Tales from Even Darker Places

by The Indie Collaboration

  "Resisting arrest, I shot you while you were trying to escape," said Simms, walking closer, gun raised.

  "Resisting arrest? When was I...?" The man slumped down, blood began pouring across his faded Hawaiian T-shirt, awareness draining from his eyes. "Bobby, look..."

  "You're right, of course, whoever you are. I have learned from my father's mistakes." Simms smiled, but the man grimaced. "I'm on the right side of the law." Another bullet to the head silenced his victim.

  © 2016 Dani J Caile

 

  Theatre of the Macabre

  By Chris Raven

  “Hold on! Hold on! I’m coming," The Old Man complained as he slowly made his way down the dusty corridor towards the theatre's side entrance. He had only just heard the frantic banging from his office, barely noticeable above the storm that raged outside, dancing a whistling waltz with the air raid sirens. "Keep your hair on won't you,” he called out, "I'm coming as fast as I can." He listened to the faint 'booms' and guessed they were coming from the docks. "Don't panic, they're miles off yet."

  He reached the side door, which rattled in its frame with every urgent knock, faint wisps of dust escaped from the cracks in its ancient wood.

  "All right! All right! I’m here, aren't I?" The Old Man pulled back the observation slot and peered out into the stormy night.

  Two people looked up at him through the rain. An American army officer in a drenched and dishevelled uniform, early forties The Old Man guessed, and a young woman, about twenty years his junior, her blond wet rattails plastered to her face as she huddled under the American's trench coat. 'Bloody Yank,' he thought as the soldier continued to pound the door with the side of his fist.

  "For the love of God man, open this door," the soldier yelled, angry and frustrated. The woman looked almost in tears as she stood there shivering.

  "Alright, alright, I had to check who was there didn't I," The Old Man grumbled as he started pulling back the bolts.

  "Please hurry," The woman pleaded, an English accent, “I'm so cold and there's an air raid and..." A quick glance at the soldier"... I'm pregnant."

  *****

  The Old Man showed his guests into a small dimly lit kitchen, the woman grateful and relieved, the man silent. He put the kettle on and turned to examine his guests. The soldier glanced around studying the room, a whimsical half smile appeared briefly on his face, reminding The Old Man of somebody from his past.

  The woman took off the trench coat and looked around, not sure what to do with it. The Old Man noticed her swollen belly and dragged a wooden hard backed chair towards the paraffin heater, the room's only source of heat.

  "Drape it over that," he told her and then invited her to sit in his old brown armchair. He watched her as she struggled to sit, her hair wet and damp around the shoulders of her navy-blue woollen maternity dress.

  "I suppose I had better find you some towels," he announced, adding that the kettle was on and they could help themselves to tea and the little sugar he had. "I have a bit of milk on the cold shelf upstairs," he told them as he left the office, "I'll bring it with me when I bring down the towels."

  *****

  The Old Man studied his unexpected guests as they sat beneath raggedy blankets around his old dented paraffin heater. Warming their hands around tin cups of strong sweet tea, they listened to the heavy booms of distant bombing accompanied by the fast falsetto of the Ack-Ack guns and the rhythmic swirls of the wind as the storm continued its performance.

  "They're really putting the docks through it," the soldier observed. East coast and educated The Old Man assumed from the accent. No drawl at any rate, not a southerner.

  "Aye," he agreed, "giving them a right old pounding I'm sure. Which begs the question, what brings you out in all this?" The woman looked up and smiled.

  “We are lost, aren’t we darling.” Her husband nodded and offered his hand.

  “Victor Oswald,” The soldier introduced himself, “and this is my wife, Rita.” The Old Man wasn’t having any of it.

  "You're him," he announced, his guests looked back inquiringly. "You might have changed your name,” The Old Man continued, but you're still him, or you're related to him." The soldier began to protest but The Old Man interrupted him. "Been nigh on twenty-five years but I don’t forget a face, so what are you? His son?” The woman looked between him and her husband and then explained that this was her husband's first trip to England and that he must be mistaken.

