by Harvey Click
She heard Carey shrieking somewhere nearby, and suddenly his naked body fell onto Greg’s back. Denise felt the cold bones beneath his icy skin whenever his hands brushed against her face, but Greg didn’t seem to notice anything. There was no link, nothing for Carey to grab onto, and he tugged desperately at Greg’s shoulders with no effect.
“But you have to understand, I didn’t want to kill Tommy. You have to believe that. I took care of Carey and was getting ready to leave when Tommy woke up and came wandering out of the other bedroom. I didn’t even know he was there, but after he saw me I didn’t have any choice, and I did what I had to do.”
Denise was struggling desperately and choking on the jacket sleeve, but Greg was calm. His expression was blandly pleasant and his voice sounded even-tempered and reasonable, as if he were explaining some everyday matter.
“You have to understand, Denny, I did this for you. I did it for us. I wanted us to have a happy life together, and we’d never have that with Carey standing between us. People sometimes have to kill, sweetheart. They do it for war and they do it for love. I’ve had to do it before myself. I had to kill my own brother when I was just sixteen. He had some dirt on me and was going to get me in a lot of trouble, so I had to throw him in front of a freight train. I didn’t want to, but I had no choice.”
Greg raised his head and looked carefully around in all directions. “Don’t think badly of me, Denny,” he said. “I have a good heart, and I love you, and I wish I didn’t have to do this.”
Before she knew what was happening, he wrenched her to her feet and hurled her over the ledge. Time slowed and nearly stopped. She saw him gazing down at her from the ledge, and his face was pleasantly bland with a faint smile that seemed to say job well done.
The jacket sleeve was no longer in her mouth, and her scream pierced the sunny air and echoed off the stone walls of the abyss. She looked down at her feet and saw they were pumping up and down as if she were peddling a bicycle, and far beneath them she saw the rocky bottom of the gorge. It was coming closer, but slowly, slowly, as if it had all the time in the world and was in no hurry to extinguish her life.
And then she saw them standing together down there, looking up at her, and they looked so much alike, Carey and Tommy, both of them pale and skinny with long golden hair and pale blue eyes. They were watching her expectantly, and as she drew closer they both raised their arms as if intending to catch her. In the last moment, just before she reached them, she heard Carey’s voice in her mind:
Just Tommy and me and babe makes three.
How to Write a Horror Story
The sun was blazing low when Derrick turned off the narrow road into the long gravel driveway, and the red and orange October leaves of the tall trees surrounding the big brick house looked like pieces of burning paper blown out of the conflagration.
As he pulled closer, Kathy noticed the downstairs windows were fortified with iron bars. “There aren’t any lights on,” she said. “Does your mother like to sit in the dark?”
“My mother?”
“Yeah. You said I was going to meet her.”
Derrick parked the car in front of an old stone garage and smiled at her. “Ah, so I did. Yes, she’s very much accustomed to the dark.”
He got out and removed the bag of groceries from the trunk, and Kathy grabbed her laptop and small suitcase. She followed him to the front porch, where he unlocked the heavy front door and opened it to darkness and the musty smell of air sealed in for a long while. He switched on a light and revealed a large foyer.
“Too chilly?” he asked.
“No.”
Derrick locked the front door, which needed a key to be locked or unlocked from the inside. He put the key in his pocket and headed to the back of the house. Kathy set her suitcase and laptop at the bottom of the stairs and followed him to a big old-fashioned kitchen, where he put their few groceries in an old refrigerator.
There was nothing else in there, and she said, “Maybe we should have brought some groceries for your mother.”
“She no longer has an appetite.”
“Is she upstairs resting?”
“I hope she’s resting, but not upstairs. My mother’s dead.”
Kathy stared at him. “Then why did you say I’d meet her?”
“Maybe you will,” he said. “Would you like some wine?”
“Yes, please.”
The purpose of this “weekend retreat,” as Derrick called it, was to teach her how to write a horror story, so probably he was throwing out a ghostly hint to get the spooky ideas started, but it seemed like bad taste to use his dead mother to set the mood. On the other hand, Derrick’s horror novels weren’t known for their good taste.
“The last time I was here, I brought up one of the best bottles from the cellar.” He uncorked a bottle of burgundy and poured two glasses. “To your horror story,” he said. “May it venture past the confines of sanity to plumb the very depths of fear.”
They clinked glasses and drank. The wine was as dark as blood, and Kathy tried to imagine a more original way to describe the color in one of her romantic vampire stories, but couldn’t think of anything. Besides, Derrick hated her vampire stories, and she now felt ashamed of them.
Derrick Mourner was a visiting lecturer invited to teach creative writing for one semester at Ohio University, where Kathy was a junior majoring in English. Her hope was to be accepted in an MFA program at one of the universities renowned for their creative writing programs, but she knew her stories were too trivial to open any doors. When she’d seen that Derrick Mourner would be teaching a creative writing workshop, she signed up immediately. She loved Derrick’s novels, though they frightened her senseless. He would never be a bestselling author, but connoisseurs of dark horror practically worshipped him.
