Screamscapes: Tales of Terror (10 page)

“I wanted to ask you about this part – everyone, everywhere is wondering what it means. I thought, hell, I can ask you directly.”

The guard began to read aloud.

“Mah-zoe Mah-zoe toso nimi so,”
he read, chanting.

Gerard ran to the front of the cell and grabbed the bars, shouting.

“Stop, please stop! Don’t read that
out loud!”

The guard continued reading aloud as though Gerard hadn’t said a word.

“Tumay noso oolaya ma-yi

Noso olaya anona ya na-mi

Tumay noso oolaya ma-yi

Mah-zoe Mah-zoe toso nimi so.”

The guard fell silent and the book dropped from his hand, falling with a dull thud onto the concrete floor. The guard stared at it, confused; then he looked at Gerard and stepped towards the cell.

Gerard backed away.

The guard smiled as he pressed his mustache against the bars, his pupils so dilated that his eyes looked black. Even from several feet away, Gerard could feel the guard’s hot breath tickling the skin on his face. It was hot, too hot, almost scalding, like steam blowing from a kettle.

“You know what, boy?” the guard said, his voice surly and strange. “Your book inspired me. I think I might become a writer myself, someday.”

This story was the opening volley of my ongoing writing adventure.

Initially published as “The Demon Writer”, the original version had an added prologue & epilogue that served to add a double-twist to the story, a trick of sorts on the reader, which was removed from “Whatever Possessed You” to create a more straightforward tale.

In writing this, my goal was to employ a style that would stand nicely alongside Joe Hill’s “20th Century Ghosts”, one of my favorite short story collections (think ‘Abraham’s Sons’ or ‘Best New Horror’).

While my writing chops are obviously still in development here, I remain proud that this story will always be my first.

Gertrude

“S
o tell me about yourself,” I said.

Despite his condition, the man spoke with cheerful frankness, his napkin still tucked into his shirt collar like a bib. He clutched a fork tightly in his left hand, his knuckles bone white, as though he was unable to let go of it.

“I have a symbiotic twin named Gertrude,” he said, matter-of-factly. “She lives in a cavity under my ribcage, next to my spleen.”

He leaned forward and continued in a whisper.

“If I lie very still in bed at night, I can hear her. I think she might be crying.”

He glanced around the room nervously, as though to check if anyone were eavesdropping.

It was hard to tell from his manner of speaking that he was injured; it would have been a natural assumption that the red splatter down his front was nothing more than spilled marinara.

But the half-eaten plate of food on the table in front of him held only chicken, rice and broccoli - not a drop of red sauce in sight.

I stepped back to give the paramedic more room to work. She lifted the bottom of the man’s shirt, exposing the area where his stomach should have been. The abdomen was now a tattered tangle of messy flesh, looking every bit like an exploded pot pie, all the way down to the peas and carrots.

The medic gagged as she attempted to clean the area around the gaping wound, her mind undoubtedly reeling from the impossibility of the task at hand.

I covered my face with my hand to try and shield myself from the putrid smell.

“Why did you do it?” I asked the dying man.

He carefully moved the IV tube that was taped to his forearm out of the way and leaned back a bit in his chair. He took a deep breath, a faraway look of hopelessness rising in his eyes.

Shock was setting in. I knew I didn’t have much time.

“
Why did you do it
?” I asked him again, more harshly this time. My voice jarred him back into reality.

“I didn’t do it. She did,” he said.

“Who?”

“Gertrude.”

“
This
Gertrude?” I asked sarcastically, pointing to the woman opposite him, whose body was sprawled across the table. “Are you telling me she did this to herself?”

The dead woman’s face was mangled and swollen and her throat torn open, as though she had been attacked by wild animals with claws. A mass of distended blue veins bulged from the wound in her neck like wiring from a vandalized circuit box.

He shook his head from left to right.

“That’s not Gertrude,” he said weakly.

“Then who is she?”

“She’s my girlfriend – no, my fiancé. I asked her to marry me tonight. I made her dinner,” he said, the life in his voice melting away like an icicle in July.

“Then who the hell is Gertrude?” I demanded.

“I told you,” he wheezed. “I have a symbiotic twin named Gertrude. She lives in a cavity under my ribcage, next to my spleen.”

His sentence finished with a cough and a gurgle. Dark blood welled up in his mouth, spilling over his bottom lip, dripping down his chin. Then his eyes became fixed on some faraway spot over my left shoulder.

“If I lie very still in bed at night, I can hear her. I think she might be crying,” he continued softly.

I watched the spark of life burn out at the back of his eyes.

Then, just like that, he was gone.

I motioned for the paramedic to stop fiddling with his bandages. All that was needed now was a body bag and a gurney.

Two of them, I guess.

I waited while my team marked the crime scene and taped off the front of the property so nobody could enter. With the bodies removed and sent off to the morgue we could come back tomorrow, give the scene a good combing over. No use in wasting a perfectly good evening sitting around in a slaughterhouse, when the wife had a hot meal waiting for me at home.

I hoped it wasn’t pot pie.

