Frightmares: A Fistful of Flash Fiction Horror (24 page)

Vincenzo Bilof
is an educator from Detroit, Michigan. Publication credits include six stories in SNM Magazine, with appearances in
Book of the Dead 6
(Living Dead Press) and three anthologies from Open Casket Press:
Zombie Buffet, Bigfoot Tales,
and
Dead Christmas
. Currently finishing the post-apocalyptic zombie novel, Under a Red Sun.

FERTILIZER

JOHN ERIK PETERSEN

The ground was baked to a hard crust, and the old man’s trowel chipped, more than dug, at its surface. He stood up next to his rusty pickup, drew a hand across his brow, and gazed across the expanse of his land.

It was useless, he thought. All fourteen-hundred acres of it. It grew more demanding every year.

A light breeze swirled out of the still air, lifting the few fine hairs on his scalp and chilling the sweat on his neck. It tickled at his ears, and out of it came the voice.

Hungry.

“No more,” the old man said. “Not this time.”

The ground under his feet churned. The hard crust dissolved into fine powder and spiraled downward in a funnel. The old man tried to run. His feet sunk into the roiling dirt, locking his legs in place. In a moment, he was buried up to his knees, and the churning stopped.

An old man makes a lean meal
, came the whisper.
But you’ll do in pinch.

“Maybe that’s as it should be,” the old man answered.

It hurts. You’ve heard their screams.

“I can take it.”

They scream for days. And for you, that’s only the beginning. A man with your history, why, you’ve nowhere to go but down.

“I deserve nothing more.”

Your sacrifice is useless. I’ve grown beyond your boundaries, and soon I will speak to your neighbor. The bits of me you have carried with you on the soles of your shoes have begun to come into their own.

The old man began to shake, his body shuddering from the knees up. He closed his eyes and shook his head.

I’ll double last year’s yield.

“I’m much too old to care about the money.”

Children are better for me. Why, a greedy young man just might be persuaded to bring me one. Perhaps a baby girl with green eyes.

“No! This is my burden.”

Ah, so sad when the consequences of the guilty destroy the innocent. I’ve given you many years of plenty. I will not hesitate to take my reward.

The old man dropped his head, and his tears spotted the soil dark. He pictured his granddaughter. Her soul-warming smile. The cheerful cooing of her newly discovered voice. Her stunning, bright green eyes. His heart ripped.

“How many?”

We shall see. You can start with three.

The dirt churned, boiling upward out of the ground until the old man stood on its surface again. He tossed his trowel into the truck’s cab, got in, and started the engine.

And make them young.

The old man drove for an hour, and then pulled over on the shoulder of the highway and cut the engine. He got out, opened the hood, and returned to the driver’s door. The surface of the asphalt was baked soft and sticky. It tugged at his shoes with each step. He leaned against the side of the truck and waited for someone to stop.

John Erik Petersen
is a professional technical writer, authoring user documentation for consumer electronics. He lives with his wife and three beautiful daughters in Overland Park, Kansas. John is a fan of classic supernatural horror, and he is working on a novel in that tradition, tentatively titled The Stendhal Curse.

GRASPING AT STRAWS

PATRICIA LA BARBERA

“Blood stained the floors. They left nothin’ else.”

Ellis stared across the chipped Formica diner table at his uninvited guest. “People have to get over it, Rufus, he said. “Consider themselves lucky to have survived.”

Turning his head away from Ellis, the old man rubbed his nose with his sleeve. His hair was oily gray weeds wandering from beneath his skullcap. He dug out a grimy rag from his gray quilted jacket. Rufus coughed up something Ellis tried not to think about.

“They’ve been gone for two weeks.” Ellis leaned forward a little and looked hard at the old man. “If anyone should be dwelling on the past, it should be me. They killed my father after they destroyed all the animals in his barn.” Ellis concentrated on steadying his hands.

“They’ll be back,” Rufus said.

“No, they only take form at night, and we burned all the straw here. It’s not happening in any other town.” As he said the words, Ellis realized it was a small consolation, with half of the residents of the town dead.

“They’re just waiting—straw men. You’ll see.” The old man stood and began walking down the aisle. “We can’t stay here.”

“Wait! Have something before you leave. Breakfast’s on me.” Ellis sipped his coffee.

Rufus waved him off and continued down the aisle. He opened the door, letting in tendrils of the thick, rolling fog.

Shut the door quickly
, Ellis thought. But Rufus took his time and then slowly walked down the steps.

The waitress set scrambled eggs, bacon, and a basket of rolls on the table. “Anything else, Ellis?”

He noticed her haggard face and empty eyes; she had seen too much and it had husked her hollow.

“No, Millie. That’s just fine.”

“It’s them!” the old man screamed from outside, his voice muffled by the diner’s windows.

Ellis shot a look out the window and saw Rufus pointing into the fog. Hesitating for a moment, he ran outside and grabbed him.

“Do you see them?” Rufus was still pointing.

“There’s nothing there. Come back inside.”

“No, they’re back! We gotta get away from here!” Rufus broke free and ran, disappearing into the fog.

Ellis sighed. He turned slowly and went back into the diner. Millie was putting silverware on a table and held a knife, turning it over in her hands. When he walked past her and calmly sat back in his booth, she set the knife down.

He swallowed his first bite of breakfast. “Eggs are good.” A piece of bacon crunched between his teeth. “Crispy. Just the way I like it.”

