I slipped my left hand into my pocket, withdrew a small red Bic and flicked my thumb across the wheel. A spark, followed by another then another. The phantoms broke from their flight path and swooped down from the ceiling to envelope me in a tidal wave of supernatural anger.
When something jabbed against my left rib, I dropped the lighter onto the floor. She tugged on my arm, spreading another river of pain down my entire upper body and laughed. I raked my thumb across the tip of the match I secretly retrieved from the floor and tossed it into the puddle of gasoline spread out across the floor behind them.
A carpet of bright-orange fire streaked across the living room and broke off into two separate paths, dragging a tail of light blue flame behind it. The first one struck the wall in the far right corner whilst the second struck the far left, spreading a blind-white flash that drew everyone’s attention. The ghostly stick figures stopped in mid-flight, glanced at the wall of bright-orange flames and intense white heat rising through the house.
I jerked my wrist from Maureen’s powerful grip and sat down hard enough to jar my teeth but not my senses. The phantoms scattered like a flock of birds in both flight and fight, their ghostly facades distorted by fear. I clamped my hand across my nose and mouth to block the thick tendrils of smoke permeating through the house; streaks of black smoke streaked the picture window facing the backyard and the sliding glass doors; a gaping maw of red-orange flame engulfed the curtain of colorful plastic beads draped across the bedroom doorway.
The oak paneled walls bubbled and popped; the sliding glass doors burst and sent a mist of jagged glass bursting through the living room. Through the haze of smoke drifting across my face, I watched the flames reduce the haunted symbol painted across the bedroom wall into a miasma of large brown blisters that popped and dissipated.
Iris hissed and floated toward the kitchen with Ethan trailing behind her until a gaping maw of flame rose up from beneath and swallowed them whole reducing them to nothing but bits of tiny black ash.
The two redheads, Daisy and Abbi danced around the house, their ghostly pale forms consumed by the flames within seconds and reduced them to ashes. The song playing in the back began to sound warbled as if the record player itself had caught fire as well.
When something plopped down in front of me like a sack of wet garbage, I jerked my hand back and clenched my fists together.
Jared crawled toward me on his stomach, his coarse brown hair and lower body ingested by a cocoon of bright orange flame. His eyes glinted with a mix of sadness, his chin bubbled and peeled away to reveal soft pockets of stringy red flesh and sinewy muscle that spilled out onto the floor and sizzled like bacon on a hot griddle. The look on his face said enough; it said he wished that he’d listened to me when I said we should’ve left this place behind and never looked back and now because we didn’t we were the ones responsible for ringing the dinner bell.
As he fell to the floor in a fiery hulk of nothingness, Larson floated above the living room and watched in horror as his world burned down around him. His face twisted with anger, his stone-gray eyes flickered in the firelight.
“I would’ve given you everything you always wanted if you’d just–”
I heard the sound of shattered glass, threw my arms up and over my face and covered my head with both hands Pebbles of broken glass burst across the house, tumbled onto the floor and scratched the knuckles of my left hand.
Something thudded against the floor, luring my arms away from my face. A red brick flew across the living room, rolled across the floor, punched through Larson’s ghostly form and struck the big picture window facing the backyard. When the glass burst, spewing onto the lawn, two cyclones of wind spewed into the house, stirring my hair and spreading the flames through the pocket of darkness swirling inside of the main foyer.
Something clutched the crown of my left shoulder and tried to lift me up from the floor. I slapped it away, spun around on my hands and knees and gazed through the broken window.
“Get the hell out of here.” Dad said, hissing through tightly-clenched teeth.
I took his right hand, leaped over the windowsill and landed onto the porch. Tendrils of heat caressing the back of my neck, the cool summer breeze struck me hard across the face; the air seeped into my lungs and rebooted them like an old computer.
Larson floated toward me as a giant tongue of flame burst through the open window, snatched him in its bright orange grasp and jerked him back, plunging him into the fiery depths of the very Hell the house was borne from. We ran, our lungs gasping for air and fell onto the front lawn across the street.
I bent over and coughed until it hurt. We heard a cacophony of doors opening and closing as the neighbors rushed out of their homes, their sleepy-eyed gazes shifting from us to the burning house and back.
Sirens rose in the distance, crying like a pack of traumatized children.
“What the hell were you thinking?” He scowled, his face dripping with sweat.
“I didn’t have a choice.”
He coughed, blotted his hands against his jeans and chuckled. The sweet smell of pine-sap overriding the noxious stench of licorice seeped into my lungs with each breath I took, sealing the house’s inevitable fate.
“You could’ve waited for me.” He panted.
He slipped an arm around my shoulders when a loud splintery crash exploded from behind us. The roof had collapsed and tore apart, spewing devil tails of dust and towers of bright-orange fire toward the heavens as if it were lighting the way home for all of the innocent souls trapped inside.
DICE
When I was thirteen, I was first introduced to splatterpunk when my brother J.R. and I listened to Edward Bryant’s story “While She Was Out” on audio. If you haven’t read it, or heard it, you should; it’s a fantastic story.
