9 Tales Told in the Dark 2

by 9 Tales Told in the Dark

  Then again—what if they break up in a week—then what?

  It wasn’t but two years ago that Ellie had been sentenced to Christmas in the Hamptons with her almost-fiancé. It was then that she knew the relationship wasn’t going to work out. Sometimes she saw Gentry’s posts online, his vacation photos on Instagram and she wondered if just maybe had she not felt so awkward that Christmas weekend that she would be basking in the orange glow of Hawaii and sending postcards from the Riviera. Not that Shane could provide Sara (or was it Cera) with lavish vacations and sparkling diamonds.

  But there was regret. She couldn’t even remember what she loved or didn’t love about Gentry anymore. All she felt now was a desire to live a life other than her current one.

  Ellie didn’t keep a journal detailing her every thought, but she was positive that not a day passed in which she thought how nice it would be if the world ended. A gigantic reset button that would save her from the dredge of all that was set in motion long before she came into the world.

  “May I help you?” The voice was scratchy, like it was spoken through a tattered paper bag.

  Ellie turned—and then actually had to look down. The person decked out in the store’s customary red vest (now littered with inoffensive holiday pins) was very, very short. Ellie was only five feet two inches, but this salesclerk only came up to her waist.

  “Uh, yeah, help would be nice,” Ellie said, trying all at once not to make eye contact and not look obviously shocked by the small helper’s stature.

  “The gift you buy, your desire to do right is more effort than most.”

  “I know, I know. It’s the thought that counts, but I don’t really know my brother’s girlfriend but we all drew names for a gift exchanged and I ended up with her.”

  “She is lucky to have you.” The helper winked. “May all your Christmas wishes finally come true.”

  The Helper handed Ellie a Christmas Card.

  The front read: You better watch out…

  When she looked up from the card—the helper was gone.

  THE PRESENT

  Ellie shivered at the thought. That somehow, all of this was her fault. But she couldn’t really blame herself. Could she? It was happening all over the world. All. Over. And if it was because she was naughty—wouldn’t she had died and not her family.

  She stood up, determined to make a stand against this nightmare.

  That’s when her head hit the stocking. Her stocking. Her embroidered name left no doubt in her mind. It was unusually heavy.

  She peaked inside. It was full of coal.

  She ripped the stocking off the mantle. Slung it through the air. She slammed it against a lamp, cracked drywall as she marched through the house. Ellie yanked the front door open—it had been left slightly ajar.

  The helper surprised her.

  Ellie stumbled back into the house. Then remembered she intended to kill it.

  But its squeaky voice froze her, hypnotizing her into a temporary paralysis that insisted reasoning and allowing the creature to speak.

  “Where are you going, Ellie?” the helper asked. “It is too cold to go out dressed like that. Your place is in here where it will be warm for a little longer.”

  Ellie wanted to tell the helper that she was going to kill it for murdering her family—and everyone. But her lips didn’t budge.

  “Murder is a complicated idea that is often simplified in order to invoke rage. We do not view our work as murder. But one necessary for survival.”

  Survival? Ellie wanted to strangle the helper—for her survival.

  “Yes, survival, and specifically your survival. The world will be rid of the cogs that kept it turning towards the evils of the universe. Only the good survive.”

  The good? Me? My family wasn’t evil. I was the one who lost the Christmas spirit! That’s what you are, an evil little elf. The coal! Santa Claus even brought me coal. Fight me. Kill me! Let me be with my family!

  “It is good to worry about what others think. To make an effort when you could just assume the worse consequence. The world needs more like you, Ellie. The coal will keep you warm through the winter. Once Santa’s conquest is completed, it will be easier to send more supplies. Stay strong, Ellie. This is what we always wished for.”

  “A reset…”

  The helper smiled and vanished into the night air. A jingle followed, echoing down from the moonlit sky.

  THE END.

