The Catacombs: Tales of the Bizarre and Twisted (The Catacombes) (The Catacombs (The Catacombes) Book 1)

by Raven Black

  Collected by Raven Black

  An imprint of Gauthier Publications

  ..............................................................................

  Copyright © 2013 by Elizabeth Gauthier

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or copied in anyway without written consent of the publisher other than short quotations for articles or review. For information about permissions please write:

  Gauthier Publications

  P.O. Box 806241

  Saint Clair Shores, MI 48080

  Attention Permissions Department

  Cover Photo: Daniel Gauthier

  Editing: Merideth Hadala

  Book Design: Elizabeth Gauthier

  This is a work of fiction. All characters in this book are fictitious and any similarities are coincidence and unintentional.

  1st Edition

  Proudly printed and bound in the USA

  Hungry Goat Press is an Imprint of Gauthier Publications

  www.EATaBOOK.com

  Contents

  The Fountain

  The Posioner by Holly Day

  The Barrel by Holly Day

  Doom Dog by Matthew C. Dampier

  Mail Order Mud by Karen DeCapp

  Kates Baloons by Norma Jean Lipert

  Musicians & Maniacs by Karen DeCapp

  Serenity Lane by Jennifer Iacovoni

  The Fountain

  Careful the coin inside you place,

  let not the statues see your face.

  What is beautiful and safe by day,

  turns to horror as the night gives way.

  The statue was cast never meant for decor,

  its meaning filled with terrible, forgotten lore.

  The man behind its creation knew,

  unearthly things, unfathomable but true.

  Their cherub faces grow grotesque at night,

  summon the monster that plagues this site.

  So beware those among these cobblestone tread,

  with a quickened pace you should have fled.

  Drop nothing, leave nothing behind,

  or come into your home, you they will find.

  Run along now, go away.

  In this place you are not safe to stay.

  Raven Black

  The Posioner

  by Holly Day

  The poisoner moved into the village soon after the doctor had died. For weeks, she had been dropping crushed narcissus bulbs into the doctor’s drinking well in the dead of night. Not so much that it’d kill him right away, but enough that he wouldn’t have to wait too long to die. The doctor’s wife followed soon after; her unborn child spilling out on the stone pavers, brought out too early by contractions caused by the poison.

  The poisoner came down into the village the very next day, dressed in a white nurse’s outfit; her clothes paradoxically spotless considering that no one had anything spotless to wear, not anymore. The war had made everyone a dirty wreck, and the impossibly white clothes of the poisoner made her seem a legitimate miracle: some sort of savior coming down from the hills. They would soon find that no matter how bloody she got, her uniform would always be clean and white.

  If she had come down from her hiding place dressed in her regular clothes, they would have cast her out as one more hungry mouth to feed in a town with nothing left to give. But dressed as she was, they gave her the doctor’s house, they gave her what little was left in the doctor’s pantry, they asked for her help. They never asked where she came from, and when she said all who had known her before were now dead, they took her past as a natural side effect of the war. If it hadn’t been wartime, and she’d given the same answer, they would have questioned who had died, how they had died, why she had left. But since it was war, they simply shook their heads sadly and offered condolences.

  Had they asked these questions, she probably wouldn’t have told them about the babies buried in her garden back home; the babies that had died under her care in the hospital; the people she had poisoned much in the same way that she had poisoned the doctor. This was before the war, and she had been put in jail, and they were going to kill her. But then the bombs came and made a hole big enough in her cell for her to slip away and run. She had run and run, sleeping in old buildings and then in the countryside, run until she had found this town, with the phone lines out and the roads mined all to hell, and she knew she was safe.

  And now she was the town doctor. She had an office, a bed, glass jars full of cotton balls and tongue depressors, needles, vials of precious morphine, antibiotics. If she hadn’t come along, someone would have broken in here and killed themselves with the morphine. She hid the twenty glass vials of morphine under the now-her bed and pushed a pillow up against them, hiding them from anyone who didn’t know what a pillow under the bed meant. She’d find a better hiding place later, when she was more settled in.

  She was the new doctor, which meant that only healthy people came to see her. People with children, old people, sick people, they stayed at home and got sicker, older, more colicky, waiting to see what kind of doctor she was. You can’t poison healthy people without incurring suspicion, so she had to be a real doctor for them. She set broken arms, broken legs, put tinctures on festering sores, stitched up wounds that could have just as easily been treated with plasters and antibiotics. Her patients went home happy, satisfied that she was indeed a doctor. Her skin itched from all the healing, but she was smart enough to know her place.

  After a while, old people started coming by for aches and pains. New mothers would come in to ask why their babies kept crying. The poisoner counted, one, two, three patients; patients who could die simple, unnoticed deaths. Eight, nine, ten. Ten was a good, even number. She was a good doctor with ten vulnerable patients healed.

