Shock Totem 8.5: Holiday Tales of the Macabre and Twisted - Valentine's Day 2014

by Shock Totem

  Shocked and embarrassed, David ducked below the windowsill so fast, his lower jaw slammed against its edge. His teeth sunk into the flesh of his tongue.

  He cried out.

  From inside the cabin, he heard the unmistakable sound of chair legs scraping on a wooden floor.

  “Fuck,” he said again. Mind your tongue, Davey, he could hear his mother admonish. Cussing is the language of the inarticulate.

  Backing away into the cover of a thick copse of shrubs and saplings, David crouched down into the shadows.

  The cabin door opened, and the woman, still holding the baby to her now-covered chest, looked out into the dark. “Thomas,” she said. “Is that you?”

  When no answer came, the woman stepped out onto the rickety landing. She scanned the darkness and stopped her gaze at the exact spot where David crouched. He sucked in his breath and swallowed the air as if he were about to freedive to the bottom of the Great Blue Hole. He could taste the salty thickness of his own blood as it seeped from his wounded tongue and trickled down his throat.

  “Thomas?” the woman asked again.

  Not wanting to alarm her by running, making her think he’d been up to no good, David came out of his crouch and stepped forward. He waved shyly. “I—” he started, then paused. The woman was smiling, and though it showed no indication of malice, he shivered. “I’m...I...ma’am, I’m sorry. My name’s David. I was out fishing and, or trying to, anyway, and—”

  “I’m Anna,” she said. “Do you have any water, perhaps something to eat, some cheese or bread?”

  “Any...?” David shook his head, confused. “No, I’m sorry. I don’t.”

  Even under the delicate light of the coming dawn, David could see disappointment cross her face like storm clouds marring a summer sky.

  “Perchance, are you an acquaintance of Thomas’s?” she asked. “Will he be returning soon?”

  “Not sure, ma’am. I’m afraid I don’t know anyone named Thomas. I was just—”

  She cocked her head slightly, as if she were just then seeing him for the first time. “Do you travel from the west? Do you know of the mill workers?”

  “No,” he said. “I live a few miles from here, not far.”

  “A curious man, you are.” She was silent for a moment, head bowed, then looked up and said, “Do you have any water?”

  Again he told her no, and again her smile dipped, her eyes downcast in apparent sadness. “Perhaps from the pond,” she said. “If it be no trouble to you.”

  David was about to tell her the pond was dry, but he thought of the deep pool at its center. “I suppose I could get you some,” he said. A smile widened across Anna’s haggard face. “But I’m not sure it’s safe to—”

  “Come in,” she said. “I’ll find you a pail.”

  David hesitated, but when it became clear that Anna was waiting for him to follow, he quickened his pace. What harm could come from such a frail thing?

  He followed her through a small foyer, and then into the cabin’s single room. It appeared even smaller and darker from the inside. A tattered copy of Dickens’s The Cricket on the Hearth lay open on the table. David thumbed through its pages. Like everything else, it looked and felt real, but also out of time, as if it didn’t quite belong in this moment.

  Then again, he was slowly beginning to feel like it was he who didn’t belong.

  The air was musty and oppressive, seemingly weighted down with despair. Dead air, he thought. Something David knew all too well...

  Before his mother passed, she had clung to this world for six long months, valiantly fighting the cancer which they all knew would eventually destroy her. Day after day, David and his father had witnessed the relentless, destructive force of the disease as it feasted. Her skin turned a sickly gray-green, she choked on her teeth as they fell from her rotting gums. Death crawled through her, over her, molesting and befouling her before their eyes. It had filled his childhood home with its vile presence, its evil promise of total annihilation. They were helpless. And now it was here, in this very room.

  The raw stench of Death.

  Anna went to the cradle and dropped the baby into it as if it were a ragdoll. The baby didn’t cry out, but David could see the way its head was cocked that it should have.

  “Maybe I should go,” he said, taking a step backward.

