Fear of the Dark: An Anthology of Dark Fiction

by Maria Grazia Cavicchioli

  “This they you’re on about—”

  “And what if we were able to somehow artificially induce such a state?” The old doctor smiled, perhaps taking my blank stare to be one of awe. He gestured toward the door with a liver-spotted hand. “Time to open up that mind, my boy,” he said, with an odd wink and a flash of the bone saw.

  7. Undeath

  If I wasn’t already positive the old fellow had gone batty, my mind would soon be made up for me. And if the foyer, reception area, and hallways hadn’t been in a disgusting enough state, then this operating theatre certainly was.

  A myriad of stains covered the walls, floor, and ceiling in every revolting colour imaginable, from the dark brown of faeces to the black of decades-old blood. From the yellow of pus to the green of bile. From the reds and blues of unspecified chemicals to the mauve of some anonymous ichor. It was all there.

  A single filthy cot dominated the room, on which lay a decomposing and dark-skinned female body. This body was hooked up to a large flatscreen monitor with countless wires and cables, and to a series of intravenous stands and pumps, a tangle of tubes and hoses in between. To say I was confounded would have been an understatement.

  “This is a, um, wow,” I said, holding a hand up to my mouth and nose. The stench of death was unmistakable, and was only barely tolerable due to a heavy dose of air freshener and the reek of caustic chemicals filling the room, cauterising my nasal passages. “I wonder if, geeze, have you thought about hiring some help to, you know, sort of keep things a little cleaner around here?”

  “I’m sorry our facilities are not up to the same standards as the ones you’re used to back home in England,” Dr. Harrison snorted, “but we simply do not have the funds to build such glistening white shrines to modern medicine.”

  I very nearly choked on my disbelief. “Surely you mean shrines to our contemporary understanding of hygiene, Dr. Harrison!”

  “My dear boy, I do understand the importance of good hygiene in a hospital, but you must understand that we deal with a different sort of clientele here.” The old man switched on the monitor. “Our need for such sanitisation is not so great as yours. You see, the dead, Mr. Rothwell, do not get sick. When they check in here,” he said, whipping back the soiled linen sheet, revealing the cadaver in all its horrific, decomposing glory, “they are already in as bad a shape as they will ever be.”

  My mind very nearly cracked at the scene before me. Sure signs of brain function on the monitor. Synapses firing in bright red, yellow, and green explosions on the brain map. My eyes followed the wires and cables from the monitor to the electrodes on the corpse’s shaved head. Breath caught in throat. My eyes frantically searched for signs of life, and my fingers instinctively grasped at the cadaver’s cold, dead wrist searching in vain for a pulse.

  Sure symptoms of death. No heart rate. No respiration. Pallor mortis: the unmistakable pallor of skin. Livor Mortis: the settling of blood in the lower body, the back of the body a sickly purple-black. Algor Mortis: the chill when life is no more. Rigor mortis: the stiffening of limbs. And the worst part, the very worst part, decomposition. Indeed, the flesh of this body had already begun to break down. Putrefaction. The swelling and changing of color to various shades of greens and oranges, skin blistering, the body cavity, itself, bloating, nearing rupture.

  Involuntarily, I gagged, my fascination giving way to revulsion, before giving way to shock and, finally, anger. “I don’t know what kind of trickery this is,” I hissed, turning to the aged doctor, “or what kind of charlatan you are, but this is just sick.” I hurriedly brushed past Dr. Harrison, unable to look him in the eye, and charged out of the examination room into the hallway.

  “Imagine, playing with the dead like this!” I stabbed a finger in his direction. “I’ll have you arrested, you freak!”

  Dr. Harrison dropped his smirk, feigning hurt. “But this is legitimate science, boy! You’ll see! Life after death. It’s all in altering the oscillation of the microcrystals. You’ll see, Mr. Rothwell!”

  This wasn’t quite what I was looking for. I hated myself for even embarking on this fool’s errand. I couldn’t get out of that place fast enough, and as I sped down the hallway, the doctor was still yelling after me.

  “You’ll see my face on the cover of Time once more, Mr. Rothwell! Dr. Prescott Taylor Harrison: The man who conquered death!”

