Small Magic Collected Short Stories

by Aaron Polson

  We made monsters, and Billy was the best.

  Maybe his father was the inspiration: the rasping, liquor tainted voice, scuffed knuckles, and glassy glare. Maybe Billy saw something different through the bruises around his eyes. Maybe he found something in the worry lining his mother’s face. Billy’s beasts crawled out of the darkness and ran their stunted claws over the cardboard boxes on the outer ring of that wall, sending a twist of delightful terror into my bones. Gabe’s expression echoed mine, both of us pale and contorted, hanging on Billy’s voice.

  A tiny voice, really.

  Lost and afraid.

  We heard the sirens, Gabe and I, one night just after supper. We met in the street, both of us all wide eyes and whispering mouths. My guts could have been ice, frozen and scooped by the shovel load from my aching chest. The sirens came from three blocks down, police and ambulance, together.

  “You think it’s Billy’s place?” Gabe asked, breathless.

  “Let’s go.”

  We planned to meet again that night, all three of us, and perfect our tales. We planned to go together into the darkness of the old mall, flashlights in hand, creeping through the silence, lonesomeness of the place. Billy promised mystery that night.

  At his house, lights from the police cruisers and ambulance chopped the night into tiny bits. Billy’s dad leaned face down on a police cruiser, hands cuffed behind him. The paramedics wheeled another body down the concrete steps, thump, thump, thump. I searched the crowd for our friend.

  Gabe looked at me.

  I nodded.

  The October air numbed my cheeks and my hands, frosting my heart while it hammered against my ribs. I felt every bump, every jostle of the pocked asphalt in the streets, the grass that snapped against my legs as we arrived behind the building. We rode through the dark at other times, but never with so much fire, so much recklessness.

  Panting, Gabe and I found one service entrance open, the key still in the lock. Neither of us brought a light.

  We staggered into the darkness, the abyss, Billy’s world, groping against the painted cinderblock walls. We stumbled toward the end of the line, the big storeroom, our ring fortress of empty cardboard and stories. A single, stationary light reflected on the ceiling, casting square shadows in looming distortion.

  “Billy?” Gabe’s voice was a tiny thing, prey swallowed by the predator darkness.

  No answer.

  I followed the glow and found Billy’s flashlight on the floor next to a crumpled pile of his clothes. Our friend was gone, naked and alone into the other places. We knew. On his words, the shadows had swallowed him. He joined them.

  Billy’s face was printed in the paper, and they spoke of him on the evening news for weeks.

  The smaller minds called him a runaway, just another missing boy. All too common.

  Gabe and I knew the truth. We had heard the tap of claws on cardboard and tasted the frosty air from Billy’s words. We lived his world in that dark, lonesome place.

  Chapter 12: Soul Marbles

  Mom had already been crying when she found me sitting on the concrete floor of the garage with a hammer in my hand. I’d been smashing marbles. All of them—the clear ones with the sparkly centers that I won from Zane Bibble in a game of chicken on the monkey bars at recess. I hammered them all to powder in the middle of the floor, right where Dad’s car should have been.

  Almost everybody in the 3rdgrade hated Zane. Once day at lunch, he poked Inez McIntosh with his thumbnail so hard she bled all over the table. There was the time he jabbed a stick—a stick he’d sharpened to a point by rubbing it against the playground slab—into all of Mrs. Wilson’s rubber four-square balls. Mom helped organize a bake sale at the school carnival to help buy new balls for the class, but Zane rode his bike over and tipped our card table, sending brownies and sugar cookies to the ground in a heap. We hated Zane.

  So naturally, the day he brought the bag of marbles—the special marbles from his dad sent from halfway around the world—naturally I wanted them. A jerk like Zane shouldn’t have marbles like that. During lunch, I fantasized about stealing them when we had afternoon reading group. I was no Zane Bibble, though. The best I could muster was a game of chicken.

  “On the monkey bars,” I told him. “First one down loses.”

  “What do I get,” he said. “These are special. My dad said all the men he’s killed are trapped inside.”

  I didn’t really believe him because he was a compulsive liar—that’s what my mom said anyway, but those marbles did sparkle in a cool way, like little stars trapped in glass. I wanted them, souls or no souls.

  “My new Power Ranger, the black one with light up face that says ‘Tranformation Go!’ when you push his belt.”

  He narrowed his eyes.

  “I brought it for show and tell last week.”

  “Deal.” Zane had only one sort-of friend in class, Luke Gilmore, and that was only because Luke was a rotten kid who smelled like poop all the time. Nobody liked Luke either, mostly because he picked his boogers and stuck them to the underside of his desk. True story—I crawled under there during indoor recess once and saw the whole, grey-brown clump. So Zane let Luke hold the bag while we mounted the monkey bars.

