Widowmakers: A Benefit Anthology of Dark Fiction

by James Newman Benefit Anthology

  Violent sobs wracked the husky form of Danny Ray as he turned away from the tree on the Old Logging Road and walked back to his truck. As he stumbled through the darkness, he considered going to the sheriff and confessing to the crime he had committed. But he decided not to. Conviction and incarceration could not match the sentence he was now serving. In his heart, Danny Ray Fulton knew that he deserved to suffer for what he had taken from Betsy Lou… and suffer he would.

  He climbed into his truck and headed back toward town. Toward his pointless work, his dishonest wife, and the maddening draw of the liquor bottle. Toward the worse form of punishment he could imagine… a lackluster life full of broken dreams.

  As Danny Ray drove away, the face on the tree remained where it had for fifteen years, and where it would be for countless years more. The lovely eyes of Betsy Lou glistened with a mixture of tree sap and the salty tears of her remorseful lover, as if herself mourning what had been lost that distant night on the dark stretch of the Old Logging Road.

  Medicine Man

  by Donn Gash

  Donn Gash lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Don't be fooled though. He hates country music, doesn't go crazy for grits, and has never made a grown man squeal like a pig. The Assistant Director of his local Humane Society, Donn has had several published articles relating to animal welfare. He has also written the text for a pet cemetery brochure (Stephen King, eat your heart out!). Donn is yet another horror writer with a shaved head and a goatee.

  As if we needed one more.

  Richard awoke to the sight of a stranger’s face staring down at him. It was dark in the bedroom, and he wasn’t sure if the grinning face belonged to a man or a woman.

  At that moment, it probably didn’t even matter. When one’s sleep was disturbed in the middle of the night by the presence of an uninvited guest, gender was hardly the main concern.

  Oddly enough, Richard did not cry out. Of course, he wasn’t completely awake yet, either. The thick gauze of sleep still gripped some part of his brain.

  “Who are you?” Richard slurred.

  He turned his head and strained his eyes to see the green, digital numbers of his alarm clock.

  1:46 A.M.

  Richard rubbed at his puffy eyes with the heels of his palms. He tried to focus on the seemingly disembodied face floating in the blackness. He hoped his eyes would focus, and the face would disappear, that it was something left over from a dream or a trick of the shadows. This was getting scary as hell in quick fashion.

  “Hello?” Richard spoke. His voice was little more than a husky whisper.

  “I’m glad to see you’re coming around,” the face said. It had a man’s voice. “You’ve been out for some time. We were starting to consider the possibility of permanent brain damage.”

  “Brain damage?” Richard groaned, “What are you talking about? Who are you?”

  “Terribly sorry,” the face apologized. “My name is Arlan Cook. Doctor Arlan Cook.”

  “Doctor?” Richard’s mind reeled.

  My God. There’s been an accident. Oh my God. What’s happened to me? Am I hurt? I don’t feel hurt. Am I going to die? Oh my God. Oh my God.

  Richard tried to sit up. Two firm hands pressed against his chest, keeping him from rising.

  “Don’t exert yourself,” the face soothed. “Just relax.”

  Richard lay back down, but he couldn’t relax. He felt like screaming. There was something insane happening here, and he didn’t have the slightest clue as to what it was. He felt like he had just walked in on a movie that had already started, and he didn’t know what the plot was.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” Richard asked. “What’s happened to me?”

  The face smiled knowingly.

  “Well, we’re going to need to run some tests,” he explained. “What do you say we shed a little light on the subject?”

  Richard could just make out the form of a hand reaching over his body. He heard the click of a lamp as the room was filled with light. His eyes shut reflexively. He threw a hand up to cover the sensitive orbs.

  Finally, as he felt the intensity of the light lessen, he lowered his hand and peeked through squinted eyes. For a moment everything in the room retained a blurry glow. As his eyes grew more adjusted to the light, he opened his eyes fully, and gasped.

