A Haunting of Horrors, Volume 2: A Twenty-Book eBook Bundle of Horror and the Occult

by Brian Hodge

  My decision to alienate myself from those others in the gallery is strongly supported by the creative processor in my mind, for it tells me that if I choose to involve myself in the non-productive social activities instigated by my fellow exhibitors amongst the patronizing enthusiasts, I would suffer malaise, that being a meltdown of the outer fringes of my inspiration—a dulling of the finer details that ordinarily bleed from my work. Without this, my art would fall into the dark abyss of mediocrity, hence forcing me to abandon my penultimate endeavor: an answer to the evil that has found its way into the deepest corner of the gallery, where my work resides.

  Now, to explain…

  Wednesday, eight in the evening, the doors opened to the public. Men and women (but not a child) paced from the front to the back and then side to side, glancing to and fro at the dark arts on display, most exhibits prevalent in painted form like my own (although I dared not gaze at any of the pieces suffocating in their cumbersome frames for fear of corrupting—of brightening—my own dark creativity) and some but not many erected in sculpted form, as evident through the misshapened figures present in my peripheral vision.

  Although I had access to all of the gallery, I stayed far away from the crux of activity, and even separated myself from the areas where a random encounter with another individual might occur, these places being a single unclean bathroom festooned with mildew and an office within which sat a rusted steel desk and some magazines, but nothing else; not even a chair to rest on. Although I never saw anyone enter or exit the room, I still kept far away from it. Its climate carried too much optimism.

  So I chose the stairwell, a cool dark haven for me. Soon it made sense for me to descend the wooden steps all the way into the cellar.

  Going down made me feel as if I were in a dream.

  Like this:

  I am wearing clothes, it appears to my skin—or my mind’s eye, perhaps—that I am naked and vulnerable, afraid of what I may find resting at the bottom. The stairwell is partially illuminated by streetlight beams bending their way through the tiny windows at the top of the basement wall: a pallid yet dismal yellowing of the cinder-blocks and gossamer webs around me. It appears as if everything has sustained a coating of phosphorescent chalk, the steps before me, and then, the strange fixtures I find upon reaching bottom. Whittled chairs alongside pocked tables, gas pipes riding the walls and ceiling like iron serpents. Within these pipes I hear a subtle whistling, as if a circle of phantoms determined them the most sufficient means of exploring this age-old building. Dying coat racks, torn plastic wastebaskets, the wiry steel skeleton of an umbrella. And a legion of bodies. Bodies. They…they appear to me as misfortunates of war, torsos once finely chiseled from clay, now the dismembered remnants of the creative mind’s yield to defeat. Castaways from the sculpt-artist’s floor, exiles from the gallery to the graveyard. Some have heads, many do not. Most are devoid of arms, and none have hair, of course. They lay in no discernible direction, nor with any evidence of purposeful arrangement. Pacing about them brings me to the center of the room and I feel like a savior of the damned, a Jesus Christ figure cast into the bowels of hell, surrounded by a sea of lost souls too emaciated to beg for forgiveness. A multitude of emotions well up inside me, that of sadness, pity, even regret. Yet strength and power find the rushing flow of my blood, and I am immediately stirred with the long to create. A surge of dizziness consumes me and I place a hand against the shoulder of an androgynous figure, motes of dust (this being the strange illuminous powder I reasoned earlier, alight beneath the waxen streetlamp) taking to the air like a flock of birds escaping a tossed stone. I blow it from my face, then turn and witness a shocking sight. Lined on a shelf beneath the stairwell, there are small, inhuman heads. Many if not all presumably intended to be utilized in this, as I now comprehend, unshared creative venture. Each countenance is unique in its own way, yet all display just one appreciable emotion. Fear. Their paralyzed eyes stare at me, and as I return their gaze I wonder if my eyes shine as brightly as theirs do in this darkness. Then, unbelievably, one head stiffly turns, just enough so that I might question the occurrence, but not doubt it should I recall the odd circumstance later. Its unblinking stare penetrates me. Only when it talks do I shudder uncontrollably and fall to my knees as a part of the underground assemblance. Weakness—it has become one with me while the sing-songy words enter my mind: One great art form deserves another, Brion. I clutch my heart as it claws the inside of my chest like a hungry animal seeking escape. Finally I unleash a scream—not so loud that I might alert those perusers in the gallery above—and stir this dream-like state from my consciousness…

  My hands explored the texture of the clothing against my skin, smooth and quite tangible. I then became conscious of my breath, as labored as it was. Alertly I took in my surroundings, which remained physically identical to that within my mesmeric state, yet carried no ghostly threat. No high-pitched voices.