  THE HEADSTONE’S HOUR BY INK BERMAN

  “Just pull over already.” Johnny rammed his head into the back of the driver’s headrest. “Christ, I fucking said pull the fuck over, mother fucker.”

  The van responded and pulled off to the side. The driver twisted his eyes into the rearview mirror and glared at Johnny.

  “Look, numb nuts, if we don’t find a place we can afford for the night we’re screwed.”

  “Oh? No shit, motherfucker. But we can’t afford the goddamned mother fucking gas if you keep driving around this bumfuck town like a stupid ass clown.”

  “Phil, Johnny’s right. Let’s just kill some time. The show is at 7 and maybe we should just get back on the highway afterwards.” R.J. had always been the voice of reason in the band. But right now, all Phil could think was how he always sided with Johnny, as if he was scared of him.

  “You’ll be paying for my Red Bulls,” Phil said and reclined his seat as hard as he could. Johnny dodged the attack and slid the van door open. It caught like it always did. Like a seatbelt when you pull it too fast. He eased up on it and it slid the rest of the way open.

  “Check it out, there’s a pretty old cemetery.” R.J. pointed. “Might make some cool promo pics. Make the best of it right?” He patted Phil’s shoulder and followed Johnny out of the van.

  “Hey, stupid fucks! We can’t just leave the damned instruments all alone.” Phil yelled out the window. “Stupid bastards.”

  “Come on.” R.J. called again.

  Phil looked around, they hadn’t passed a single car since they left the hotel that they supposedly did not book, and was all booked up with people coming from all over for the big show. The big show that would finally get them some recognition.

  A festival in bumfuck nowhere, wasn’t that what Woodstock was? That’s what R.J. kept saying.

  “Come on! You’ve got to see this!” R.J. yelled, now several yards deep in the cemetery.

  Phil yanked the keys from the ignition. “What? What?”

  “Look.” Johnny ordered pointing at a headstone.

  “Damn. That. Is. Sweet. You know what that is don’t you? That’s our next fucking album cover,” Phil said as his eyes lit up.

  “No shit.” Johnny said.

  The three stared at the headstone. A clock face and layers of gears and arms formed a working clock, softly ticking away the seconds that they stared.

  “Who puts a clock on a tombstone?” Johnny laughed. “It’s brilliant.”

  “There a name on it?”

  “No name.” R.J. said. “I’ll go grab the camera.”

  “It’s in the bag under the bass drum.” Phil yelled, unable to take his eyes off the clock.

  “Maybe he was a clockmaker. The Greatest Clockmaker.” Johnny joked, laughing as his mind rhymed with Clockmaker, “I don’t know, seems like it has more gears than it needs. Maybe it does something else.” He shrugged and started off, “I’m gonna keep looking around.”

  Phil watched Johnny for all of a second. He even heard the clock tick to mark it. He returned his attention to the delicately designed yet sturdy and perhaps brass clock face.

  R.J. returned with the camera.

  “Saw the gate up there, says this place closes in a few minutes. From Dusk til dawn and then from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. Kinda of random. Caretaker’s lunch hour probably. Where’s Johnny?”

  “He went exploring.”

  R.J. began to take pictures of the clock as it ticked softly. It seemed to almost match the artificial click the digital camera produced to remind
people of a film camera. Not at the same time, but almost a response.

  A tick for a tick.

  A voice yelled from near their parked van.

  “Hey! Hey!” They turned to see a man waving erratically.

  “Told you, caretaker wants to go to lunch.”

  Phil laughed. “Small dumb ass towns.”

  They started toward the man. A look of fear came over his face and he checked his wristwatch.

  “We’re coming,” Phil yelled back. “Chill out, dude.”

  The man stepped back into his parked sedan, rolled up all his windows. They were just close enough to hear him lock all his doors. Then he looked at his wristwatch again and shook his head.

  He didn’t look afraid. He looked sad.

  R.J. and Phil shared a look of confusion and turned around to call for Johnny.

