Just A Little Terrible
Vincent V. Cava
Edited by
Defne Güçer
Copyright © 2015 by Vincent V. Cava
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below.
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Defne
I couldn’t have done this one without you.
The Author
Vincent V. Cava
His tales have been known to induce seizures in small children. Merely skimming through one of his stories can lead to anxiety, nausea, and internal bleeding. You should not read anything written by him if you are currently pregnant or nursing (including this author’s bio…although it’s probably too late by now). He’s a man whose mind is so dark, not even the World-Wide-Web could contain his horrific imagination.
He is Vincent V. Cava!
The son of NASA researchers, Vincent V. Cava’s writing has quickly amassed a following over the Internet. His stories have been translated into dozens of different languages and have been used to promote major studio films. You can find out more about Vincent by following him on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.
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Table of Contents
Schizo
Fate
Immortal
Grave Digger
The Old House
Freak Show
The Stranger’s Debt
A Novice Killer
What Would You Do?
No More Sins
To Make An Omelette
The Psycho At Rider’s Lookout
She Knew
It Was Ellen’s Face
The Little Hobo Boy
To Be Normal
Foreword
When you’re learning to swim, the last thing you want to do is dive headfirst into the deep end of the pool. You need to wade into the shallow end before you get into the fancy stuff. That’s why I began writing flash fiction before I started working on short stories, novellas, full-length novels, and screenplays. However, as my writing continued to improve, I never stopped enjoying the short stuff. There’s something extremely satisfying about a good piece of flash fiction. It’s like treating yourself to a scrumptious pastry halfway between breakfast and lunch.
I looked at this little project as an experiment. Can I scare you, blow your mind, or at the very least entertain you in a thousand words or less. It’s quite the challenge. Writing in this format gives you little room to set the mood or introduce characters. In a way, it forces the reader to dive into the story headfirst. There’s no time to wade in.
I’m proud of these tiny tales of terror and I’m happy to share them with you. From a creative standpoint, some of them took just as much planning and focus as many of my longer stories. I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Schizo
Donny Polk sat upright in his bed, back against the headboard as terrible memories of his childhood began flooding back to him.
Memories about the Bird Woman – the creature his diseased mind had conjured up during his youth. The thirty-nine-year-old family man was no stranger to schizophrenia, though he hadn’t felt its symptoms since he was a boy – before his doctors had put him on a plethora of anti-psychotic medication.
He remembered the way The Bird Woman would wake him in the dead of the night, her slippery, forked tongue sliding into his ear, wriggling and writhing like some sort of alien parasite attempting to invade his brain. He could still vividly recall the way her breath always smelled of rotten meat, how its stench would rape his mouth, leaving its rancid flavor in the back of his throat every time she leaned her face into his and whispered her awful secrets. Secrets that appalled him as a young boy, that terrified him even more than her hideous, warped face.
He glanced over to his wife, Gina, who was sound asleep next to him in bed. Donny hoped a familiar sight would somehow snap him back to reality. She looked so peaceful as she dozed; her tranquil slumber uninterrupted by the panic attack her husband was currently experiencing. He felt as though he was losing his grip on reality. Gina was real. That much he was sure. What he wasn’t sure about was whether or not The Bird Woman hovering at the foot of his bed was real too.
It was the first time he had seen her in three decades, but she was just how he remembered her – pale white skin, stringy black hair, and a pair of mustard yellow eyes that’s perverse stare made Donny feel both terrified and unclean at the same time. His old nightmare had finally found a key to the vault in his mind and now she was free – unleashed for the first time in years and back for vengeance.
The Bird Woman lifted her leg and placed a deformed foot on top of his bed. Her black, crust-covered toenails left grime and dirt on his Egyptian cotton white sheets. Donny’s heart skipped a beat as he watched the creature slide a second filthy, grotesque appendage on top of his mattress. She was coming for him – just like when he was a child. He considered waking Gina, who was still snoozing next to him. His wife knew about his history with hallucinations, but had never seen him have an actual breakdown. Donny wasn’t sure how she’d react. The Bird Woman crouched on top of his legs like a wild predator stalking a wounded animal. Horrible whispers had begun to trickle out of her disfigured mouth.
His meds!
How could he have forgotten about them?
Donny remembered that he always kept a bottle of Clozapine in his nightstand incase his hallucinations ever returned while he was in bed. He opened the drawer and rummaged through the darkness, frantically searching for the anti-psychotics while the Bird Woman started to slink up the bed. The smell of rotten meat began to force its way up his nostrils. Donny held his breath in an effort to prevent the repugnant stench from entering his lungs.