At the beginning of the semester she submitted one of her stories and waited anxiously for his response. The other students discussed it rather favorably in class, though one student called it warmed-over Anne Rice and another said there were too many clichés, but at the end of the class when Derrick handed the copy back to her the brief comment he’d scrawled on the last page felt, to use one of her favorite clichés, like a dagger to the heart.
“Trite,” was all he’d written. And beneath that, a B.
She’d stared angrily at the single word while the other students filed out of the room. After they were all gone, Derrick Mourner still sat in his comfortable upholstered chair (for in the creative writing room everybody sat in a circle in comfortable chairs as if in a Parisian parlor), his dark eyes watching her and a faint smile on his sensuous lips.
“One word is all you have to say?” she said. “I spent two months working on this story, and all you can say about it is one word?”
“Do you want to write horror or romance?” he asked.
“Horror. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to write. Poe, Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, Shirley Jackson, Richard Matheson, Stephen King, I’ve read all of them, I’ve read them my whole life.”
“Do you want to frighten your readers?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think your story would frighten anyone?”
She sank down into one of the cushioned chairs and said, “No, I guess not.”
“Would you like to go out for a beer?” he asked.
“Yes.”
And so began their odd and illicit affair. Illicit because professors and lecturers weren’t supposed to date their students. Odd because even though they’d spent many hours sleeping together and many more hours talking, she felt no closer to him than to some stranger across the street. His dark eyes were like windows covered with black drapes; there was no way to see into them. He was a talented lover, but so aloof even in lovemaking that it seemed he was making love to someone else in some faraway world.
But so handsome. Though he had already published five novels, he was only thirty years old and looked even younger than that. With his angel face and long mane of black hai
r, he reminded her of Jim Morrison. And the way he wrote—like a prophetic shaman sharing dark visions of a mysterious and terrible world hidden inside the corners of our own.
And then, just two days ago, he had said, “Let’s go on a writing retreat this weekend, and I’ll show you how to write a real horror story. We’ll go to the house where I was raised, and you can meet my mother.”
And so here they were, standing in this old kitchen with October chill in the musty air. He hadn’t switched on the light, but the last rays of sunset streamed in through the window, painting the room a lurid shade of purple. He turned to the window and stared out at the illuminated woods behind the house.
“What frightens you?” he asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“Ah. But if you want to frighten your readers, you need to know what frightens you. Do romantic vampires frighten you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Well, for one thing they’re not real.”
“You said my novels frighten you, but they deal with the supernatural. Is the supernatural real?”
“No, but…”
“But what?”
“Your books seem real. They somehow make me believe in things I can’t see, and then I begin to sense them all around me. I mean, maybe there are dark forces around us that we can’t see. What makes serial killers kill? Psychologists haven’t done a very good job of explaining it yet. What causes a mild-mannered old man to suddenly murder his wife?”
“Ah,” he said, with his back still to her as he stared out the window.
She looked past his shoulder at the thick woods smoldering in the dark haze of the nearly extinguished sun. She was used to cities and didn’t feel comfortable with nothing around her but trees and silence. When he’d invited her to spend the weekend here, she’d assumed he had romance on his mind more than writing. She hadn’t expected this eerie silence, this uncomfortable mood. It was Friday night, and she realized she’d rather be in a campus bar with a jukebox playing and people laughing and chattering. She didn’t want to know what really frightened her and wasn’t in the mood to find out.
“What about you?” she asked. “What frightens you?”
He turned to her suddenly, his face nearly invisible in the gloom. “This house, for one thing. I write all my novels and stories here. All alone, or maybe not alone.”
“Why does this house frighten you?”
“Come with me.”
He grabbed the wine bottle from the kitchen table, and she followed him down the hall to the doorway of a dark room.
“This house has two living rooms,” he said. “The other one we used only for company, not that we had much company, especially toward the end. This one was our everyday living room. Mother called it our family room.”
He switched on a ceiling light, and Kathy followed him into a large room with two sofas, some chairs, and a big fireplace surrounded by carved oak. But what caught her attention was a noose hanging from a steel hook in the ceiling near the chandelier. Four heavy wooden chairs sat in a circle facing the noose, each one about four feet from it, and beneath the noose was a fifth chair lying on its side.
Kathy stood staring. Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising for a horror writer to decorate his living room with a noose, but this seemed tacky and childish.
He motioned to one of the sofas and said, “Have a seat.”
She sat down and he sat beside her. He refilled her glass, and she sipped her wine and stared at the noose. This was becoming weird. She wanted him to say something, maybe make a joke, but he didn’t.
As she set her glass on the coffee table she noticed a yellowed newspaper lying there and picked it up. It was the local section of The Columbus Dispatch with today’s date, October 13, but exactly eighteen years ago. There was a picture of a very beautiful woman, probably in her mid-thirties, and beside it another picture of her with her husband and three children, two boys and a very pretty little girl. The oldest boy looked about twelve, the other maybe ten, and the girl no more than eight.
Below the photos the headline read: “Mother murders husband and two children, kills self.” Beneath that a smaller headline read: “One child escapes.”
