Past The Patch
Brian Fatah Steele
A Dark Red Press Presentation
Past The Patch, edited by Brian Fatah Steele
Copyright © 2011 by Dark Red Press
“Halloween Candy” © 2011 by J.T. Warren
“The Jack Lantern” © 2011 by Jack X. McCallum
“A Clown Walks Into A Halloween Party” © 2011 by C.L. Stegall
“Funsize” © 2011 by Jack Lloyd
“Chaldon’s Bones” © 2011 by Robert S. Wilson
“Moon Dance” © 2009 by Matthew J. Leverton (reprint)
“Eddy” © 2011 by Jack X. McCallum
“Infected, Yellowing Moments” © 2011 by Brian Fatah Steele
“The Wolfman’s Wife” © 2011 by Sarah E. Adkins
“Home Invasion” © 2011 by John J. Smith
“Growing Up Gruesome” © 2011 by Brian Fatah Steele
“The Perfect Pumpkin” © 2010 by John Claude Smith (reprint)
“The Witch Of Mistletoe Lane” © 2011 by Court Ellyn For that terrible tapping at the twilight window, the boogeyman lurking beneath our beds, and the creatures creaking the closet door – we salute you!
A BRIEF INTRODUCTION
This is not a collection of horror stories, but a collection of Halloween stories - there’s a difference. Now, given the nature of the holiday, you’re going to find a great deal of horror crammed within a number of these tales, but not all of them. That was never the purpose of this anthology, simply another genre collection, but an attempt for authors of various styles to all throw their talents at one theme.
I’m quite pleased with the result.
As an author and reader, I’ve consumed quite a bit of material by now in my mid-thirties. While my tastes run wild and varied, it has been the anthologies by the likes of John Joseph Adams, Al Sarrantonio and (of course) Harlan Ellison that have always stood out to me. Why? Because they know how to capture a concept as editors, they know how to see the forest for the trees. If I’ve pulled together even a fraction of that dark magic inside here, I’ll feel successful.
Dark Magic. I remember feeling it the first time I stumbled upon Borderlands 2, edited by Thomas F. Monteleone when I was still too young to fully grasp the madness in the pages. An amazing, imaginative and grotesque collection by names I didn’t recognize then, it had a definite impact. I still have the battered paperback to this day.
Now, there are many reasons why this anthology is free. I could say it’s because I didn’t want to be bothered with royalties and financial issues, and that would be partly true. Mostly, however, it’s because these are rising authors who deserve to be read and in this Wild West market, “free” works out nicely for everyone. There’s also the fact that Dark Red Press just likes folks out there to be able to read cool stuff.
So here you go, stroll on past the patch and see what you find.
Try not to get eaten. ‘Cause that would suck.
Brian Fatah Steele
October, 2011
HALLOWEEN CANDY
J.T. Warren
J.T. Warren was born on Halloween, a few months after his mother saw Jaws at the movies. His affinity for horror can be traced to an early age when he built a coffin out of cardboard and pretended to be a corpse, much to the concern of his parents. He can still be found in a coffin on Halloween when he gets into the spirit of the season. He is a public school teacher and has successfully lured thousands of students into literary waters through works of horror. He hopes his writing will further encourage young adults, and everyone older, to discover the wonder (and dread) found in the written word. J.T. Warren is the pseudonym for a much creepier guy. He is the author of Hudson House, Blood Mountain, Calamity, and Violent Glimpses: Five Dark Plays. Each is available as an ebook.
***
I was restocking the million different varieties of baby lotion when the fight erupted at the far end of the aisle. I had seen something similar to this many times in my life as a stock boy and had even once witnessed an old lady beat a man over the head with an umbrella because he had snatched the last box of turkey stuffing.
