Dark Things IV

by Stacey Longo

  Just before Dylan collapsed dead onto his face, his clutching fingers relaxed, spread apart slightly. The sudden release of pressure caused a long ribbon of blood to spurt from the punctured eye, jetting across the room and spraying Ben’s legs. In falling to the ground, Dylan no longer obstructed Ben’s view of the card table. Before Ben even had a chance to feel sickened by the blood, he recoiled with a jerk at what he saw on the table, every muscle in his body tightening, his heart punching wildly against his breastbone. The lingering fear, shock, and confusion brought on by Dylan’s assault on his life instantly transformed into unimaginable horror.

  From the spot where the Ben-doll had been situated, a short trail of unwound cloth and Spanish moss lead off to the other side of the table. At the end of the trail, the Ben-doll hovered above the Dylan-doll, supporting itself on one of its arms, an arm that was impossibly bent at a shoulder joint that could not possibly exist. The bottom end of the stick that formed the lower half of its body was split down the middle forming two thin, stalk-like legs. With its other moss-ball hand, the Ben-doll held onto the end of the pin it had thrust through the center of the Dylan-doll’s right eye.

  The Ben-doll stared down at its victim. It seemed to realize it was being watched. The doll twisted its body and face toward Ben. Beneath its insensate button eyes and nose, the jagged line of stitched yellow thread that was the doll’s mouth twitched spasmodically for a moment before it curled into a hideous half-smile.

  The voodoo doll saved my life, Ben thought, his sanity nearly wrecked beyond the point of repair. But his disbelief in what was happening allowed him to shift his thoughts back to his friend. “Dylan,” he muttered in despair as he crawled over to his friend’s cooling body. Ben pulled him onto his back. “Oh no, oh no, oh no…” he stammered through panting breaths. Ben held his hand to Dylan’s bloody neck, felt for a pulse that wasn’t there as the blood continued to bubble from Dylan’s deeply punctured eye and brain, pooling blackly in the surrounding socket. “Dylan. Shit! Oh no, dude. Oh no. Oh no…”

  The rose petals!

  The idea came to him from out of nowhere, likely inspired by the insanity, horror, and absurdity that his world had suddenly been reduced to. Ben looked up at the Ben-doll, which had moved to the table’s edge on the side closest to Ben, presumably to watch. Defying gravity, the doll stood perfectly still on it spindly legs as if held in place by invisible strings.

  Ben cautiously pulled himself from the ground and sidled to the other side of the table, not taking his eyes off the doll. The rose petals lay at one corner of the table. Ben opened the bag, his nostrils catching the spring bloom, death-sweet fragrance of the flower. He pinched one of the delicate, moist petals between his thumb and forefinger, and turned to the Dylan-doll. Ben pulled the pin from the doll’s eye, placed the rose petal on its face like some crimson, featureless death mask. But the purpose of the rose petal was life, not death; according to the voodoo doll instructions, the rose petals possessed healing magic.

  The terrified boy then scrambled back to Dylan’s side, knelt down, cradled his head in his arms. He gently stroked his hair, rocked his torso back and forth, mindless of the copious blood around him, heedless of the sharp reek of excrement and urine. “I love you, Dylan,” he said. “Come on, man. Come back to me. Come back.”

  He waited, rocking and stroking, cooing in the dead boy’s permanently deaf ear. Nothing was happening. Ben’s head snapped up when he realized what was wrong. He turned to the doll, the lone audience member of the dramatic spectacle, who stood on the table watching the scene with a respectful silence.

  “People can’t work the magic! You have to do it!” Ben’s face contorted into a crazed, exalted grin. “You killed him, you can bring him back. Do it! Please do it! Please!”

  The doll stared down at Ben. Its stitched mouth had relaxed back to a straight expressionless line. It gazed at him for a moment through its black, shark-like eyes. Though the movement was nearly imperceptible, the doll shook its head in refusal.

  “Please,” Ben pleaded as a tear broke loose from his eye.