  Anna didn’t seem to hear. On tiptoe, she rummaged through a deep-set cubbyhole in the cabin’s back wall. Her short nightgown had risen above her hips, revealing to David that she wore nothing beneath. He could see pubic hair and the lips of her vagina jutting down between her skeletal legs, which were themselves covered in bruises and scars, her waist all sharp angles of bone.

  “Here it is,” she said. David quickly looked away as she turned around, his cheeks burning. She held out a rusty bucket reverently, as though it were an offering to a god.

  David stepped forward, grasped the handle, and took the bucket from her shaking hands. She was still smiling.

  “Please,” she said, “I’m so thirsty. I can’t leave. Thomas is due home from the mill, and my baby—” She stopped, gestured toward the cradle.

  “Ma’am, is everything okay here?” David asked. “I mean—I could get help, if you need it.”

  Anna looked down at her feet and fidgeted with the lacing around the neck of her nightgown. “Fine, everything’s fine,” she replied. “Thomas will be home soon, and everything will be fine.”

  David knew that was bullshit. This cabin, this woman, her unmoving baby—his entire morning, for that matter—was anything but fine.

  “I’ll get the water,” he said, holding up the bucket, its handle rattling and echoing through the bare room. “Be right back.”

  “Thank you. Bless your heart, David.” She grabbed him by the arm, startling him, and kissed his cheek. Her breath assaulted his senses like the stink from a long-dead animal, but he blushed all the same.

  She followed him out onto the landing, thanking him again and again, her happiness visibly splayed across her tired, sickly face.

  But David had lied to her. He had no intention of ever going back to the cabin in the woods. He was going home, to call the sheriff.

  Probably to report a murder.

  • • •

  Anna watched David disappear into the woods, while the world around her slowly came alive with the coming sun.

  She cried.

  Though she had promised herself that she was done with crying, she cried. And it felt good. Wonderful. She had found a reason to hope, to truly have faith again.

  David would help her, if only until Thomas returned. She was saved.

  And so she cried.

  • • •

  The rusty bucket rattled in David’s hand as he stomped his way across the pond bottom. His shoes left imprints of his passing in the soft earth.

  Sympathy and uncertainty tugged at his heartstrings, and he found himself heading toward the pool at the center of the pond. He was torn. Should he get the water, bring it back to the strange woman in the cabin, and then go home and call for help? If one thing was clear, she needed help. Or should he just go straight home, make the call to the sheriff?

  The clattering bucket tormented his indecisiveness.

  He stopped and cursed himself for ever having looked through that window. He knew this area, knew that cabin did not belong and should not be there. But then, how many years had passed since he’d last been in the woods on the other side of the pond? Twenty years, at least. Not since childhood. Could someone have been living out there like a frontierswoman for that long? He supposed it was possible.

  Though Anna’s words gnawed at him. Do you know of the mill workers? Thomas is due home from the mill. There hadn’t been any active mills in the area for at least fifty years.

  Frustrated, David raised his arm, fully intent on hurling the bucket—and with it his promise to Anna—into the brightening morning. But his hand was empty, the bucket gone. He looked around, but saw nothing of th
e old metal thing. Must have dropped it, he thought. Dropped it while pondering the strange business of Anna and her dead baby.

  Without the bucket, though, his decision was made. David stalked off toward the fishing gear he’d left on the opposite shore.

  The morning brightened further, birdsong filled the warming air. As he trudged along, David gradually felt the change beneath his feet. Only when his right foot slipped out from underneath him and he crashed to the ground—now a soggy, muddy mess—did he realize just how much it had changed.

  He’d been too busy chasing the dizzying thoughts spinning around his head, trying to sort through everything that had happened. He half-expected to wake up at any moment, in his own bed, as the fuzzy tendrils of this bizarre dream receded into nothingness. But the cool water that seeped through his jeans felt too real, too cold to be a dream.

  He slowly stood, centering his balance. The sun had not yet fully broken the tree line, but as the day continued to engulf the night David could see the reflective glimmer of light upon water.

  In all directions.