  8. Resolution

  A dead, yellow moon drooped bloated in the sky, rising between the crumbling brick buildings as I made my way by dusk’s dark light into the depths of Windhoek, my overworked lungs full of arid African air. A mindless stumbling through alleys and side streets commenced, a weak attempt to wrap my broken mind around the disturbing events of the evening.

  I felt the buzzing of my mobile in my trouser pocket, withdrew it, and squinted at the small black letters on the too-bright screen:

  Bank holiday, sorry for delay. Did not send memo. You may be in danger. Please report back ASAP.

  There was a prickling on the back of my neck. I stopped. Footsteps. Familiar. Almost out of earshot. The click, click, clicking of high heels on concrete. Then, in an instant, cold breath on my neck, and the slight scent of perfume. Funeral flowers.

  “I think it’s time we formally met,” she breathed.

  I tried to turn, but something stopped me.

  “Don’t,” she commanded.

  I caught only a flash, a glimpse of her profile. Beauty, there. That was sure. Preservation even more perfect than a saint’s incorruptibility. Skin of polished marble, with the otherworldly translucence of blessed parchment. Her eyes, lips, nose, all faultless. Still. Two hundred years on. Then, the unmistakable rigidity of categorical death.

  “What do you want?” I trembled, shaken.

  She giggled. “What do I want? Is it not you who has sought me out all these years? I suppose I could ask you the same question. What do you, Benson Rothwell, want?”

  “So you knew,” I said, my voice rasping, terrified. “You knew this whole time that I was searching. And it was you — it was you who I was, at times, so close to finding.”

  I wanted to turn. I wanted so badly to turn, to look upon the face for which I had searched this past decade. I wanted to, but could not.

  “You were only ever as close to finding me as I wanted you to be,” she said, her whisper cold. “Close enough to feel me watching, to smell my perfume, to hear my footsteps. But, no closer. No, it would have to be me who found you, when I chose. Here. Now.”

  “But why?” I pleaded, desperate. “You mean to tell me that you’ve wasted an entire decade baiting me, luring me?”

  “What’s a decade to one who enjoys the potential of eternal life? Hm?” Her hands were on my shoulders now. Strong. Fingers massaging deep into my collarbone, digging beneath the clavicle. Pointed nails, talons, very nearly piercing my mortal flesh. “But you speak of waste — did you manage to enjoy any of your life during your mad pursuit?”

  She laughed, callous.

  Her voice was in my head as much as it was in my ears. “You needed to grow, that was clear. To experience age. Just as you needed to experience life’s beginning, you needed to see your possible end. Death: life’s tragic little side effect. All humans fear it, and no one understands it. Science barely knows how to define it. Humans pitifully search for answers in schools and churches. They search the world over for a cure.”

  She was so close, then, on me, inside me. My mind fuzzed, and my heart beat heavy in my ears. I swooned.

  “Take your new friend there — Dr. Harrison. What kind of a life is that? You,” she continued, “you needed to be better. You needed to finish medical school, to start a career, to foster passion. You needed to know the highs and lows, the joys and sorrows of being human. You needed to catch a glimpse of the possible. You needed to venture beyond the hive.”

  “But, what’s the point?” I feebly demanded. “A decade! Why spend any time at all? Is the chase for you
r amusement?”

  “Nothing as banal as that,” she sniffed. “I get my kicks elsewhere. In addition to growing, we thought it important that you get to know our history. Your history.”

  “But, what—?”

  “And, hopefully, you’ll manage to sidestep that commonest of all human mistakes: You get what you want, and then you miss what you had.”

  And with that, a bite.

  Charlie Loudowl was born and raised on the Canadian Great Plains where he developed an appreciation for solitude, an interest in writing, and an attraction to robots, rayguns, zombies, horror, and the weird. He currently lives in the quiet suburbs of Calgary, Alberta with his wife, twin girls, and dog, where he divides his time between writing, painting, and playing music. Loudowl is the author of “The Still Beating Heart,” a short story featured in the Poe-inspired anthology Return of the Raven.

