Hello, my name’s Charlie Ipstien. Dorky, I know. But I’m better known as ‘Chips’ by my familiar. I ain’t a classy guy, a lowlife thug people call me. And I admit it. Can’t really blame myself though. It was where I was damn raised. Messed me up badly. I grew up in the slums, the absolute pits. The school I was taught in was complete and utter shit. The budget was around about the price of a taco. The teachers knew no better than us, and were nearly always pissed off. Let’s just say they had a different idea on ‘Punishments’, back then.
However, it wasn’t just them that caused us to be how we are today. It was a kid, who came to our school during April. You see, this was a cheap, cheap school, so the peasants around here could afford to ‘educate’ their child. So it’s no surpise to anyone that some shady characters got into the school. Like Larry. Although no-one actually called him that. That had a special name for him: Freak.
Larry had the average personality of a kid who just moved to school. Shy and quiet. But how he looked, well that was a whole new story. He had one of those conditions, I’d researched, um, let me see, ah yes: Hypertrichosis. Or as it’s better known ‘Werewolf Syndrome.’ Because who cares about being subtle. He had hazelnut brown hair all over his face, and his body. We found that out when Razor took his shirt off and started kicking him. People like us weren’t so used to the condition, so he was bullied badly.
We’d all call him freak, and ‘Werewolf Kid’ and usually taunt him with wolf howls all day. It weren’t ‘cos we didn’t like ‘em. ‘Cos deep down, we were scared of him. We’d never seen anyone like it, so that was our natural reply to it. You might call me sick, but I wasn’t doing the bullying so much, more just watching. I know, that’s no better but what would the teachers do anyhow? The gang would howl at him, and hit him all lesson long, while the teacher was usually shitfaced on the table.
The more I think about it, the more I feel bad. He was just trying to fit in, and we weren’t making that easy for him. But the others didn’t care, they never stopped having fun with him. Especially Razor. He seemed to take an instant dislike to him, and usually went way too far as we stood back. Razor wasn’t the most healthy-minded kid, as he lived in a house right next to druggies, the fumes getting through, most likely. Not many people knew Razor’s name, we think it was Robert Mayfield or something. But when some poor sucker named Jeff made fun of his name, Razor justified how he’d got that nickname. It was a natural decision to let him be in charge.
One of the incidents were Razor freaked out was P.E, and the teacher, being the lazy bastard he was, just gave us all a ball to bounce. We did the usual stuff, dodge ball, football, while Razor had two balls, and held them to his chest pretending they were his boobs. You know, the normal High School stuff. Then Larry came, presumably from the teachers office, his hair ruffled and messed up, and his eyes red from tears. Despite his large amount of hair, he was pretty weedy. There was a ball each, but since Razor had taken two, there wasn’t one for him.
“Um, could I have a ball, please?” He said, stuttering as usual.
Razor looked at him, then held one of the balls way over his head.
He pointed to the white ball above Larry and said, “Oh look guys! A full moon!” I had to admit, that was funny. We all laughed and Larry sighed.
“What, ain’t I funny enough for ya freak?” Razor said angrily, gaining closer to him.
“Just come back over here man, carry on with the game.” One of us called out.
“I’m not done with hairy and ugly over here.” He snarled back, as he carried on pacing towards Larry. “Well, what’s your problem, huh?”
Larry was walking back quickly, so Razor pelted one of the balls at him as hard as he could. It must have caught him of guard, because he slammed on the ground. The gym teacher just gave a grin through his cigar.
Razor got his second ball, and threw it even harder at him. Larry writhed on the floor in pain. Razor was freaking out, as usual.
