Frightmares: A Fistful of Flash Fiction Horror (8 page)

“It’s fine,” I told him.

I was up late with an empty bottle when I called her to tell her I had decided to expand the room we used to share. I told her how glad I was that I would never have to spend another holiday with her mother in the extra bedroom. After I called her every name I had always wanted to call her when we were together, she hung up, sobbing. I sat in bed staring across the room at the hole in the wall. I had the whiskey in one hand and the phone still gripped tightly in the other, the dial tone blaring. I dropped both and approached the man-sized hole, and tore away the caution tape.

I peered sideways into the darkness; it had been a week, yet no one had come by to take the bodies. I crept inside carefully to get a better look. There were three dusty, disarticulated bodies lying on the floor that I could see, but there might even be more, deeper in the space. There was just enough room within the wall for me to squeeze through, shuffling sideways over the unfortunate souls that had been abandoned there for decades. Stepping over bones I walked slowly, further and further into the wall with my arms held up high. I thought about what I said to her, the names, the stuff about her mom, and I started to laugh. I kept moving sideways into the space between the walls, laughing, and then began choking on the dust. I tried moving my arms down to cover my mouth instinctively, but there wasn’t enough room. That’s when I noticed the pain; I had been holding my arms up for twenty minutes. My feet were sore too, having been mashed awkwardly as I tried to walk through the wall. All at once I felt completely exhausted but I kept stepping over bodies and moving further.

Later, I awoke in total darkness. My head hurt. I tried to move back in the direction I had come, but it was impossible to position myself correctly; my body was sore from being in the same position for so long while I slept. A spider crawled down my face and bit me. I gasped in pain, but I couldn’t even swat it away. I couldn’t see them, but I could feel the hollow gaze of the forgotten skulls as they watched me, amused.

In the darkness between the walls I shouted franticly for help. In the darkness I waited.

I am still here.

Aspiring author
Jack Nealy
shares a birthday with horror movie legend Bela Lugosi and has harbored a lifelong fascination with all things horror and pulp. He grew up in Southern California where he happens to live two blocks from a cemetery. He is currently working towards a degree in Literature.

THE REAL WORLD

CYNDIE GOINS HOELSCHER

Never before had I experienced the oppressive darkness that gathered just beyond the lights of the midway my first night working at the circus. Clouds hovered chillingly close to the ground. A brisk wind twisted them into ghostly figures prophesying doom.

“What’s up buttercup?” Joshua called, walking to join me in looking up at the sky.

“I don’t know,” I hesitated, watching a cloud shift into a form and dissolve once again. “Do you see that?”

“What?”

“Never mind,” I replied.

I suspiciously watched the clouds as they pirouetted around the Big Top. Fingers seemed to emerge, beckoning the fog to blanket the ground. I shifted nervously.

“You’re scared of fog?” Josh laughed at my expression. “Baby, it’s just clouds! Look, we can dance on the clouds tonight!

“Uh. What the . . . ?”

A grinning clown materialized out of the dense fog only a few feet away from us. His blue Mohawk and peeling pancake make-up made me take a step backward. His pursed lips were painted in a perpetual smile. But the clown’s eyes riveted me the most. Gray, like the fog around us, they didn’t reflect light.

“Hey man! You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that!” Josh yelled. He tried to push the clown back, but his hand sank into the clown’s torso with a sickening crunch.

Josh stared at his arm, now firmly lodged in the creature. Its grin sharpened into a sneer as Josh strained to free his arm.

“It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real!” I repeated to myself using the words my shrink had taught me to banish my recurring nightmares. How often had he smiled condescendingly and assured me that killer aliens, zombies and monsters didn’t really exist? My nightmares were figments of my over-active imagination and a brain that was basically undisciplined and dysfunctional. Once I secured a real job and walked around in the real world, I would have normal dreams like everyone else.

“It’s not real,” I repeated once more.

The zombie clown sank his teeth into Josh’s neck. The fog turned red as his blood spurted out around the clown’s mouth, fine red drops misting my face, slaughtering my mantra, leaving me helpless.

This
is the real world, and there’s no such thing as nightmares.

A NEW SUIT

JOHN HUNT

Charles awoke with a start, naked and cold on a concrete floor. Laying in darkness, he could only make out vague, indistinct shadows. He tried to sit up but screamed when searing pain, sharper than any knife, radiated up his legs. His shriek echoed around him, high pitched—a stranger’s scream. He ran a tentative hand down his thigh, and recoiled when this light touch produced disproportionate pain. The strange lumps in his thighs suggested that his legs were broken. He realized he would have to crawl out of here, dragging the now-useless appendages behind him.

He’d picked a fight with a little guy in a bar. He recalled a fist connecting with his face followed by a blurred image of the barroom floor, wet with boot prints, rising up to meet him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d lost a fight; he was a big guy, six-feet-six and thick with muscle, who’d spent years cultivating a nasty image justified by his malicious actions. He’d even been incarcerated multiple times for his violent tendencies. He was the guy with the handlebar moustache, scruffy face, beady eyes and jailhouse tattoos—the guy no one ever dared to fuck with. Until now.

A blinding light snapped on, catching him in its spotlight like a broken beetle lying on its back. The dizzying illumination revealed old crumbling brick, and water sliding down the walls to collect in cracks on the floor. Charles realized he was in a derelict building, far from any help. He looked up when the shadow fell upon him, and was alarmed to see that the little guy was naked.

“I’m not into guys,” Charles stated.

“Neither am I,” the little guy growled.

“Then what do you want?”

“A new meat puppet . . . something that fits better than this bag of bones. I think you’ll do nicely.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You’ll see.”

