by West, Sam
“Tom?” she snapped, all but giving up on the pretence that he was acting normal. “What’s the matter? Do you have nothing to say?”
“Not really,” he replied dreamily, good-naturedly.
She could feel herself on the brink of making a scene. She didn’t want to, but if she had to, then she bloody well would. This evening was rapidly turning to shit, and whatever respect and warm feelings she’d had towards Felicity had long since evaporated.
Then a horrible thought occurred to her – what if they had drugged his wine?
That’s just ridiculous. Why the fuck would they do that?
“I have a question for you, Flick,’ Katie said, smiling sweetly. “Well, several, actually. When you’re awake, you know you’re awake, yes? But when you aren’t, you don’t know you aren’t. So how can you prove you aren’t dreaming? Maybe the body you perceive yourself to have isn’t really there. Maybe the entirety of reality, even its abstract concepts like time and shape are false. How do you know you’re not dead?”
Her words were the equivalent of a bucket of icy water tipped over her head.
“You what?”
The large room swam around her and she was aware of her heart slamming painfully hard in her chest. This dinner party had gone to hell, and she had had enough.
“Can I use your bathroom, Felicity?” she managed to ask in what she hoped was a normal voice.
Shakily, she scraped back her chair and got to her feet. As the same time as she did so, Alan, Roger and Mary also got to their feet.
They stood completely still, their heads swivelling in her direction, their expressions blank. The room lurched around her as fear squeezed her heart, making it pound at an alarming rate.
“Oh, they aren’t real, dear,” Felicity said. “They are a physical manifestation of the evil that inhabits this house and your subconscious mind. They are in your husband’s mind too, such as it is.”
Flick’s mouth hung open and Tom still sat there grinning.
“Oh, don’t look so confused, you’ll soon get the hang of it. But I’m afraid the whole process has taken its toll on your husband; the darkness is inside him now, it’s wrecked his mind. He is a very weak man, my dear, you could’ve done so much better for yourself.”
“It’s like I say,” Katie piped up helpfully, “when you are asleep, you don’t know you are. Being dead is like being asleep. The subconscious mind is set free.”
I’m asleep, but I keep waking up.
“Yes dear, that’s exactly right. You are trapped.”
Did she just read my mind?
Felicity just smiled.
“Really, Flick, I thought you were brighter than this,” Brian said, the corners of his eyes crinkling in that delightful, Gary Oldman kind of way. “We got into your husband, just like we have done with weak minds before him. We rung out his mind like an old dishcloth and we made him kill you. Surely you remember?”
No, it couldn’t be true.
But she hadn’t forgotten her nightmare – how could she?
“But I woke up.”
“Yes. You woke up to death.”
She staggered sideways, the room closing in around her, and she gripped the back of the chair for support. “No.”
“Nothing is real and everything is true. This is your reality now,” Felicity said, getting to her feet.
She went to stand with the other three, her expression falling as blank as theirs. Now all four of them stood there staring at her before turning to walk single-file out of the room.
Tears blurred Flick’s vision, her mind teetering on the cliff-edge of madness. And still, her husband sat there gently grinning, not moving a muscle.
“Who are you?” she whispered, backing away from the table and into the living-room.
When Katie and Brian both swivelled their heads and spoke to her in unison, she very nearly screamed.
“Think of us as your guides. We have taken the shape of your subconscious desires. We are the dark. Our strength comes and goes and we move between this realm and ours. We cannot always alter the perception of your reality, or of the people who inhabit this house. But the question should now be, who are you?”
She threw a glance at the door, remembering how the other four had just walked through it.
They’ll be waiting for me, outside…
“No, no, no, there is no outside,” Katie and Brian said together. “We created it but it is gone now.”
“Tom?” she sobbed to her husband. “For God’s sake, will you do something?”
Still grinning, he swivelled his head to look at her. He was bleeding from his eyes.
“This house is a gateway to our realm, and you and Tom belong to us now,” they said as one. “You exist in your plane of existence, and the others exist on theirs. You inhabit the same physical space, but your paths will never cross. So many souls, trapped in this house. So many future souls, waiting to join us.”
Katie rose from her chair, and in one fluid motion, she lifted the innocent white dress over her head. Beneath it, she was naked. She straddled Tom’s lap, shoving her perfect breasts in his face. Greedily he sucked on a pink nipple, roughly kneading her breasts together.
“Tom? Tom!”
Katie turned her head to look at her, laughing. Her eyes had turned completely black, and inside her laughing mouth, Flick saw nothing but swirling darkness.
Because she is made of darkness…
When she lowered her gaze in an attempt to compose herself, she saw that she was wearing her blood-splattered pyjama top, and nothing else. The front of it was ripped, and running from between her breasts to her groin was a jagged cut. As soon as she saw it, pain seized her body. Dimly, she was aware that such a wound should render her immobile and near-death, but the pain was nearer a viscous stomach-ache that one could still just about function with.
With a cry of utter terror, she stumbled on her bare feet over to the door.
“Time and space have no meaning here,” they called out to her. “Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.”