“You want a ball, do you? YOU WANT A GODDAMN BALL?” He grabbed a ball of someone else and continued to pummel him, as Larry squirmed on the floor, his face twisted in pain.
“Leave it man, come on!” We all pleaded, this could get real ugly.
I wish, and I’m sure a lot of others wish, that we’d done more then. The display that happened through the next ten minutes or so was too disturbing even for us. Razor continued to pelt him until Larry was just breathing heavily, occasionally jolting with pain. I still regret not doing something to this day.
One day, as we were walking out of school, I saw Larry walk off to the right, where I was pretty sure just led to the woods. The woods were a creepy ass place. It was the birth ground of campfire stories, and many urban legends. Ghosts, bigfoot, some weird tall dude who stole kids. I quickly ran up to him, and he looked mildly surprised, as I guess he thought I was gonna beat him up.
“Please, just let me go…” He said immediately, trying to quicken his pace.
“Where to? The only place you can go is the woods. Where’s your mom or dad?” I asked. He slowed down, and sighed.
“I don’t have a house. The woods are my home. My mom died while I was on the way out.” He continued to walk on. I just stood there. Poor guy. Wait! ‘Stop feeling sorry for Larry!’ I convinced myself, and I ran back to the gang, way ahead now. Still, he had no home, and we weren’t making it easier for him.
The next day I told them about what he said, obviously instead of me talking to him, I was punching him, so they wouldn’t judge me. I was planning on maybe raising a bit of sympathy, but it raised more taunting, and the bullying just grew worse.
The story spread across the lunchroom like a germ, as I saw Larry look into his hands. He looked at me, shaking his head slowly. I felt kinda bad, and the next day, Larry had come up to me, while I was talking to my friends.
“Why, why’d you do it?” Larry asked, so pathetically I almost felt sympathy. The gang looked at me, waiting. I had to do something to please them.
I shoved him to the ground, his eyes wide with shock.
“Sorry Larry, nothing personal.” I joked. The gang laughed heartily, and I felt pretty good. Not for hurting Larry, but for being accepted a bit more.
But the day my childhood really got messed up was the day Larry left school. It was the Monday after a previous week of taunting and slightly more vicious attacks off Razor than usual. The story had mutated to a straight up insulting rumour, and I could tell Larry was losing it. I saw his occasional eye twitch, and his slight vibrations and he sat on his desk, clawing at the table. On Monday, he was walking through the gate, twitching like a mental patient. Razor met him at the gate, me and the gang behind him.
“Hey Larry, Look what I got for ya! Ahem..!” He began.
“St-, stop it.” He spat quietly. Razor was surprised, he wasn’t used to getting spoke back to.
“What, am I getting to ya?” He said in mock empathy.
“Shut up. Just shut up.” Larry countered. His eyebrows were slowly curling down, and the crowd gave an excited murmur. This was action!
“Really? You and what army?” Razor shouted, pushing Larry fiercely.
Larry, instead of backing away, just stumbled back a bit, and shook violently even more. He looked like he was in-between ‘not giving up’ and ‘not snapping.’
“You know what I think freak boy?” Razor said, nose to nose. “I think ya momma just killed herself when she saw what just popped out? Deserved it, if you ask me…”
It all happened so fast. Larry pounced on Razor, sending him to the floor, roaring as he did so. Razor gave a startled cry, shocked at this sudden outburst. We all stopped breathing, as time seemed to stop. We were all dumbfounded by this sudden outrage. Larry continued to beat him furiously, his arms so quick they were just a blur. Blood splattered to the ground by Razor’s head, as we just stood there in horror.
“Hey, let him go freak boy!”
Some kid tried to hold Larry back, and Larry reacted by punching him away with all his force. The kid fell back like a ragdoll. Larry spun his head back to Razor. I saw his eyes, and for the first time I’d seen him, he had a look I’d never seen before. The look of an animal…