I was the last one out of the place, I always am – as chief detective, it’s procedure.

I flipped off the light in the hallway and was headed for the front door when I stopped dead in my tracks.

I had heard something, I was sure of it. I walked back into the empty hallway and listened.

There it was again.

Someone was crying.

I drew my weapon and crept stealthily down the hall, stopping in front of the laundry room door. Whoever it was, it sounded as if they were in there.

Gun at the ready, I pried the door open with my foot. There was a blood smear on the bottom half of the dryer.

I flipped on my flashlight, opened the dryer door and shined the light inside.

That’s when she screamed.

I jumped back, startled, slamming into the wall on the opposite side of the hallway, knocking the wind clean out of my lungs. I tried my best to hold the light steady as it illuminated the wailing female abomination that sat, naked inside the dryer, its body covered in green slime and dried blood. It -
she
- suckled an even smaller creature that appeared to be growing out of her side, suckling contentedly on a fleshless, oozing breast.

“He was mine!” Gertrude shrieked, her eyes hot embers in the flashlight’s beam. “He was my man. She had no right to take him from me! He already had a wife, already had a child!”

She pulled the horrid thing forcibly away from her breast, and held it up in her solitary, twisted, three-fingered hand for me to see, thick pus dribbling both from her nipple and the thing’s tiny mouth. It was the size of a newborn rat, but not even half as pretty.

The thing she called a child began to scream, and so did she.

And so did I.

I was having lunch with a group of people I didn’t know and who didn’t know me. Someone had the brilliantly original idea to have each person introduce themselves in turn around the table.

One person after the other said basically the same thing: “Hi everybody! I’m Bob, and I’m married, and I’ve got two-point-five kids who play soccer and we live in the suburbs and life is just as sweet as vanilla pudding,” or something to that effect. I slipped into a semi-comatose state after the fourth repetition of the same story of life’s grand adventure.

Then all eyes turned to me. I hadn’t even thought about what I was going to say. My life felt messy and not easily summed up in a trite splooge of happy words.

Before I knew it, I heard myself speaking: “Well, I have a symbiotic twin named Gertrude. She lives in a cavity under my ribcage, next to my spleen,” I said, surprised at the words coming out of my mouth. “If I lie very still in bed at night, I can hear her. I think she might be crying.”

Everyone stared at me, speechless. After a few awkward moments, someone to my left said, “Wow. You should be a writer.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said as casually as possible before quickly excusing myself from the table and running for my laptop.

I didn’t know where it had come from, but I had my next story.

Arbor
eat
um

A NOVELLA OF HORROR

I. A Flaming Sword

D
irt is edible.

It could even be considered delicious, especially if your last meal was several days ago.

Fifteen-year-old Micah Jenkins became acutely aware of this simple fact as he lay on his belly, scooping soft gray clay from the bottom of a cool running stream as if it were ice cream.

The clay was the first thing he had found to eat since his family had run out of food three days before. There wasn’t much in the way of roots or berries to forage for here in the middle of the prairie, far west of Missouri; the wild game was small and nimble, mostly a waste of ammunition to try and shoot – and a rabbit or a gopher certainly wouldn’t provide enough meat to feed everyone anything close to a proper meal.

He wished that his family had stayed with the main group, but no – Lemuel’s creeping mental shift had blossomed into a full-blown messianic delusion. No surprise there. He was always rambling about finding the Garden of Eden and other such nonsense.

It had all reached full boil when the family heads of the wagon train had flatly rejected his frantic demand to follow his “revelation” and veer off the established trail. That was when Lemuel had struck off on his own, dragging Micah’s father Samuel and the rest of the family along.

Micah hadn’t seen a trading post, another wagon, or even a halfway decent watering hole since he and his family had started travelling through this uncharted prairie. Now he was pretty sure they had fully completed the transition from
travelling through
to being
stranded in
this endless expanse of nothingness. The year eighteen thirty-nine hadn’t been a good one so far, and he hoped it wouldn’t end up being the one carved on his headstone.

They had passed a handful of sod huts during the previous days, but they never got within more than a hundred yards or so of any of them. Each hut featured a scrawny man or a tattered couple in front, clutching a gun and possessing a powerful case of the thousand-mile stare that suggested perhaps they had eaten some - maybe all - of their children during the winter before, and that any visitors, invited or otherwise, might end up on the menu for dinner that night.

The thought gave Micah the shivers. If ever there was a man who would gladly eat his young to save himself, it was Lemuel. He hoped they found food and shelter before Lemuel got
really
hungry.

He plunged his hand into the water and dug up a second handful of creamy clay from the streambed, sucking the goop hungrily from his fingers.

The clay had a strong mineral taste, like the medicinal tonic his father forced him to choke down whenever he got the fever; the only thing missing was the warm sting of alcohol on the back end. He also thought it tasted a little bit like blood, though that may have been from the growing number of open sores inside his mouth, Micah wasn’t sure.

He stopped eating for long enough to glance at the other children, who had gathered around, watching him intently. There was a total of nine children in their wayward caravan, including himself - although he hardly considered himself a child.