  For an indeterminate amount of time I stared at the mannequin-like figures, and only upon collecting my wits did I notice a great deal of time having passed, and that the gallery’s doors had been closed for the evening. I crawled to the landing, then quietly ascended the stairs in a crawling position, placing my hands into the dusty footprints I left upon coming down.

  Upon reaching the top of the stairway I felt the residue of my hypnotic slumber obscuring my senses. I did my damnedness to cast it aside while standing in the threshold, gazing at the serenity of the lifeless gallery, of course avoiding at all costs even the slightest glance towards another’s creative struggle. I paused for a moment, staring above and beyond the erected display boards, through the filmy window and out towards the shapeless forms in the quiet street. An amber traffic light at the corner blinked its pale rhythm into the gallery, offering me intermittent vision in the dour-blackness I was about to traverse. It was at this moment that I realized my feet were bare, the cracked linoleum and exposed cement foundation nibbling at my heels. Keeping my sights to the floor, I paced in the direction of my display, at one juncture accidentally banging my shoulder against a support beam, which caused a tiny shower of plaster chips to rain down upon my head. I turned to the left and focused on the crumbling archway at the forefront of the narrow vestibule holding my depictions. When I passed beneath it, an odd brewing of perceptions immediately engulfed me, a feeling I could only describe in empathetic terms: a distant and dreary desolation.

  It was an ambivalent sensation, since my work, although drowned in oddness and obscurity, customarily brings me to a lofty level of dark pleasure. But here I am, adversely submerged into pure devastation, not for the true nature that is my work, but for the strange supplement left behind to complement one of my depictions. Before I describe it, let me discuss the art to which it was intended.

  The painting itself is entitled Hallow’s Moon. It is, as well imagined, a moonscape comprised of a black sky, winking stars, and a meadow sprinkled with dandelions. The lunar phase is in its early stages, first quarter, that of a concaving crescent caught in the sun’s hidden emission, the slightly visible dark side spherically prominent. The ruralscape, seemingly asleep and simplistic in its nature, is alive with all that is dark and evil, and if one with a creative mind looks very closely, he may glimpse one or more of a hundred gremlins hidden in the whorls of paint that make up the insinuated innocence of grass and flowers; the moonlight provides sufficient illumination to make this effort possible. To the right, halfway across the meadow sits a tree, one rather large with no definitive classification other than it bears a red-brown fruit of some ilk (I painted these here as an afterthought, thinking that my hidden gremlins would need to ingest something when there were no do-gooders nearby to ravage). A small treehouse rests in its lower branches, a not so necessarily safe-haven for all those who reach its walls.

  Now, the supplement. An envelope, large, yellow, and clasped, taped to the easel beside Hallow’s Moon, but not anywhere near the depiction; the instigator had been careful not to damage an
y portion of the scene. If my actions could ever have been described as poetic, then the slow deliberate method I used to open the envelope and remove its contents could have taken a pageful of fear-filled stanzas. When the contents finally lay nestled in the palm of my hand, I could only shudder at the remarkable progression used in this supplement to Hallow’s Moon, the mad genius it took to create them, plus the fear these items evoked upon me.