******

That all happened in high School, as I said. Left me pretty devastated and disturbed. Took me a long while to get over it, still fully haven’t really. Sometimes the memory comes back, after trying so hard to forget it. I see Razor screaming in agony, as Larry continued to claw and punch him. The teachers had apprehended Larry a couple of minutes later, they held him back with all their strength, as he writhed like a fish caught in a net. He was taken to children’s juvenile centre. We never heard from him again, and the teacher would nervously change the subject when he was mentioned. Razor hardly spoke after that, He was never the cocky airhead I’d known him to be. Larry had left him with some serious scars, mentally and physically.
I’d just finished remembering all that suppressed trauma when I got a phone call. I picked it up, and Razors voice was on the other line. The audio was shaky, as if he was holding it with a broken hand.
“Hey, hey Chips.” He said un-confidently.
“Hey Razor man!” I said happily. I hadn’t heard from him in months. “How you been?”
“Can’t complain, can’t complain…” I could hear the paranoid tone of his voice. “So, hey, I was wondering, if maybe you’d like to…”
There was a long pause. I could have sworn I heard some very high pitched sounds, like whining…
…pleading.
“Yo Razor, you there?”
I heard a low grunt from the other end, a forceful grunt. Deeper than Razors voice by a long shot.
“Okay, 0kay! Sorry man, um, line went dead. Um, so, I was wondering if you wanna get a couple of beers?”
“Sure man, tonight?”
“Yeh, yes tonight. JTK bar at 8:00. See, see you there…”
I swore I heard another grunt, and the line went dead. The phone call had, unnerved me at the least, but he’d went kinda coo-coo after the whole ‘you know what’ incident.
I was walking towards the JTK bar and it was already dark. The gnarled trees from the upcoming forest were bent and twisted, like a spinal cord. The clouds devoured the sky like smoke. Hell, probably is smoke from all the damn chemicals from the factory around here: SIREN INDRUSTIES. Damn bastards, as if this place didn’t smell bad enough.
To get the JTK bar you had to go through the woods, the one were Larry had lived. I wasn’t so scared of it now, you just have to walk through a straight path, and it’ll lead you right to town. Still, the place gave me the creeps. All the legends, and especially knowing now that Larry lived here.
I walked into the entrance of the woods, and jerked slightly. I looked down at my feet, I’d stepped into a big footprint. Not just big, huge. And right by them were smaller footprints. I carried on walking until the smaller ones just suddenly, stopped. No evidence of them turning around or nothing. Weird.
I carried on, the huge trees towering above me, watching me almost in anticipation. Like they knew they were about to get a show. The cold air stung my skin. The owl gave the occasional hoot, and the moon rose above the smoke. Classic cliché horror movie moment. I chucked, but they weren’t real. None of them were.
Snap.
I turned to the sound with a jolt, and there was just 2 particularly large and menacing trees, and some over-grown, swamp green bushes. Instead of the smell of piss and bark, here it smelled even worse. It smelt like raw meat, that’d been left here to cook and rot for a million years. Probably a dead skunk, but I couldn’t get over how bad it was. The odour filled my lungs, as I coughed and spat. I squinted my eyes to see what was behind there. All I could make out was a huge lump. Probably a tent, or a den some kids had made. Probably cooking some bad meat, or cooking something else. I heard slight whimpers, so quiet they could be missed. I wanted to see what was behind there, overlooking the entire meeting with Razor.
I began to try walking through the bushes, and the thick bristles made it tough. Ivy scraped my leg, like they were warning me to leave but I got through them. The smell was stronger now…
There was a narrow gap, and with a squeeze, I got past the tightly packed trees. I looked to where I had seen the shape…
The smell was strongest as it had ever been.
I gasped.
I saw Razor, beaten, bloodied and broken. His face was terrified, agonized, but somehow, self-accepting. His clothes were torn with three long marks. His body was dangling like a puppet. Around his neck was a gigantic fist, squeezing the life out him. The fist was brown, and hairy. The arm followed to the body of an enraged figure, a figure I knew all too well.
Larry.
But this was nothing like the Larry I’d known. The Larry I’d known was small and weak, but this one was built like a bear! He had fists the size of wrecking balls, his body like a tank. His biceps were like giant pumpkins, and just looking as hard as steel. His fur had never been too rough, but his fur looked like it had been dragged to hell and back. When he was a child, you had been able to see his human features, however now he barely looked human at all. His face was angry, but calm. But underneath the miles of fur, his eyes were bloodshot and yellow. His teeth had been filed to a point, and they were stained with red. He had a particular look, I look I’d tried my damned hardest to forget.
The look of an animal.
“P, please….,” Razor said so, so quietly.
Larry raised one hand up to Razor’s head, and gave a sharp twist. A sickening sound followed, a sound like a plate being smashed. Razor fell to the ground lifelessly.
The puppets strings had been cut.
I gagged. My feet were glued to the floor, as the rest of me shook widely. Larry turned to me, his face partly hidden by the shadows. He gave a sick grin, like an animal that had cornered its prey.
“Sorry, Chips.” He, it growled, a voice so deep it sounded it would hurt to talk.
He took a pace towards me, his fist rose to me. He lifted me, his sharp nails, claws digging into my hip. His grip was so tight. I must have weighed nothing to him. I was now face to face with this monster I had once known to a child, a lost child, with no-one to love him, tormented to insanity. He spoke again.
“Nothing personal.”
I heard the plate smashing sound again, and it all went dark.

Credit To – YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE USERNAME! (Thanks to tytiger10 and Joshua Standlee!)

This is the first entry in the Modern Monsters series.

This is the third installment in the Tower of Sorrow series.
Part One: Yon Black Edifice Hath Called Me
Part Two: First Steps

-

“Hello?” I ask perplexed.

