Screamscapes: Tales of Terror (5 page)

The woman was on her side, facing away from him towards the stone foundation, her bottom leg sticking straight out, the other leg pulled up slightly; ankle resting daintily on calf.

He placed his hand on her shoulder and pulled her gently towards him. Her head flopped back and her empty gaze met his.

“No, no, no, no!” Tom whimpered in a low sobbing tone as he recognized who it was.

It was Miranda. The new light of his life –
no, fuck that
– the only light his life had ever known. The light had been extinguished.

He had been anticipating her arrival all morning, all week – in a manner of speaking, his entire life. Now, he realized she had been here all along.

He didn’t want to believe it – the body couldn’t be Miranda, it couldn’t; but deep inside he knew the awful truth, no matter how much his mind tried to persuade him that
it wasn’t, it couldn’t be, how could it be? -
Tom knew with horrible certainty that it
was
her.

As he stared through tears into her lifeless eyes, he realized she didn’t quite look like his Miranda anymore. The sparkle in her eye that made her different from every other woman he had ever met was gone, replaced by a glassy coldness that was nothing like her, the
real
her - not this wax-museum quality replica of her laying in the mud underneath his house.

As he began to weep - something he hadn’t done since he was a small boy, the flashlight shook violently in his hand.

Maybe she was still alive, and he could save her; he hoped it wasn’t too late. He slid his arm under her head and pulled her close into his chest, cradling her like a child.

“Miranda,” he pleaded. “Talk to me. Say something. Come back, baby, come back – I love you so much.”

His warm tears rolled down her cold cheek as he laid his sobbing face against hers. He pressed his fingertips against her slender neck, checking for a pulse. Her skin felt like fossilized wood: cold, smooth and rigid.

Her eyes were wide open, bulging half out of their sockets, mapped with dark red bloodshot veins, her eyelids dried and curled back much farther than they should have been. She stared past him, at some point off in the distance, over his right shoulder.

Her mouth was frozen in a snarl, teeth slightly bared. It reminded him of a dog growling a warning: “Stay away, or else.”

He wanted so badly to close her staring eyes, to bring together those soft lips that had kissed him with such tenderness only a couple of days before. He wanted to give her back the dignity that had been stolen from her in death. She had been murdered and discarded like garbage, a total calamity in which he had played an unwitting role.

She was wearing a blue dress, a gift from him. It had perfectly matched her stunning periwinkle eyes, those eyes that had sparkled with delight when he had surprised her with it.

She loved it, she had said, and had wanted to try it on immediately. He had said no, to wait. He had asked her to wear it when she came to see him at the farmhouse this week. He couldn’t wait to see how beautiful she would look wearing it while lying across his bed.

Well, here she was, and he was finally seeing how beautiful she looked in the dress. Except she wasn’t reclining gracefully on his bed, she was laying in the mud underneath his house, about six feet below where his bed would be. The blue of the dress now more closely matched the color of her pallid skin than her eyes. Those eyes that once contained a bottomless sea of blue were now wide and black in the center, pupils dilated like big black pennies.

This is not real
, he thought, but it was. The cold heaviness of her body in his arms was proof enough of that.

An odd thought occurred to him, the thought that at any moment she might spring back to life, full of hatred for bringing her to this tragic end. He pictured her setting upon his flesh, intent to devour him with canine fangs gleaming, glistening in the dim glow of the solitary light bulb here in the squalid mud beneath his house.

He resisted an urge to drop her into the mud; instead he laid his hand upon her clammy leg, stroking the smoothness of her right calf, so cleanly shaven and porcelain white, as if to say
“I’m sorry. Oh, my dear sweet Miranda, I am so sorry.”

But she didn’t jump to life with eyes blazing and teeth bared to devour his flesh and his forever damned soul as he had feared. Instead, she did what the dead do: nothing. She ignored his touch as though
he
was the phantom, and something much more important than him occupied her entire attention, somewhere over his right shoulder.

The texture of her skin reminded him of silly putty he had played with as a child. For a moment, he had the perverse idea of pushing a color Sunday comic up against her skin to see if a reverse image would remain imprinted on her leg.