  The doll ceased shaking its head and stood there for a moment as if unsure how to proceed. It then lowered itself to the table and scuttled on all fours to the Dylan-doll, its jerky movements like those of an insect that had breathed in a lethal dose of insecticide. The Ben-doll grasped the rose petal with both its little tumbleweed hands, lifted it from the other doll’s face, held it in the air for a moment, and then lowered it back down.

  Ben turned back to Dylan, the boy’s head still wrapped in his arms. “I love you, Dylan. Come on, Dylan. I forgive you. Please come back to me.”

  At first nothing happened. But then Dylan’s glazing-over left eye blinked. Once. Then twice. Ben felt Dylan’s body twitch as his dead ganglia and nerve fibers began to reconnect, defying the laws of God and nature.

  Though Ben did not see it, the Dylan-doll also stirred. Its writhing caused the rose petal to fall from its face, thereby uncovering its eyes and bringing sight to the doll. In abandoning the empty black void of nonbeing to come into the world, the Dylan-doll was initially blinded by the ethereal candlelight that enveloped the room. But the bleary image of the Ben-doll’s primitive head hovering above its own nearly identical face then came into a grainy, gray-orange, supernatural focus.

  The Ben-doll lowered its head to welcome back the Dylan-doll with a kiss.

  ***

  Ben ordered his three dolls never to leave the Fort.

  They obeyed him without question.

  He stayed clear of the place for a while, waited for the local and state police to be done with their questions, for the search parties to finish dragging nearby Nawscahaw Reservoir and all the local ponds, for the initial intensity of the search for Dylan Rhodes to cool down as hope for his recovery dimmed. Once things felt safe, Ben began visiting the Fort again, spending as much time there as he could. With his part-time job bussing tables and summer school being back in session, that time was not nearly as much as he would have liked. But he managed to get out there four or five times a week.

  Ben found himself spending a lot of his money on fabrics and thrift store clothing. He purchased muslins, flannels, denims, silks, twills, and more. These he cut, stitched, seamed, and embroidered into clothing and costumes for Dylan-Doll and Ben-Doll. Ben usually worked at the table in the Fort while the three dolls sat around him and watched. He tried to make them something new every week—collared shirts, ties, suit coats, hats, capes, spangled dresses, petticoats. Whether the clothing was male, female, or androgynous in design did not matter to the dolls; they loved whatever Ben dressed them in.

  For Dylan—the largest doll, the one he loved the most—Ben purchased pants, suspenders, belts, ties, shirts, blouses, sundresses, men’s and women’s hats, tiaras, anything that struck his fancy as he strolled happily down the aisles of the local thrift store. Once he even found a gorgeous wedding dress for only $22.50.

  Ben loved dressing his dolls.

  And Ben forgave Dylan for nearly strangling him to death. He was certain that Dylan had been on the verge of releasing his throat when Ben-Doll intervened to save him. The timing of things had just been off, that’s all. Very bad, ill-fated timing.

  It made him think of Romeo and Juliet and poison and daggers.

  But this was not a tragedy. Ben’s dream had come true: Dylan belonged to him now. Just in a way he had never imagined.

  Dylan didn’t talk anymore. But he could still stand up, sit down. He could still embrace Ben when Ben opened his arms to be embraced. It just took some time for Ben to acclimate to Dylan’s smell, especially near the end of summer when Dylan’s bloated, maggot-laced, liquefying body entered the more advanced stages of putrefaction. But Ben learned to tolerate the ripe stench.

  Burning incense in the Fort took some of the edge off.

  Without actually making sounds, Ben-Doll occasionally whispered things to Ben. Sometimes it told him about its fever dreams of the Motherland—of
little known catacombs beneath the last of the mangrove swamps in Haiti, above which could be heard the pulsing music of the undead rising from the dank earth without pause. Other times it employed its susurrate telepathic voice simply to tell Ben how much it loved him, to remind him that, being carved from Ben’s very own soul, it was his soul-kin, his little brother, his petit frère.

  Ben-Doll also assured him that Papa Gid’s magic protected them all. He said Ben never had to worry: no one would ever find the Fort.