  Beak Boy

  by Eric Dimbleby

  I fear the darkness. Not so much for the blackness that surrounds me, but for the sleepiness that it heaps upon my brain, bringing me to my foul dream world, where the Beak Man (formerly the Beak Boy) groans and squawks and ruins my bliss. I have known the Beak Man all of my life, and he has never brought me anything but grief. He is a thief, a murderer, a demon dragging his talons across my soul, cackling and drooling and celebrating my misery.

  Tears fill my eyes when I feel sleep upon me. I quake and kick my sheets, cursing the cosmos as a whole, for making me human — for needing sleep, and for having no realistic mechanism to avoid that prone state of needless drifting.

  It was around my fourth year, when I first started to emerge from the fuzzy tangles of a toddler’s mind, that I first met the Beak Boy, the detestable son of a bitch that still plagues me. I can remember, deep in my dreams, walking about my mother’s home, dragging my blanket behind me and sucking my thumb. I looked in every room in that dream-house for my mother, but could not find her. I stared out the misshapen cartoon windows of my fantasy world, which was loosely based on reality, only interjected with bits and pieces of things I had thus far absorbed from my television set.

  My mother was nowhere to be found, but in her dream-bedroom was the Beak Boy, hopping upon her bed and squawking in some form of conviviality. His face, head, and neck were a hideous gray sandpaper which looked rough to the touch, though I dared not to reach out. The beak I would later compare to that of a squid, sharp and devious, with a twittering thick tongue. He wore pajamas much like my own.

  “What’s your name?” I asked of the thing in my dream, the little beaked monster in my mother’s room, wearing my pajamas. He only stared at me, pausing in his celebration, craning his head and looking me up and down with his black lifeless eyes. For what seemed like an eternity, we measured each other up. “Who are you?” I asked next, almost shouting. Still, he stared.

  His beak opened up and a terrible screech came from it. Flapping his arms as a bird would, he had somewhat human hands, but gray in color like the rest of his visible body. The fingers flicked nervously and he started to jump on the bed again.

  I stormed away in anger, wanting to rat him out to my mother, wherever she was.

  How dare he!

  That was my first encounter with the Beak Boy. In every dream since that day, he has been at my side. He has never said a damn word to me, but is always interested in my dream-life. If my dream involves building a model airplane, then Beak Boy was standing next to me, looking over my shoulder, occasionally offering a nasally squawk or approving nod of his ugly head.

  For every year that I aged, so did the Beak Boy. When I became a man, so did he. It was when I said to myself, “I’m a man now,” that I also added, “and so is the Beak Man.” Our lives had become interchangeable to some degree, though nobody knew of the Beak Man/Boy but me. I once explained his existence to my mother, who laughed the concept away, referring to me as “silly” and “so very imaginative — I wonder if you got that from your father,” as if she did not know enough of my father to draw her own conclusion based upon historical evidence. I never knew my father, and I often wonder whether I was better off for that fact. A lot of people seem to despise their fathers.

  Up until the age of seven, everything was just dandy with Beak Boy. We would visit the circus. Play at the baseball field. Ride in circles upon our tricycles, sometimes laughing but most often stoic and quiet. We had become accustomed to each other, but I often questioned whether I was invading his world, or if he was invading mine. Was I likewise in his dreams? It seemed completely fathomable, especially in my teenage years when everybody was out to get me and reality was but a spin away from falling to anarchistic pieces.

  My nighttime world of sleeping and co-existing with the Beak Boy had become a standard for me, and I never minded until his first kill. The Beak Boy had lured a puppy into my dream-backyard, using a string tied around a piece of greasy bacon. The puppy, a golden retriever, had come scampering along, batting at the bacon with his furry little paw. My heart had melted when I saw him, as I would have done in the wakeful world as well. “Beak Boy,” said I, “You’ve got a puppy!” I was seven years old at the time, and so a puppy was pretty much the top of the pigpile in terms of aspirations.

  When the Beak Boy snapped the dog’s neck, I cried out, “No, Beak Boy! No!” He looked to me. Though he had no lips or teeth, only that hardened black beak, I could tell that he was smiling inside. He had enjoyed the death of the puppy, and he was equally enjoying my tumultuous reaction. He poked at the body with a stick, squawking delight at his apparent power of will. Soon, he grew bored and meandered back into my dream-house. I pulled the puppy’s mushy body from the grass and dragged it out to the street corner, where I could not see it from inside the dream-house. If it was away from my sight, even in that blurry fictional world of my sleeping state, then I would not have to deal with the repercussions of the dead thing. I was only seven years old. I was not ready for that kind of death. Not yet.