This was nothing so grand. Two young boys, maybe four or five-years-old, were running around playing some ridiculous version of tag only they understood while Mommy was standing next to her shopping cart, infant child strapped in the front seat, box of diapers in her hand. She was reading the box, turning it over, reading whatever she could find. Probably reading the bar code. I imagined she was debating whether to take the chance on this different brand of diaper with the reinforced grip tabs because little baby Willie was always ripping off his diapers at the most inopportune times, especially after making a fresh deposit. Whatever the mother’s internal debate, she was too engrossed in the fine print on the diaper box to notice that her two other little darlings had morphed from sweet playmates into vicious enemy combatants.
The little boy wearing a bright red T-shirt slapped the other little boy who was in a shirt with a smiling jack-o-lantern on it. That poor kid started crying in loud, rolling sobs. Mommy’s head twitched but her eyes did not venture off the diaper box. “Play nice,” Mommy said.
The crier stopped his outburst and leveled his gaze at his brother. The red shirt boy started laughing. I could imagine that kid years hence tripping some unsuspecting victim in a high school hallway and grinning when the kid tumbled full-sprawl, books and papers spilling everywhere.
“You’re it!” the future bully yelled.
“No!” the other boy shouted back. “No! No!”
“Boys,” Mommy said in a plain, flat tone. She was rereading the front of the diaper box. Little Willie was sucking on his fingers. His plump face reminded me of mushy balls of Play-Doh.
“It!” the red shirt boy said again. “It! It! IT! ” The boy in the pumpkin shirt growled and lunged at his laughing brother. The bully saw it coming and sidestepped, but as he did, he placed his little hands on his brother’s back and shoved him hard.
I saw what was going to happen and though I was at least watching, I was as unhelpful as the boys’ own mother, though I wouldn’t have been able to do much anyway considering the brace on my left leg. The kid with the grinning pumpkin on his shirt collided into the shelves. His face was at the perfect height to take a metal-shelf hit right in the forehead. His face smacked with a resounding metallic warble and I thought maybe that would be the end but as a stock boy I knew that was too much to hope for.
Above the boy, the dozens and dozens of baby food glass jars wobbled in their little towers and tumbled from their appointed spots. The kid even glanced up as if he sensed that the shelf hit was not to be his only embarrassment at his brother’s hand. I wanted to yell out, to tell the kid to back up, or duck and cover, but there wasn’t any time. I had a flash of a thought-- this is going to be bad--and then the jars were falling.
The first casualty cracked onto the white tile floor and split open like a gourd to reveal its mushy orange insides. Several other jars hit the floor around the boy in rapid popping succession like each jar of food was a mini grenade, like the damn things were filled with so much pressure they were just waiting for the slightest extra stress to explode. The jars ruptured and spewed their multi-colored contents. Glass shards sprayed across the floor.
Tiny arcs of white fluorescent light flashed off them as they scattered.
The first jar to smack the kid was filled with a dark red gunk that was supposed to be squash. If I could have taken a snapshot, it would have gotten a million hits on-line: the little kid frozen in disbelief, head tilted back, jars of baby food cascading around him, and one jar of red squash-like stuff just crashing onto the bridge of his tiny nose, the black and white face of the chubby Gerber baby grinning stupidly off the labe
l.
Then the kid fell backwards. His ass hit first and he might have stayed that way in the classic I’ve-just-fallen little kid pose of shock and helplessness, but a trio of jars conked the top of his head-- thwak, thwonk, thunk.
A full second after the onslaught ended, one last jar of brown baby food tipped off a high shelf and crashed on the floor between the little boy’s spread legs. It looked like the poor kid had crapped himself. As if to punctuate that final glass-popping explosion, the little kid with the pumpkin on his shirt unleashed an epic howl of pain.
Mommy was running over, her face twisted in an expression of shock and sympathy and guilt and anger and, after she spotted me at the opposite end with a bottle of coconut butter baby lotion in hand, embarrassment.
She scooped up her child, his arms outstretched and eager to wrap around Mommy’s neck. She tried to coo away his pain but he only sobbed louder and louder. She examined his face, rubbed something off his forehead and peered close at his skin as she had been peering at that box of diapers.
