Night Terrors: 16 Horror Stories

by Valentine King

  Chapter 5

  Patrick walked into room five still wondering if this was a joke. He winced slightly as he pushed the door open but then relaxed. All that was inside was a steel square set into the floor, roughly two feet in diameter. On the far wall was another door and next to that was a flat screen which came to life as the door clicked shut behind him.

  “Welcome to the show Patrick!” a grinning gameshow host said to him, his face filling the screen. “I know you’re going to love it. How are you feeling?”

  “Erm, wondering what the hell’s going on.”

  “Of course you are. Well let me tell you a few things. This is a new kind of game show with only one rule. Once you step onto the pressure plate, you mustn’t step off it for exactly five minutes. Do that and the grand prize will be yours. Think you can manage it?”

  “Just stand on there for five minutes. That’s it.”

  “Yep indeedy Patrick. There is a catch of course. This screen will be taken over by your fellow contestants and they’ll do whatever they can to persuade you to step off early. Ignore them and you’ll win, let them beat you and you go home with nothing. Are you ready?”

  “Erm, I guess so.”

  “Then if you wouldn’t mind?”

  Patrick walked over to the pressure plate and stepped onto it, hearing a click at his feet as a timer appeared in the corner of the screen on the wall, counting down 5:00, 4:59, 4:58.

  “Good luck Patrick,” the host said, his face vanishing, replaced by a CCTV camera showing a figure strapped to a chair.

  Patrick leaned forwards, looking closer at the figure as someone appeared next to them. “That’s my…that’s my fucking son.” He stared at the figure tied to the chair as people appeared around him, all of them wearing balaclavas. They turned and waved up at him as he fought the urge to jump off the pressure plate. It’s a trick, he told himself. They’re trying to distract you. They wouldn’t do anything, it’s just a trick.

  He looked at the timer, 4:30. As he looked up one of the masked men raised an arm and pretended to slap his son. The boy started to cry. “You bastards,” Patrick snarled. “Don’t you lay a fucking finger on him.”

  The seconds ticked past infinitesimally slowly as the figures passed around Adam, occasionally pretending to hit him, seeming to laugh every time they made him flinch. Patrick clenched his fists, praying the timer would speed up. His mind was filled with a tumult of emotions. Just weeks before he’d wished his son dead, being sick of attending to him night and day. He’d never asked to keep him, not when the pregnancy scan had shown that many deformities. But now he saw those men round him, fury filled his mind and he loved his boy more than he’d ever thought possible. How could he possibly have wanted him dead?

  As it reached one minute to go, the men untied his son and moved him to a flat platform, tying the struggling figure on his front, his head sticking out over the edge. One of them brought a knife from his pocket and moved it close to the camera, forcing Patrick to stare at it as the screen filled with the image of the blade. They stepped back and faced the prone figure once more, lifting the knife above their head. 0:15,0:14. The blade swept down through the air towards his exposed neck as Patrick leapt off the pressure plate and ran to the far door, kicking it open and stepping through.

  The signal went from the pressure plate through the floor at the same time as he moved. As he skidded to a halt before the platform and looked down at his son’s prone figure, he wondered where the men had gone. He heard a click and looked up in time to see the blade of a guillotine swoosh down through the air. It sliced through his son’s neck in less than a second, the decapitated head rolling along the floor with a wet thud, coming to rest by Patrick’s feet as the voice of the host filled the room. “Oh bad luck Patrick, if only you’d lasted a few more seconds. But don’t worry, nobody leaves here empty handed. You get to take his body away with you. Now have you enjoyed being on the show?”

  Chapter 6

  Detective Edwards stood in the corridor on the ground floor of Ship House rubbing his eyes. “Where the hell do I start?” he asked, looking at his colleague who only shrugged. “A guy drowns his lover, a woman burns her abusive ex to death, another one tortures a prostitute to death and this fuckjob slices his own son’s head off and all of them in the same damn block of flats at the same fucking time. Have I forgotten anything?”

