The rat waited until the Man was entirely involved again in his task, and then began more noise, this time running straight up the wall and dropping down again with a thud. The Man jumped up and screamed. I hate rats! By now, of course, he was quite drunk, but didn’t know it. Randy was subject to blackouts. If he survived to the next day he would remember little if anything of what he had done. Not the conversations on the phone, not installing a virus, not the rat, nothing. From somewhere outside the room, someone shouted, Pipe down in there! Some folks wanna sleep! Randy ignored that, swearing and searching for a weapon. The rat could not understand the Man’s words, but it understood his rage. It could smell anger and fear as easily as food. It kept on making noise, scrabbling and squealing.
Randy grabbed the knife he’d almost used on the salami. He attacked the wall with it, stabbing and hacking. An idea came to him: slash the wallpaper to ribbons, then set it on fire. Burn the little fucker out. He was beyond rational thought. He stumbled over one of the shoes he’d thrown earlier, fell, and landed on his blade. Suddenly he stopped yelling. He rolled over, pulled the knife out of his body, looked down at the blood. “Son of a bitch,” he said. They were his last words.
The rat was patient. It was in no hurry. Under the Man’s bed there was a hole in the floor, which was the rat’s portal to the Man’s room. Soon it would go there. But there was no rush. The rat knew it had won. From the wall crack, it could see the Man on the floor, and blood spreading everywhere. It looked like the red wine for which the rat had developed a taste. Smelled better, though. At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, the rat went down to feed.
Missing Pieces
Ali Maloney
Jaim felt every pulsing beat from the DJ in the abscess in his gums.
He kept poking and prodding the painful hole even though he was terrified it would spread through contact with the tip of his tongue. Christ, it hurt. He could barely greet each merry well-wisher and drunken hug, he was in so much pain.
But still, he’d doped up on painkillers and come out to the party, so he may as well see in the New Year in style, with his friends.
It had been, he reflected, a really good year: He had been promoted to manager of the call centre in which he’d been working for the past three years. It wasn’t his ideal job, of course—growing up, he’d always imagined himself to be an astronaut or cowboy—but it paid well, it was steady and he could forget about it when he went home. This was the year he’d finally bought a house, all his to do with as he pleased. Sure, the mortgage would work out to more than he’d been paying in rent, and it wasn’t in the best part of town, but it was all his. And his girlfriend’s. He’d proposed to her that year as well and she’d said yes, of course. She was…well, very nice. Good looking in a homely kinda way, but then Jaim wasn’t exactly Brad Pitt either. She was a reasonable cook, even if she’d stopped Jaim eating meat and made him go jogging with her. She wasn’t really his type, that girl, but she really made his parents happy and that’s what was important. Wasn’t it?
It had been a good year, and he ought to celebrate all these wonderful things that had happened, and that he’d achieved. This was one night when he could stop to take stock and reflect.
But it was hard to stop and reflect when the DJ was blasting such loud noise and the club was packed with revellers and merriment. This was the club they always came to when the week was done—that Friday feeling of being the longest possible time until more work. Jaim hated the music they played—an incessant pulse of soulless bleeps—but all his friends loved it and he’d hate to let them down.
One of the balloons held up by a net for release at midnight and the New Year had somehow punctured a hole in itself and was screeching a whizzing zigzag across the dance floor.
“C’mon, Jaim.” It was Finn, one of the temps in the office, a good-looking and ambitious young man who’d been writhing in the dark corners with an elderly gentleman since they’d arrived. “You’ve barely touched your drink. Me? I keep needing a new one—mine all seem to have holes in them!”
He laughed, punching Jaim’s shoulder, and walked off into the throng.
Since they’d arrived? That was hours ago, Jaim thought. Had this pain in his mouth been getting worse or better?
Jaim hoisted himself up to go to the toilets to check. He didn’t think it would matter that their table was being left unattended, with all the group drinks, bags, coats and phones. It was New Year’s Eve. If he couldn’t trust his fellow man on this night, and perhaps Christmas, than Jaim didn’t know when he could.
Inside the toilets, someone had ripped the entire condom machine from the wall, leaving only a foreboding and gaping hole. Jaim stared into it: Beyond the preliminary frayed wire ends and some plumbing, it seemed to go off into infinite pitch black. Spooky.
He didn’t like hanging around that dark portal where anything could be lurking, but he hurriedly tried to examine the roof of his mouth in the soiled and graffiti-covered bathroom mirror.
NO FUTURE!
He struggled to find a patch of mirror where he could get a good view.
I’LL TAKE YOU IN MY MOUTH, CALL ME
It was disgusting having to touch the mirror, but he used the end of his sleeve to wipe a small portion and opened his mouth wide.
FUCK BUSH… O Yeah!
He couldn’t quite see anything—it felt like it was just behind his front teeth, and the light in there was terrible.
SLAYER RULE
It didn’t seem to be as painful as it had been. Maybe he was just tired and grumpy, and needed a moment of peace somewhere quiet.
He tried to find it with his tongue.
There.
It felt bigger.
Oh god.
It felt like he could almost squeeze the tip of his tongue right in there.
