Two and Twenty Dark Tales

by Georgia McBride

  “Just. Get. Out.” Addie says.

  So I do. I stand, leave my tray, and walk out of the cafeteria. Everyone stares at me. One kid even throws potatoes at me and misses. Walking through the hall isn’t any better. People outright stare at me. They all think I am a murderer. Maybe I am. Something inside of me tells me otherwise. I would never hurt Ro. I loved her. I have to find out what really happened that night.

  No one says anything as I leave. No faculty tries to stop me as I leave the school through the main entrance and head to my car. When I get home, I closet myself in my room and lie down on my bed. Sleep seems to be the only thing I can handle right now.

  ***

  When I wake, it is dark. I fumble around for my phone to get the time. Five a.m. I have slept another day away. I wonder if I will ever be able to stay awake for more than four hours. I can’t go back to school today. I have to remember. I have to go back to where Rose died.

  ***

  There are few cars on the road and I get to the field of flowers in record time. I walk to where her body had been laying when I stumbled upon her Tuesday morning. The flowers lay trampled and broken all over the field; the police had no time to protect Mother Nature as they made their way to Rose. Using my phone as a flashlight, I find where she died. Police tape is still strung in a makeshift barricade the cops had erected when they were investigating her murder. It looks crass in the dim light. I sit at the edge of the ring of flowers and begin to cry. Coming back here has done nothing for my memory. I am no closer to finding the truth than I had been when I woke up with bloody hands and posy in my pocket.

  “I told you to forget.” The voice is hard and sinister. It is deep and has the timbre of someone who smoked way too many cigarettes. I turn around, fighting my phone for light.

  “Who’s there?” I ask, fear obvious in my voice.

  “You don’t remember me?” The man asks, stepping into the vague stream of light.

  “No,” I say. “I don’t remember anything.”

  “This poses a problem,” he says. “I told you to forget and you should have forgotten everything. The fact that you have been back here at least twice shows me that my coercion didn’t fully work. I’m not hungry. But I could eat.”

  “Coercion?” I ask. “What do you mean?”

  “You are young,” he says in way of an answer. “And handsome. Perhaps we could come to an agreement. I have been alone for such a very long time.”

  “How do you know me?” I ask. “How do you know how many times I’ve been back here?”

  “I could smell you, on her body,” he says.

  “What?” I ask. Then it hits me. Her throat was torn out. I remember everything.

  We had decided to go all the way. I had bought her a fifty-cent ring as a joke at the supermarket. We were going to be married after college; we had both been accepted to UNC. She wanted to go to the field; she thought the flowers made it more romantic. I had to go back to the car; I had forgotten my lone condom there. On the way, I picked flowers and fashioned the posy I left with her.

  When I got back, this man was leaning over her. He heard me approach and stood. There was blood all over his mouth and the collar of his old-fashioned shirt. He walked toward me and whispered one word. Forget. I remembered nothing else.

  “I see you remember me after all,” he says, smiling. “How would you like to live forever?”

  I turn and run. I want to get to my car, but in the dark I become lost easily, and I’m sure I’m headed in the wrong direction. I hear him laugh.

  “All right then,” he says. “A hunt it is. I hope you are fast. I like a challenge.”

  I stumble. Every horror movie I have ever seen flashes through my head. I am making all the wrong decisions. All I need is blonde hair and a huge set of boobs; I am acting like the girl who runs upstairs instead of out the door. I resolve to make a smart decision. I have to think about everything that has happened. My brain doesn’t want to believe what my heart has already seen. Vampires exist and I have about a nanosecond before one is on top of me.

  There are no trees in the field, so grabbing wood for a stake is out. I have to wonder if you even need wood. Wouldn’t any sharp, pointy thing through the heart do the job?

  He hits me from behind and I fall to the ground. I feel as if I can’t get air, my vision is blurring and my back arches in pain. He stands, looking at me as if he doesn’t know what to do with me. I check my phone. Five-fifty. He must think I am trying to call for help, because he kicks the phone out of my hand. But I don’t require the light anymore. The sky is already turning orange.