I was twenty-three when I delved into another visceral horror novel-Off Season by Jack Ketchum. When I was finished, I had to read more Ketchum and I did. Then I read Edward Lee and this story was born.
THE chains hung down from giant metal rings embedded into the ceiling and secured the hooks planted into her back, pulling the skin taught. Her feet dangling above the floor, the overhead light threw odd shadows across the wall; rivers of blood trickled down her back, buttocks and legs and dripped off onto the thick double carpet of blue plastic tarpaulin laid out across the floor. She sobbed, strands of long blonde hair clinging to her sweaty forehead and tried not to move for fear the hooks would pull away and rip her apart; a river of snot hung down from her right nostrils and clung to the corner of her thick bubble-gum pink lips.
Amidst all the pain streaking through her body, she thought how it all came to this point. She was sipping drinks and grinding up on any Tom, Dick and Harry that walked up to her on the dance floor at The Slippery Noose (or was it The Silvery Noose?). She couldn’t remember because she hadn’t taken a second glance at the sign over the bar’s entrance when she first got there; she couldn’t even see it when she and her date left long before Last Call.
By the way, who was that guy who to–
“Don’t be afraid, Whitney.”
She glanced upward in the direction from the voice had come and found a broad-shouldered man leaning back against the right side entryway of an open closet, his arms laced across his chest and his right foot braced onto the wall behind him. He shook his head, pushed himself away from the wall and moseyed across the room; the overhead light iced cryptic light patterns across the from the front of his apron which crinkled with each step he took. The straps from the goggles on his face hugged the sides of his egg-shaped head.
“Do you know what these are?” He said, sliding the back of his hand across her cheeks.
Something rattled inside of his fist rattled like broken teeth.
“I’ll understand if you don’t want to talk.” He said. “I’d do the same thing if I were in your shoes.”
“Why-ar-yu-doi-is?” She sobbed, her pleas warbled and distorted. “I love you, Ant
hony. I love you, baby. You know that, don’t you?”
“Shhh!” He pressed a finger to his lips. “No, you don’t. And neither did the others.”
Others?, she thought as a chill traced her spine.
He rolled the dice inside of his left fist, held his hand up to his ears to listen to their sweet melodious rattle as if he could hear the ocean and lowered his hand back down by his side. He paced the room back and forth in slow unhurried steps like a teacher waiting for an answer. She heard the dice click inside of his fist and felt her body tingle with a mix of curiosity and fear.
“These are the keys to your fate.” He knelt in front of her and set the dice in her right hand. “If you roll an odd number, you live. If you roll snake eyes, then you die.”
She avoided the break-neck torrent of blood rushing toward her head and rolled the dice; her heart pounded as a noose of cold fear squeezed her throat. He retreated to a thin metal lever jutting out of the wall beside the closet door and felt a wide smile cut across the front of his fleshy oval face.
When the dice settled, she pumped at the air with her fists and screamed, “Seven! I rolled a seven.”
He looked at her with sad basset-hound brown eyes. There were rules and then there were his rules. This was one of those times when the latter overrode the former.
“You have to let me go.” She pleaded. “You said I could live if I rolled a—”
Without another word, Anthony flipped the switch and jerked the hooks out of Whitney’s back, spraying blood across the room as chunks of soft pulpy flesh and frayed strips of skin clung to their curved metal tips. He sighed, watching with glee as her body plopped onto the floor–just like all of the others.
*****
“OKAY, Anthony.” Dr. Robin Hammond said. “What do you see?”
“I’m walking toward third period class. Everyone is smiling at me as they pass me in the hallway and some of them are whispering to their friends while they’re standing by their lockers. I stop by and kiss my girlfriend on the cheek while she takes her book out of her locker.”
“Who is your girlfriend?”
“Amber Dunn. She’s so beautiful she makes your heart skip a beat so fast and she has long brown hair down to her shoulders and she’s wearing a purple and white cheerleading uniform.” He said and gave a small gasp. “Something squeezes my hips and then I feel air around my legs and when she looks back at me she points and starts laughing and pointing at my crotch.”
“What happens next?”
“Everyone starts pointing and laughing. I look down and see my pants have been pulled down around my ankles and my dick’s drooping down like a wind sock. Amber’s still pointing and laughing when Scott Richards walks up and pushes me down onto the floor and then she kisses him on the lips but I’m pleading for her to stop but I’m sobbing and they’re all pointing and laughing and pointing and laughing.”
Anthony’s left leg spasmed and jerked itself away from the couch in a spasmodic fit, kicking the glass of water he’d placed on the edge of table five minutes ago. It wobbled like a drunken dancer and tipped onto its side; a fresh puddle of water and jagged shards of broken glass spread across the floor. He sat up from the overstuffed orange couch sitting off to the left side of the room under thin white window blinds edged by the sun and flinched at the sound of shattered glass.
When the door flew open, Dr. Hammond’s secretary Sydney walked into the room, her shrunken pale face twisted with disgust. She wore a light blue blouse, brown leather Doc Martens and a tight black skirt with fishnet stockings. Her fire-engine red hair was twisted into a wide fat bun fastened to the back of her head by a thin black stick.