  He was not in a hospital. He was, in fact, still in his own bedroom. The bathroom door was slightly ajar, just as it had been when he went to bed. His wallet and wristwatch were still lying on the night-stand where he had left them. The clothes he had worn to work that day were still lying in a wrinkled heap in front of the closet.

  Everything was exactly as it had been when he had slipped off into dreamland.

  Except for one minor difference — there had been no strange man looming over him as he had gone to sleep. Of this, Richard was quite sure.

  Richard was also positive this guy was no doctor.

  Although, he did remind Richard somewhat of a disheveled, unkempt English professor from his sophomore year in college

  The man wore a loopy, if not completely threatening grin on his red, heavily lined face. A wild, fright wig of longish gray hair adorned his cranium. It was fairly obvious that neither comb nor shampoo had touched it in some time.

  His body was long and lanky, almost scarecrowish. Drab, threadbare clothes hung loosely on him as if he were some fantastic walking coatrack.

  “Hey! Wh —” Richard started, but was cut off when Doctor Cook, or whatever his name was, put a finger up to his pursed lips.

  “Shhh.”

  Richard’s lips worked open and closed noiselessly. His first impulse was to burst out of the bed, or scream for help, or even to punch this guy in the mouth. He wanted desperately to lash out somehow. Instead, he fought to remain calm. For one thing, the guy had an obvious advantage. Richard was lying flat on his back, while Cook was towering over him, in a much better position to react. Also, this guy was clearly a nut. A real head-case. What other kind of person breaks into your apartment and accosts you in your sleep? Definitely not the actions of a sane man.

  The question was, just how insane was he? Was he the kind of insane where he heard voices and masturbated in public, but was basically harmless? Or was he a full-blown, four-alarm whacko who drank blood and kept a collection of dismembered genitals in a box under a bridge? Richard was afraid to find out. Scratch that. He was certifiably terrified to find out.

  He would have to show extreme caution.

  “What do you want?” Richard asked. His voice was calm, almost singsong, the way you might speak to a strange dog that was growling at you and seemingly ready to eat guts for lunch. He lay perfectly still, not wanting to startle the guy into doing anything violent.

  The man acted as if he didn’t hear Richard. He turned to a battered shopping cart full of scrap and junk. He retrieved a metal clipboard, and proceeded to look over some scribbled notes.

  What the -!?!

  How the hell did he manage to get that cart up here, to my floor, without anyone noticing? Richard wondered. For Christ’s sake, what was the doorman being paid for? Wasn’t he there specifically to keep people like this out of the building? If he wasn’t stopping psychopathic homeless men with shopping carts, just who the fuck was being turned away?

  “What do you want?” he repeated, this time, an edge of panic in his voice.

  The weird stranger looked away from the clipboard and beamed at Richard. His teeth were brown.

  “What do you say we start those tests now?” he asked, though it seemed to be a rhetorical question at best.

  “Tests?” Richard asked. The whole staying-calm thing was beginning to fall apart. He twitched nervously under the covers. The taste of fear was hot and coppery in his mouth. “What are you talking about? Get out. Get out of my apartment. Now.”

  The man turned to his shopping cart, still oblivious to Richard’s questions. He dug through the cart’s items, junk clanging together. Finally
he withdrew some sort of threatening tool that looked to be a homemade device of welded hunks of black, jagged metal. He ran a spider-leg finger over one especially nasty barb.

  “Just open up and say ‘Aaahhh’,” he said grinning, leaning toward Richard.

  That did it. Richard let out a scream, and tried to spring from the bed. His legs became entangled in the sheets. He flopped over on his side with a grunt, having hardly moved at all. The man dropped his instrument on the floor, where it hit the carpet with a flat thud. He reached across the bed and took hold of Richard’s arms. Richard tried to pull free, but the skinny bastard’s grip was amazingly strong.

  “No!” he said.

  “Please,” the man urged him. “If you don’t calm down, I’ll be forced to have you restrained.”

  “Fuck off!” Richard cried. Globs of spit danced off his lips. He kicked at the twisted bed sheets wrapped around his feet.

  “Nurse!” the man shouted, but with no panic in his voice.