  He grabs my shoulders and smiles. I watch his teeth shift over, making room for fat, wide fangs that elongate before my eyes. I want to scream, but his eyes challenge me to do so. Like it would make killing me so much better for him if I did. Instead, I feel around on the ground. I almost let out a whoop of joy when I find a heavy rock. He is leaning toward my neck. I bring the rock to his temple. He rolls off of me, groaning, and I stand. Then I run again. This time, I know I’m going in the right direction.

  I can see my car. I am almost home free, when something grabs my ankle, pulling me roughly to the ground for the second time. I turn over and kick out with my other leg, but the beast keeps his hold.

  “No, no, little human. No more games. But since I like you, I will ask you again. Die or become like me?” he says, smiling victoriously.

  “Neither,” I say. I feel brave enough to smile back at him. If I am going to die, I want it to be on my terms.

  I wait for him to bend down. When he does, I stick both of my thumbs in his eyes. I feel some squishy resistance but then something gives and the vampire is screaming, but it doesn’t sound human at all. It sounds more like a banshee wail. He grabs my wrists and I pull my fingers out of his sockets and roll him over easily. He is too distracted by the pain to fight me. I’m right beside my car when I see the tree. I race to it and break a good sized branch off at an angle. This monster will hurt no one else.

  When I get back to where I’d left him, he isn’t there anymore. I look around and see him standing a few feet in front of me, still holding his hands over his eyes. The vulnerability in his stance makes me reconsider my murderous plans for a moment. Then I remember that he is a murderer of many with no remorse. My resolve hardens. I walk toward him.

  “Don’t come any closer human, I can still kill you,” he says, but his voice shows that he isn’t sure that he can still win.

  I say nothing. When I am two feet in front of him, I kick out, connecting with his knee. He falls to the ground, landing on his knees and he pulls his hands away from his face. The sight of his eyes and what I did to them makes me want to run away, but I have to end this.

  Pulling my arm back, I aim for the middle of his chest and bring the stick down, hard.

  His ashes fly all around me in the morning wind.

  I turn and head back to my car. No one will believe me. I wouldn’t believe me, either. The one good thing is now I know I can weather anything. I know for sure.

  I didn’t kill Rose.

  – The End –

  The Well

  K.M. Walton

  Jack and Jill

  Went up the hill

  To fetch a pail of water.

  Jack fell down

  And broke his crown

  And Jill came tumbling after.

  Up Jack got

  And home did trot

  As fast as he could caper.

  Went to bed

  And plastered his head

  With vinegar and brown paper.

  – Mother Goose

  I do not like my brother Jack. With crossed arms, I stand over him, watching him sleep. I study the rise and fall of his chest. He sleeps soundly, always has. Jealousy and worry don’t stick to Jack. How could they when they’ve fastened themselves around my waist, poised and ready to pull me under at any given moment.

  Jack readjusts underneath the blanket and his black curls
fall into his eyes. The amount of female attention he used to get—the constant visits, filled with giggling and hair tossing and touching—did nothing but get in the way of keeping things running around here. And further build my resentment.

  The sound he makes when he licks his lips reminds me of a sloppy yard dog. He grunts in his sleep. I clench my teeth and leave my brother snoring on the sofa. There is work to be done. Like always.

  I grab a fresh candle from the box and check our reserves. “Damn it,” I grumble. We’ll have to figure something else out. Before lighting the candle and unlocking our front door, I peek through our front window. I count the flies on the glass. Eleven today. Three less than yesterday.

  This was my grandmother’s routine, what she taught me to do. It has been a few months since she died peacefully in her sleep, but a dark morning hasn’t come that I haven’t looked through the window first, before stepping foot outside. When she was alive, we usually checked for strangers or sick people. Now, I check for flies.

  The more flies, the more death.

  My Nan and Jack and I watched a lot of death last year. The nightly news ran story after story of entire towns dying in a week. Thousands of people. Gone. Birds fell dead from the sky. Major cities placed under martial law. The human death toll was in the hundreds of millions before modern living stopped.

