Garden of Fiends

by Matthews, Mark

  Garden of Fiends

  Tales of Addiction Horror

  Wicked Run Press

  Garden of Fiends: Tales of Addiction Horror is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, contact: WickedRunPress@gmail.com

  Edited by Mark Matthews

  With assistance from: Jason Parent (editor for the novella Garden of Fiends) and Andi Rawson

  Cover Art and Design by Zach McCain

  End of book artwork by Rick Mosher

  Also from Wicked Run Press

  On the Lips of Children

  “A brutal, intense ride of claustrophobic horror and gritty, page-turning suspense. This is dark fiction at its visceral, chilling best.” –Jan Kozlowski, author of Die, You Bastard! Die!

  Stray

  "An intriguing book combining the disease of addiction intertwined with lost dogs looking for a new life. Stray is a book for anyone, but if your family has been touched by addiction, this book will engage you in so many ways." –Cathy Taughinbaugh, founder of Treatment Talk

  Milk-Blood

  “An urban legend in the making. You will not be disappointed.” –Bookie-Monster.com

  All Smoke Rises

  “Intense, imaginative, and empathic. Matthews is a damn good writer, and make no mistake, he will hurt you.” –Jack Ketchum, Bram Stoker Award winning author of The Girl Next Door.

  Praise for Garden of Fiends

  “There’s something here to scare anyone and everyone. Garden of Fiends pushes all the wrong buttons in all the right ways!” –Jonathan Maberry, New York Times best-selling author of Dogs of War and Mars One

  “Garden of Fiends is scary in the realest of ways. What fertile ground for horror; stories that already, by nature, take place in the Twilight Zone; where lies and shady acts are the rule; where men and women step out of one world and into another; a place where addiction is king. John FD Taff's 'Last Call' is worth the price of admission alone." –Josh Malerman, Bram Stoker nominated author of Bird Box

  “A brilliant and original concept, Garden of Fiends captures the struggles of addiction and the horrors they inflict on those affected by it. Yes, it is dark and visceral, but with moments of hope throughout that make this a memorable collection of stories.” –Rich Duncan from The Horror Bookshelf

  “An incredibly fascinating and at times grim read. These are dark tales set against a backdrop of fear, addiction and self-loathing where families are ripped apart and relationships are left in tatters. Some of these stories will infect your conscious, burying themselves deep inside your mind.” –Adrian Shotbolt from The Grim Reader

  "Garden of Fiends brings us face-to-face with the demons driving us to dependence. Raw, brutal and insightful, Garden of Fiends is an important work." –Lee Murray, author of Into the Mist

  “An unflinching and intense look at addiction and its consequences, from some of the best horror writers in the business.” –Char’s Horror Corner

  "Every offering drips with truth, blending tales of horror and addiction into an emotionally draining, yet essential experience." –Ben Walker from UK Horror Scene

  Table of Contents

  Truth is Darker than Fiction: An Introduction

  by Mark Matthews

  A Wicked Thirst

  by Kealan Patrick Burke

  The One in the Middle

  by Jessica McHugh

  Garden of Fiends

  by Mark Matthews

  First, Just Bite A Finger

  by Johann Thorsson

  Last Call

  by John FD Taff

  Torment of the Fallen

  by Glen Krisch

  Everywhere You’ve Bled and Everywhere You Will

  by Max Booth III

  Returns

  by Jack Ketchum

  Acknowledgements

  Truth is Darker than Fiction:

  An Introduction to Garden of Fiends

  The intoxication from a pint of vodka, the electric buzz from snorting cocaine, the warm embrace from shooting heroin—drinking and drugging provide the height of human experience. It’s the promise of heaven on earth, but the hell that follows is a constant hunger, a cold emptiness. The craving to get high is a yearning not unlike that of any other blood-thirsty monster.

  The best way to tell the truths of addiction is through a story, and dark truths such as these need a piece of horror to do them justice.

  Reality horror is what you will find in these pages. The stories, some of which include the supernatural, are true, even if they didn’t happen. The characters who live and breathe within them experience horrors whose equivalent can be found in any city’s newspaper. The reality of addiction is darker than any fiction.

  Here’s what I mean.

  More people will die of a heroin overdose in the time it takes you to read this book, than die in the book. The horror of addiction which real people (who you probably know) will feel is well beyond anything that follows, and it will cling to their insides and make a permanent psychological imprint. Someone just shot up for the first time, and soon their body will be aching for heroin the way a vampire thirsts for blood. Someone right now is buying a half pint of vodka with shaky hands at the liquor store, trembling with terror. A mother just identified their daughter’s overdosed body at the hospital. Another is writing their son’s obituary. As a recovering alcoholic and addict, I’ve lived through this. As a substance abuse therapist, I’ve seen it every day.