“Fuck you,” she called back, hurtling herself through the door and out into the hallway...
Except she wasn’t in the hallway of Felicity’s and Roger’s house, but her own bedroom.
In her mind, she screamed, a never-ending wail of misery, but all that came out of her mouth was a pathetic whimper. On the blow-up mattress, she saw herself and Tom. Their figures were transparent, and their voices sounded like they were coming from very far away. She watched in horrified disgust as Tom slit open her bare torso from chest to groin with the shattered mobile-phone. The sound of herself screaming was like shards of glass in her brain, and she clutched her head as she watched herself die on the bed.
When the apparition of herself had expired, Tom sat up next to her lifeless body and dragged the jagged edge of the phone longways across each of his wrists in turn.
Flick ran crying from the room, blinded by tears. But instead of finding herself out in the hallway, she had ended up in the living-room of her house.
Except it looked different; different furniture, fussy wallpaper, a carpet on the floor… Like in the bedroom just now, the sound was very faint. In horror, she watched the horrific scene unfold. As with her and Tom in the bedroom, the figures were shadowy and transparent. A man, dressed in flared corduroys and with centre-parted, shoulder length hair, was kicking the shit out of a cowering woman on the floor as a little boy cowered behind the sofa. The woman’s faint screams, the man’s grunting and the little boy’s cries filled her head with madness and sorrow.
‘Katie’s’ words echoed in her head:
Time and space have no meaning.
She knew perfectly well what she was seeing; the guy in the seventies who had killed his family before killing himself. But whether she was seeing it take place as it was happening, or if it was some kind of projection of the past event, she didn’t know.
Sobbing, she ran over to the kitchen a
nd threw open the French-doors, chucking herself out into the garden. But as soon as she set foot outside, she was in the living-room again, next to the door she had just entered through.
This time, she saw a couple she didn’t recognise, embracing in the middle of the room. They were a little older than her and Tom, and like the others before them, they were transparent. The room was piled high with boxes, but they were different boxes to the boxes she and Tom had used. The sofa was different too, covered with an upholstered floral fabric as opposed to their leather sofa. Just like the couple, the furniture wavered slightly, as if it were a mirage in a desert.
Flick had to strain her ears to listen to them:
“I can’t believe we live here now,” the woman was saying.
“Yeah,” the man said, “and I can’t believe that barmy old crab over the road told us to get out of France. God, we moved here to get away from such a shitty, racist attitude.”
“Help me!” Flick screamed at them.
She ran at them, but she went straight through them.
The woman shivered. “Bit cold in here, isn’t it?”
“You think?” the man replied.
Screaming, she chucked herself at the boxes, but again, they had no substance and she stumbled through them, thumping against the wall.
This house is my prison, she thought in escalating horror and madness. She went to the door, and it was solid beneath her fingers. Curling her fingers around the handle, she slammed it as hard as she could.
The couple’s heads snapped around in the direction of the banging noise.
“You’re right, there is a draft in here,” the man said.
“Fuck,” Flick screamed, not being able to stand it a second longer. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
She chucked herself through the door out into the hallway, but as soon as she did so, she found herself standing in the doorway of her bedroom. Frantically, she scanned the room, expecting to see herself being murdered again, but there was no one there. She took in the familiarity of the blow-up mattress and the half-empty boxes scattered everywhere, all of which were shadowy and transparent.
On shaking legs, she went over to the window. The glass was blissfully solid to her touch, and she pressed her forehead and cheek against it, closing her eyes. With the way the cool glass felt against her hot skin, it was easy for her to believe that she simply was at home – that she was experiencing a breakdown of epic proportions.
She opened her eyes, staring out at the view. God, it all looked so normal, but deep down, she knew that if she were to try to get out there, she would just end up in a room of her house.
A movement across the way startled her, and she found herself locking eyes with the old woman who lived in the house opposite hers. Like the last time she had seen her, she wore a red headscarf tied around her head and a long, sack-like skirt.
“Hey!” she shouted, pounding the glass with her fists. “Hey! Help me! Please help me!”
The old woman stared up at her, her expression sombre. Even from this distance, Flick could see that her eyes were glistening. She wiped under her eyes with the fingertips of her gnarled hands and turned away, heading back up the garden-path towards her front-door.
“Hey! Where are you going? Help me! Oh God, please help me!”
Sudden pressure on her shoulders made her jump and scream out. She lurched sideways, spinning round to find herself face to face with her husband.
“Boo.”
Together forever, ‘til death us do part, came the half-crazed thought.
If only that were true, because in a horrendous moment of clarity, she knew that death had only brought them closer together.
His black eyes dripped blood, and when he smiled, the inside of his mouth was as black as the pits of hell.
The End.
Hello, dear reader, thanks for reading to the end. I hope you enjoyed the story. Below, I have enclosed the first chapter of ‘The Dark Side Of Red’ a sick novel about the dark side of the sex industry and the twisted sexual desires that can be catered to on the net. I warn you now, it ain’t pretty. Thanks for sticking with me on my writing journey, it means more than I can ever say.