  There was a strange cloudiness, unlike fog. The air felt cooler and the sky, while not dark, was dimmer. Like early morning facing west where the sun hasn’t touched yet.

  They heard a click that echoed within them like the slamming of the door.

  It was one o’clock.

  They both turned back to look at the man in the car, but they couldn’t see it. It was just the strange cloudiness, like looking into the bottom of a muddy pond.

  “Let’s find Johnny and get the fucking hell out of this shitty place.” R.J. suggested it, but it was on both their minds. Something was about to happen. It was like when the waves at the beach start to crash just a little harder. Only those waves broke in one-second increments.

  “Johnny!” Phil called.

  Every tick was felt without an echo. A sharp pinch of a needle.

  “Johnny!” they both called and wandered, keeping each other in sight. They couldn’t speak of the dread that started to fill them. There should be no reason to fear a cemetery. As far as they had believed there were no such things as ghosts and the undead only appeared on album covers.

  They kept calling for Johnny.

  “Come on, he probably went back to the van to jerk off.”

  Phil buried his first response, which had been to say they could leave their lead singer behind. He convinced himself Johnny would head back to the van.

  But which way was the van?

  The clouds had become thicker and only a few headstones dotted a horizon that was almost only as far as one could stretch their arms.

  “Head towards the clock.” R.J. said as he tried to go in the direction of the ticks. They must’ve walked for minutes before he would admit that the sound seemed to be coming from no particular direction at all.

  “The sign said, ‘it was closed from 1 to 2.’ Maybe we just have to wait this out.”

  “What is it, swamp gas?” Phil stopped in his tracks. His frustration had multiplied. Not only had they not booked a hotel correctly, but now they’d managed to get stranded in a cemetery for no explainable reason. He was almost certain it was a dream, if his peripheral vision hadn’t been so clear. He knew in his dreams it was always narrower. It always felt as if he was squinting. Not here.

  “There he is.” R.J. pointed to a pair of legs that started to show beneath the thick clouds. The legs pressed forward and slowly the clouds revealed an abdomen and then a red tie neatly dangling from a collared neck, and then a chin and a mouth. Followed by a nose and eyes.

  Eyes like raisins.

  Dark, dead, and wrinkled.

  They twisted in the eye sockets and oozed black syrup down the cheeks, curling inwards towards the man’s lips.

  They did what any musicians would.

  They ran.

  Hopping over tombstones like hurdles. Begging the dead their forgiveness and saintly intervention.

  They had once been able to see to the edges of the cemetery, but now seemed to be running around it in circles. The ticking clock reminding them they were on some strange treadmill.

  There were more people standing in the clouds. Watching as R.J. and Phil panicked in every direction, sliding to a stop to turn away from another group of strangers.

  No one was chasing them. Not a soul.

  They were exhausted and the air in the clouds was cooler and scratched at their lungs as they fought to breathe. The both collapsed on the ground and watched as the strange people moved towards them in the clouds.

  “Where the hell is Johnny?” Phil realized he’d wasted his last ounce of adrenaline by yelling.

  “Shut up.” R.J. wasn’t able to take his eyes off the tortured forms that started to become more vivid with every step they took, every step in time with the ticking of the clock. “Don’t come any closer!”

  The people stopped. The blackness dangling off their lips rose like snakes, disobeying gravity. They reached out like tentacles, or the whiskers of a cat. They could sense R.J. and Phil. Perhaps they couldn’t see but they could definitely sense they were there.

  “Who goes there?” A voice came from behind them. Every syllable matched the ticking clock.

  “Did Johnny slip us some acid?” Phil asked. It was a likely scenario if they had had money for some. They wouldn’t get paid until after the show and all three had been mining lint the last couple nights hoping to have enough for gas.

  “They’re not ours.” The rest of the people surrounding them spoke in variations and some just shrugged and grunted.

  “I’m surprised there are visitors today,” The man said like tick, tock. “They must be here by error.”

  The man’s black whiskers read the air.