  Ben experienced fear at the Fort only on those rare occasions when Papa Gid came to visit them, an occurrence that only took place under cover of night. As he sat at the table with his dolls, Ben would know their benefactor was coming when the sound of footfalls reached his ears, always approaching from the west. When the heavy, twig-snapping footsteps stopped just outside the Fort’s entrance, four sharp knocks on the door invariably broke the silence. Ben and his dolls knew never to open the door to let him in. According to Ben-Doll, opening the door would spell certain death for them all. It was all part of Papa Gid’s game, a game played in payment for the dark magic that made their little family possible. A few moments after the four knocks, the footsteps would take up again as their visitor trudged around to the other side of the Fort to halt in front of the lone window.

  Like answering the knock at the door, looking at the window and gazing on the face of Papa Gid was strictly forbidden and was tantamount to death—another rule of the game. Ben would then play with his dolls, dress them, talk to them, kiss them, just as he would at any other time. He would pretend no one was watching him through the little window, all the while feeling that malevolent, voyeuristic, inhuman gaze creeping over his skin. He had to ignore the inarticulate, sepulchral noises that sometimes sounded from the widow—deathbed wheezes, doglike whines, horselike snorts—had to resist the strong curiosity to let his eyes follow his ears. Usually in less than an hour, the footfalls would start up again, tramp back to the front of the Fort, and head back the way they had come into the dark of the woods.

  Ben-Doll once whispered that Papa Gid would eventually show himself to them.

  But they would have to wait.

  Ben often wondered what his life would be like years from now when he was an adult. He would break out of the closet eventually, he knew that much. And he would revel in the exuberance of that freedom. No more hiding, no more lies. Ben imagined he would become a successful fashion designer and live in New York City, just like those hip, witty designers in those reality TV shows he watched sometimes. Ben’s partner, his soulmate and lover, would be wickedly handsome, perhaps a model, maybe a stage actor. He would have fierce gray eyes, eyes just like Dylan’s when Dylan had been alive. But he would be kinder than Dylan had been.

  No more lies except for one.

  Ben would have to tell his partner one small fib: he would have to fabricate some reason to fly back to Ohio a couple times a year. Perhaps Ben would tell his lover that he was obligated to visit his aging parents ever so often, even though they were homophobic, racist yokels who would sooner drop dead than welcome their son’s gay lover into their old run-down house in the middle of nowhere in rural Ohio. That lie would be mostly true.

  But the real reason he would return home, of course, would be to visit his three dolls.

  To play with them—to keep playing with them even if he lived to be 100 years old.

  And to one day look upon the face of Papa Gid.

  About the author:

  Douglas Hackle writes out of Northeast Ohio, where he lives with his wife and son. He has published short stories with The Absent Willow Review, House of Horror and Flashes in the Dark.

  Afterlove

  by Tomas Furby

  I love you.

  I sit in darkness, drinking those words like wine. The lights are off, curtains shutting out midday sunlight. Darkness is complete, and the only thing that exists: those three tiny words, silhouettes on the blue glowing screen of my mobile. I cradle them in my hand; absolution incandescent.

  I love you.

  I thought I’d lost everything. We nearly destroyed each other. I ran away to a different country after that last terrible night.

  “So you’re really ending this? After everything we’ve been through together, you’re going to let one stupid little fight get in the way? You’re ending us, because of this?”

  “Look, it’s not a little thing to me…”

  “You coward! You spineless wimp! I love you, don’t you get that? That should be stronger than this. You should be stronger than this!”

  “I’m sorry…”

  “Do you love me?”

  “What?”

  “Do you love me? Did you ever, or were you just fucking me?”

  “Emily, please. Don’t make this any harder than…”

  “Breaking up with your girlfriend’s meant to be hard, you asshole! Now, do you fucking love me?”

  “…No.”

  I lied. Or maybe when I told the lie it was the truth. But now it’s a lie. It seems like weeks since that night, but in truth it’s only been five days. I run a thumb over the screen. I got the text this morning. On the morning of the day I fly back to England. I’d been too afraid to phone her. Too afraid that I’d burnt my bridges, shattered this precious thing into a jigsaw I’d never be able to put back together again. But no…

  I love you.