  “They all deny it,” his colleague said. “Say someone told them to do it.”

  “Let me guess, God was talking to them.”

  “Nope. A gameshow host.”

  “You’re kidding right?”

  “Nope. They all gave me the same story. They got an invitation to appear on TV, went to Ship House and...”

  “Oh for crying out loud,” Edwards leaned back against the wall and sighed. “Who called it in anyway?”

  “No idea. Anonymous phone call.”

  “I thought we could trace those.”

  “Not this guy, he knew what he was doing. Told us to come here, said there’d been multiple murders and if we were quick we’d catch the culprits before they got away.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Well I did notice one other thing I thought you should know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “There were four people but five rooms. We went into room three but there was no one there although you’ll never guess what was?”

  “Don’t piss about, just tell me.”

  “A severed arm and leg sitting on the floor.”

  “Who’d they belong to?”

  “You tell me, you’re the detective.”

  At the back of the block of flats a fire exit swung open in the breeze. Beyond it a dripping line of blood led down the pavement and around the corner. Larry crawled along the middle of the road, a rucksack on his back. He paused for breath and then continued dragging himself forwards, the effort of moving expelling more blood from the reluctantly clotted stump of his leg. He coughed and thick black mucus came into his mouth, dribbling onto the tarmac under him.

  He yanked his arm forwards but was unable to move any further. Panting and wheezing, he rolled onto his side, looking up at the clear blue sky, his ears ringing as the light faded from his eyes. On the corner of the street a teenager on a bike appeared, riding up to his prone form and looking down at it. He glanced left and right before scratching his face with bony fingers. Making sure the sirens he’d heard were nowhere nearby he leaned down and unzipped the rucksack, looking at the wads of banknotes crammed within. Pulling out a flickknife he sawed through the straps of the rucksack and yanked it free from Larry’s body, holding it in one arm as he cycled slowly away, vanishing around the corner just as a police car raced into view. The car skidded to a halt by Larry’s body, the driver staring out at the glassy dead eyes of the winner of the Game of Life.

  Birthday Party

  I stood over his grave as the rain began to fall, memories of my birthday party flooding back to me. Uncle Paul had been there at every birthday since I was born, eighteen years, eighteen parties but no more. No more birthday parties for me and no more Paul either.

  “Happy birthday!” he’d said as I came downstairs to find the party already in full swing. It was the same every year. My parents would invite their friends, not mine. I’d come downstairs to find mum, dad, uncle Paul, aunt Judy and that was it. “How does it feel to be eighteen? Care for a legal glass of wine?” I took it from him as Judy shoved a party hat onto my head and then the games began as they did every year.

  The earliest party I can remember is my fourth and I’m guessing that was the year they decided I was ready. They’d hired a clown and I remember being terrified by his white face and red nose as he squirted water from a fake flower into my face. By the time I went to bed that night, I’d learned there were far worse things in the world to be scared of, far, far worse things.

  I thought it was normal, that was the worst part. I just assumed it happened to every child, something you didn’t ment
ion to anyone for fear of getting in trouble. They used to tell me that if I told, I’d go to prison I believed them. It was only when I was eleven that I started to wonder.

  Mum and Dad should have stopped him. They should. But they didn’t. Why would they? They were as bad as him. By my fourteenth I’d grown used to what would accompany my birthday presents but everything changed when I met Laura.

  She’d transferred to my school from down south halfway through the year. I think that was why we got on so well. She didn’t have anyone else to talk to and neither did I. Within weeks of her starting we were thick as thieves, skiving off lessons together and sitting on the field behind the sports hall, smoking heavily and talking about our lives. Or at least she talked about hers, I had long been taught to keep my mouth sealed about what happened at my house.