He pictured a comic strip with Charlie Brown sitting in front of Lucy’s psychiatric advice stand,
5 cents, please
; except instead of Charlie Brown sitting on the stool it was him and instead of Lucy seated at the stand it was Miranda, dead and stiff and staring off into the distance with those glassy, bloodshot eyes.

His sorrow at finding Miranda lying dead in the mud under his house had come to him fast and hit him hard, a sucker punch to the heart. But now he felt another emotion pushing his sorrow away: a sense of anger stronger than any he had ever known before flushed his cold body with a raging heat that boiled in his marrow.

Kelly would pay, he decided.

Kelly had done this. Kelly had killed his true soul mate. His fucking bitch of a wife had stolen the last single joy he had left on this whole entire planet.

Why hadn’t she killed
him
, instead? Why did she have to murder a perfectly innocent young woman, so full of life and beauty? What had she ever done to hurt anyone?

Tom pictured his wife standing outside the crawl space door again, arms still crossed in her typical disapproving manner; but this time he imagined seeing her eyes full of delight as she listened to the cries of his sorrowful discovery seep through the door.

He wanted to kill her, to drag her worthless life straight out of her body and give it to Miranda. Life for the worthy, for the beautiful – not the worthless cunt his wife had become.

He would kill her himself, he decided.

Tom let Miranda’s lifeless corpse fall back into the mud; her head landed with a dull plop, free arm dangling over the backside of her body.

Tom stabbed his dying flashlight into the darkness ahead of him as he crawled furiously back towards the closed crawlspace door. He splashed through the mud and threw himself towards the sealed exit of what had become in his mind a cursed crypt.

The only remaining vestige of thought in his mind was of revenge: immediate, unyielding and unmerciful retribution.

The rusted steel door stood resolute before him. As he faced it, he became possessed with the conviction that no mere obstacle of brick, mortar or steel could prevent him from inflicting carnage on the person responsible for the horrendous death of his beloved.

Tom squatted on all fours, every muscle of his body tensed like a lion, set to pounce on its prey. He lunged at the door as though it were his mortal enemy, letting out a feral growl as he slammed his shoulder into it with every ounce of his rage-fueled strength.

“You killed her, you bitch!” he snarled through rusted metal with inhuman ferocity. “You killed her. There’s nowhere you can hide, I’m coming for you.”

He hurled himself against the door again and again, bruising muscle, tearing tendons, ignorant of the absolute futility of his efforts.

Despite the fury within his soul, his body was human and could only withstand so much abuse. Tom launched himself forward one last time before allowing his body to drop into the mud, but he was far from finished.

He clenched his muddy hands into fists and began pummeling on the door in a sick, steadfast rhythm, like a drummer settling in for a solo at a rock concert. Tom already knew how this performance was going to end: with that fucking cunt’s head ripped clean from her body, that’s how.

Unceasing curses billowed from his mouth like an incantation from the depths of hell, a stream of pure hatred manifested in auditory form.

His effort was wasted; the door absorbed his abuse with stubborn indifference. His fists were not so unaffected; the rough, rusty surface efficiently shredded his skin, creating a foamy mush of blood and flesh above his wrists.

“I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you,” he screamed, his threats in time with the pounding of his fists. His voice faded to a rasp, his breathing labored.

He twisted himself around in the small space and lay flat on his back in the mud, planting the soles of his feet solidly against the crawlspace door. He resumed stomping on the steel again, with the full strength of both legs at once, not missing a single beat of the rhythm he had established with his now battered and bleeding fists.

“How dare you lay a finger on her? She never did anything to you! You killed her for making me happy? You had no right!” he screamed at the wife he imagined must be standing just outside. His voice began to change, to falter, to tire out. What had started as a lion’s roar had been reduced to a pathetic whimper.

WHAM-WHAM-WHAM slammed his feet against the steel.

“I’LL – KILL – YOU!”
His threat had become a mantra.

Yet the door stood firm, unyielding. Some tiny part of Tom’s brain knew that the door would never kick open, that it only opened inwardly – but the rest of his mind didn’t care.