“Be careful, Doc.” She said, as the doctor knelt down to pick up the pieces. “You’ll cut yourself.”
“It’s okay, Sydney.”
“I’m so sorry, Doctor.” Anthony pleaded. “I didn’t—”
“You need to watch what you’re doing.”
“It’s not his fault, Sydney.” The good doctor replied in a soft tone. “Anthony’s anger just got the better of him.”
Sydney gathered the debris and stormed out of the room, shutting the door behind her. After Dr. Hammond sat down behind his desk, Anthony slumped back onto the couch, sweating profusely behind flushed-red cheeks. The dull gray sunlight poured through the V-shaped slit of the bright blue curtains; behind the thin black-iron railing sitting behind a pair of sliding glass doors, tall shaggy pines rose in the distance like gangly-green teeth ready to gnash at the sky.
“It seems like we’re making progress.”
Sighing as if he’d heard a bad joke, Anthony said, “You call that making progress? I could’ve hurt someone.”
“From what you’ve shown me on the chart I asked you to make, the dreams are not as persistent as usual.”
“Persistent?” He asked, confused.
“You’re not having the dream as much as you did when you first came to see me.”
“The pills are doing great.”
“I thought so.” The doctor said, brushing his hand across the air. “This is why I’m going to lower your dosage.”
“Do you think that’s okay?”
“Eventually I won’t have to give them to you anymore.” He said. “In due time, you’ll be able to mingle in public just like everyone else.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Doc.”
Hammond scribbled something across a prescription pad, tore it off and handed it over. He led Anthony out of the office, wished him a nice day and waved him over to Sydney’s desk to make his next appointment. After he slipped his prescription in his right pocket, he approached her desk.
“What?” She said, rolling her eyes.
“I need to make my next appointment.”
She placed the headset on her desk beside of her monitor and tapped her fingers across the keyboard.
“I have the tenth of next month.”
“I can’t do that day I have to—”
“Okay, the tenth it is.”
She clicked the mouse a few more times, scribbled across an appointment card and slid it over to him. Anthony took the card, slipped into the same pocket as the prescription and flashed an angry confused stare at her; she ignored it and slipped the headset back onto to her bright curly-red hair and went back to talking. He shook off the heat from her gaze, thumbed the square white button with the black DOWN arrow and waited for the elevator to arrive.
Before the day that would stain him forever, Anthony could lure a woman like a paper clip to a magnet. Sydney, however, was immune to his cute boyish charms but he was always looking for a challenge. He tried his best to avoid her at any and all costs because he didn’t want to cause any trouble between himself and Dr. Hammond.
After that terrible day in seventh grade, he became as compatible with a woman as the left shoe on the right foot. Internet dating was out of the question because then he could leave a breadcrumb behind that a blind man could find especially when someone had stumbled onto the missing women; speed-dating was non-negotiable because of the eyewitnesses who could identify him. When he met Whitney last night, she was as easy as drunk girls got; he was less worried about getting into her pants and more about not killing her until he got her back to the house.
The events that unfolded at Logan Middle School fifteen years ago had left an indelible mark behind both mentally and physically. His brain projected the incident every second he felt Cupid’s arrow flying toward him, filling him with an undying sense of betrayal he expected to see coming at any moment. The killing was his way out of ever committing to an honest relationship; at least he wouldn’t be too bored.
Now that he was back inside of that corner of his brain that he loved to go into when no one was looking, he considered adding some music to his murders.
Why not? Would he go creepy fifties music like the stuff that Stephen King always put in his book or would he go with classic rock?
Whatever he planned to do, he hoped it wasn’
t that crap they were passing around like herpes and calling it “pop music”. Half of the time, you couldn’t understand a damn thing they were saying. He’d gotten a taste of that painful sounding shit two months ago before he met Whitney and just thinking about it now made his brain ache.
He shut himself down–if only for a little bit–and boarded the elevator. As the doors closed, Sydney leaned across the top of her desk and gave him the finger. He’d consider putting her on his list one day, then showing her a good place where she could stick that fucking thing.
He was halfway across the lobby when he stopped to gather a glob of hand sanitizer from the dispenser beside of the front doors and saw an old couple chatting with a middle-aged brunette in a dark blue business suit; the brunette and the old woman were seated on the edge of the couch sitting against the right side of the lobby. The brunette craned her head down to meet the woman’s gaze as she rubbed her hand in smoothly across the back of the old woman’s left shoulder. The old woman’s husband sat in the chair beside of the couch, cradling her right hand in both of his and gave a sympathetic nod every time the brunette spoke.
“These things happen, Eleanor.” The old man said kindly.
“He’s always came home every night at ten o’clock.” She stated, gripping a ball of tissue in her right fist. “The only thing I regret is letting him get that tattoo of his mother’s name on his chest.”
He rubbed the sanitizer into his palms, shook his head in amazement and exited the hospital through automatic sliding doors. He paced across the sidewalk bordering the front of the building, stepped down onto the pavement, walked between two cars and stopped to dig a speck of dried blood out of his fingernail. When he flicked it across the parking lot, an angry voice stopped him dead in his tracks.
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