  “We didn’t mean to trespass.” R.J. apologized, he slowly dared to stand up, and Phil wearily followed until they were at eye level with the gruesome man before them.

  “Where is your friend?” The man asked. “Did he run off without you? Did he lead you here for us?”

  The tentacles seemed to smell the fear that R.J. and Phil perspired. They couldn’t put it past Johnny to ditch them here, running off at the first hint of trouble. They couldn’t even put it past Johnny to not have researched the strange headstone on the Internet before. Johnny always had to be one up. He always had to be the center of attention. How could they not imagine him plotting his very own VH1 special BEHIND THE MUSIC where his original band mates are murdered by the undead in a cemetery just before their big breakthrough concert forcing him to perform a solo set for the ages?

  “We just stopped for a minute, our band is playing in the festival tonight.” R.J. continued to phrase all of his sentences as apologies.

  “The musicians.” Did the blackness at his lips force a smile or had his dead flesh been delighted on its own? “Then you have come to appease us.”

  The blackness was helping his smile, it kept reaching down and pulling the corners of the man’s mouth up, but it couldn’t sustain its grasp and so a smile flickered on the man’s face to the rhythm of the second hand.

  “Sure we’re here to help, but we must be on our way if you could just point us back to our…”

  Too many voices broke Phil’s confidence and he lost his ability to speak again as he tried to sift through what the people surrounding him were discussing.

  “When I say ‘run’ you run,” R.J. whispered.

  “We are frightening them. Please take a moment and look, no one has explained to them,” the man said, silencing the others.

  “Oh Christ, we’re dead R.J., I knew it we died on the way here somewhere.”

  The man shook his head. They were not dead, not yet anyways. The thought wasn’t as appealing when imagining what these people intended to do to them.

  “This is a small town, we don’t get many visitors that we do not know. In the old days towns started up with people who had similar ideas and values. Not like the confusion that is a city but with people who loved and would do anything for their neighbors, but life was harder and so many died that a cemetery had to be built.

  “I helped build so much of it with my bare hands. And I thought I was honoring them when he came and offered us a way to see them again. To see us a
gain.”

  The man waved his arm at the group, who all solemnly nodded as if disappointed in their hideous existence.

  “He built the clock.”

  Through the clouds, they could see it again as if it had heard its name mentioned.

  “For years I visited, but our loved ones were just so happy to see us. They didn’t tell us that we sentenced them to hell. We hear the ticking. For an hour we walk above the ground, but every other hour we feel the roots and the worms, the dirt in our lungs and we hear that damned ticking, etching into our mind counting down until we can walk again. I can only assume it hasn’t been an eternity yet?”

  They didn’t know if they were supposed to respond with the date or not and both thought it was wise not to make the undead any angrier.

  “But we’ve told this generation. We’ve demanded that they help soothe us, and so they have brought you all.”

  Sacrifice.

  The word repeated with every tick and every tock.

  Sacrifice.

  Some strange occult practice had done this. Phil and R.J. both wanted was for Johnny to pop out of nowhere, wake them up, and remind them it is only dream.

  Or had Johnny sold his soul for fame and fortune. Their hatred towards Johnny was starting to grind their teeth. Their minds jumped forward and backward as if they were capable of walking through the group that surrounded them and off into the sunset. But it couldn’t. Their minds hit the wall that was their skulls and rattled around like a hamster in its wheel.

  “What songs will you play us?” They heard one of the women ask. It was obvious she had asked out of turn, all the others glared at her.

  “Uh what would you like to hear?’ R.J. asked as if he wasn’t sitting in the boiling pot with all the cannibals gathered around asking him to sing. Phil nudged him, reminding him of the situation.

  “Play something pretty.” A small girl tugged at her mother’s dress and clumps of dirt fell to the ground at their feet.

  “Not yet, the moon is not right.” The man said.

  “But I don’t want to hear the clock anymore.” The little girl wined. By her clothes, she looked a century’s worth out of fashion.