  The eleventh patient was a man everyone called “Bobobri.” Something to do with a vehicle he had once owned and the sound it made driving down the street— the poisoner wasn’t sure about the story and didn’t really care. She knew he was the one when he stepped into her office, that he was the one to stop the itching in her palms, the creepy-crawlies under her tight still-white nurse’s uniform. Bobobri came into her office with an ache in his lower back and tremors in his hands, wanted something to stop the pain so he could keep working on his farm, or his car, or something—the poisoner didn’t pay much attention to this information, either.

  “I just want to make it through this damn war,” Bobobri said as he sat down on the examination table, his breath wheezing as he raised his arms up over his head, turned his head this way, that way. “I just want things to go back to the way they were.”

  “Hmm,” said the poisoner, nodding. She would shoot the morphine into his muscle right over his shoulder. He would be able to make the short walk home, sit down, maybe even fall asleep on his own before the morphine killed him. Or she could give him something to take orally right before bed: one pill with no written prescription. What would that pill be?

  “I’m glad my wife never lived to see this bloody war,” the man was saying as the poisoner searched the medicine cabinets for the perfect poison. “I’m glad my daughter went to America, so that she’d never have to see how I’m living now.” He wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand and sniffled a bit. “We were so upset, especially my wife, that Ally didn’t want to stay here. But now I’m so happy that she’s gone.”

  “Ah,” said the poisoner,
pulling down a small vial from the cabinet and reading the label. Yes, this would work perfectly. She pulled a small plastic bag out of a drawer and shook three white pills into the bag. “It’s hard work, being a parent,” she said absent- mindedly. She zipped the plastic baggy shut and handed it to Bobobri. He took the bag from her and looked at it curiously.

  “No prescription?” he asked.

  “Nope,” she answered. “Three pills. Take them tonight with water, right before bed, and come see me in the morning.” The poisoner smiled gently at Bobobri, warmly, motherly. She would have hugged him if it had been appropriate. She was already picturing what his face would look like as the pills seized his muscles, stopped his breath. His eyes would be frozen shut when friends found him the next day, days later, maybe even weeks. “He must have died in his sleep,” they would say. “He looks so peaceful.”

  “God must have sent you to us,” said Bobobri as he left the poisoner’s office. He held the tiny bag with the pills tightly, as if aware of the miracle contained within. “We lost one doctor, and God sent us another.”

  “Call me in the morning,” said the poisoner loudly as she showed him out the door, so that anyone passing by on the street would think she was truly expecting a call. “Let me know if you need anything else, Bobobri,” she added, and she meant it. She would do anything for him, right now; her salvation from the itching of her skin and the claustrophobic darkness pressing against her. He was a pinprick in an oppressive bubble of solid darkness. A pinprick that grew wider and brighter the further away from her office he walked. The closer to his home he drew. The waiting bed: his waiting death.

  The poisoner spent the rest of the day consoling patients with minor injuries, cooing at babies, advising pregnant girls and single mothers widowed by the war. “Everything’ll be okay,” she said, over and over. She was surrounded by light now. She radiated holiness, healing, and everyone who left her office just knew things were going to get better for them, no matter what their circumstances.

  It was nearly a week before she was called in to help remove Bobobri’s body. The old man had fallen out of bed during his paroxysms, most likely right as the pills began to take effect, before paralysis set in. He was lying face-down on the floor by his bed, looking nothing like she had pictured his death would be. His eyes were frozen open instead of shut, a look of terror on his face. “Something must’ve scared him,” said one neighbor. “Look how scared he looks.”

  “There’s a lot to be scared of,” the poisoner murmured, trying to decide if this sort of death was as satisfying as the peaceful death she had had pictured in her mind. Or perhaps it was more satisfying, because maybe he knew she had killed him, that maybe this thought was the last thought he held before slipping into death. He knew she had killed him, and he could do nothing about it.

  Any time but now, someone might have called for an investigation into Bobobri’s sudden death. His daughter might have come home, made demands, voiced suspicions. A neighbor might have heard his last, strangled sounds of dying, come in and checked on him, caught the poisoner’s name in a last gasp. But no one heard anything over the constant rattle of bombs anymore, and he was old, so no one questioned her diagnosis. “Heart attack,” the poisoner said. “Definitely a heart attack.”

  Days passed, weeks passed, and the itch came back. The poisoner checked in her log book to see how many people and children and babies she had not killed, and the number made her proud. Someone might think she was a real doctor from these numbers. The villagers trusted her because their children and their babies and their sick, elderly parents were not dying under her care. No one ever mentioned the pills she had given to Bobobri, or even asked about him. She had received a letter from his daughter in America, and according to the letter’s instructions, the poisoner had helped distribute Bobobri’s scant possessions to any villagers in need and mailed the few photographs left in his house to his daughter in America at her own expense. A family whose own home had been destroyed by bombing moved into Bobobri’s house, and it was as though the old man had never been there.

  But the itch was still there. It grew until the poisoner could feel the creepy-crawlies under her girdle, between her shoulder blades, in between her toes, all over the skin of her face. She spent her lunch break hiding in her bedroom, rubbing soap and hot water all over the itchy spots. She brushed her hair until her scalp was red, then tied her hair up so tight it stretched the corners of her face. And then she couldn’t sleep, and she knew she had been good for long enough.