  “Na!” The Old Man insisted, “It’s him alright or his offspring. Am I right?” The soldier looked apologetically at his wife and told The Old Man that he was.

  “His father owned this theatre, back in the day,” The Old Man told her, who anxiously looked back and forth between the two men. “I worked for him, a younger man then of course but I stayed on after, as caretaker."

  “Victor?” The woman asked, “Do you know what he is talking about?”

  “He knows,” The Old Man continued, “I take it you’ve come back for the plays.”

  “You have them still?” The soldier asked excitedly and The Old Man nodded.

  “Your father asked me to look after them, so I’ve looked after them.”

  “Victor, I don’t understand,” the woman struggled to her feet, pushing herself up with one arm whist cradling her swollen belly with the other. Her husband ignored her as he greedily stared at The Old Man.

  “Where are they?” He demanded.

  *****

  The Old Man led his guests to a storeroom and showed them an old sealed tea chest covered by a large sheet of brown tarpaulin. He pulled the tarp off and levered open the chest’s lid with a heavy screwdriver.

  “They’re all here,” The Old Man said as he took out the topmost manuscript, which like those bellow, was wrapped in wax paper. The Old Man carefully peeled it away. “I remember this one, ‘The Dead That Shamble.” The Old Man handed the script to the soldier and took another from the chest. “And here, another one,” he said excitedly tearing away at the wax paper, “The Electric Creature from the Ether.” He handed the second manuscript to the soldier, who was still staring in awe at the first.

  “You kept them all?” He managed to stammer, “All this time?”

  “Was the last thing your Father said to me before he buggered off to America,” The Old Man said proudly. The solder carefully handed the two plays to his wife and holding The Old Man firmly by his shoulders, he moved him aside and started to delve into the tea chest himself.

  *****

  The Old Man and the woman returned to his room for more tea and a warm up. The soldier remained in the cupboard, almost trance like, as he pulled play after play from the ancient tea chest. The woman was frightened and upset, the distant sound of bombing had grown louder and as far as her husband was concerned, she no longer existed. He just passed her script after script as he searched through the chest, her tears merely annoying him. The Old Man had thought it best to lead the woman away.

  The soldier had obviously not told her anything, so he tried to explain it himself. He thought it might help her to make sense of what was happening and maybe even distract her from the growing sound of the air raid.

  “Your husband’s father owned this theatre,” he told her, once she had settled back into his comfy chair, half a dozen play scripts on her lap and a fresh cuppa in her hands. “His family still does," he continued. “It’s held in trust by a legal firm here in the city and managed by Lauren Buildings and Security, which is also owned by his family. It’s them who employ me as caretaker."

  The Old Man told her that it had all been set up about twenty-five years ago, when her husband’s father had set off to tutor at an American University. "I open it up now and then," he explained, "when there’s some do or other. It doesn’t happen often. We had the Combined Services Entertainment lot in here last week.”

  “My husband owns this theatre?” The woman quietly asked and The Old Man told her that in a way, he did.

  “Thi
s theatre was a going concern once,” he told her. “I got my first job here working back stage, a young man then, around the turn of the century. I've worked here ever since." He told her about the theatre in its heyday, when it had the kind of following film stars have today, when it was famous for staging gothic plays of horror and suspense.

  "Your husband’s father, Victor Coldwell," The Old Man continued, "he was a notorious occultist and he claimed he could weave evil enchantments into the scripts he wrote and produced. ‘The Strange Dream-Quest of Trefor Brice', 'Melpomene’s Love’, ‘Trefor and the Amazon Queen’, all of them famous in their time, all billed as darkly occult and mystical.”

  The woman looked down uneasily at the scripts laying on her lap.

  “How did it all end?” she asked.

  “He was pushed out by his enemies of course,” The Old Man explained, “someone like that? He had many of them.”

  *****

  When the soldier returned to the kitchen he held a single manuscript rolled up in his hand saying he had found it. The final play, the one into which all the dark magical energy from the theatre, the power from all the dark magician’s previous works, had been channelled.