  Everything is silent. Dark and silent and warm and that slow sure sound of her breath that makes my heart flutter with its rhythm. The sun’s rising, casting shadow fingers across her pale, pale skin. I haven’t slept, I don’t want to… How could I miss this?

  She stirs. Her eyelids flutter, lashes dark against cheeks. One hand passes, graceful, before her face. She catches my stare as she wakes, and smiles.

  “Oh! Don’t look at me! I look horrible.”

  “Horribly beautiful.” She laughs at me. I kiss her. It’s a very long kiss.

  “I love you.” She smiles as she says it. My face is so close to hers that all I can see are her eyes. They’re green. I’ve never noticed that before. They’re green.

  “I love you too…”

  I think I’m crying. I haven’t felt like this since the start, since I first met her. My heart full of something fiery and freezing, sharp and soft, exciting and terrifying. God, I want her to be in love with me forever. I smile. There are so many words. Which ones do I use to reply. I have to reply. If I leave it, she’ll think I’m still angry, that I don’t love her, that I really am a complete bastard.

  I’m so sorry, Emily. I was a fucking fool. I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t think I was thinking at all. Maybe I just needed some time to sort my head out. You were quite right not to trust me, but please trust me now. I love you. I‘d give anything to have you back.

  No. Too much. I delete it with a single touch of a button. She won’t want me back on my knees. No. Keep it simple. No lies or half-truths. Just what you feel. What is true.

  I love you too.

  ***

  I’ve always loved flights. There’s something about escape and something about beauty framed within a plane’s tiny window: detail blurred by distance, obscured by cloud, flying higher and higher. For a short time, my eyes disbelieve the sheer size of my world. Then it’s gone, hidden beneath an ethereal blanket of white. We pass through nothingness for a moment, sight veiled in glass and cloud. Then we break through into a glorious dream, the world above the world, a landscape of rolling white and searing sunlight. Just like heaven.

  The light hurts my eyes. I look away.

  I half close my eyes, tired. Someone says something over the intercom about landing soon. I sigh. Back to reality. Back to Emily. I smile. My head slowly drops down to my chest. My breathing begins to deepen.

  Something jabs me from my semi-slumber. I open one eye and glance down. My shades are digging into my chin, hung from the collar of my shirt. I shift, loath to move from my reverie. Then, in the reflection of dark glass: Emily
’s face, beauty distorted in the bulge of a lense. Demonic, terrifying...

  I look up.

  Nothing before me but the back of a seat. Nothing but a dream… Nothing but a nightmare... My heart drops. I chuckle at myself. God I can’t wait to see her.

  Someone yanks one of my earphones out. With one earphone in and one out, a thousand whispers, half heard and hissing, blend with the music; join with it, and change it into something more…sinister. I turn.

  Emily is sat beside me.

  “Hey you.” She smiles, radiant and pale, as beautiful death. I smile back.

  “Jesus! Emily? What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “I missed you.” She leans forward and kisses me. It’s a very long kiss. My heart strains against my chest and my breath comes harsh as she pulls away. Her fingers trail my chest. They are cold.

  “Wow. No shit. But…”

  She laughs.

  “Always the romantic, Miles.” She brushes her long auburn hair out her eyes, self-consciously, subconsciously. I grin. It’s the most attractive thing I’ve ever seen her do. I put one arm round her shoulder and she leans into me, burrowing at my chest as though she can get to my heart. The smell of her hair—musky, permeating, completely entrancing—stings my nostrils. I breathe deep. My anxiety, my confusion, my fear, disappears. I can’t even recall why I felt shocked in the first place.

  “So did you enjoy your holiday?” She turns to see my blush, giggling. She knows exactly how much I enjoyed my holiday. I enjoyed most of it with her. I growl at her and the sparks of laughter in her eyes fan into flame. Then I shiver. The chill breeze of the air conditioning plays across my skin. Her fingers are icy cold, and my flesh pebbles beneath their touch. A shadow steps at the corner of my eye; disquiet enters my mind.