Psychosis: Tales of Horror

by Matt Dymerski

  ****

  The Bonewalker

  8:51 PM…

  I place the last bone in my carefully laid trap, and check my watch. I told it to meet me at thirty seconds past nine, and it has never once been late. I feel an odd sense of freedom and calm as I stand at the crest of the desolate junkyard, the battleground for my last stand. In nine minutes, one of us will die. If it must be me, I will at least go down fighting, and no longer held in thrall by fear. I hope that this act will somehow provide me a slight redemption in Audrey’s eyes, if there’s an afterlife, and if I go to the same place as she did.

  It was her death that started all of this. No, I shouldn’t say that. My inability to cope with her death was what started it all. When she died, I let a crushing depression grip my soul, and I let it fester within me, turning my heart black and desperate. Elation fills me as I realize that I am finally able to take responsibility for my actions. I am doing the right thing, standing up to the bonewalker like this. It’s been over nine months since she died, and ever before I found something or someone else to blame for my choices and misfortunes.

  8:52 PM…

  Eight minutes. It’s strange that I think of that detail now, that it was on my eighth and final visit to the occult bookstore that the owner approached me. He’d seen me at the ‘rituals,’ poorly veiled excuses for anonymous orgies in which I could never bring myself to partake. Still, I lurked on the edges of the underground, watching what became of people who were even further down the path of losing themselves in the darker human emotions than I. He handed a book to me, one which I almost refused out of frustration. The other books on occult powers I’d tried, ostensibly to speak to or gain knowledge of Audrey or our unborn child, had never worked, and had left me feeling ridiculous. This one, he insisted, held something more.

  The powerful surge of freedom and elation in me begins to ebb as I remember the stress and nightmare of that first ritual, so exceedingly simple in design, yet so terrifying in result. The eight pages of instructive text, found near the back, were free of elaborate prose and vague promises. They merely… led. I prepared a vial of my drawn blood as the pages instructed, performing rites based on geometric angles, observation, and thought, rather than the arcane or satanic themes I’d seen elsewhere, a fact which curiously disturbed me.

  8:53 PM…

  I remember debating within myself over whether to go through with it, but, seven months into my downward spiral, I was too cynical to stop. In the end, I went through with the final step, and poured a bit of the prepared blood on my fingernails. Nothing happened at first, and I was sorely disappointed. After giving it seven minutes, I stood to leave my dim basement… and crumpled to the floor as an agonizing pain tore through my left shin.

  8:54 PM…

  I looked down aghast, screaming at the long, white, blade-like protrusion that had erupted from my leg, covered in crimson. Even as I watched, razors of bone slid out, tearing the skin open and forcing the iron smell of my own lifeblood into my senses. As I struggled and screamed, the protrusions spread themselves, and gripped the floor, pulling the rest of the thing delicately out through the six-inch gash in my shin.

  And then, it was over. I whimpered, holding my eviscerated leg in shock. Gasping, I looked down myself, along the floor, at the watching thing that I now recognized as being alive. It was spindly, beautiful, deadly, and utterly alien in every aspect. It seemed to be comprised of carefully sculpted bone, resembling some sort of two-foot tall spider, except that it had six legs. My blood, dark red, dripped from every delicate angle as it watched me with its six opal eyes.

  8:55 PM…

  Without voice, it told me that next time I would not struggle and therefore the pain would be much less. It was much, much larger than the profusely hemorrhaging slit it had made in my flesh, and I realized that it had tried to maneuver its spindly form so as to minimize the damage its entry had caused. Still in shock and breathing rapidly, I saw my exposed tibia bone, undamaged amidst the tear. Five seconds passed in silence as I calmed.

  Finally, it spoke without words once more. It told me that it would do something for me, and that I would do something for it. That was the darkest moment of my life. I foolishly agreed to some unknown deal in the hopes of gaining a thing which had consumed me for months, a thing born of the blackest of all human emotions. I would visit, for the fifth and final time, the man who had drunkenly killed my family.

  8:56 PM…

  I stared at him across the table, and four guards stared at me. I had become violent on my previous four visits, yet the haggard and drained-looking murderer continued to let me see him. His beard was much longer now, and he moved as little as I did, an emptiness welling in the brown of his irises as his eyes stared at mine. A part of me held back, decrying what I was about to do. The other part of me prompted the constant pain from the stitches in my leg, reminding me of the hurt that had not gone away since that moment, that last sweet moment, in our car.

  I put out my hand, holding the vial hidden within. He put his hand out under mine, palm down. Four tense seconds passed, and then I dripped some of the blood on his fingernails. I looked up to see his reaction, but there was none. He even seemed to… relax. Could he have known? Is this what he… wanted? The guards took him away, and his empty brown eyes never left mine.

  8:57 PM…

  The next day, I received a call. He had died, and the coroner, a personal friend who had known Audrey, spoke to me personally. He said he’d never seen anything like it… as if something had emerged from the inside of the man’s ribs, and scratched at his heart for three hours before piercing it like a blade. He had died in immense and horrible pain. I hung up wordlessly. I felt… no better. If anything, I felt even emptier.

  It was then that the bonewalker returned. I froze at the pain, and it maneuvered its lithe body through my flesh without breaking any of the stitches. I looked at it in wonderment for a moment, but quickly remembered my promise. In three days, it told me in silence, a senator would be visiting the city. I was to go to the rally, meet him, and touch the prepared blood to his nails or teeth, through whatever means necessary. Terrified, I refused, and the bonewalker shoved a lightning fast bladed limb through my stitches. The other end erupted from my right arm, rending the flesh outwards. I saw the skin from my arm hanging loosely where it had been torn, and I screamed in pain and surprise. It withdrew its razor limb, and said no more. I nodded, and steeled my eyes shut, nodding until I felt it slip back through my leg, and back to wherever it came from.