  By the time I launched into puberty, the Beak Boy had spun out of control. I dreaded falling asleep, knowing that there was no other finality beyond spending my evening with the Beak Boy, covering up his dastardly deeds or trying to talk him out of them beforehand. It was, in all senses, a futile effort.

  On one occasion, the Beak Boy had followed me to the grocery store down the road. We had ridden our bikes there. I was thirteen years old, both in reality and in my dream. It was safe to assume that the Beak Boy, he of that other dimension, had an equal number of rings upon his stump.

  I walked through the store and many of my mother’s closest friends were there. Sweet old Cora Francis from the PTA, scouring the aisles for graham crackers. Keira Hannaford, my mother’s best friend and confidant, quietly examining the broccoli and asparagus in the produce section. Hannah Jenkins, who was another friend, and coincidentally Keira’s sister-in-law. They came as a sort of pair — where there was one, the other soon followed. Dozens of other familiar faces filled the market, some with names I could not even recall. Some were close friends of my mother, others were casual acquaintances.

  Beak Boy followed behind me as I circulated amongst these women, none of whom gave me even a passing glance. Later in life, I would wonder if I was secretly in love with this mixed bag of women; that they served as a strange pubescent fantasy. Perhaps, I would also wonder, that is why the Beak Boy decided to murder them all, to squelch away those simple innocent feelings from my being.

  He withdrew a long serrated knife, looking it over in his gray hands and then glancing at me. He squawked, as usual, and I protested, as usual. “Drop the knife, Beak Boy.”

  He shook his head from side to side, his midnight beak opening and his pinkish tongue lashing about, as if he was licking his rock-hard lips.

  “I never invited you into this place. And you’re not real,” I said to him, shaking my head in judgment. I would not allow him this devastation. Not this time.

  But he only craned his head at me, as a curious d
og would do if its master issued a strange command.

  “I know you understand me,” I said to the Beak Boy, who cackled and emitted a low growl from his dirty old beak. He lifted the knife up in front of him, daring me to snatch it away. I tried and failed, stumbling on to the floor of the market, staring up at my murderous bird-like doppelganger. “Leave them be!” I griped.

  The Beak Boy moved himself up and down the aisles of the store like a ballet dancer, grace in motion, squawking with every slash of his knife, blood blossoming on the boxes on the shelves. He was creating art, I realized, but I could not appreciate it as he did.

  When he was finished with his vicious massacre, he returned to me. I had decided it was better to curl up on the floor, to close my eyes and cover my ears. If I could not see it, then it was not there. It did not happen. But when I awoke for real every morning, I would then reaffirm to myself that it was a dream, that the Beak Boy did not exist, that I was simply stuck in a mental loop when I dreamed. If I could dream beyond him, then I could conquer him, eviscerate him.

  I read every dream book I could get my hands on, to almost an obsessive extent. For every birthday and Christmas my mother would buy me books on the subject. I had even, at one point in my burgeoning years of young adulthood, contemplated the possibility of choosing Dream Studies as a career. Sort of New Age of me, but it seemed like a reasonable possibility, all the same. Of course, I would later end up in management classes. Today, I manage a car wash. I don’t know how I ended up here, and I don’t really care. It is not my life, for it belongs partially to the Beak Man. I wonder if the Beak Man would approve of my work, were he able to leap out of my sleepy mind and into reality.

  By the time he (and I) became Beak Man, I had lost track of his murderous activities. In the early days I kept count of the animals and people he murdered, of the houses he burned to the ground, of the property he willfully destroyed, of the rigged elections, of the spray-painted swear words, of the defecation, of the occasional rape, of the dream-people he tormented with his squawking and snapping beak. He never used human words, but his point was always poignantly lucid. He loathed you. Myself included. He existed as my interminable shadow so that I could not enjoy my dreams, to be that ever-present fly in the ointment.