The Bird Woman was half way up his torso now. Her grubby claws nipped playfully at his crotch as Donny hunted for the drugs. The whispers had gotten louder even though the awful creature’s lips weren’t even moving. Donny tried to calm down by reminding himself that the monstrosity was just a product of his mental illness, but she seemed so real. The desperate man’s fingers grazed up against a plastic cylinder inside the drawer. He had found what he was looking for!
Donny yanked the pill-bottle from the nightstand and unscrewed the cap. The creature’s chin was resting on his chest. Her forked tongue hung from her mouth, snaking back and forth across the base of his neck as if it had a mind of its own. He poured a handful of pills, not bothering to worry about the recommended dosage as Bird Woman’s slimy tongue slithered its way up the side of his face. The smell of her putrid breath had become overpowering.
With one eye trained on the monstrous sight, Donny raised the fistful of pills to his mouth, but felt a tug on his arm, giving him pause before he had a chance to pop the drugs. He turned his head to see his wife, Gina, eyes wide and full of panic, looking back at him. She swatted at her husband’s hand, causing the pills to scatter across the bedroom floor.
The Bird Woman’s gaze stayed fixated on Donny as she lapped at his cheek like a child with a melting Popsicle. Gina opened her mouth to speak, voice quivering between her lips. Her words would send a new wave of horror through her husband’s body, the likes of which Donny Polk had never felt before.
“Donny,” Gina whisp
ered. “I see her too.”
Fate
At that moment Jessica seemed so sweet and innocent. Her blond hair glistened like gold as the little bit of sunlight that had seeped in through the boarded up windows caught her curls. Her rosy red cheeks, so flush and full of life, radiated a warm glow in the dimly lit room as enchanting and captivating as any of Mother Nature’s most awe inspiring phenomena. Truly, Michael thought to himself, she was the most beautiful little girl in the world.
He admired his daughter one last time as he raised the gun to her head. The shot roared through the house like a thunderstorm. Skull and brain fragments flew through the air as his daughter’s carcass slumped to the ground in a broken heap. Carefully, Michael dragged Jessica's dead body across the floor, and laid it next to her mother and brother's corpses. A single tear escaped his eye, but before the grief managed to overwhelm him, he took a deep breath and said a prayer to compose himself. It would all be over soon.
Michael peered out the 2nd story bedroom window of his home. Hoards of the infected stretched as far as his eyes could see and he knew that it was only a matter of time before they would blow through his home like a plague of locusts. Many of them had already made it inside and his bedroom door was beginning to buckle as the banging on the other side of it grew louder. It would not be long before the monsters broke through. He looked into the chamber of his revolver. Jessica had received his last bullet. The final gift a father could give his daughter. And as horrible as it was, at least his family had escaped his fate – the fate that would be crashing through his door at any second.
Immortal
“What you seek is just beyond this door, young man.”
Young man.
No one had called David young in a decade. Those were words that harkened back to a simpler time for him – before his obsession with immortality began to consume his life. Before he had wasted his physical prime locked away in his den, poring through archaic texts and studying ancient hymns. Before he devoted his life to investigating the validity of age-old legends from bygone cultures around the world.
From the Philosopher’s Stone to the Fountain of Youth, David had researched tales of eternal life stemming out of every corner of the globe. He had even focused his efforts on more obscure, lesser-known lore, like the Owanu Frog of Ghana’s Sisaala tribe and the disturbing story out of Slunj, Croatia that had come to be known regionally as The Night of The Star Child.
It wasn’t until he reached his mid-forties that he was able to piece together a trail of evidence that gave his quest direction. He had begun to recognize patterns throughout his studies of history – tiny consistencies buried in long-forgotten writings, reoccurring symbols carved into timeworn relics, peculiar regularities that had no right turning up in the places and times that they did. And after more than two decades, all of his findings had led him to one place – a lone monastery sitting atop an icy mountain in Eastern Tibet.
David had braved the conditions in order to speak to the wise holy men he believed held the secret he had spent most of his adult life searching for, but when he arrived he found the temple mostly empty, save for one old monk with tired eyes. Pangs of disappointment surged inside the gut of the frustrated traveler when he first laid eyes on the elderly hermit. After all, he had come so far and been so sure that the monastery housed the key to his deepest desire, but the deep age-lines in the old monk’s face told him a different story. It told the story of muscle atrophy, the story of cognizance withering away, of bones becoming brittle. The old monk’s face told the story of aging – the story of impending, unstoppable death.