  The metal bars were cold on a cloudy October afternoon, so cold they burned my hands as I started to swing toward Zane. We met in the middle, neither one conceding until I wrapped my legs around his waist like a pincer and pulled. His face turned red like the water after Mom boiled her garden beets. When his hands slipped off, he made a little sound like the McIntosh’s dog did when Dad accidently hit him with the car after having “another big fight” with Mom.

  The other kids roared.

  Luke might have been a smelly kid, but he was honest enough, and handed me the marble bag while Zane picked himself off the ground. It was heavy, that bag. Zane’s eyes burned like soul marbles, and he charged me. Wham. Flat on my back, I couldn’t fight back while he drummed on my chest with bony fists. Of course the recess monitors yanked him off and he howled and howled and spent the rest of the day in Mr. Bay’s office.

  I had a bag of soul marbles and a couple of bruises.

  The trouble started when I tried to go to bed. I hadn’t shown the marbles to Mom, and Dad was “working late” again. She tucked me in, her eyes red and puffy, and I lay there for a while, staring at the ceiling, thinking about how red and puffy Zane’s eyes were when we rode the bus earlier in the evening.

  Then I heard them, the marbles.

  Crying.

  First I stuffed my head under a pillow, but the voices cut through that like there was a speaker tucked inside. I couldn’t make out what they said, but the emotion was there. Sadness. Pain. Fear. Then I realized they were crying in a foreign language, whatever language they spoke in the country where Zane’s dad killed them. My throat felt hollow and cold and hurt so much I wanted to cry, too, like tears would dissolve the hurt.

  But I couldn’t.

  Mom was on the phone when I tiptoed downstairs, carrying the bag of soul marbles like a wounded baby. I used Dad’s big hammer, laid out the marbles on the floor of the garage where the car would be but he was working late—later than he ever had—and started smashing. The hammer made a sweet ting when it struck concrete. Each blow stung my arm.

  I guess it was the pounding that brought Mom outside. Her face was wet and red from crying—maybe she’d heard the soul marbles, too. My eyes dropped to the mess, the little piles of white dust, all that was left of Zane’s marbles.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Dad’s hammer was still in my hand.

  We were alone but not alone, standing in the cold of the garage with all the ghosts I’d set free. Mom just hugged me then, wrapped me in her arms and squeezed until I thought my ribcage would snap.

  Chapter 13: Luck

  "There's a couple of things you're going to have to understand about this job."

  Jerry nods.

  "First of all," Franz speaks slowly, like he's ex
plaining the why the sky's blue to a five-year-old, "the job has some drawbacks."

  "Drawbacks. Check." A pen wiggles against a notepad in Jerry's hand.

  "The temperature in here for one. Get yourself a nice coat. A jacket. Light and flexible but enough to keep the chill off."

  "Jacket, check."

  Franz grips a handle and walks the drawer out to full extension. A body lays between them, covered with a sheet. "Second of all, these poor sons-of-bitches smell pretty bad."

  "Bad smell, check."

  Franz grips the sheet at one end and pulls back enough to reveal a pair of bluish feet. A toe tag dangles on the left big toe. He bends forward, squinting at the tag. "92 years old, well..."

  Jerry's pencil is motionless. "I don't get it."

  Franz produces a pair of snips and slides one of the dead man's toes between its blades. He squeezes the handles together. A click echoes through the morgue, and the toe drops into Franz's waiting palm. "There's some benefits, too."

  Jerry scribbles. "Benefits..."

  "For one, nobody ever checks too closely after we're done with them."

  "Right." Jerry pauses for a moment and frowns. "I don't get it."

  "Toes, man." Franz draws the sheet over the corpse's feet and slides the drawer home with a resonate thunk. "I figure they're better than rabbits' feet, especially on some SOB that lives this long. Lot of luck in making it to 92, Jerry."

  Chapter 14: Why We Decided to Use a Blender

  Jack wipes sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. “You ever read that Poe story?”

  I look up, but my hands keep working. “Which one? The guy wrote tons of stuff.”

  “The one with the old guy.” Jack thrusts deeper with the knife.

  A spurt of crimson strikes my apron and I flinch. “Be careful, damnit.”

  “So, have you read that one?”

  “Jack, there’s a couple with old guys.” My knees are tired from kneeling on the tile, but the job is almost finished.

  Jack stops. He looks at the bathroom light as if the answer's hiding there.

  “The Tell-Tale Heart,” he says, puffing out his smile like he just won the Kentucky Derby or something.

  “Oh yeah.” I look at the mess in the tub. We’ve got most of the corpse dismembered. “Cuts the old guy up, buries him under the floorboards.”

  Jack nods and holds up a lump of meat. A few ticks pass before I realize what he’s holding. “Be a shame if we heard this thing beating later on, wouldn’t it?”

  Chapter 15: Poe’s Basement

  "Damn, Jack. I told you we should have rolled him up in the carpet first."

  "We still can. You have no imagination."

  I step away from the spreading pool of blood. "No, dumbass. If you wrap him first and shoot through the rug, it doesn't splatter so much. Easier clean up."