  How can you tell these stories of addiction without horror? I’d argue that remarkable literary works featuring addiction such as Trainspotting, Requiem for a Dream, and Junky could be marketed as horror with a different cover slapped on top. Horror is just the volume of life turned up so high the reality breaks through the confines of normal everyday limits and explodes in a bloody mess.

  Addiction, as AA will tell you, is cunning, baffling, and powerful. Until you’ve had your mind and soul hijacked by addiction, it is difficult to comprehend the craving for substances. In the throes of a craving, the desire to obtain and use substances equals the life force for survival itself. Imagine yourself drowning and being told not to swim to the surface for air. Obsessions should be so mild.

  Of course, recovery works, sobriety is possible, and learning to live with these cravings is a complex but very real process. Someone just celebrated twenty-four hours sober, someone else twenty-four years. Families get their loved ones back from the dead through the miracle of recovery. This is why, in the call for submissions to Garden of Fiends, I asked for two things: compassion for the plight of the addict, but also a thorough depiction of the insidious nature of both addict and addiction. If you’ve read this book and do not have a greater empathy for the addict, along with a more visceral understanding of addiction, then I’ve failed.

  Most of the works here (but not all) are longer than most anthologies call for. This was done to allow for deeper exploration of plot and character. As much as I like reading short stories, I find I want to stay in the literary world a bit longer. You’ll also find heroin and other opiates play a major role, which is certainly reflective of the current opiate epidemic in our country.

  Kealan Patrick Burke starts it off with “A Wicked Thirst,” a tale of an alcoholic who needs liquor for social lubricant but the damage he’s done foll
ows him like a specter and will not let go. Jessica McHugh’s speculative piece of heroin addiction is so pulse-pounding, had I read her work before putting together this anthology, I may not have bothered, for everything I wanted to accomplish with Garden of Fiends, she has in her story. My own tale, and the title track for the anthology, is a homage to parents who will do anything it takes to save their child from the devastation of opiate addiction. A marvelous piece of flash fiction follows about a girl who “could quit if she wanted to” (and she does, until Thursday). The son must bear the burdens of his alcoholic father in John FD Taff’s story “Last Call.” In Glen Krisch’s story, a demon-plagued girl named “JennyHalloween” takes a pilgrimage to her long lost father and finds him using heroin for the strangest of reasons. Max Booth III has written a story of a recovering heroin addict who relapses into horrors that makes a day using dope seem preferable. Finally, Jack Ketchum’s story, “Returns,” is a somber look at alcoholism. It ends with a tragic sadness that will have you cuddling with your favorite pet as you think about the assortment of stories you just read.

  The best introductions are the shortest introductions. I’ve already said too much. Time to start for real. Let’s go.

  -Mark Matthews

  3/1/2017

  A WICKED THIRST

  by

  Kealan Patrick Burke

  I wake up drowning in a puddle, my lungs filled with rainwater. Through the panic, only one thought is clear: I am going to die. This stark certainty is enhanced to a horrible degree when I attempt to raise my head and find resistance, something pushing back against my skull, keeping all but my eyes submerged. Someone is trying to kill me. In this moment, perhaps one of the few I have left, the nature of my enemy is irrelevant. It matters only that he is there standing over me, his boot against the back of my head pressing down, down, down, and that he will not relent until the life or the fight has left me.

  * * *

  “You like to drink, huh?”

  Melinda says it with no accusation in her voice. If anything, she looks amused, and that’s good. Too many of these dates have been wrecked by judgment.

  Over my glass of bourbon, I shrug and offer her what you might call a “wry smile,” though I only employ it to avoid opening my mouth and letting the world see my teeth. The few remaining people in my life who still call themselves friends claim this doesn’t matter, that anyone who cares enough about me would be willing to disregard this aesthetic flaw. But I know this world. I see the celebrities beaming their pristine, expensive smiles at us mere mortals, and I’ve thwarted many an incumbent lover by admitting upfront that my dental state is not pretty. Even long-term lovers (back when long-term was a logical assumption) used it as ammunition during arguments because they know I’m self-conscious about it. They know it hurts, so it’s an easy play. You’re a waste of space, a goddamn drunk, and don’t get me started on those fucking teeth. Ugh! I want to say that if I had the money, I’d get them fixed, but that’s not true. I’ve had the money plenty of times, and it was then, as it is now, much easier to drink away the need to care. That the alcohol and the cigarettes are what destroyed my teeth in the first place is a truth that doesn’t hinder me at all.

  “Sure, who doesn’t?” I say, in response to Melinda’s question. She plays with the swizzle stick in her own drink, a cocktail of some indeterminate origin. The glass is enormous and rimmed with sugar, the liquid within the color of a sunrise. I’ve never understood pretty drinks. Lethality should come in a more obvious costume, don’t you think? The amount of alcohol in that rowboat-sized receptacle reinforces the hope that no lecture about abstinence is forthcoming, so I allow myself to relax a little.

  “My parents,” she tells me, with a sigh, and to this I can relate.

  “Yours too, huh. Religious?”