Jaim started to panic—you’re not supposed to have a hole in the roof of your mouth, are you?
THE BLACK HOLE WILL DEVOUR YOU WHOLE.
What?
Suddenly freaked, Jaim had to get out of there—fast. He almost ran to the door, past the gaping emptiness in the wall, away from the disgusting mirror and into the club.
He bumped into two men in the midst of a heated argument.
“I leant my jacket to you so you could go out for a smoke and you give it back to me like this?!”
“I don’t know, I must have caught it on something and torn it.”
“Torn it?”
“I’m really sorry.”
“There’s a huge hole in it. Looks like you held it over your lighter or something.” The man was holding up a tattered leather jacket with, indeed, a ragged hole in the back.
Jaim didn’t like that he had to pass through the dance floor to get back to his table, but it seemed to swallow him and he was instantly engulfed in a tangle of frenetic limbs, neon, spilled drinks, shouts, cheers, gropes, noise, kisses, sweat, powdered drugs, fashion and smiles. The DJ shouted something incomprehensible and the crowd started bouncing in time to the monotonous beat. Jaim felt jostled, crushed and trapped. Through the throng he felt someone grab him. It was Finn, screaming and slurring something about this being the best New Year’s ever. Jaim hated it—he hated this place he always had.
Once he’d emerged, anxious and gasping, out the other side, their table seemed so empty and quiet. He saw the hole in the crowd made where he had pushed out, instantly filled by more faceless people.
This was awful, he thought. And where was Emma? He had tried to call her earlier but heard an automated message saying the number was disconnected. The phone networks always get jammed on New Year’s Eve, and it must have been a glitch in the network mainframe, but it was still worrying. She said she’d be here.
But then, he thought, shouldn’t he really just enjoy the night without her? He didn’t—if he was truly honest with himself—really enjoy her company, and he had tried to call her, so it was not as though she could claim he had deliberately not been in touch. She was nice and polit
e, but she was so boring to be with; she did everything her dad told her to and Jaim hated that, not least because he suspected her dad always thought that she could do better. Well, he was lost in his thoughts. If he was not spending New Year’s getting wasted and throwing spasms on the dance floor, he may as well congratulate himself on the year drawing to a close.
And, really, he hated his job, and being promoted just meant that he was more entrenched in it now, he’d probably be there until he retired. He had always laughed at the people who had been there for 50 years, every day in the same mindless office, and right then he knew that that would be him as well. And his house, he was muttering to himself, it could have been nice if it wasn’t so damp and cold and the neighbours weren’t always blasting the same blaring beats as this club.
There was, Jaim concluded, something missing; there was a hole in his life after all.
“Wh’ye sayin’?”
Jaim looked up, and sitting across from him at the table was a young girl. She looked completely wasted and was having trouble sitting upright. Her dress was torn and her makeup was haphazardly smeared around eyes that were so black, so black and empty that they terrified Jaim.
“Why ye sit by y’self?”
Her oddly pronounced and slurred words did not seem to be coming out of her mouth, and when she actually opened it, Jaim almost screamed—she had no teeth, and her mouth was opening ever wider to reveal a gaping bleak void. She was swaying, her horrible mouth turned up to the ceiling in a muted howl, as if trying to swallow the very air. She was scratching her legs at the edge of her miniskirt and the noise was as if she was sandpaper. Jaim couldn’t help but look. Her legs were wide open to him underneath the table, revealing an absolute emptiness where the darkness seemed almost to be tentatively reaching out to envelop Jaim into it.
He almost jumped away from the table, knocking several of the abandoned drinks over. The strange girl didn’t seem to even notice, and continued her strange drunken swaying ritual, her mouth as open as an endless void from which there seemed to echo a deep, distant gurgling.
Jaim backed away from the table and the girl. All of his friend’s bags and jackets were there, and if they wanted them, they could deal with that demented drunk. He could see the abandoned glasses spurt their contents out sideways, and obtuse angles from tiny holes that had somehow cracked into them.
The glasses all seemed to shatter in unison, making Jaim jump in fright, and it was then that the throbbing in his mouth almost crippled him with pain. He was anxious that it wasn’t just an ulcer or something regular, but some disease he had picked up. He prodded it with his tongue again and almost fainted when his tongue met not the roof of his mouth, but a gelatinous mass that it passed right through. He heard his front teeth drop out and clatter onto the floor, sticky with beer, but didn’t feel them fall. He couldn’t feel anything now. He was in shock and hallucinating—or maybe his drink was spiked, he desperately tried to tell himself, as his tongue seemed to squelch around in the cavity about his mouth.
He could feel the rain on his face from a hole in the ceiling above him, its icy sharp drops slapping him back into a moment’s clarity. He reached up to try and feel his mouth with his hands but there was nothing there. He could feel his hands disappear into a chilling nothingness where his head should be.
He tried to scream but nothing came out. He could feel the larynx vibrations shudder their way down his void but no sound came out.