  My Nan took her last breath by candlelight, tucked underneath her treasured quilt. There was no blood, no gasping for air. Nan had just closed her eyes, and that was that. A plain old, regular death.

  All of our town had died. My brother and I had no idea why the virus hadn’t affected us. But it hadn’t.

  The Shiver Rash swept across continents in just under a year. The government named the fast-moving virus after William Shiver, the first known victim. But sickness and death took a long time to reach Porcupine Creek, and for a few months we Alaskans thought we’d been spared. A benefit of living the clean life up here. We thought nature would protect us.

  When my trig teacher was found dead in her driveway, face down in a pool of her own blood and pus and covered in black flies, Alaska lost its mind.

  Everything kicked into hyper-speed. People ping-ponged around—clearing out stores, emptying gas stations, crying their eyes out. It only took Porcupine Creek forty-eight hours to go into lockdown. Families holed up in their houses, their windows covered in thick plastic tarp. Fireplaces sealed.

  People were able to keep in touch for a little while—giving reports of who’d died or who was infected. Then the emergency generators stopped humming. No one wanted to leave the safety of their sealed homes to fill their generators with fuel. I will never forget the day our generator went quiet. I felt the void in my skin. The quiet made me itch.

  We all thought I’d contracted The Shiver.

  I even texted Courtney that I’d finally gotten sick. My last text from her read: Mom died last night. My mouth is bleeding now. It sucks we’ll never go to prom.

  I cried into my pillow until the sun came up.

  Courtney and I had been best friends since third grade. Her father had moved their family up here from Florida to mine for gold. My parents had done the same thing before my brother and I were born. Neither of our fathers had ever struck it big, but we used to say it didn’t matter, because we’d struck it rich when we became friends. Corny and dorky, but true.

  Sometimes, I lie in the dark and hold entire conversations with Courtney in my head. We make plans, we laugh, we talk about our crushes, homework, shopping, and our annoying older brothers. In these imaginary moments, we never talk virus. Dying at sixteen doesn’t come up. Ever.

  I’m still here. Jack is still here.

  I hear the sofa cushions squeak. My brother is up. “We’re low on firewood, Jack,” I shout over my shoulder. If I had to go climb that steep hill to gather the crowberries, then he was going to do something to help.

  “We’re low on water,” he mumbles as he comes into the entryway. We’d been sleeping in the living room to stay warm, to be close to our makeshift fire pit. Before we sealed ourselves off, Jack had rolled a rusty steel drum up from the garage. It sits in the center of the living room.

  I stare at my brother. Did he think I didn’t know we were low on water? I’m shocked he noticed. “Yeah, I know.”

  “Do you have to sound like you hate me every second of every day, Jill? What the hell? God, I just woke up.” He rakes his hand through his hair. “Don’t you think I’m as miserable as you are? I didn’t kill everyone. The virus did.”

  I laugh in his face.

  “You’re a bitch,” Jack says. He turns on his heel and heads into the kitchen.

  It’s in these moments that I crave my evil wish: that Courtney had been immune instead of Jack.

  The fact that Jack was three and a half minutes older than me has everything to do with how I feel about him. He clawed his way from my mother’s womb, leaving her bleeding to death in the tub. Her body had gone still. Or so I’ve been told.

  Despite the fact that not a single soul knew I was still inside of my dead mother—the silent and mysterious fraternal twin—I’d wanted to be born as well. My entry into the world was far less violent than Jack’s. I simply slid out on my own into the warm bathtub water. Slick and bloody and new. Well, that’s the story Nan always told me as she tucked me in with her icy hands and warm brown eyes.

  When Jack and I were only two days old, the grief of losing his beloved wife had caused my father to dive headfirst into the old, dried-up well at the top of our hill—the hill I was about to climb. For months, no one knew my father’s fate. Everyone, including Nan, believed he’d simply run away. The talk in town was that the stress of infant twins mixed with the sudden death of his wife sent him over the edge.