“Who is this?”

The phone is silent and soon begins assaulting my ear with a “busy” signal. I feel my muscles begin to loosen as if the very bones that held them had liquefied. I can see the phone slip from my fingers and begin tumbling to the floor. My coffee cup tilts forward and the hot black liquid begins to spill over its edge. I slowly begin to realize that the blue and white tiles of my kitchen floor are closer than they once were. The realization sinks in that I am falling. I try to put my hands out in front of me but my limbs refuse to respond to my commands. My knees thud to the floor followed by my useless arms. The world around me begins to grow dark. This grand symphony comes to a close as my face meets the floor.

The darkness floods in and enshrouds me in its black garments. It begins to shift in a sickly ebb and flow with crimson and purple running through it. In amazement, I begin to feel my arms and legs coming back to me. I realize that I am no longer lying face down on the ground, but rather on my back. I am staring up at a crimson sky with small wispy purple clouds drifting lazily toward the horizon. There is a tickling sensation against the back of my neck and when I turn my head I see the reason why. I am lying in a field of some form of grass. It is exceptionally long and has small soft hairs running up and down its smooth blue surface. My gaze and reverie are broken by a rustling in the grass just feet from where I lie. As I peer in that direction I begin to see eyes staring back into mine. They are the brightest orange-red with three small black pupils set in a triangular configuration. A small furry creature pokes its head out of the grass. I begin to see that its wide round eyes are set in a small fuzzy face much like that of a lemur. I sit up and it shrinks back.

“It’s ok,” I coo, holding out my hand. The small creature extends its neck, which is nearly a foot long, and begins to sniff my hand with its small pig-like nose. In an instant the sun’s light is blinked out by a massive shadow. A mad screech breaks across the sky and I jump to my feet, throwing my gaze skyward. There it is, or rather, they are. The swooping black demons with their piercing green eyes are covering the sky. My small furry companion tries to disappear, running back into the tall grass, but he is too late. One of them dives down at lightning speed and snatches him up in its jaws. As it flies away it spits out the smoldering skeleton of the poor creature. Their shrieking and screaming are thundering across the open field. I feel a trickle run down my cheek and wipe at it with my fingers. Blood, my own blood, I start to feel dizzy and giddy, as if I had had too much to drink. In a matter of seconds the world has once again faded to black.

This time though, there are no demons. There are no whispering voices, no tower. The only sound is a low steady rumbling and music. The music is low and distant, but it sounds soft and sad. I can tell from the movement of my breath in front of me that I am in a tight enclosed space. I can’t move my arms or legs and if my eyes are open, there is no light to see. A chill runs through me and I wonder, am I dead? Is this small black space my final resting place? Is the slight movement I feel the pallbearers carrying me to my grave? As the fog inside of my head begins to clear I begin to smell a familiar stench. Is that gasoline? Oh dear God, am I going to be cremated?! I start to struggle to move and am met with resistance. I now know all too well that my immobility is not due to death or rigor mortis. My hands and feet are bound and I can feel the ache in my bent legs. They are screaming to be set free to straighten themselves out. The rope is cutting into my wrists and ankles as I fight to get free.

Suddenly I’m jolted to the right as what I now realize is a vehicle, slams to a halt. The distant music fades into silence. I hear a loud creaking sound and the weight of the car shifts. I hear the car door slam closed and the whole vehicle rattles with the force. Now, I can hear footsteps heading towards the rear of the car. There is the shuffling and tinkling of keys just before the trunk lid pops open. In the pale yellow light of the moon I see a dark figure towering over me. In the shadow of the figure’s wide-brimmed fedora, I can only see its mouth. The figure smiles and its teeth are horrible pearly white needles glistening in the moonlight.

In a deep and raspy voice the figure says with a chuckle, “Oh, I see you’re awake.”

Credit to: J. Brown

As my foot descends, it comes in contact with and crushes something small and brittle. I look down to see that small skeletons litter the ground beneath my feet. They are indiscernible. Some look ever so slightly familiar, approximations of the skeletal configurations of cats or dogs, but most are entirely foreign. The wind sweeps the dust into the air in small clouds that swirl around me. As they swirl they seem to form letters, perhaps even words. I cannot tell what they say. Their meaning is lost to me.