  Again he found himself fascinated. The pond was filling with water, it bubbled up through the ground all around him. He shifted his feet, and in the slick clay mud he nearly toppled over again.

  Time to go, he thought.

  As he hurried along, the mud became more treacherous. The ground clutched at his feet so greedily that he kept looking down expecting to see the bony hands of the dead wrapped around his ankles. He was reminded of the pool scene in Poltergeist, and he quickened his pace. Water sloshed as he pushed forward, but the faster he went the slower he seemed to move. His panic rose with the water. When his left leg sank deep into the sucking mud, up to his knee, fear churned up his insides.

  David pulled at his stuck leg, but the harder he pulled the deeper his other leg sank. Before long, both legs were entrenched deep in the mud. He yanked and twisted and thrashed about.

  The water deepened.

  Frantic, David screamed for help. He watched the water rise past his waist and steadily up his chest. He cried out to his father, to God, and even to Anna. He prayed that someone—anyone—would hear.

  The water reached his quivering chin. David lunged below the surface and tried to dig his legs out of the mud. He managed to loosen—but not free—his right leg.

  He came up for air. His head broke the surface, but his mouth was now under water. He titled his head back and inhaled deeply through his nose.

  The sky above was a dim blue, spotted with bruise-purple clouds. Birds soared across the sky, free as air.

  Free as air...

  Inhaling again, David disappeared into the water. He tore at the mud, handful after handful, until his right leg came loose.

  Head pounding, chest feeling as if it were about to explode, he continued to dig.

  Somehow, his left leg sunk deeper, but he managed to liberate it enough to hope. His lungs demanded to be fed.

  David straightened his body and stretched his neck, anticipating that cool touch of oxygen.

  It never came.

  Cold realization struck him as if a mountain had crumbled atop his helpless body. David thrust himself toward the surface and the air he knew was just millimeters away, flapping his arms with all the strength he could muster.

  He never moved.

  He reached up and absurdly tried to pull the water down.

  Terror crushed his resolve. His mouth opened wide...and he inhaled. The water rushed into him unhindered. It tasted salty, like cold, bitter tears. Pain exploded within his chest as if he were being eaten by the lust of a thousand sorrows.

  He continued to struggle for the surface. And then, almost in an instant, the pain receded; a calm fell over him, a serene assurance that there was nothing left to fear. A tranquility he’d never known before.

  Peace, he thought. And it was beautiful.

  His vision blurred, and his body tingled as a small seed of regret blossomed in his gut. He thought of his father, his friends, even Anna, felt as if he’d failed them all.

  A deep chill settled over him. His body shuddered. David Hardwick opened his mouth to cry out...

  • • •

  Anna lay in bed. Fresh tears welled in the corners of her eyes and streamed down her temples, onto her pillow. Outside, birds chattered and sang their songs, their jubilant music flittering through the morning.

  Just before dawn broke across the water, the candle illuminating the inside of the cabin went out. A lazy curl of smoke snaked its way toward the ceiling.

  Anna watched it, thought of David, her savior, and smiled. She thought Thomas, of welcoming him home, then pulled the blankets tighter around her, closed her eyes, and dreamed.

  K. Allen Wood’s fiction has appeared in 52 Stitches, Vol. 2; The Zombie Feed, Vol. 1; Epitaphs: The Journal of New England Horror Writers; The Gate 2: 13 Tales of Isolation and Despair; Anthology Year One; Appalachian Undead and its companion chapbook, Mountain Dead; and most recently in Anthology Year Two: Inner Demons Out. He lives and plots in Massachusetts.

  For more info, visit his website at www.kallenwood.com.

  HOLIDAY RECOLLECTION

  THE SAME DEEP WATER AS YOU

  by Bracken MacLeod

  In my early twenties, I didn’t know that you can’t save people from themselves and ended up learning that lesson over and over again. Youth is the teacher of fools.