  Richard heard her before he saw her, screaming from the hall outside his bedroom. It was a cross between a car horn and a squealing pig. The hideous screeching grew louder until she ran through the doorway at a full run.

  She was awful, a ghastly hag of a thing. She was Richard’s vision of what a witch should look like. Not with green skin and pointy hat like in the Wizard of Oz. This woman was the sort of creature that inhabited nightmares. She had a withered, wrinkled face that looked like parchment paper. Her grin was toothless. One eye was milky, and the iris was a dull, sightless gray. Greasy tangles of hair the color of dust bunnies flapped wildly as she ran at him.

  Richard screamed. The witch raised her left arm over her head. Clenched in her hand was a wooden meat tenderizer. The kind with the cleats on each end of the mallet. Richard bellowed as she brought it down on his head with a sharp crack. Richard’s head exploded — or at least that’s what it felt like to him.

  He didn’t fall unconscious immediately. Bright stars clouded his vision and danced about. He felt the Doctor roll him back into the supine position. He caught a glimpse of the man smiling at him, almost paternally. Richard’s head lolled to the other side and he saw the old hag. She wore a white nurse’s uniform. The front of it was streaked brown. Dried blood or simple filth?

  Finally, Richard’s vision was overtaken with whiteness, as if he were trapped in the middle of a blizzard. Then the world turned black, and he slipped into darkness.

  * * *

  Richard coughed. It was a painful, rattling sound. His throat hurt. So dry. He started to lift his head, but when he moved it, a bolt of pain seized his skull.

  “Oh, Christ,” he whispered.

  He opened his eyes, but the lids were heavy. It took a moment for his sight to return. It was as if they weren’t wired up correctly. When he could finally focus again, he let out a moan.

  They were still there.

  He wished he could be unconscious again. He wished they had left while he was out of it. Better yet, he wished they had never been there to begin with.

  Shit in one hand and wish in the other, he thought. His old man had always been fond of that saying. A regular Henny Youngman that guy was. Richard didn’t feel like laughing.

  Apparently, the hag wasn’t of the same mind. She cackled like she had just heard the funniest goddamn joke in the world. Her toothless gums smacked wetly as she twirled an oily strand of hair around a gnarled index finger. She tugged at the strand so hard it looked like it might pull out of her scalp.

  Richard’s skull was pounding. It felt like someone was performing a drum solo inside his brain. He tried to rub his forehead, but found that his arms were immobilized. He craned his neck upward and found that his wrists were bound to the bedposts with wire. He gave a yank, but the wire dug into his skin. He sucked in a breath though clenched teeth. He looked to the foot of his bed, and saw that his legs were pulled apart, spread-eagled, and his ankles were wired to the lower bedposts.

  Richard grunted in anger. His throat still hurt, and he couldn’t muster anything more than that.

  The next thing he knew, the Doctor’s face was inches from his. The deranged maniac pulled back one of Richard’s eyelids and seemed to examine the eye. Richard tried to pull away. With only his head free of binds, the action didn’t do much good.

  “I’m glad to see you’re coming around,” the Doctor said. “You’ve been out for some time. We had started to consider the possibility of permanent brain damage.”

  “Huh?” Richard moaned.

  As if the whole situation wasn’t fucked enough, the guy seemed to be on some sort of continuous loop. Richard coughed again, and mustered up the strength to speak.

  “Why are you doing this to me? Who are you? Who are you, really?”

  The Doctor brushed a shock of grey hair out of his face.

  “Terribly sorry,” he apologized. “My name is Arlan Cook. Doctor Arlan Cook.”

  Richard grimaced. It was deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would say.

  The old hag snickered and cooed. She clapped her filthy hands together like a child who had just been told she was going to Disney World. Richard shot her a dirty look. She leered at him and said something that sounded like French, but wasn’t. When he couldn’t stand to look at her any longer, he turned back to the Doctor.

  “I’ll give you anything you want,” Richard pleaded. “My wallet and my watch are on the night stand. My keys too. Take my car. It’s a Mercedes. The new model. Take whatever you want. Just leave me alone. Please, leave me alone.”