The opening becomes closer; the call more desperate and alluring. I can no longer feel myself walking. My footsteps have become automated and the call sinks its tendrils deeper into my mind. The voices whisper more loudly now. They whisper harsh warnings. They beg and urge me to turn back and return from whence I came. I hear them, but I only vaguely understand. I am consumed by the need to move forward, the need to engulf myself in the anti-light emanating from the monument before me. There is a feeling of calm descending upon me. It enfolds me in its warm velvety wings. My emotions have ceased their struggle, only to become willing spectators watching the present unfold from the theater of my mind.

I take my first step through the threshold and what small amount of light is left in this dismal place fades. Darkness so complete and pure envelops me. It is a darkness that could only be known by those in the very depths of hell. The whispering voices fade and my ears ring in the newfound silence. The calm has sunken into my very soul. I can feel only one other thing, the overwhelming sense that my journey has come to an end, I am home.

I awake to the warmth of the sun shining on my face. The sweet sound of birdsong wafts in on the cool spring breeze. My sheer blue curtains tumble lazily creating dancing shadows on the wall across the room. As I slowly bring myself to a sitting position, I ponder the oddity that was last night’s dream. The remnants of it are curiously strong as they swim through my foggy mind. In fact, I can still see the dark monolith and its swirling demons. I can hear the whispering voices as they echo into nonexistence. I can still feel the call that had pulled me into the eternal darkness. Somehow, I am not chilled by these thoughts. They are comforting and make me feel out of place in the safety of my own bedroom.

As I place my feet on the floor I could swear I feel the crunch of small brittle bones underfoot. I peer down at my beige shag carpeting to ensure myself they aren’t there. I groan and stretch in an attempt to shake away the last vestiges of sleep within my body and mind. They go begrudgingly as I shuffle to my bathroom. The running faucet in the bathtub babbles in a low voice reminiscent of the voices from my dream. As I slide into the warm water I am reminded of the embrace of that dark structure and the sense of coming home.

Slowly I slide into the day’s clothes and make my way to the kitchen. The heavy aroma of freshly brewed coffee greets my nostrils and causes me to salivate. I make my way to the cupboard to retrieve my most beloved coffee mug. As I pour my coffee the swirling black beverage causes a flashing image of the clouds around the tower’s peak. The heat of the coffee warms me to my core and once again I am reminded of the feeling of complete acceptance. My cell phone begins to ring. Within the small LCD display I can see that the number is listed as “Unknown.” I flip it open and place it to my ear to be greeted by a sharp whisper. It is so harsh I could swear I feel a puff of breath against my cheek.

“You must come home. Come home. Come home…come home…”

Credit to: J. Brown

This is a sequel to Yon Black Edifice Hath Called Me., and part of the Tower of Sorrow series.

The dark black edifice surfacing in my mind is as “The Nothing” from “The Neverending Story.” As it rises to fruition, it eradicates all in its path. Images and memories are stripped away as though they never were. The landscape of my psyche is left barren, scarred, and burnt to its very bones. I can’t remember when this even began anymore. I only know what it is now.

Emotions run wild. Never settling or standing still. They all claw at my mind as they ceaselessly wage war in an attempt to become dominant. The black edifice rises even still; its peak so high that the clouds obscure its very topmost heights. The sky is charred black with streaks of crimson and deep purple showing through cracks in its surface. The angry clouds swirl around this monumental structure, exchanging bright flashes of intense lightning.

Dark winged creatures swarm the structure, swooping and diving at each other. I can hear their shrieks and cries of pain as they attack and devour each other. Many fall and tumble toward the barren wasteland below. I cannot see their faces, only their eyes. They are a bright and brilliant green and they shine like fireflies dancing in an open field. As they fall I can see their lives and their eyes blinking out of existence. This structure is destroying even its own denizens. What hope have I to survive?

The ground shakes as this monument to death and destruction ceases its upward movement and stands still. A ghastly anti-light radiates from its peak, sending the demonic circling creatures caterwauling into the unknown darkness that has settled into this world. A cacophony of whispering voices fills my ears, further clouding my thoughts. I can only latch onto words and phrases that seem to beckon me from a past that feels familiar. Is this me? Are these my thoughts?

An opening begins to form in the base of the structure. A deep and cavernous black void that calls from its depths. Emotions fail to respond, still struggling to gain control. I lack the sense of foreboding and dread that should cause me to balk. I have no will to survive and no want to die. There is simply the call. I place one foot in front of the other. Yon black edifice hath called me.

Credit To: J. Brown

This pasta is the first in the Tower of Sorrow series. This series will not be posted all at once, but gradually over the coming weeks.