  She told me about getting raped when she was eleven. The fact that the trial had collapsed due to lack of evidence as it had taken her four days to build up the courage to tell her parents what had happened. She’d been walking home from school and dragged into the bushes in the park, attacked in broad daylight. Seeing him on the streets afterwards had been torture for her and she’d started cutting herself a year later. Eventually her parents had decided to make a fresh start, hoping her slate would be wiped as clean as theirs by moving up here. “If only it was that simple,” she said, staring into the distance and sucking on her cigarette. “I wish I had the courage to kill that fucker, I really do.”

  It was another two months before I was finally brave enough to tell her what happened at my birthday parties. I only mentioned it because when she talked about being raped, I started to think and as I thought I found it harder to differentiate what had happened to her once three years before and what happened to me once every year.

  “Fucking hell,” she said when I finished my story. “What the fuck?”

  “What?” I asked, feeling immediately as if I should have kept my mouth shut.

  “That’s not fucking normal Clare,” she replied, looking furious. “How could you possibly think that was normal?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s happened every year, I suppose I thought…”

  “You fucking idiot. Jesus Christ.”

  We lapsed into silence. I made her promise not to tell anyone. She fought that tooth and nail but in the end she reluctantly agreed.

  She tried to come to my fifteenth birthday to protect me but my parents refused to let her through the door. Paul stood behind them, grinning from the top of his pint. “Go on,” he slurred. “Let her in. I’m sure she’ll liven up the place.”

  “Certainly not,” my mother replied as I sat on the bottom of the stairs, trying to stop my hands from shaking. I knew what was coming. “This is a respectable house and look at her. She looks like she’s on something.”

  For once my mother was right. By then we’d progressed from cigarettes to joints. It helped to block out the memories, at least for a few minutes at a time. They closed the door in her face and I was left to enjoy the party.

  She asked me about it afterwards but I couldn’t tell her, I didn’t want her to worry about me any more than she already did. Besides she had enough to worry about, I’d seen the marks on her arms when we’d changed for P.E. She’d started cutting again.

  On my sixteenth I tried to fight back. It was the first time and the last time. Until my eighteenth of course. I was off school for two weeks after turning sixteen, not allowed back until my black eye had gone down and the bruises on my neck had faded. They made me wear a scarf when I went back, just in case any of the teachers had overly attentive eyes. Gave me a note to take in explaining it was to protect my throat while I recovered so nobody would ask me to take it off.

  When my seventeenth came round, I vowed this would be the last time. I wouldn’t let it happen again. Let them kill me if they would, I wasn’t going to put up with it anymore. The worst part wasn’t the pain, it wasn’t lying there wishing I was dead or wishing they were dead. The worst part was when your body betrayed you. Your mind would be screaming out to be left alone, wanting their dirty hands nowhere near you but your body would respond to their touch with its own heat and you’d be more disgusted with yourself than them. Every birthday I’d go to bed hating myself for the way I’d reacted far more than I hated them all. And I fucking hated them more than I could possibly put into words.

  I think they knew I was close to fighting back because they held me down in turn on my seventeenth, each of them using me whilst reminding me this was my annual secret present that I wasn’t to tell anyone about, the smell of alcohol wafting down towards me as I lifted out of myself and floated somewhere far away, somewhere safe where they couldn’t touch me.

  By then I’d changed shape of course. Earlier in my life I’d thought it was my body that appealed to them and in my own self deluded way I thought that when I matured and grew breasts and pubic hair that their interest would tail off. Naïve fucking idiot that I was, I know. The only change was my mother would come into my room the night before my birthday and shave me whilst telling me what a beautiful girl I was, how I should never grow up. She’d look at me and water would appear in the corner of her eyes but then she’d blink it away and carry on, running the razor over the skin above my cunt whilst all the while talking about what cake she was baking me like I gave a shit.

  They all called me their little girl. Even at seventeen when I took the slow steps downstairs from my room to the waiting party they still called me their little girl. I hated it. I hated them. I went to bed that night with my whole body aching from their use of me and I couldn’t even cry. I’d learned to suppress every single emotion I had, it was the only way I could survive my birthday parties and it meant I just lay there waiting for the pain to subside and stared at my ceiling in the darkness.