She smiled. Ellis thought he saw ghosts of happiness in her eyes.

He forked another mouthful of eggs and reached for a roll. The basket twitched, and one of the ties that held the lacquered straw popped free. He jerked his hand back and heard Millie scream. A pile of baskets unraveled on the counter. When the food stuck in his throat, Ellis coughed and pressed his lips together to form the “m” sound as the pieces of straw formed into a hand that reached for his throat.

Patricia La Barbera
, MFA, is a freelance editor. She has had poetry and prose published in various magazines such as
House of Horror, Fear and Trembling, SNM Horror Magazine, Flash Me Magazine, Big Pulp, Death Rattle, 69 Flavors of Paranoia,
and
Everyday Weirdness
. The writer's mystery novella is titled
The Celtic Crow Murders
. www.patricialabarbera.com.

GRAY

JANEL GRADOWSKI

Alex woke with a vicious headache. He was afraid to open his eyes, knowing light would make his pain rage. His nauseous stomach growled. A dull ache spread across his back. He tried to roll over, but couldn’t.

His eyes snapped open. Everything was gray.

A scream rattled in his throat, not able to escape. A rag had been stuffed in his mouth. The rancid wad mercilessly sucked up saliva. The noxious odor assaulted his sinuses.

He flexed his forearms. Bracelets of pain seared his wrists. Black dots danced across his vision.

The last thing he remembered was talking to another guy who had been attending the sales conference. They sat in the hotel bar drinking martinis.

That was it. His mind was blank after the second drink.

Alex exhaled through his nose and the gray shifted. It was fabric. Faint light filtered through the threads.

The bomb in his head exploded. The rope stretched across his forehead burrowed into his skin. A faint humming wormed into his consciousness. The sound got progressively louder.

It was a motor. He could feel the vibrations of tires rolling over pavement. His heartbeat pounded in his ears as a vehicle roared past.

Alex tried to arch his back to inchworm to safety. His chest strained against more rope. He dug in his heels and tried to raise his legs, but they were strapped down, too. A splinter from the plank he was bound to dug into his ankle.

Another automobile approached from the same direction. Vomit scorched his throat as it passed. The bass beat of a radio lingered in the damp air.

The cars weren’t slowing down. He wondered how they couldn’t see him.

A weather report playing on the bar’s television slipped into his thoughts,
heavy fog likely for the morning commute
.

The growl of a semi-truck perforated the cloth. It approached from the opposite direction of the other vehicles.

Alex squeezed his eyes shut while the whine of massive tires resonated through his body. He just wanted to go back to sleep so he could wake up from the nightmare—

Janel Gradowski
lives and writes among the farm fields of central Michigan. Her fiction and non-fiction work has appeared in
Long Story Short, Every Day Fiction, Luna Station Quarterly, Beadwork Magazine
and several other publications. You can also find her blogging at: http://janelsjumble.blogspot.com.

HOLLOWED WALLS

DIANE WARD

The human corpse in the painting reminded him of a drowned rat he’d once found in the swimming pool when he was nine years old—pallid, with bloated skin stretched until torn over tightly corded muscle.

Disgusted, he dropped the sheet that covered the painting back into place.

“It’s horrible,” he muttered. Not that the technique was poor. He didn’t know much about art, but he could tell the oil painting was of exceptional quality, despite being grotesque.

Deciding that no one else needed to know that his father had painted this—at least not until after the funeral—he stuffed the painting into a black trash bag. He set it with the rest of his dad’s belongings before he resumed cleaning out the house. It quickly became apparent that his father either had a strange sense of humor, or was just strange.

He found more paintings throughout the house. When he unhooked a painting of an orchid, he noticed that the wallbehind it was partially crumbled and a dried orchid was stuffed into the wall, peeking out in a manner that perfectly mirrored the image from the painting.

Curious, he used his pocket knife to carve out the spaces behind the other paintings, finding an old shoe, a smashed chair (his father had jammed the chair in with the insulation) and dozens of other objects. It seemed his father had buried the subject of each painting behind where it was framed.

The painting of the corpse gnawed at him, itching at the back of his mind like a trapped insect.

Could his father have killed someone and stuffed the corpse into the wall?

On a whim he pressed his ear to the wall where the painting of the corpse had originally hung. Holding his breath until his lungs ached, he strained to listen. Nothing. There also was no stench, but that didn’t prove anything. Still . . . he couldn’t shake the feeling that something
was
hidden behind the plaster, as if a nearly imperceptible pulse were reverberating beneath the wall’s surface.

The sensation was unbearable.

He ran to the garage and tore apart the workbench until he finally located a hammer, and then rushed back to the wall where he’d first discovered the painting. He pounded away until it broke open, and didn’t stop until he’d dug a hole approximately the size of a dartboard.

Sweat trickled down his brow as he took his cell phone and shined it into the hole. A creature packed into the wall like a maggot nested in rotted food craned its neck towards him with a featureless face.

***

The next day, the family came looking for him. They didn’t find much but bags of belongings and a large variety of oil paintings . . . one of which depicted two pale, faceless corpses twisted around one another in a dark hollow.

Besides writing,
Diane Ward
is an avid artist. She lives with a variety of reptiles in attended humidified terrariums. Since she lives in the Deep South, she plays the banjo, fortunately, it is tenor, not clawhammer.