. His confident hold carried him swiftly and safely in her direction.

  Guessing the man to be within earshot, she shouted, “Hey. Take me with you.” Even though she raised her voice, the words rebounded off the thick atmosphere, muted and dull.

  The man must not have heard, not even looking her way as he used her hunched back like a rung on a ladder and lowered himself onto the chains below her.

  She made a second attempt, screaming so loud she feared her lungs would tear. The man paused and popped his head back into view, looking her straight in the face. He had a bald head and slanted eyes. Even though the flowing robe covered most of his body she could see strange symbols emitting a faint luminescence where his sleeves had rolled up. The clean white glow gave the marks a magical quality like Elf runes. She had seen her share of tattoos hanging around Inkenstein, but nothing like these.

  More symbols decorated his cheeks and cranium. Some of them looked like representations of animals; monkeys, panthers and spiders, every one of them lit by the gentle magical glow. She had a hunch the luminescent markings covered his entire body; a true illustrated man.

  His face exuded the calmness of someone in control. Kelly felt an immediate bond.

  “Please. Don’t leave me here.” She screamed at the top of her lungs, determined to get her message through the muddled air.

  The robed man frowned, as if wrestling with a decision. He smiled, patted the top of her head and dropped out of sight.

  “Come back!” Kelly yelled, but the clogged air beat her voice down to a murmur. She cried, the dark swallowing her sobs as greedily as it did all other sounds.

  The pillars of light gained closer proximity to the bizarre tower of human flesh. The closer they came, the more they resembled celestial entities.

  Angels? She hoped so. Again her mind, faced with the unexplainable, fell back on religious dogma. It made sense. In traumatic situations the mind had to compete with panic and fear to form some sort of rational thought. The prevalence of religion in society made its concepts easy to latch onto in the presence of immediate danger. There truly are no atheists in the foxhole.

  One of the celestial entities floated within Kelly’s reach. She got a good glimpse and realized she had made a drastic mistake. Not an angel by any stretch of the imagination. The thousands of piercings and short lengths of chains filled her with dread. The horrible television static eyes stared straight through her own eyes into her mind. The buzzing scrubbed her brain, stripping away her volition.

  The din in her head subsided as the pierced being left her vicinity, imposing its mind control on the next chained victim.

  After finishing their rounds, the floating wraiths winked out like dying stars. She was glad to be rid of their ominous presence.

  Kelly’s muscles cramped from lack of mobility. The clogging dark made each lungful of air feel as if she had swallowed an invisible fist.

  She found herself employing the same survival mechanism that had worked in her former reality, the one filled with empty holes left by a dearly departed mother and scars from the abusive ogre stepfather. She was a pro at numbing her mind and now it helped her cope with the irrationality of this strange new world.

  Some escape this turned out to be.

  Apostle Peter, trepanation and piercing through all seemed like a big joke now.

  She wanted a redo, but she had a feeling the pierced wraiths were not in the habit of bargaining.

  Another episode of fluorescent light interrupted her troubled thoughts. The bodies on the chains stirred, coming to life like bees awakened by an infiltrator in the hive.

  Once again, after minutes of imposed static mind control, the glowing pierced wraiths either blinked out of existence or faded from sight. The same suffocating darkness returned in force.

  More time elapsed. Kelly discovered that the perpetual dark rendered time irrelevant. She had no way to measure its flow; no sunrises or sunsets to mark the beginning or end of a day.

  One endless moment bled into the next without anything to break up the monotony except periodic visits from the pierced wraiths and their mind invading static stares.

  For the average person Kelly’s suffering would be unbearable, but she had lived through several tragedies already, and had learned the benefits of being numb. Her mother’s untimely death, her father’s abuse; all of it she survived by adding one layer of numbness on top of another, the way you would layer clothing to survive a brutal winter evening.

  So she managed to endure her imprisonment on the wall of human flesh by wrapping herself in a thick cocoon of apathy until the moment the robed stranger reappeared.

  She awoke from a stupor to a soft glow a few inches in front of her face. Still dazed, she tried to turn, desiring to wrap her body around the alluring radiance, but the chains reasserted themselves with a painful tug. Kelly huffed. How long were they going to make her suffer on her hands and knees like a lowly four legged animal?

  The comforting glow bent forward and spoke directly into her ear. It was the clearest stream of words she had heard since entering the muddled darkness.

  “Here, eat this quickly. We must hurry.”

  Straining through light deprived eyes her vision landed on the robed form of the monk. The monkey symbol on his cheek gave off a soft inviting light. He pushed a leafy substance towards her mouth.

  “Go on eat it. You’ll need it.”

  Under more normal circumstances her cynical mind would have suspected poison. All things considered, however, being poisoned would at least offer an end to the infinite darkness and solitude.

  She parted her lips a
nd chomped down on the leaves. Her mouth tingled as a bitter ooze coated her tongue. She swallowed. In seconds a tingling erupted over her entire body.

  “Do you feel it?” the monk asked, his smile as radiant as his facial markings.

  She nodded.

  Without delay, he grabbed a handful of chains and yanked. Kelly screamed in anticipation of the excruciating pain. She could feel the movement of the hooks as they slid through her tissue and broke through her skin but the pain never materialized. The tingling sensation buffered the agony she should have been experiencing.

  She looked into the robed monk’s almond shaped eyes. He assured her with an abrupt nod and yanked out another handful of chains and hooks. The leafy analgesic worked like a charm. No pain and very little blood.

  The monk loosed her from a lengthy series of links running into the prone body suspended above her. Once free of the support, she dropped onto the figure below, who had been fastened to the tower in a fetal position.

  The dozing man registered her fall with a groan. He curled tighter into himself but made no further protests. She sat on him and started flexing her stiff muscles, releasing their cumulative knots and tension while the monk worked on freeing the rest of her body.

  Tossing aside the final chain, the monk bent close and again spoke into her ear. “Put this on and start climbing down as fast as you can.”

  She wrapped a white terry cloth robe around her body. She held onto the man below her and lowered herself onto a section of interlaced chain that provided a good hold. She scampered down like a spider traversing a web.

  The glowing symbols on the monk’s face produced enough light for Kelly to make good time. However, she exercised caution, not wanting to make the same mistake as the earlier woman. A lump still formed in her throat every time she thought of the unfortunate fall from the tower.

  Kelly was fast, but the pierced wraiths were equally so. They emerged out of the inky blackness, their celestial glow filling the void like stars in the Milky Way.