  The patient was young, barely a woman, perhaps sixteen, and had been having trouble throughout her pregnancy, mostly hysteria-related. When her mother burst through the door of the poisoner’s office screaming about blood and the baby, the poisoner knew it was some sort of sign: a harbinger of her relief. “Go back home,” the poisoner told the mother. “Get some towels. Boil some water.”

  The poisoner pulled one of the precious bottles of morphine from under the bed and filled a syringe up to the top. Such a tiny, thin needle, so tiny the girl wouldn’t even feel it going into her body. The poisoner stood before the mirror and slid the syringe into her sleeve. She looked at her reflection and could see the syringe. She slid the needle higher into her sleeve, practiced bending her arm, her wrist, with the needle concealed there. Pills were much easier, but she could do this. One pinprick in the base of the spine or the inside of a thigh and it would be done. One pinprick during the noisy, thrashing distraction of labor, and it would be done.

  The poisoner slipped the needle into her pocket and grabbed her black medical bag. Besides a cursory show of interest in the baby’s and mother’s health with a dramatic flourish of a stethoscope, she didn’t really need the bag for what she was going to do. But if she didn’t show up with it, people would be suspicious. She knew how to play the witch-doctor role as well as any real doctor, knew the pantomimes necessary to allay a patient’s fear.

  When she got to the house, she was almost disappointed at how easy this was going to be. The towels the mother had spread out on the floor around her daughter buttocks were already dotted with blood, while the girl herself was obviously in real pain, beyond the pain of a normal birth. The poisoner ran to the girl to inspect her, putting on her practiced panic-face, shouting orders to the mother, “Get more towels! Where’s the hot water? Put your hands here, here—I need more pressure here!” She shooed curious onlookers outside, finally sent the mother outside, called her back inside, waved her outside again.

  “I could save you,” the poisoner said out loud to the girl, the girl with the face twisted in pain, more animal than human in the face of agony. Yes, this was what she had missed, having her patients know she was going to kill them, or maybe save them. The slow light of recognition in the girl’s eyes that the poisoner was talking to her, the realization of what the poisoner was saying.

  It’s one thing to imagine your victim dying, alone in his bed, alone in his house. It’s quite another to hold your victim’s life in your hands.

  “I could save you,” the poisoner said again, louder. She pulled the needle out of her pocket and held it up to the light. She wouldn’t have dared do this if the labor hadn’t been so dramatic, so loud, loud enough to justify sending everyone out of the house, to send the mother hiding with her friends in the house across the street. She had freedom to put on a little show, the sort of freedom she might not have for years to come.

  The girl saw the glass syringe glinting in the light and squealed. She opened her mouth and tried to scream, just as another contraction wracked her body. “Just… just…” she stammered before groaning and squeezing her eyes shut.

  “The baby’ll probably make it,” soothed the poisoner. “If you die, but the baby lives, people will forgive me. The baby will probably live.” She checked the progress of the baby. Almost there. If she gave the girl the shot now, the baby, still attached to its mother, might die as well. Her skin itched. Light filled her eyes. The blackness that always danced in h
er head roared beyond the edges of the light. The risk would be worth it. She plunged the needle into the vein in the girl’s thigh and pushed the plunger down, hard. The girl’s body shook; she managed one last high-pitched, awful scream, then fell silent. As her muscles contorted, then relaxed, the baby fell out of her body, alive. The poisoner quickly cut the cord, tied it up, and checked the infant’s vitals to see if it had been freed from its mother in time.

  “It’s a boy,” she announced, opening the door of the house to the crowd loitering in the street outside. Her neat, white uniform was covered in blood. She felt exultant, jubilant, frightened at the risk she had just taken. The baby fussed and croaked and whimpered in her arms. She held the wiggling, wet infant to its grandmother.

  “I’m so sorry,” she began. “I did everything I could for the girl.”

  The mother’s eyes clouded over as understanding tried to force its way past her joy at holding the new baby. She shook her head slowly, choked back a sob.

  “The baby’s perfect, though,” said the poisoner before the mother could say anything, could ask any questions, could push past her into the house to wail over the corpse of her daughter. “See how perfect he is? We should focus on this new, wonderful little life, right here; focus on how this new little life will need your love, your nurturing. We can’t forget, in our sadness, how important this new little life is.” The poisoner kept talking to the woman, numbing her, distracting her, until the woman finally looked up from her new grandson to nod and say, “I understand.”

  They buried the girl a few days later, no questions asked. The woman holding her grandson stood by the casket as it was lowered into the ground, fending off any condolences with, “I have to be here for my grandson now. This is all so awful, but I have to carry on for him.”

  The poisoner was filled with bright light once again. She smiled at everyone, everything. Birds seemed to be singing at her window every morning with the sunrise, the children playing in the street outside her office seemed only to have kind words and gentle laughter for one another. Her patients seemed truly appreciative of her ministering. It was a good place to be.