  “Catholic.”

  “Same.”

  “To the lapsed.”

  We raise our glasses and toast gently, with no real celebration, because the ugliness of the truth we just shared is something that deserves only to be buried, not commemorated. Then again, who I am these days is commemoration enough of that dark time in my life.

  We’re seated at a moderately well-lit booth in a bar-restaurant hybrid, better known these days as a gastropub, a name which never fails to make me think of beer farts. This whole area of town is trying hard to be upscale, and failing gradually. If the demand isn’t there, it doesn’t matter how glossy your business looks or how high you hike the real estate prices. Now when you walk this neighborhood, it’s not difficult to imagine what the big glass and brass frontages will look like with shutters.

  At the bar, a line of businessmen and women flirt and talk shop much too loudly while spending too much money. Around them, as attendant as bees, harried looking waiters and bar staff with no money at all rush around them trying not to look miserable and annoyed. All of them are slightly blurred, and not only because my focus is directed at Melinda, but also because it’s been a long day, and I’ve marked three quarters of the hours I’ve been awake with either a cheap beer or a midrange bourbon.

  I’m spending money I don’t have. Child support money I tell myself I can make back before it summons trouble. Sometimes this is even true.

  “Am I losing you already?” Melinda asks, and despite the permanent fixture of her amused smile, I suspect it won’t be long before the phone comes out and she gets a “surprise” text and with it, the apology that she must get going to attend to some sudden and unavoidable event.

  “No,” I tell her, and wonder if the dimming of the lights is actual or imagined. “Rough day, and finding myself seduced by the ambience and the company.”

  Her smile widens just enough to let me know she appreciates the compliment but recognizes its fragility. “Nothing at all to do with the three bourbons you’ve sunk since we sat down?”

  Her math is wrong. I’ve been taking hits from my pocket flask in the men’s room. Part of it is whatever compels me to never get close enough to sobriety to feel the real tragedy of my existence. I know how pitiful that sounds, but it doesn’t change the reality of it. Another part of it is nerves, because the simple truth is this: I’ve had a lot of women. This is not a boast, just a fact. I’d make a list if I could recall half of them, but I can’t, so you’ll just have to take my word that we’re probably talking close to a hundred. Without drink, that number would be less than ten, because I’ve never known how to talk to women—or anyone else for that matter—unless I’m buzzed. Walk in on me in a bar halfway through the night and you’d think I was perfectly at ease, comfortable in my skin, and just the best damn company. Charming, if a little quiet, confident but not cocky, and you’d be right. Catch me in the morning and you’ll end up calling the suicide hotline on my behalf. Catch me in the company of women before I’ve had a shot and I look like a man afraid to address his own reflection. I don’t like that person. Truth to tell, I don’t much like either of them, but at least there’s something I can do about the lesser one. That confidence with women, forced or not, worked better back in the day, before my looks began to fade. That Melinda is sitting across from me now is nothing short of a miracle, though on such occasions I figure my idea of a miracle is closer to pity than I’d like to admit.

  “Do you do this often?” she asks, waving a hand between us.

  “Dating?”

  She nods.

  “On and off for the past year. Mostly off.”

  “Only a year?”

  “Considered trying it earlier but marriage got in the way.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yeah. Soon as the divorce hit, I signed right up to see what I’d been missing.”

  “And did it meet your expectations?”

  “Not until tonight.”

  She rolls her eyes and sits back. She doesn’t blush or fawn. I can see she appreciates the compliment. I can also see it’s a line she’s heard a lot and which consequently, has lost all value. Her green-eyed gaze is penetrating, as if she’s be
en asking me the real important questions all night long without ever opening her mouth. Her hair is long, dark, and wavy, her bare shoulders sprinkled with freckles. I like her. I think the sober me would adore her, but that’s a question destined to remain unanswered, not because I don’t plan to see her if all goes well, but because I’m unlikely to be sober when and if I do.

  She sits forward again, takes a short sip from her cocktail and crosses her arms on the table. “So tell me, what’s been your worst date so far?”

  I scrunch up my face, and then remember the expression exposes my teeth, and switch instead to studious pondering, a forefinger to my lips to seal them. “Hmm.”

  “Want me to go first?”

  I nod, and she does.

  “I won’t bore you with prefaces or qualifiers or buildup. I’ll just get straight to it. First off, the guy looked nothing like his profile picture, which is always the dreaded expectation.”

  I resist the urge to interject that she doesn’t either. She looks better. But I’m already pushing my luck in the flattery regard, so I do what all good men are supposed to do, and just listen. It’s not easy though. As people are fond of telling me, one of the characteristics that emerge when I’m drinking is an inability to shut the fuck up, and I feel that now, the urgent and omnipresent bubbling of words in my throat. It’s almost like I sometimes think if I don’t make a sound, I’m not really there, or that I’m in imminent danger of being forgotten if I’m not part of the conversation.