  In ‘91 I was smitten with a woman named Jill, who was soulfully intellectual and beautiful. However, she was also deeply, clinically depressed over a recently failed marriage and the pressures of grad school and being a single mother. I arrogantly convinced myself I could be the rock she and her son clung to for support in bad weather and that eventually together we’d walk out of the sea into bright sunlight and lie down in tall, soft grass. She never got the professional help she needed and ended up violently killing herself. The storm that followed tore at my heart and mind and propelled me through two more increasingly destructive relationships that alienated my friends and drove me deeper into despair.

  That lasted until I met the actual love of my life. But even after I married her, it took the better part of a decade for me to stop blaming myself for being unable to save Jill. She still haunts me on occasion. That was the worst.

  HOLIDAY RECOLLECTION

  ONE LUCKY HORROR NERD

  by James Newman

  “Share with me your morbid love, we are the living dead.”

  —from “Tonight (We’ll Make Love Until We Die),” by SSQ, on the Return of the Living Dead soundtrack

  “See how she sets you on fire...black candy is so hard to find.”

  —from “Black Candy,” by Danzig

  I am a lucky man in so many ways. I’m married to a woman who is a shining example of a perfect wife and mother. That’s the most important thing, of course. But as it relates to this fine publication, I’d like to talk for a few minutes about how fortunate I am to have bagged myself a “horror chick.”

  My wife, Glenda, puts up with a lot. My obsession with monsters, madmen, and everything in between is just one of the many things she tolerates about me. There’s an ongoing joke we share between us that pretty much says it all: Glenda tells me, “You can remember the name of the guy who used to be the hairdresser for the woman who was married to the director of that cheesy killer clown flick from 1979, but it always slips your mind when I ask you to take out the trash?”

  And I have no retort. She has a point, and it pierced my heart a long time ago.

  The only thing my woman ever complains about, in fact? It’s not the twenty to thirty hours a week I stay logged on to Netflix, constantly looking for a new horror film to impress me or just revisiting forgotten faves from years ago; it’s not the hundreds (thousands?) of dollars I spend annually on books by my favorite writers of dark fiction. It’s not the way I “check out” of the real world while I’m hard at work on my latest writing project. The only thing that ever seems to bother her about my infatuati
on with the horror genre is...well, I’ll just let her say it: “You don’t write enough.”

  I got a good one, didn’t I? No doubt about it. And did I mention she can be my toughest critic when it comes to my own work? Yep...Glenda doesn’t tell me what I want to hear, she tells me what I need to know. Such honesty is invaluable to any writer who wants to continually improve at his or her craft.

  The cool thing is, she digs this stuff, too. How could I not fall head-over-heels in love with a woman who cites The Exorcist III: Legion as her “favorite scary movie,” a woman who prefers watching episodes of Dexter, Bates Motel, and American Horror Story to Keeping Up with the Kardashians?

  Every few years, we throw a massive Halloween bash, and Glenda gets into the extensive decorating and dressing up just as much as I do (one year we were Frankenstein and the Bride, another a sated vampire and his victim in her blood-soaked nightgown, then the next year we switched it around so Glenda was the bloodsucker and I was the pajama-clad victim with his necklace of garlic and crosses that hadn’t done a damn bit of good). We love to read together, too. I know that’s incredibly nerdy, but I couldn’t care less. We’ve been together for a little over twenty-two years as I write this, and for at least twenty of those years we’ve enjoyed sharing good books. How does that work, you ask? Well, usually it entails reading aloud to her as she soaks in the bathtub or cooks dinner for our family. Traditionally, we read every new Joe Lansdale and Bentley Little title together, not long after they’re published (we’re currently about halfway into the latter’s The Influence, by the way, and it’s fantastic), although we’ve enjoyed plenty of other great writers together as well.

  Through the years, Glenda has accompanied me to the occasional horror convention, and these days we take our sons with us to enjoy the freakish festivities (we have a toddler and a teenager...and you think you know horror?). They get a kick out of it. Jacob, the little guy, is obsessed with zombies and werewolves, while Jamie’s favorite films are Night of the Creeps and David Cronenberg’s version of The Fly. I couldn’t be more proud!