The Waterfarmer

Tonight he had purpose. The number was to be twenty…twenty of the best. Or at least the best he could find. The twenty were to be found in the water; in their place of rest. They will be part of the offering; an offering that must be made.

Out to sea he realizes he must go and in the horizon an aged wooden boat, similar to a small, rotting schooner appears to him as a specter of the sea. His Dark Captain greets him at the peer and waves him aboard as a servant would greet an expected guest. It is known that the Dark Captain, shaped as a shadow of a large pirate, will guide him through to the soon to be chosen, with his oar in hand, steering through the salty, dense, and suffocating fog.

There were others fishing. He could sense it though he could not see them, these competing fishermen. Their presence weighed down the air as though a final plea, a plea for life, was soon to be heard. The pressure mounted as the urgency was palpable. And soon his lottery would be chosen.

And there they were, floating like underwater rows of corn. Souls, the ghost of weathered men and women made of oily liquid and illuminated smoke, familiar yet not. Vast fields of past experiences sprinkled the sea mirroring the starry night above in darkness, silence and spectacle. The harvest was to be made both quickly and with utmost certainty. He, the waterfarmer, the fishermen, must choose his bait wisely and throw back the unworthy catch, for there would be only one offering.

The selections were to be made through the senses, not just of those senses of the physical world, but of the metaphysical as well. He must feel their energy, their being and emotion, their wisdom and sin, what made them who they were and what will make him part of them, part of one. But how would he know? Understanding the task at hand but not the how, he fished, reaching his hand as far as he could toward the water touching soul after soul, each time rejecting yet taking a part of them with him as though he were collecting letters to home from lonely soldiers. Catch after catch is made and thrown back…until he finds one and another…each choice made filled a hole in his spirit, like a mathematically perfected piece of a whole. He now knows that these chosen few represent his past, his present and most importantly, his future.

As each undeniable link is made with these lonely souls, each one manifests itself onto the Dark Captains schooner, slowly floating upside the boat, over the edges and into their place in the pews much like mercury finds itself. Only these souls start taking shape into ghostly men and women with cloudy and hollow eyes, skin of liquefied pearl, and strikingly faceless. They begin to slug into a pool at the bow of the ship. As the souls gather they begin an entangled embrace, one after another, taking a liquescent shape.

At the base of the creation, broad backs and strong chests stack in rows and depth to solidify the structure above six stacks of feet, hands and knees. A backrest of sturdy shoulders begins to form. Armrests made of thighs melt together with the smooth curve of breasts at grips. The heads and bones gather at the top of the nine-foot design creating a complex helixed catacomb revealing the shape of an incomplete but great throne of pearly iridescence. This beautiful architecture will be his offering.

The boat is almost filled with the remaining faceless twenty, each one sitting at the inside edge of the pews when the Dark Captain points to a massive foggy wall slowly approaching. Time is running out to finish the harvest. The Doctor will soon have his gift and his future may be granted.

The Patient

He is lost in a nauseous stare. His fever has peaked now and his energy is seeping through his pours as if it is an August afternoon in the swamps. As they prophesized, the pounds melted away, thirty-seven of them in fact. Food would no longer be a pleasure but a chore. The shivers, fevers and cramps were undersold however. And he still has his flowing silver hair; a miracle by its own standards. Their poison was effective in its side effects but the results are an invasive surgery away. The visitation to his bladder tends to take an unkind path; as though the cancer and its’ treatment were not penance enough. Now he finds himself struggling to make the simplest of movements as he rushes toward the emergency room for time feels as though it is slipping away.

The hospital is unusually quiet today. He notices there are no ambulances under the canopies and the parking lot seems empty. The entrance way is exceptionally bright as well as it leads down a narrow hallway walled with frosted glass. There is a nurse at the end of the path waiting patiently for her patient in front of the triage desk. Strangely there are only three people sitting idly in the large and bright waiting room, each with an expression of angst, uncertainty and desperation. The nurse, dressed in white scrubs and red lipstick simply points toward the waiting room with a smile and a nod. He knows the Doctor must be coming out soon.

Walking with an ethereal gait, the extraordinarily tall and slender Doctor approaches the room wearing a long white and buttoned doctor’s coat and pressed white pants. He greets his patients with a smile and clinched hands.