The other boy, the future bully in the red T-shirt, stood off to the side.
The floor before him was a mess of baby mush and jagged glass fangs. I was up and moving toward him as best as I could, the metal brace clacking against the floor, my hand coming up to tell him not to step on the glass (I could imagine him going forward, sneakers sliding in the food, him falling forward, catching the ground with his hands where glass sliced each of his palms in brilliant crimson arcs like bloody smiles) when I stopped.
The kid was staring at me. A huge smile stretched his lean face into a gruesome mask that could have been molded into one of those flimsy plastic Halloween disguises I had recently stocked in the seasonal aisle. He giggled and then laughed outright. I tried to tell myself that the boy was just a young kid. Kids always laughed when other people got hurt because they didn’t understand. They lacked empathy. This kid’s laughter, however, came so easily and his little eyes stayed focused on me as if he knew damn well that he was laughing at his brother’s misery. In that face I saw all the people who had ever made fun of me, kids who called me “Limpy” or “Cripple” or
“Retard Walker.” In that tiny laugh, I heard the cruelty of my shift manager Freling who always sent me out stocking shelves near the end of my shift when my leg was throbbing and I couldn’t conceal the pain on my face. I’ve known him since high school. At least he doesn’t call me “retard” on the sales floor.
In that moment, I could have punched that kid.
Then Mommy called for her boy and the kid ran off. He did not slip in the spilled mush, but when I got close, I saw the grooved imprint of one tiny sneaker. He had managed to avoid the glass entirely. I needed to do my best to clean this up and then get the mop and the rolling garbage can and one of those CAUTION WET FLOOR signs.
I can squat down if I have to but the pain is quite intense and the brace requires I have something to lean on otherwise I might tip right over.
Instead of trying and possibly ending up coated with baby food, I bent over and started scooping the mush to one side. The smell was faintly acidic and nauseating.
Mommy and family disappeared around the corner of the aisle where the big Halloween candy display had been erected. Nothing like a little candy to soothe away the pain and humiliation. My mother had been the same way: The kids called me a freak, Mom. You’re not a freak, baby.
Here, have a Snickers. Even now, I keep one in my pocket for when I need emotional comfort.
Someone was standing next to me. I thought it was Freling, figured he’d make some kind of comment about me making more of a mess or ask if I was eating the stuff and why didn’t I just go get the mop already? Yes, master. Then I’d hobble away.
But it wasn’t Freling. It was a young girl, maybe eight-years-old. She stood next to me in a black dress with a pointy black witch hat perched perfectly on her head. Long dark hair ran down her back.
“Careful,” I said. “There’s glass.”
“That boy was mean,” the little girl said.
“You saw?”
The girl’s face was pale, her eyes large and dark. “My brother was like that.”
“Some people are,” I said.
The girl watched me, noticed the brace on my leg. Kids always ask about it. They’re curious. They ask, what happened?; does it hurt?; are you deformed?; do you shower with it on? This time of year, I sometimes joke that I make one hell of a zombie, and then I do an overdone stuttering gait, hands out in classic hungry-for-flesh style. Kids laugh when I do that.
Freling says I should take my act on the road, join one of those freak shows that perform in circus tents.
“Some people need to be taught,” the little girl said.
“I guess they do,” I said.
She reached toward one of the destroyed jars. It had once contained something that resembled green vomit.
“Careful, sweetie,” I said and put my hand out to stop her. “You don’t want to get cut.”
“It’s okay,” she said. Her hand moved from the busted glass jar and her fingers plucked a small shard from the muck that was already beginning to dry into a crust. Her fingers curled around the piece of glass. “Will you help me find my Mommy?”
The question was so unexpected and sincere that I was no longer sure if I had seen her pick up that fractured section of glass. She held out her other hand and I took it. Her skin was soft and cold like she’d been outside for a long time. She led me through the mess toward the end of the aisle.