  8:58 PM…

  Having redone the stitches myself in the two places I was injured, I found myself unwillingly present at the senator’s rally. I had been patted down for weapons, but of course I had none. All I had on me was a small vial in an inner pocket, and the security hadn’t found it. I wish they had. I wish they’d taken the thing, recognized it like the murderous man I’d had killed. If they’d taken the vial, I could just tell the bonewalker I’d failed… but what would it do to me if I did?

  Thousands of roaring people moved about the huge auditorium. None of them had any idea what was about to happen. None of them could help me. None of them would believe me. If Audrey could see me now, would she turn away? Two security guards eyed me, noticing my sweat and nervousness, but they’d already patted me down. There was nothing they could do. I moved towards the walkway that the senator would enter through, and joined the crowd lining the sides.

  8:59 PM…

  The gray-haired senator, clad in an expensive suit and looking cheerful, walked down the path with his entourage. People cheered and clapped, and he shook hands as he went down the sides. For one brief, terrible moment, I thought he might not shake my hand. For one brief, horrible moment, I was terrified that he would. Then, suddenly, he was past. I looked around in confusion for a few moments, but then, aghast, I looked at my hand. My instincts had taken over, and I’d done it without thinking. I saw the senator frown, and wipe a few drops of red liquid off of
his fingers, and then continue on towards the stage. I ran.

  In the days following, I sat by the television in horror, waiting for that one phrase, waiting for that one broadcast. I had… I’d… I couldn’t even think the words. I couldn’t comprehend what I’d done. A week of darkness and terror passed, and then I saw the senator on the news. He was alive… I’d failed…! A moment of relief and fear washed over me... then, I saw his face. He seemed nervous, drawn, and worried. He was on the interview announcing a change in his policies. I screamed hoarsely at the television. I hadn’t been tasked to assassinate the senator. I’d been tasked to give the bonewalker control over him!

  9:00 PM…

  The bonewalker came again, and it was then I realized that our deal would never end. For weeks, it made it clear that I had zero choice, and ordered me to several more tasks whose nature and purpose I could not discern. It made it clear, as its opal eyes stared at me in silence, that disobedience would be met with death. I thought about Audrey while I lay in bed each night, scratching my poorly-stitched leg wound. My arm wound was narrow, and had healed adequately.

  At some point in those black and empty nights, as I thought back on the warm and happy times of our marriage, my grief and depression suddenly fell away. I realized that I had no future with this thing controlling me. If I wanted to be worthy of seeing Audrey again when I died, I couldn’t let it continue whatever plan it had for the human race. First a senator, and then… what? There was no way it ended there.

  It was then that I resolved to end this. I devised a trap, and begged the bonewalker to come at this time on this night. I was under its control, though it was not altogether against doing favors for its slaves. It enjoyed torturing and killing any whom its ‘pets’ disliked, with zero compassion… I can only pray that it doesn’t suspect treachery. If it does, it can rip me to shreds from the inside, in ways too cruel and horrible to imagine. I look at my watch.

  Time’s up.

  As my arm falls from looking at my watch, a white streak appears in my vision. Horrible pain shoots through me, but I was expecting it. It’s just the location that’s different… it must suspect! Another razor bone shoots out of my face, tearing open the left side of my nose. Screaming, I reach up, and grab hold of its limbs, which slice deeply into my hands. I can’t let it escape!

  I pull with all my might, my hands quickly becoming bloody messes of flayed flesh. For the first time, the bonewalker makes a sound, a sort of roar erupting from near my mouth. My mind erupts into chaos because of the pain, and I turn to animalistic rage, roaring back. It thrashes, and bone spikes erupt from my right leg and my left shoulder. Urged on by its panic, I explode with energy and fiery pain and tear the thing forward by its limbs. The eruptions abruptly recede, and the bonewalker’s body rips through the skin of my face. I feel each bit of skin and muscle tear and separate, and one of my eyes goes dark, but I can’t stop. I throw the spindly and blood-soaked creature into the compactor below…

  A compactor I’ve filled with vial-treated animal bones.

  The bonewalker thrashes, and its limbs begin sinking into each bone that they touch. My guess was correct, that it uses bones as portals somehow, and I just threw it into a pit filled with dozens… and there’s about to be more. Staggering to the compactor controls, I activate it. The bonewalker struggles wildly, its limbs sinking into and emerging from bones in thousands of different angles and directions. Thoroughly mired, it can’t figure out how to pull itself out, let alone escape. As the compactor begins crushing the trap, I can see bits of the bonewalker extending between almost every single bleached surface, its body completely trapped in a thousand twisting dimensions. That roar comes again as the bones crack, crush, and become hundreds, and then thousands of fragments. As the compactor walls meet, there is an immense shattering sound, as of something delicate exploding.

  Finally, silence falls.

  I fall to the ground, going limp as the ambulance I called in preparation arrives. The paramedics load me into the stretcher, looking at me with shock, horror, and panic. I sway with the vehicle as it rushes to the hospital. A paramedic shouts at me in desperation, asking what happened to my face, but I can only lie there, floating and disconnected, as everything goes dark. I made things right... I won… Audrey…