  There were ten photographs of the instamatic kind, the type bought in a cartridge at the local drugstore then used primarily by lust-filled couples to record their plotted events of drink and drugs while romping between the sheets. They showed a series of scenes, all eventuating before the serene backdrop of the fictitious landscape I designated Hallow’s Moon. The first photograph was that of the meadow, an exact duplicate of every detail of scenery that I’d painted, from the tree and its tiny dwelling, to the dandelions and the wisps of witch-grass blowing in the gentle wind. I searched for the hidden gremlin-faces but could not locate them, for the definition within the photograph was lost to poor clarity. And then I went to sheer lengths to wonder, how is it that the photographer was capable of photographing this landscape which was created solely through the workings of my creativity? The level of unreality surrounding this strange revelation was impressive to me, and I could only attempt to answer my question by viewing the remaining photographs. The second was nearly exact to the first, excepting a thin line of shadow obscuring the left tenth of the meadow, concealing the grass and dandelions there, as if the picture-taker’s finger had accidentally slipped out in front of the lens at the moment of exposure. The third showed the dark shadow as more prevalent, it still being in the forefront, but having moved across nearly a third of the viewable area. The fourth photograph appeared to have been taken a minute or more later than the one previous. Here the curious shadow became an outline of a person, this individual now standing at a distant point in the meadow so that their being took up perhaps a quarter of the entire scene, but was central and solitary so that the sky, grass, and even the tree framed the person equally on all sides. The fifth picture offered a vague identity of the person, and I say vague because although I could readily identify the subject as a person, there was no further familiarity in them enabling me to specify any motive for the taking of these pictures, nor given the presumed reality of the fictitious Hallow’s Moon, as to the possibility of their existence. The person (I continue to refer to the androgynous figure as a ‘person’ because I feel it nearly impossible to pin a sexual gender upon him/her; if I had to guess for the intents of my plight, I would say she) had turned to face the camera, and was in full make-up, black lips and eye-shadow, white face glowing beneath the moon’s beams, short hair slicked back as if deeply oiled, bushy eyebrows thick like worms. She wore a dress in monastery-black which ran flush against her waistline and bellied out near the pelvic area. A boustierre pressed in below her bustline and ran straight up to her neck where a metal chain was tied in a noose-like knot. The chain hung slackly from her neck and dangled into a high pocket of grass. In the sixth picture, all evil intentions of the photographer became apparent. The chain was suddenly taut, the black-clad individual now leaning over (rather, was being pulled over), both hands gripping the links as if in a tug-of-war with an unseen entity burrowing in the grass. Her face was no longer solemn, but presently a mask of terror, eyes bulging and lost amidst the wild growth in search for her tormentors. She needn’t have to search very far, for in the seventh picture my gremlins made themselves known, the hundred or more that I’d masterfully hidden amidst the scenery in Hallow’s Moon uprooting themselves from their hiding places, the grass, the bark of the tree, the tree-dwelling, the dandelions, little men no taller than twelve inches, their faces dark brown and repulsively wrinkled, red eyes beading like single drops of blood. Their bodies were ensconced in similar gear, leather outfits covered with open slits that looked like scars. Photo eight showed the gremlins taking control of the girl, many carrying whips which they used to fetter her limbs, others covering her torso and head like aphids on a rose stem. The ninth picture told an alarming story: she’d been dragged through the meadow to a point under the tree, an irregular swath matted down in the field indicating that she’d put up quite a struggle in effort to escape (in the distance, her clothing and face supported this obvious theory, having been torn and marred in a multitude of places). Lastly, picture ten, the protagonist of the instamatic pictures swings from the chain, her head twisted to the side at a near-impossible angle, forced there from the noosed chain at her neck that had been strung over the lowest branch of the tree. The only color present in this depiction, which had miraculously been stripped of its crescent moon, was that of the red bloated tongue bursting from her mouth.

  I took my gift from the God of Art, these photographs, and went back into the basement of the gallery where I slept on the floor beneath the amber glow of the filtering streetlight, curled amidst the heads and the torsos of the sculpt-artist castaways.