“That’s a nice hat,” I said. “You’re going to be a witch for Halloween?”
The girl didn’t say anything for a moment. “It wasn’t right what he did to you,” she said. “It’s not right what he does still.”
“What do you mean?”
“He knew you’d get hurt,” she said. “He knew it and he was happy.” We reached the end of the aisle. The huge Halloween display stretched out before us in all its cliche macabre grandeur. A giant cardboard mausoleum bedecked in fake spider webs offered entrance to bins and bins of bags of candy, each filled with individually wrapped pieces perfect for trick-or-treaters. Plastic skeletons dangled from the ceiling and a motorized witch cackled every time someone got within a foot of it. A big sign proclaimed, Have a Spook-tacular Holiday!
The woman with her infant and two boys were scrounging through the bottomless bins of candy. The boy with the pumpkin shirt was rubbing his red eyes but seemed basically okay. The kid in the bright red shirt grabbed a big bag of snack-sized chocolate bars and held it over his head.
“I want!” the boy yelled.
“Okay,” Mommy said. “You can open it and have one candy, but be sure to share with your brother.”
As the red shirt kid tore open the bag and several bars tumbled to the floor, the kid’s brother turned hesitantly toward him. The kid smiled at him the way he had smiled at me and both the little boy and I knew his brother wasn’t going to share any candy with him. He ripped open a tiny package and bit into the candy with a large, greedy bite.
“Where’s Mommy?” I asked.
The girl tugged on my hand, stared up into my face. Her eyes seemed older, like they had been transplanted from an elderly person, each eye shining beneath a dull sheen, a shape seen through curtains.
“It’s not too late,” she said. “Not too late to teach him.” She pulled out of my grip and was through the cardboard stone entrance before I could say anything. She went right to the boy in the red shirt. They started talking. Mommy was now distracted by the sudden cries of baby Willie to see any of this.
The red shirt boy held out a candy bar to the girl in the witch hat. She shook her head and then after a moment of hesitation, the kid handed over two bars. The girl took them, turned to the kid in the pumpkin shirt and gave him one. He took it slowly, as if thinking it was a trick, and then smiled real large when the girl said something to him.
The girl opened the other piece of candy and looked over her shoulder at me.
I smiled, feeling a warm sensation spread inside me. There was cruelty in the world but there was also goodness. There was always a choice.
The girl held the open bar before her and then brought her other hand to it. Light bounced off the fragment of glass before she buried it in the chocolate. She patted the bar down with her fingers and went back to the kid in the red shirt. She held it out to him and he took it eagerly, all smiles.
He was still smiling as he took the first bite.
“What the hell are you doing?” I jumped in surprise and Freling laughed. He had come up behind me. He was wearing a blue dress shirt with an ugly brown tie. His manager name tag hung crookedly on his sagging breast pocket. “Careful, Chubs,” he said. “You don’t want to fall and put the other leg in a brace, too.” Chubs was his other name for me.
When he wasn’t mocking my leg, he went after my gut.
“Right,” I said.
“Were you going to stand here watching kids like some perv or did you plan on cleaning up that mess back there?”
It wasn’t right what he did to you, the little girl had said. It’s not right what he does still.
Freling had been the one who said the slope was open, the one who said he had just skied it, the one who called me a pussy for hesitating. Of course, I was the one who skied down it and crashed into a snowmaking machine. I was the one lucky to not be paralyzed.
“Sure,” I said.
“You want me to hold your hand?” Freling said.
The little girl was looking at me again. She didn’t smile, she didn’t acknowledge me, but I knew what she was trying to tell me. He knew you’d get hurt. He knew it and he was happy. She was right about that. I had known that ever since freshman year when it happened.
It’s not too late. Not too late to teach him.
“I got it,” I said.
“Good,” Freling said. “Now get hobbling.” He walked away.
Past The Patch Page 1