A brief glimpse of the dance floor was one of the last things that he saw. The sweating, throbbing mass of bodies as the sole lit thing in the darkness all around. Jaim tried to reach out to them but all he was was darkness amidst more darkness and nobody heeded his cry for help. In his final moment, he saw some of their faces as they violently pirouetted around and against each other—and they weren’t faces. They were gaping vacuums, sucking the unsuspecting into them, swallowing their existence, devouring them, nullifying and cleansing.
Jaim fell in and away.
“Hey, did you see Jaim leave?”
“No, I thought he was watching the jackets.”
“Well he’s not there now.”
“Probably slipped away. He’s not been himself recently.”
“I know, so down all the time. Why does he have to act like there’s always something missing?”
“O well, his loss. Here’s to the New Year.”
“To the New Year.”
*clink*
Token Lesbians
Foxglove Lee
“I am so coming with you,” Jewel said, hands on hips.
“Not dressed like that, you’re not!” Manisha looked from Jewel to Stefani, like she wanted approval. “Tell her! She’s your sister.”
“Exactly,” Stefani said. “That’s why she never listens to me.”
“I’d listen if you didn’t sound so much like mom.” Jewel stuck her tongue out, which didn’t help her case.
Backing Manisha, Stefani said, “If you’re going to act like a child, you’re not coming with us.”
“Why do you even want to come?” Manisha asked. “You know we’re going to a lesbian club. What, are you switching to our team now?”
“No.” Jewel’s response couldn’t have been more pointed. “I don’t care where we go, as long as it’s out. What kind of loser spends New Year’s Eve at home? Dude, even mom and dad went somewhere!”
“Yeah, to Aunt Sylvia’s,” Stefani giggled. “Party time! Excellent!”
“Why aren’t you going out with your own friends?” Manisha asked. She was obviously antsy to meet some ladies—she was already zipping up her coat. “Or do you just love us that much?”
“Yes, Jewel loves me!” Stefani cried, wrapping her arms around her little sister. She hadn’t told Manisha about Jewel’s ordeal—how an idiot ex-boyfriend sent half-naked pictures of the girl all over school. That was the sort of thing only sisters shared, and even though Stefani told Manisha everything, she didn’t tell her that.
“You really think you’ll pass for nineteen?” Manisha asked, leaning into Jewel’s doorframe. The bed was piled up with outfits that had been tried on, evaluated, and discarded. “Steffi and I get carded all the time, you know.”
Jewel unzipped her fake snakeskin clasp and produced a student card from the University of Montreal. “Read it and weep.”
“You have a fake ID?” Manisha cackled. “Where did you get this? Steffi, would you know where to get a fake ID?”
Stefani shrugged noncommittally while Manisha examined the card. “And this actually works? It’s not even a driver’s license.”
“I tell them I don’t drive,” Jewel said, ultra-casual.
Stefani chose a belt from Jewel’s collection and slipped it through the loops of her tight coppertone pants. “You’re not even old enough to drive.”
Rolling her eyes, Manisha handed the card back to Jewel. “Promise you won’t drink.”
“Awww!” Jewel stamped her too-tall heel on the bedroom carpet. “What’s the point of going to a club, then?”
“Fine.” Manisha held up a single finger. “One beer, and it must be from a bottle and you must see the bartender open it and you must not let it out of your sight, not for a second.”
Stefani had to laugh, because nothing brought out her best friend’s accent like lecturing other women. “Mani, loosen up! Have you ever heard of girls getting drugged at Chickadee?”
“There’s a first time for everything,” Manisha shot back. “You should be more protective of your sister.”
A spark of unspoken rage ignited in Stefani’s chest. Didn’t Manisha understand that the best way to protect Jewel was to do exactly this: take her out with them, keep an eye on her? Locking a teenager in her room was not an effective punishment, no matter what their parents thought.
“You’re really going to wear that skirt?” Manisha scolded. “And those shoes? Are you crazy, little girl? It’s snowing outside.”
“Don’t call me a little girl!” Jewel grow
led, grabbing a long coat from her closet. “I’ll wear this. It’ll keep my legs warm outside.”
“You know how hot it gets in the club,” Stefani said to Manisha. “After ten minutes, you’ll be tearing off that woolly sweater and those ugly-ass cords.”
“By midnight, you’ll be dancing naked,” Jewel laughed.
Manisha shoved her hands in her pockets, scowling at the pair of them. “I’ll meet you at the subway station. If you’re not there in ten minutes, I’m going by myself.”
Jewel waited until Manisha was halfway down the stairs before laughing. “Dude, she is seriously pissed.”
“Meh.” Stefani shrugged. “She gets seriously pissed five times a night. You gotta roll with the punches, kid.”
Jewel grimaced, but didn’t say anything. Turning for a final look in the mirror, she met her own gaze and seemed shocked by her reflection, like the older-looking girl in the glass had betrayed her too many times already. Her grin fell, and her lip quivered. Before the first tear could fall, Stefani pulled her into a hug.
They walked to the station as fast as their heels would carry them. Manisha waited on a bench outside the token-only entrance. Her glower asked, “What took you so long?” but she didn’t say a word.
Year's End: 14 Tales of Holiday Horror Page 13