Time stopped for Tom. He continued pounding for what might have been hours, but what was more likely only a few minutes longer. His voice grew softer and softer as his exhausted body continued its increasingly hopeless flailing in the cold, wet mud, the gasping spasms of a fish in a drying puddle, taking its final breaths.

“I’ll… kill… you.” His last statement of malevolent intent amounted to little more than a thought in his head and a small wisp of steam above his lips.

Tom’s feet dropped to the ground beside the doorway. He lay there, as spent as three-inch ash on an abandoned cigarette.

Then silence set in, a quiet so dark and deep and real that his heavy labored breathing seemed to belong to it, not him.

Tom lay motionless as his body slowly sank into the cold mud. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed since he had come to be here, but it was long enough for him to be certain that he was, in fact, completely and utterly alone. He knew there was no one in the house, no one outside of the house, no one for miles.

He felt the reality of his solitude with so much certainty it was as though a sixth sense had emerged. His wife had never been there listening, smirking as he had imagined. The silence that greeted him from outside the door and from the house above him was complete. It contained not a hint of a presence other than his own, and even that felt as though it was in danger of slipping away.

The flashlight, tossed aside during his rage, lay in the mud somewhere off to his right. Its filament was a dying ember, a soft red halo of light in Tom’s peripheral vision.

Then, as quickly as he noticed it, the glow extinguished.

Silence had arrived first; now its companion, darkness, announced itself. Tom barely had time to register these sensations as actual thoughts before the next unwelcome guest arrived, like the third horseman of the apocalypse: the cold.

A bitter chill gripped Tom’s body with a sudden rushing ferocity. The hot heat of rage that had burned in his veins only minutes before was replaced with a torrent of frigid water, ripping through every capillary in his body like tiny jagged shards of ice.

Tom tried to roll over onto his front, but found he was unable to move. He lay terrified, half-paralyzed, teeth clenched as his entire body convulsed; shivering as the excruciating pain of the cold drew him into its arctic embrace.

The unholy trinity of cold, darkness and silence now owned his soul. With enormous effort, Tom dragged himself onto his stomach; his shredded hands dripped blood that clotted in sticky spiral ribbons on his forearms. He wanted to crawl from his muddy puddle back onto the dry plastic sheeting, but the exertion of his rage had completely depleted his energy.

He looked towards the light bulb in the center of the crawlspace that still burned like a distant sun in the darkness; it seemed as though it was a million miles away. He wanted to go there, to be close to its warmth and light, but he felt like a planet at the farthest end of the solar system, spiraling out of control, about to be flung into the nether regions of the uncharted void of the universe, never to return.

Time passed. Tom didn’t know how much. He’d been trapped in the crawlspace for days, weeks – maybe even months; he didn’t know or care anymore. Tom no longer had a sense of time, of day or night.

Everything was night now. Everything was cold.

He had kicked at floorboards, pulled at pipes, pried at foundation stones, but to no avail.

He had survived as best he could. He had moved the water bottles nearer to the light bulb in the center of the crawlspace, had pulled the plastic sheeting there as well. He had created a makeshift shelter around the light, to capture its warmth in a bubble of plastic.

He had tried to dry his sopping clothes, but there was never enough heat to make a difference. They sat in a soggy pile, unworn, forgotten. He had ventured from his shelter from time to time to revisit his useless attempts to escape, to sit nude and freezing by the crawlspace door and call for help until the cold drove him back to the warmth of his shelter by the light bulb.

That had been back in the good old days here in the crawlspace, back when he had still had light and warmth, before he had accidentally broken the solitary incandescent bulb.

Since the light bulb had gone, there had been nothing but dark and cold and silence.

Tom lay on his back in the dark, nude and wrapped up in plastic in the spot under the house where the dirt was the driest. The clearance there was only fifteen inches, but Tom didn’t mind. He’d rather lie flat on his back pinned under the beams in dry dirt than to be in the cold mud with more room.

Things were better that way, he would probably have told you; but Tom didn’t talk anymore. He’d been quiet for a very long time.