A woman named Maureen Bradly had drugged her husband and children, tied them to chairs in the living room, and slashed their throats. Her oldest child, twelve-year-old Matthew Bradly, had gotten loose from his bindings and had fled to a neighbor’s house half a mile away. By the time police arrived, Maureen had hanged herself from the ceiling.
“It was a Saturday morning,” Derrick said. “She put the drug in our oatmeal, but I hated oatmeal, and she didn’t know I usually slipped most of mine to the dog under the kitchen table. And fortunately she wasn’t very good at tying knots. I was waking up from my stupor just as she was cutting the throat of my little sister, Sarah. Father was awake by then too and was screaming with horror, but she must have done a better job of tying his knots. You’ve never heard such a sound.”
“But your name’s not Matthew Bradly.”
“It’s not now—I had it legally changed. Wouldn’t you? By the way, that short bio in the back of my novels is entirely fictitious.”
Kathy put the newspaper back on the coffee table, unable to look at the photos anymore.
“Haven’t you noticed the blood stains on the rug around three of those chairs?” he asked. “A writer needs to be observant.”
It was a large Oriental rug of many colors, but now she saw the stains. They were nearly black and looked like Rorschach inkblots.
“The one with no bloodstain under it is my chair,” he said. “And of course the one lying on its side beneath the noose is Mother’s. An aunt and uncle on my father’s side adopted me. They were very kind and spoiled me, out of pity. My father owned a pet food plant, so there was a fair amount of money in the estate, which was put in a trust fund for me. Of course my aunt and uncle wanted to sell this house, but I pleaded with them to use some of my trust fund money to maintain it. I told them I wanted to keep it so I could have a real home to come back to when I got older. The psychiatrist who was working with me told them that keeping it might help me work through my trauma, since I’d lost so much already, so they did as I asked.”
“This is just incredible,” Kathy said, knowing it sounded like a feeble cliché from one of her stories.
“So then, is a horror story beginning to suggest itself to you?” he asked. “Tell me where you’d you go with this from here.”
“But I wouldn’t. This isn’t a story, it’s real life. I mean, this is your family…”
“If you can’t stand the horror of real life, you shouldn’t be writing horror stories. Everything I’ve written has been a continuation of this story. If you can’t stand the horror of real life, maybe you should try your hand at children’s stories and let them all live happily ever after.”
“I didn’t mean… I just mean this is so personal. It’s your parents and your siblings…”
“All horror is personal. Where there’s no person, there’s no horror. Come on, Kathy, cut the Pollyanna crap and show me your stuff, if you’ve got any to show. This is your premise, this Friday evening when a horror writer brings you to this house in the country. Where does your story go from here?”
He got up and moved a chair to the other side of the coffee table so he was facing her, watching her intently like a teacher rather than a lover.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s just a story, so don’t be offended.”
“Wrong! If you want to be a horror writer, you must never be afraid of offending me or anyone else.”
“Okay. So all along the reader thinks the mother killed her family, but it turns out it wasn’t the mother after all. The killer was the twelve-year-old boy, the one who ran away. He murdered his own parents, his brother and sister and then…”
“Crap, pure crap. Gee, haven’t I read this one somewhere before? How soon does the big thunderstorm blow in?”
He
was right, she’d read the same sort of twist and had seen it in bad movies countless times. It was like her erotic vampires or her werewolf girls, stale and lame, pathetic really. And yet, real life was filled with clichés—maybe he really was a killer, maybe he really had murdered his family, maybe he really intended to murder her in this same dark house. She wished he would look away, but his black eyes drank in the discomfort blazing on her face, and his sensuous lips smacked as if savoring the taste.
“You’re not even trying to write a horror story,” he said, “you’re trying to write some sort of silly whodunit. Horror writers aren’t interested in who, they’re interested in why. They’re interested in what drives a person to commit unspeakable acts, they’re interested in the subconscious cesspools of the human mind, those ugly secret rooms of the brain that even psychiatrists can’t unlock. What’s inside those rooms—repressed childhood horrors that fester into evil, or maybe something more enigmatic? Maybe there are ghastly strangers cloistered in there, sinister guests, dark diabolical visitors who have slipped in somehow and have taken up residence.”
He had gotten up and was pacing around the four chairs that sat in a circle around the noose. She’d always known him to be calm, almost too calm, but now he was deeply agitated and she was frightened. She kept thinking that with the bars on the windows and the door dead-bolt locked and the key in his pocket, she’d not be able to escape if she needed to.
He grabbed a butcher knife from the mantle and said, “This is what she used. A few years ago I went through some paperwork to get it back from the police. But a good horror writer doesn’t care so much about the weapon. It can be a knife or a chainsaw, what difference does it make?”
He put the knife back on the mantle and said, “A good horror writer mostly cares about why. My sister Sarah was the most beautiful little girl I’ve ever seen, and I loved her with all my heart. How could her own mother murder her? My own mother, who breast-fed me and changed my diapers and tucked me into my crib and sang me to sleep? Why?”