CHAPTER ONE
Stacey Adams was sweeping up the hair of her last client when the stranger entered ‘Scissor Sisters’.
Instantly, she was on edge. There was just something so incredibly intense about him, with his deathly-pale complexion and black hair. He wasn’t a goth or anything, far from it. He wore a pair of well-cut, blue jeans and an un-tucked, plain black shirt. Despite his casual attire, something about him spoke of Money with a capital ‘M’.
“Hi,” she said, leaning on her broom, and straightening out her twisted, white blouse.
“Hi. Can you fit me in or are you closing?”
He had no accent as such, but his clipped voice gave him away; this guy was pure class. He carried himself with the all the arrogant grace that went hand in hand with wealth and privilege.
She hesitated for a moment; she didn’t usually cut men’s hair. But then she thought of the outstanding council-tax bills she had amassed, both for her flat and her hair-dressing business.
“Sure. I’ll do you right now. Please, take a seat.”
She gestured to the middle seat in the row of three. He sat down and openly watched her in the long mirror that ran the length of the wall. Her stomach flipped. He wasn’t handsome in the conventional sense, but there was just something about him. His pale-blue eyes glittered and a corner of his perfectly shaped mouth tugged upwards in a smirk. There was no warmth in it, however.
“Now, what can I do you for?” she asked, standing behind his chair, their eyes locking in the mirror.
“Just a trim.”
His hair was a few inches long on top, and neatly trimmed at the back and sides. In fact, his hair was beautifully cut to accentuate the natural wave, and looked very much like it had been done recently.
For some reason, she found that her hands were trembling.
I don’t want to touch him, came the strange thought.
She tied the black plastic sheet around his neck and grabbed her scissors and comb.
“Is this your business? Or do you just work here?” he asked, his blue eye pinning her in place in the mirror.
Most customers didn’t make so much eye-contact – this guy was just so intense.
“It’s mine.”
“Do you employ many people?”
“Just the one. Bethan. She’s a lovely, talented young girl that could undoubtedly get a lot more money elsewhere. You have beautiful hair,” she said, realising too late that she was rambling; she always did when she was nervous.
And the more she looked at him, the more good-looking she found him. Her reminded her a little bit of that actor whose name she couldn’t remember that played Sherlock Holmes on the Beeb; the guy with the posh surname that sounded like a vegetable. She guessed him to be in his late thirties or so, about ten years older than her.
“Thank you,” he said. “So do you. Beautiful and natural.”
“Thanks,” she mumbled, avoiding his penetrating gaze in the mirror.
Stacey wasn’t a vain girl, but she knew he was right – she considered her hair to be her best feature. It hung halfway down her back in loose curls, and was many dazzling shades of gold.
“So, do you live round here?” she asked, keen to shift the emphasis onto him.
“I’m based in London, but I’ve recently acquired a property here in Thanet. I’m looking to extend my business ventures down this end of the world.”
“Oh. What do you do, if you don’t mind me asking?”
He smiled wolfishly at her in the mirror, and her stomach somersaulted like a school-girl’s.
“I’m an investor.”
“Oh,” she said again at his sweeping reply. Figuring that he didn’t want to talk about it, she didn’t push him and changed tac. “Whereabouts in London do you live?”
“Kensington.”
/> “Wow, Kensington. That’s posh.”
Fuck me, this guy must be minted.
“Indeed. Tell me, I don’t know your name.”
“It’s Stacey.”
“Stacey,” he repeated, saying it as if he were tasting the word. Tasting her.
It should’ve been creepy, but coming from him, it wasn’t. It suddenly occurred to her that she was really attracted to this guy, and that realisation didn’t sit easy with her.
“That’s a nice name. I’m Tristian.”
The upper-class name suited him. He looked like a Tristian, and she couldn’t even begin to imagine anyone calling him something as pedestrian as Tris.
“So, Tristian,” she said breezily, doing her best to disguise the fact he was having such a strong effect on her. “How much do you want off?”
“Just tidy me up.”
She wanted to say that his hair was perfect as it was. “Do you want it wet or dry?” she asked instead.
As soon as she realised what she had said, her cheeks flamed.
“Dry. I’m on a tight schedule.”
His blue eyes sparkled, but not in a necessarily friendly way; now she absolutely understood the term ‘wicked glint’.
Oh, this one’s a bad boy.
“Okay. I’ll just damp it down.”
She reached for her squirty bottle of water and set to work on his head, trying not to think about how good it felt like to touch him. As she ran her fingers through his hair, the fleeting, but oh-so-vivid image of him fucking the life out of her with her legs wrapped around his slim hips and her hands fisting his hair slammed into her mind.
She realised that she was scrunching his hair between her fingers, and she let out a little gasp, praying that he hadn’t noticed.
This really won’t do, she chided herself. You’re a grown woman, not a simpering teenager.
“Tell me, do you do other things, besides cut hair?”
For a moment, she thought he was being lewd and her heart started to hammer in indignation.
Or excitement…