The little guy opened his mouth, and Charles heard a pop when the man’s jaw bone dislocated and his mouth grew impossibly wide. A sound like the buzzing of crickets filled the room. Black, hairy fingers resmbling spider legs sprouted from the little guy’s mouth and then folded back to grasp the distended cheeks. The fingers pushed outwards, stretching the skin like rubber until small lacerations began to form in the middle of the little guy’s lips. These lacerations became jagged rips, rupturing the flesh around the mouth, tearing apart the nose, splitting the chin, and slashing down the chest and stomach until the shredded body lay torn in half at Charles’ feet. Charles’ eyes fixed upon the grotesque pile of skin, muscle and viscera piled in front of him, which no longer resembled anything human. Then
it
stepped away from the slop.

Charles began to scream when the hairy monstrosity looked down at him with six fathomless black eyes and declared, “I always liked the feel of a new suit.”

A busy father of four,
John Hunt
is a published author who had not started writing until late 2009. Most of his writing is done during his spare time. He works and lives in the city of Guelph, Ontario, Canada with his family.

THE VOYEUR

RAN WALKER

The old man eased out from the shadows, his motions fluid and easy as he lifted his camcorder into the sunlight. He adjusted the zoom, aiming it at the top of the building as the child stepped into view. The flowing satin cape caught on the slight breeze, and damned if the kid didn’t really look like a superhero. The child placed his fists on either side of his waist and poked out his chest, taking in the moment. It was a thing of beauty, the old man thought.

The boy stepped to the edge of the roof, his golden locks shifting with the wind.

“You have to believe,” the old man whispered, adjusting his camcorder. He looked away for a moment at the group of children gathering below. They were doing just as he had instructed them. Now the
real
crowd would come.

A woman looked upward and screamed.

“Someone call 9-1-1!” a man yelled.

The old man quickly lowered his camcorder to get a shot of the growing crowd before returning his focus to the boy who stood frozen like a statue atop the building. He could scarcely make out the boy’s face, but it was clear the boy’s posture and stance betrayed his ten-year-old body.

Then the boy moved. Just a slight step, but everyone, including the old man, gasped collectively. It was a delicious moment, this child flaunting his power over this world, proud in his ability to transcend gravity and give himself over to his dreams. The old man smiled, his hand perspiring behind the camcorder.

Without warning, the boy leapt off the building, his cape catching in the wind and trailing boldly behind him as he outstretched his arms so that his body became parallel with the earth. It was a beautiful sight, thought the old man, as he moved his camera with the child.

In the brief seconds after the boy’s commitment to flight, the man watched gravity wrap its heavy hands around the child, yanking him to the earth with such violent force that the boy seemed to disintegrate into bloody dust as his body slammed against the concrete.

When the old man later replayed the video, he admired that fleeting moment when the boy, prostrate against the wind and oblivious to the screams below, floated just off the roof of the building, his cape rippling perfectly behind him. The man hoped that the other children would be equally inspired. Surely there was one among them who viewed himself as bulletproof or capable of breathing under water.

Pausing the video just before the child hit the sidewalk below, the old man smiled at the intensity of the child’s expression.

That boy was determined to fly—even until the very end.

Ran Walker
is a native of Mississippi and currently teaches creative writing at Hampton University. He can be reached at www.ranwalker.com.

THE SUMMING OF PARTS

VINCE DARCANGELO

Tommy can’t help that he was born with cheesecloth skin, knobby limbs, and that hideous, asymmetrical face. He winces at his reflection in the mirror. His mouth droops as if he’s catching flies.

Tommy Flystrip
, Sam Dillard has called him since freshman year.

And sure, Tommy knows that beauty is not the summing of parts, but still he feels like a monster constructed of odd-fitting pieces. He stares at this disfigured wreck of a thing and wonders,
Who could love me?
Or,
Who would ever touch me?
which is worse, because you could love ugly. You could love it like a child. But who wanted to touch it?

Julia Dillard is nothing like her brother. She never called him Tommy Flystrip, but she is too beautiful to really love him.

Today, in front of her locker, he’d asked Julia to accompany him to see a movie. She flashed a smile, but it was the wrong kind. Her eyes avoided his and before she could respond, Sam snuck up from behind and pulled down his pants, underwear and all.

Tommy shudders, recalling the humiliation. He slams a fist into his reflection. Bright blood splatters the wall, but the ugly doesn’t go away. He digs through the broken glass for the sharpest piece. It sparkles in the dim motel light, and though beauty is not the sum of one’s individual parts, he believes that if he could fix the most offensive sections of his body he could create a more appealing whole.

I will be beautiful
, Tommy says to the broken mirror.

He pierces himself with the glass and cuts. There is pain, but also a pleasant tingling in his neck and head. The bathroom darkens and swirls, and Tommy concentrates on his breathing. Then he peels back that disgusting layer of skin to see if there’s a beautiful version of himself living inside the ugly one. There isn’t, so he cuts deeper, all over. The tip of his nose plops into the sink. An acne-scarred cheek hangs like a banana peel.

For a moment, he almost forgets Julia is waiting for him in the next room.

Instead of the cinema, Tommy brought her here, to this forgotten motel far from town. Now Tommy feels sorry, because despite his efforts, he can’t make himself beautiful enough for her.

On the bed, Julia is squirming beneath her bonds. The duct tape seals her screams. Peels of flesh hang off him like a tattered suit, and Tommy Flystrip kisses her with the shredded remnants of his lips. He’ll keep the best parts for himself before taking her home. He presses the bloody glass to her face and searches for the beauty within.