  “Of course, we’ll have to run some tests,” the Doctor said. “You’re not out of the woods just yet.”

  “Goddamn it, answer me! You’re no doctor! Who are you?”

  The Doctor turned his back on Richard and began scouring the contents of his cart. Richard growled in frustration. Once again, he tugged at his binds, and once again the wire cut at his wrists. He stopped and sighed.

  “What in God’s name do you people want?” he pleaded.

  The Doctor turned to face him and seemed to have found what he was looking for. It was a briefcase full of electrical wires, rubber bands, and other doo-dads jumbled together and held in place by clear masking tape. Connected to the handle was an old, discarded Mister Microphone — the kind with the big foam head on it.

  “Let’s see if we can find anything in the way of internal injuries,” the Doctor announced.

  He set the briefcase on the bed beside Richard and dug into one of the pockets of his tattered coat, withdrawing a cracked jar of petroleum jelly. He removed the lid, stuck his fingers in, and swirled them around. When he pulled them back out, they were covered in goop, which he rubbed over Richard’s bare, quivering belly. When he was done, he wiped the excess gunk on one of Richard’s pillow cases.

  He picked up the Mister Microphone and placed it against Richard’s stomach. Richard squirmed a bit as the Doctor rubbed the thing around on his jelly-covered abdomen. As the Doctor did this, he stared at the odds and ends in the briefcase, as if they contained the answers to life’s greatest mysteries.

  After a minute or two, he set the microphone down and smiled at Richard.

  “That’s very encouraging. The results of your ultrasound show that your abdominal cavity seems clear of any damage. Best of all, the fetus looks to be fine.”

  “Oh, son of a bitch,” Richard moaned.

  This guy was as far from anything normal as one could possibly be.

  The Doctor was still looking at Richard, when his brow wrinkled unpleasantly. He leaned in closer.

  “How did you get that bump on your forehead?” he asked, a look of worry on his face.

  “What? Are you fucking kidding me? Nurse Ratched over there did it to me when she tried to turn my head into London Broil.”

  “Hmmmm. That worries me. I think we better get a CAT scan.” He made a gesture to the hag, without taking his eyes off the knot on Richard’s head.

  “Nurse,” he called.

  The
hag unzipped a scuffed gym bag that lay at her feet. As she shuffled her hands around in the tote, she made a mewling noise like that of a hungry kitten. She withdrew an old Polaroid instant camera — the kind that spat out a thick photo covered with crinkly paper. It was a heavy, clunky thing with a collapsible lens. Richard had no idea how long ago they had stopped making them.

  The old witch placed the camera against Richard’s forehead, bumping the knot on his brow.

  “Hey!”

  The Doctor pulled a roll of silver duct tape out of the same pocket that had held the jar of petroleum jelly. He pulled at it, until a long strip came with ripping sound. He stuck it to the surface of the camera and proceeded to wrap the roll around Richard’s head as the macabre nurse held it in place.

  Richard didn’t try to fight it. It felt pointless. He tried that, and look at where it had gotten him. Besides, he was beginning to think cooperation might be the only way out of this mess. If he just went along with it, maybe they would finally leave him alone.

  When the duo was finished taping the camera to Richard’s head, the Doctor stepped back. He tilted his head to one side, admiring his handy-work.

  “Nurse,” the Doctor spoke. “If you’d be so kind.”

  The crone obliged, reaching forward and pressing the “shoot” button on the camera. The flash went off like a phosphorous grenade, blinding Richard for a moment. Tiny gears wheezed inside the contraption, as a picture puked out of the slot and landed on Richard’s face. The hag snatched it up with greedy fingers and pressed the button again. The process repeated, and she grabbed that pic too.

  “That ought to do it,” the Doctor declared.

  His trusty nurse handed over the photos. He quickly peeled off the wrapping like a child opening presents on Christmas morning. He licked his cracked lips and gave the pictures a quick looking-over. Seemingly satisfied, he stuffed them into his coat pocket.