  Sometime later I was awakened by a voice, high-pitched and child-like, calling my name. Brion Heloise, Brion Heloise, over and over again. When I opened my eyes the small window at the top of the wall greeted my slumberous gaze and I saw at this sharp angle a sliver of moon high above the buildings in the street; the blackness in the Nyxian sky from which it hung indicated that I’d slept either one or twenty-one hours—for which, I could not be certain. The silence in the building indicated that again I was alone in the gallery

  (or was I?)

  and that another supplement may await me in the vestibule housing my depictions. I stood on shaky legs and tackled the field of bodies, arms, legs, and torsos tossed at odd angles. I peeked over at the line of gremlin heads on the shelf, some of them seemingly rearranged to contemplate me, their red eyes reflecting the moonlight that somehow found its way to them. The one that had spoken to me…

  …one great art form deserves another, Brion…

  in that child-like voice was silent at the moment, and I wondered if it had been this particular head that had just called my name in a successful push to stir me from my slumber.

  I carried myself up the flight of wooden steps, out into the darkened gallery that was devoid of people, and retraced my steps from the previous amble I took, all the way to my own personal area of display. I found myself staring at the abstract magnetism of the second complete piece, that which was titled Raingods Dancing. This selection is a mixture of oil and water in which I endeavored to arouse the ferocity of an unanticipated storm. But here, I might add, nature holds no responsibility to the tempest at hand—on the contrary, it is a plague of ghosts that rain down upon the poor souls residing in a quaint bungalow on a dark countryside, a mother, father, and baby peering out from their windows (although only the glow of their eyes and a faint outline of nighttime garb is evident, it provides the admirer with just enough detail to assume their presence), their actions still and tentative, other than the possibility that they’ve tolerantly resigned themselves to certain death. Above, the clouds have blackened before a blue sky, only faint traces of sunlight breaking through the smothering formation. And again, if one looks closely into the black monster above, amidst the bruise-like abstractions and scintillating cumulus patterns, the faces and hands of ghosts suddenly appear, specter-like gremlins riping to swoop down from their places in the sky in a race to possess the bodies of the three living souls trapped behind the four walls of their quaint bungalow. In addition to the bungalow, there is a wooden stockade fence whose unfettered gate is caught in the muscling gale, two trees set off on the left side whose leaves are being stripped away like the clothes of a victim about to be raped.

  After spending an indeterminate amount of time reveling in the creativity of Raingods Dancing, I peered down below the easel which held my work and saw not an envelope this time, but an old-type cassette player-recorder, one of those rectangular-shaped devices most notably used years ago by elementary school librarians and teachers. I knee
led down before it and pressed the button labeled play, watching as the tiny gear-like cartridge wheels within began their revolutions towards the continuation of this enigma of supplement.

  No voices came from the player. Rather a hiss-ladened chorus of sounds emanated: that of a creaking gate slamming against its cradle, a cowbell tinkling madly in a whistling wind (taking my sights from the rotating cartridge wheels for a second, I peered at the work entitled Raingods Dancing in which this supplement in the form of a soundtrack was intended, and noticed without remembering for the life of me that I’d painted a tiny cowbell beside the door of the bungalow in which the family of three awaited their fate), and the static-like sway of leaves gripped in the fury of the coming storm. These sound-characteristics on the tape carried on for a period of perhaps fifteen minutes, in which the volume of the intemperate wind increased at a moderate pace until the wooden gate began to slam violently at close-to-even intervals of three seconds. Then the band of sounds grew very intense, apparently becoming infected with the plague of ghosts I’d imagined raining down from the skies. At this moment I felt as if I were falling into a trance, and my recollection of actually painting this depiction became spotty and vague. And then, as I sat on the floor listening to this tape as the bellows of the ghosts roared above the shrilling winds, I found myself merging with the soundtrack, so that not only was I hearing the events occurring in Raingods Dancing, but I was feeling them, to a point where my skin rippled at the wet air that seemed to bleed from the depiction above me. My apprehension grew like fire, as thinking back to the photographs supplementing Hallow’s Moon made me consider the dreadful probability as to how this would end, and before I gave myself a chance to draw a conclusion as to what might occur, three individual screams ejaculated from the tape player, the first one of a grown man, then that a woman’s, and then, most alarmingly, that of a baby’s, and I say this with such dread for in my mind’s eye I’d made it clear—and in the depiction quite apparent—that the third family member was not merely a child of six or eight or ten, but rather a baby of an age measured in months rather than years. Undoubtedly, the third voice I heard was the innocent end-cry of an infant.