  “All collected into one place and hidden,” the soldier explained, “safe from my enemies, most of them gone and forgotten now, like those idiots in The Order, only that fool Rooksley is left, and those other meddlers of course, Dunston and Vakovlev. With this city constantly blitzed, I had to come back, I couldn’t risk waiting, risk losing the source of my power under tons and tons of bricks and rubble. Besides, what can three old men do to me now?”

  Something had changed, the yank's energy, his excitement, how he spoke. There was something different. That’s it The Old Man thought, the soldier had lost his accent.

  "You’re a Brit!" He accused, causing the woman to gasp and stare at her husband.

  "Victor?" she stammered, "Your voice, I don't understand."

  "Bugger being his son," The Old Man said, "You're him, you’re Victor Coldwell himself, returned from America and no older than the day he left."

  "Yes my old friend," the soldier confirmed, ignoring his wife’s pleas. Coldwell had returned and the script in his hand was one component to a spell they had tried to cast together, so many times, so many years before.

  "Welcome home master," The Old Man said, bowing his head. The soldier laughed and affectionately patted him on the shoulder.

  "Don't worry my friend," he assured him, "no need to be so formal, all those years in the states has left me quite the egalitarian."

  Victor Coldwell will always be my master, The Old Man thought as he listened to the soldier’s plans. It was no surprise, the plan was the same as it had always been, the same old obsession with immortality. The Master had learned, many years ago, how to use the salts and powders to extend his life, he had even claimed to have the power to bring himself back from the dead, but that had never been enough. Despite the long years, death still haunted him, chasing him down, ever threatening to take back the time he had stolen. The Master had tried to cast the spell before and despite his loyalty, The Old Man had always found the price very steep. The spell’s other component, the focus for its supernatural power, was life itself. To banish death, one must first fuel the spell with life. It had been the murders committed to that end that had drawn the attention of two amateur sleuths. The two meddlers who had forced the experiments to stop. They were getting nowhere at the time anyway, The Old Man remembered, The Master always blaming the lack of purity within their victims.

  The woman screamed at a particularly loud explosion, the air raid was drawing much closer. Both men had momentarily forgotten all about her.

  "We've not much time," Coldwell told him, "tie her up."

  *****

  With The Master holding her down and using an old frayed rope from his tidy draw, The Old Man managed to tie the woman to one of the hard-backed chairs. She had struggled at first, finally succumbing to the superior strength of the two men. He guessed she also stopped struggling for fear of hurting her unborn child. She just sat there now, quietly sobbing, any fight having left her, washed away with her tears.

  “That was the problem my old friend,” The Master shouted wildly above the noise outside, “it was the purity factor. I have had many years to think upon it, no one was ever quite pure enough for the spell to work.

  "You said so at the time," The Old Man shouted back over the sirens and explosions that competed with each other. He was scared now; the air raid was on top of them and they had left it too late to find a shelter. He suggested they go under the stage for greater protection but The Master ignored him.

  "You are born and then you sin," he continued to rant, it was the same rhetoric from twenty-five years ago, the result of countless kidnappings and failed sacrifices. "You enter this world hungry and selfish," The Master continued.

  Just like his master, The Old Man also had many years to think on all those sacrifices, the suffering the two of them had caused and he now understood them for what they were, nothing more than murders, pure and simple. They had justified them at the time, for knowledge and the supposed greater good, but they were murders never-the-less. He had almost felt relieved when Dunston and Vakovlev had started poking around, lead on no doubt by Rooksley, The Master's arch-rival. Luckily, they never knew the part The Old Man had played in those grisly murders so many years ago, had overlooked him in their pursuit of Coldwell. Could he really do this all over again? Murder innocent people in the vain hope for immortality? But what choice did he have, The Master's fate and his had been tied together for decades.

  "So you see, it's obvious," The Master explained, "for the energy to be pure, we must sacrifice a preborn."

  "But Master," The Old Man protested, slowly realising the horror of Coldwell's plan, "That'll mean killing your own child, won't it?"