  The irony of how my father actually died, falling over the edge of a well, plummeting to his death, hadn’t been lost on Nan. She told me so on my tenth birthday, along with the haunting fact that my father’s bones were still at the bottom of the well.

  His crumpled body had decomposed. No one knew he was down there. By the time our neighbor accidentally discovered my father’s remains, my Nan thought it better to leave him undisturbed. The rain and the flies had stripped dad’s flesh and muscle, leaving only his bones.

  Jack is slamming kitchen cabinets. That’s usually my job. I’m the miserable twin. He tells me so every day. He seems angry today, which makes me angry. What the hell does he have to be angry about? I do almost everything around here, while he locks himself in the bathroom for hours, crying like a damn baby.

  I stomp into the kitchen. “Hey, you know what?” My sudden yelling startles him. “The fact that I am forced to spend the rest of my days on this empty planet, alone with you, makes me want to join Daddy at the bottom of that well!”

  “I’ll push you in,” Jack deadpans. “It’ll be a win-win.” He glares at me and then pops a handful of crowberries into his mouth. “You know what? You make me sick.”

  I slam the front door on my way out. I make him sick? I wasn’t the golden child, the one everyone loved, the one showered with compliments and adoring looks. He was the one every teacher gushed over. The one Nan adored, always making his favorite moose stew with crowberry pie for dessert. I don’t even think Nan realized I didn’t like meat until I was twelve.

  Nan. I tromp past her grave. The wood of the cross has yet to darken, its sandy color a reminder of the day we were forced to unseal the house. Nan’s body needed to be buried. At that point, Jack and I were pretty confident in our immunity to the virus, but we weren’t one hundred percent sure. We agreed that giving Nan a proper burial was worth the risk of dying.

  When the sun rose the morning after putting Nan in the ground and neither of us felt sick, we opened up the house.

  I look over my shoulder as I trudge up the steep hill. Jack doesn’t follow me. The thick summer grass makes no sound underneath my boots. What fills the air is the clank of the metal pail hitting against my thigh with every step I take. Th
e solitary sound is thick and absolute. There are no animals or rustling leaves. No planes or birds overhead. The road just beyond our property line has been empty since spring.

  I dig my boot into the ground to steady my footing, and I look out over the valley. I swat away the flies circling my head. The beauty of the landscape—the snow-capped mountains off in the distance, the bright blue sky—saddens me deeply. Why did we survive? Why us? Why couldn’t Courtney have survived instead of Jack?

  I reach up to bat another fly. The pail falls from my grasp and tumbles down the hill. “Crap.” Without thinking, I lunge for it. I need it to hold the crowberries. I lose my footing and land hard on my butt. Then I slide a few feet before coming to a stop. “Ahhh. Ow.” I exhale and slowly stand up.

  My sweatpants have ripped. I can feel the crisp morning breeze hit the back of my thigh. I reach back to assess the damage. The hole is huge. I switch the pail to my other hand and notice the blood on the wooden handle. I must’ve cut my leg.

  Like sharks to crum, the flies show up. They love blood. My Nan used to call them mini-vampires.

  I look down at the house and wince. I’d rather continue up the hill with a bloody leg and flies trailing behind me like rats than go spend unnecessary time with my brother.

  I limp my way to the top. I lean on the cold stones of the well to catch my breath. I’m lightheaded. The flies tickle the back of my thigh. I swish them away. It’s no use. My knees give a little and I grasp the well to steady myself. My hand is covered in blood.

  I scream my brother’s name.

  The sun shines directly overhead. A bright light illuminates the depths of the well, lighting up my father’s remains. I blink and stare down at his white skull for what feels like forever. The sun inches across the sky.

  “Jack!” I shout again. Random thoughts torture me as I hopelessly swat the flies and do my best not to pass out. I wonder what my father’s voice would’ve sounded like. How his hug would’ve felt.

  Where is my brother?

  I drop the pail and hear it bounce down the hill. I turn to watch. There is the top of Jack’s head.