  That was when the idea came into my head. A special surprise for my eighteenth birthday, one they wouldn’t expect. It took a long time to plan and even longer to pluck up the courage to tell Laura. “Are you serious?” she asked as she passed her joint to me, her eyes glassy.

  I nodded. “Want to help me?”

  “Will it work?”

  “I don’t know but I hope so. You on board?”

  “Jesus. Give me some time to think about it, okay?”

  The hard part was hiding her in the house. I had to bring her home the night before. She was hidden in my wardrobe whilst my mother shaved me, my skin crawling at the touch of her fingers as she again called me her little girl.

  “I’ll be a woman tomorrow,” I replied.

  She put her lips to the skin she’d just finished shaving, kissing it softly whilst I tried not to vomit on her head, a wave of nausea washing over me. “You’ll always be my little girl,” she said before standing up. “Now get a good night’s sleep. We don’t want you tired at your party now do we?”

  When she’d gone, closing the door and locking me in as she did every night, I crept to the wardrobe and eased it open.

  “Is it safe?” Laura whispered, glancing out.

  I nodded. “Just keep quiet,” I replied, putting my finger to my lips.

  “I saw her shave your cunt, that’s fucking fucked up.”

  We spent an hour talking about our plans before trying our best to sleep. It wasn’t easy. I watched her in the darkness, the tiniest spark of hope in my soul at the sight of her by my side. What would I have done if she hadn’t come into my life? Would I have put up with this forever?

  The next morning she hid in the wardrobe again while I went through the familiar ritual with my mother. She always chose my outfit, specially selected for Uncle Paul’s approval. This year she went for irony, a schoolgirl Halloween costume. It consisted of a miniskirt so short it might as well have been a belt, a white blouse two sizes two small and knee length white socks. She even tied my hair into pigtails while I sat and stared at myself in my bedroom mirror, telling myself I could do this. I could do this. She kissed me and ran her hands over my chest, my nip
ples stiffening as I forced myself not to recoil from her touch, knowing the pain that would ensue if I did. “That’s better,” she said, tugging at them with her fingers until they jutted through my blouse. “He’ll like that. Now don’t be long.”

  She left me and I nodded towards the crack in the wardrobe before walking out onto the landing.

  “Happy birthday!” Uncle Paul said as I appeared at the top of the stairs. ““How does it feel to be eighteen? Care for a legal glass of wine?”

  With the wine in my hand I stood in the middle of the room as the four of them stared at me. Paul suddenly knocked the glass from my hand, sending it spinning across the room before it smashed into the wall. “Look what you’ve done,” my mother said, glaring at me. “That’ll stain!” She slapped me across the face and my cheek flared with pain.

  “Oh don’t be too hard on her,” Paul said, taking a step towards me. “After all, she’s only a little innocent schoolgirl.” He scratched his cheek as he took me roughly by the arm. “Perhaps what she needs is a spanking.”

  He bent me over the table by the window whilst the others stood behind him, watching him lift my skirt and slowly lower my panties to my ankles. I remained in place, telling myself it wouldn’t be long now before all this was over. He began to slap my arse with his rough hand, not a hint of gentleness to him as the sound of smacking filled the air. I kept quiet for as long as I could but in the end I began to scream, the pain forcing me upright before he bent me over again and continued whilst muttering how I should learn how to behave.

  “I’ve got your present right here,” he said, leaning towards my ear as he finally stopped beating me. “Do you want to know what it is?”

  I didn’t need to answer, I could feel it between my buttocks already. He forced his way into me as he had done so many times before. When it was over he stood me back up and insisted we all play pass the parcel. I sat on the wooden chair in the centre of the room as the others sat in a circle around me. Music began and when it stopped, Judy stood up, taking a step towards me and pulling off my shirt. “Next round!” she laughed, returning to her seat.