  "Yes, my sacred blood flows through that unborn infant's veins, just think how powerful that is. Both potency and purity, my friend, how can we fail? Not this time."

  The Old Man looked at the woman, who was beyond any sense now, oblivious to the fate that awaited her and her child.

  "Right then," The Old Man sighed, resigned to what must be done, "but before we kill her, I think we should have one more cup of tea."

  The Old Man took the heavy water laden kettle from the hob and started towards the sink, ignoring his master's incredulous look.

  "This really isn't the time for..." Coldwell began to protest, but was suddenly struck dumb as The Old Man swung the heavy brass kettle around at arm’s length, striking his Master across the side of his head with a satisfying thwack. Coldwell's legs buckled beneath him and he dropped unconscious to the now soaking wet floor. The Old Man, now drenched in tepid water, quickly set to work untying the woman.

  "Listen," he said urgently, "you need to get out of here before your husband wakes up." She didn't seem to hear him, she just looked into space, but was gratefully no longer crying. The Old Man slapped her hard across the face, making her jump. Blinking, she started to focus as The Old Man awkwardly crouched down beside her. She slowly raised a hand to her cheek to touch the read welt that was forming there.

  "Listen," The Old Man repeated, "you must get up. You have to go." He started pulling her to her feet. "Take your chances in the air raid," he advised, "your husband plans to kill you." Her frightened eyes darted to her husband lying on the floor and widened still, when he let out a long deep groan. The Old Man quickly supported her to step over his prone body, warning her to mind the wet floor. Coldwell groaned again, his eyes flickering open. As the woman froze in shock, The Old Man quickly took one of the high-backed chairs and pinned Coldwell to the floor with it, wedging his thin body between the wooden legs. Coldwell grimaced in pain as The Old Man sat heavily down upon it. The Old Man's eyes met the woman’s as Coldwell started to weakly writhe. As the chair rocked with Coldwell's growing struggles. Fear welling up from his stomach, The Old Man warned her that he wouldn'
t be able to hold her husband down for much longer.

  "Run!" He screamed.

  The Limehill Chronical

  23rd February 1944

  A concentrated air raid all but completely destroyed the Limehill business district last night, with high explosive and incendiary bombs disrupting gas and water supplies and starting several fires. Damaged buildings include the famous Limehill Repertory Theatre, which was razed to the ground with two unfortunate fatalities, the theatre’s caretaker and a United States Army Captain, Victor Oswald. Captain Oswald was sheltering in the theatre with his wife Rita. Mrs Oswald, a British citizen, told our reporter that the caretaker, an elderly local man, had fallen while assisting her from the building. Mrs Oswald, who was expecting a baby at the time, told us that her husband had returned to the theatre for the care taker after leaving her sheltering on the stairs of the gentleman’s convenience on Leaver Street. Just seconds later the building received a direct hit from a high explosive bomb which collapsed the ceiling and most of the upper walls. No bodies were recovered. Mrs Oswald has since given birth to a healthy son, one month premature.

  © 2016 Chris Raven

 

  One Rainy Night

  By Priya Bhardwaj

  I wake up to a loud thunder instantly shaking wondering what had happened, looking around I notice something shining in a distance looking familiar. I gather my thoughts and open my eyes properly to see it’s my table lamp.

  I hear a loud thunder again followed by heavy rain and wild wind; it almost feels like a thunder storm. I get off my bed to grab a glass of water as I am walking towards my kitchen; I hear a loud bang on my front door. I rule that as just something random and continue walking towards my kitchen. I walk towards the fridge to grab a chilled bottle of water. Opening the fridge door, I grab a bottle and start walking back to my room as I hear a second bang on my door and this time it was louder than the last. Getting a little nervous, I look at the wall clock right above the fridge; I can hardly make out what time it but somehow manage to see its 1am. I choose to ignore the bang again thinking if it was someone looking for me they would rather call my name than bang the door. Ignoring, I continue walking towards my bed room and as I am about to enter I hear someone knock on my front door 4 times straight loudly and rushed.