With a pair of wrinkled, weathered hands, the hermit seized David by the arm, and led him inside, away from of the cold. The entrance hall of the temple was barren. A row of torches lined the interiors’ gray, stone walls providing only just enough light to illuminate the path ahead of them. The old monk, still clutching tight to his new guest’s arm, began to hobble down the dim, corridor. Together, the two navigated through the darkness in silence, until they reached a winding staircase plunging downward into the monastery’s shadowy depths. With his free hand, the elderly man removed the last torch off the wall and gestured towards the stairway.
“What exactly is this place?” David had asked the holy man as they began their descent.
But the old monk said nothing. Instead he directed his gaze ahead, his tired eyes focusing on nothing but the twisting steps in front of him. David felt alone as they snaked their way into the abyss – like a tiny rock floating by itself in the vacuum of empty space, millions of miles removed from the closest celestial body. The pangs of disappointment he had been feeling just minutes earlier had begun to mutate into something else entirely. Paranoia, angst, and dread were now running rampant inside of his head, weaving themselves into an indescribable terror.
Just when he thought the black void he had found himself in would drive him mad, a golden radiance caught David’s eye. As the two proceeded closer to it, the source of the glow became clear and David realized that his research had not been in vain. The base of the stairs came into sight. They appeared to open up into a small chamber with nothing but a large red door built into the wall. Beautiful ornate symbols were inscribed into the face of it. Egyptian hieroglyphics, Sumerian designs, and a variety of other ancient multicultural characters lined the perimeter of the impressive structure. By the time they reached the bottom step, the old monk’s torch was no longer necessary. A brilliant light was seeping out of every crack in the door, flooding the chamber in a golden hue.
The old monk released David’s arm and raised a wrinkled weathered hand towards the shining spectacle before them. It was here that he uttered those words – those words that had harkened back to a simpler time for the explorer.
“What you seek is just beyond this door, young man”.
“Just beyond this door,” David repeated.
A rush of excitement swelled through him. He had found it. He had succeeded where Ponce de Leon and thousands of others like him had failed. He had located the secret to immortality.
David reached for the handle of the door, and with a quick tug, jerked it open. A blinding light burst forth, enveloping the room, swallowing David and the elderly holy man. He fell to the floor clutching at his chest. As the light intensified so too did the searing pain he could feel in his heart. It was as though the entire core of his body had caught fire. The pain was unbearable – the most excruciating thing he had ever experienced in his life.
Questions started whirling through his head. What is going on? How could it feel so horrible? He had never once read, in all of his studies, that the youth rejuvenation process would be a painful one. Something had to be wrong.
Summoning every last ounce of strength, David crawled along the ground until he reached the door. He propped his shoulder up against it and drove his feet as hard as he could into the ground, in an attempt to force it shut.
With a THUD, the door snapped closed causing the blinding light to disappear behind it, and leaving only a golden glow to wash over the room. Down on the floor again, David rubbed his eyes while he waited for the pain in his chest to subside. When his vision had regained focus, he looked up to scan his surroundings. What he saw ignited an inferno of terror that burned mercilessly inside of his body, spreading like wildfire.
Looking down on him was a familiar face – one he had watched age in the mirror every single day of his life. His face – and it was sporting a satisfied smirk. He was somehow staring up at himself as if another person was wearing his skin like a costume. Shock and confusion overran his mind. No longer able to gaze upon the imposter he attempted to bury his face in his palms, but when he peered down, the sight sent pulse after pulse of panic through his very essence. His hands were no longer his, but he knew he recognized them. They were wrinkled and weathered. Hands he had seen before – hands that once belonged to an old monk with tired eyes.
Digging a grave is hard work – mentally and physically exhausting. Oh, you thought it was just mindless labor performed by simpletons? Well, think again. You have to have balls of steel out here in the graveyard! Not everybody is capable of spending hours digging plots in the dead of night.
Why, don’t be surprised if on a moonless evening with nothing but a rusty old lantern to illuminate this necropolis, you start hearing voices whispering from the shadows. What will you do then? Run away crying with your tail tucked between your legs!? Not me! Not when there’s work to be done!
It’s particularly difficult to bury a loved one. Many members of my family have made this the place of their eternal slumber. And who do you think is shoveling the dirt, eh? I’ll give you a hint. It’s not the Dalai Lama!
That’s what I’m doing here tonight. Putting another loved one to rest – my mother to be precise. I told myself I wouldn’t cry when I began digging this stinking thing, but I just can’t help it! It’s so hard knowing that after I pour this last shovel full of soil atop her plot that she’ll be gone forever. Life’s too cruel! I’ll probably just wait around for a while after I’m done and reminisce about good times, you know? At least until she runs out of oxygen...
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