  Jack runs a hand through his hair."Oh. Right. Sorry."

  "Look, we gotta do something with this mess." I wave the gun toward the kitchen. "What's in there?"

  A smile crawls across his lips. "Oh, I get it. Stairway to the basement." Jack nods. "Like that Poe story, right?"

  "Not Poe again."

  "The basement...we can hide the body down there. Poe used that one, too. 'The Black Cat' I think." Jack grabs Mr. Body's feet and pulls him across the hardwood, leaving a thick streak in his path.

  "For fuck's sake, you're making it worse."

  Jack pauses. "What?"

  "The blood, dumbass. We gotta clean up."

  His stare shifts from the blood to the body to me. "That's what the fire is for."

  "Fire? Jeeee-sus."

  Jack shakes his head. "Don't you read anything?"

  Chapter 16: How to Write a Horror Story

  Every story must begin with a plot. Think of plot as a journey—and your horror story is bound for a magical destination called “catharsis.” Read a wide variety of horror tales. Start with Edgar Allan Poe—or even Charles Brockden Brown if you’re feeling ambitious. Read through some of the modern pulp magazines. Stephen King is okay. Tell yourself you can do better, and then copy the plot of one of your favorites, switching the vampire with a werewolf or vice versa. Every good horror story needs a monster. Serial killers make great zombies, but it’s a one-way switch.

  You must decide on a setting for your story. Setting means when and where your story takes place. Night is always a good choice for horror because night is when things “go bump.” Things like werewolves and vampires and zombies. Serial killers sometimes have night vision goggles like Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs, so they rarely bump into anything.

  You may have heard the tip “write what you know.” This means you should set the story in your house, especially if it is located in a rural area and/or next to an abandoned factory/warehouse. After all, if you are stuck, you can always look around for details to add to your story. Writers call these details “imagery.” If your house isn’t located near any abandoned buildings and/or not located in the country, you may want to choose one of the following spooky locations to set your story: a lake cabin, parking garage, dark house after the storm has knocked out the power, or perhaps an old farm. Old farms are scarier than new farms because there will be more items on an old farm into which to bump. Although either is likely to be in a rural area in the first place.

  Finally, you will need characters. Every horror story has them because the vampire/werewolf/serial killer/zombie must have something to suck/bite/stab/eat. Here again, borrow from real life. Everyone wants to be famous, so feel free to use real names. Legal action can be avoided with the prudent blending of one person’s first name with another’s last. You may have heard the term “character development.” This occurs when an author makes a character seem like a real person by giving them baggage. Baggage can be many things: regret over stealing a candy bar from the store/anxiety about a math test/desire to lose a few extra pounds before prom. Don’t worry about developing your horror story characters personalities too much. Since most of the characters will die, it doesn’t matter if they are flat and uninteresting. The reader wants to see some blood, thus achieving “catharsis.” Catharsis occurs when a reader is happy some other person is bleeding and not her.

  Catharsis is your horror-story destination.

  Now that you have planned your tale, write. This is the easy part. Begin with a character and an action:

  Bob walked into the house.

  Here we have a character, Bob, an action, walked, and a setting, into the house. But imagine taking it further:

  Bob stumbled into the dark, abandoned farmhouse.

  The author has taken his story to an eleven by adding darkness and a secluded location. The verb “stumbled” also suggests a sense of urgency and/or drunkenness. Is Bob stumbling into the house to save someone after he has been shot in the leg or is he stumbling into the house to hide from something which may or may not know he is intoxicated? These are details best left to the reader’s imagination. The more unclear a horror story, the darker, and therefore more apt to have a reader wondering if the story is real. Confusion is scary. One thing is sure: Bob will be dead before you type the words “The End”. How you get from point A to point B is secondary to the fact that our hero will die a gruesome death. Remember: catharsis. You want the reader saying, “Boy, I’m glad I didn’t die a gruesome death like Bob.”

  Never underestimate the importance of using multisyllabic vocabulary when describing your character’s death. Disembowel and eviscerate are personal favorites. Make sure to mention plenty of blood. The word “gore” is powerful as well because it implies chunks of flesh mixed with the blood. The more chunks, the more sure the catharsis. “Boy, I’m glad I didn’t die a gruesome death like Bob.” Think of synonyms for the color red so as not to browbeat your reader with the same word over and over and over again. Crimson, scarlet, burgundy, ruby, and cherry are all suitable substitutes. Nothing beats “dark crimson rivulets of scarlet gore cascaded from the gaping wound wh
ere Bob’s head had been viciously torn from his body by the werewolf’s claws”. Some variation is acceptable, but keep it scary. No one likes to bleed in dark crimson rivulets of scarlet gore, and they will feel sympathy for Bob. Now you have achieved catharsis. Whoot!

  With a little practice and liberal application of werewolves/vampires/serial killers/zombies and blood/viscera/gore, you will be on your way to fame, fortune, and a folding table at the next comic book convention in the lobby of the local Holiday Inn.