“We all know why we are here don’t we?” the Doctor asks. “Which ever one of you four brings me the best offering will be healed. Those who fail, do so, for as you know, I only have the time and inclination for one. Tomorrow your presentations will be made here. Go now to the water’s edge, the captains await.”

He, the patient, did not understand. Had he not given enough to the Doctor? His tortured body, broken spirit, and dignity were only the obvious tokens he had bequeathed to this Doctor. Yet the price has not been paid? The other patients did not seem to bother with such tawdry questions. None of it mattered, all that mattered was the prize at hand and that the competition had begun.

The Offering

The elderly schooner breaks through the dense fog and a shore emerges. It is dusk now. To his left and right he can see the other three patients on their boats, each distinctly different from the next. He shares glances of guilt, pity, sadness and hopefulness with each of them; the emotions showing on his face as one would if they locked eyes with someone who had just lost someone. Three will fail. Three must fail.

Having drifted ashore over large rocks and steps, the bow of the boat flattened out making a ramp leading to newly paved asphalt roads. Each boat had its own empty road leading in the same direction. In the distance up the large and wavy hill was no longer the hospital but the Doctor’s office surrounded by a magnificent cityscape sculpted by mismatched sized skyscrapers and crafted as though it could fit in a gigantic snow globe. This is where the offering would be delivered.

In unison, the remaining souls gathered behind the throne and lifted it up onto their shoulders and began to march in a two row procession off the schooner. He quickly noticed that there was a soul missing from the middle of the procession that he now was forced to fill. Had he made a horrible miscalculation? Would the Doctor notice the error? His color, while sickly, was more vibrant than the faint oyster shell iridescence of the ghosts. Surely the Doctor would notice but what other choice did he have? The other patients were marching as well, each carrying something in the front of their procession, yet invisible to him. The scene was that of a New Orleans jazz funeral; intensely sad and heavy though awkwardly festive and beautiful. Yet he was the only patient to not be standing alone at the end of their marching party.

He was confident his offering would still be enough, regardless of ritual.

They soon reach the top of the hill and each march meets at the foot of the steps of the Doctor’s office with their invisible offerings. The office resembles the exterior grandeur of a city museum. While there were no parade goers on the street, the vast buildings were littered with strange figures cramming out of open windows for as tall as the eye could see. Their faces expressionless, yet body language showed a childlike wonder, grappling for a better look at an execution. The Doctor stands at the top of the elevation with a welcoming smile while taking in the spectacle of the event, pleased.

The Doctor motions each patient forward with their offering and gestures them into his office. A shared expression of panic and qualm waxes over the other patients as they climb up the steps, each behind their procession and the last to enter the large arched double doorway entrance. After a few moments, each patient returns outside to the landing and each with an evacuated gaze. The Doctor finally locks eyes with him and calls for him to present his offering sending unease and hope shivering down his spine.

The procession of souls begins to march up the stairs with the incomplete throne at the lead. The throne was not brought inside like the other gifts were. It was placed in the middle of the landing at the top of the steps directly in front of the Doctor and out in the open for his guests to admire. One by one the remaining souls morphed into the throne, each adding a different element and final touches to the masterpiece of his subconscious imagination. Towering over the Doctor, the throne shined with what appeared as glowing and pulsating white marble. It fluttered iridescence with every heartbeat for it was living architecture. At the top of the backrest, the helix hummed with the wisdom of the collective souls as though they would forever be guidance for its owner. It was complete, immaculate and divinely sublime. This throne was him, his shared soul with those chosen, his life experiences and combined energy from the life-forces webbed throughout his life. It was his purpose, revealed and stunning.

The Doctor leaned over and whispered to him, “It’s beautiful.” Taking a lap around the glimmering throne, the Doctor sensually caresses it as thought it were water at his finger tips. He steps forward, arms thrown to the sky to his guests and yells with rebellious and incredulous tone, “IS THIS NOT BEAUTIFUL?!” All of the guests shrilled in excitement and quickly floated out of the windows, twisting up into the overcast sky, into the raised fog still lingering from the morning. The Doctor, clearly pleased, turned back at the patient and gave a wide smile full of large white and perfectly capped teeth.

Drunk from the intoxicating vision of the moment, unease somehow penetrated him at the sight of it all. Then sobriety hit him as he thought to himself, “Why were twenty needed but only nineteen used? Why am I in the procession and the other patients were not? Am I part of my throne or is the throne made for me? What am I truly offering here?” As the last question rolled off his tongue he began to melt away, turning into a puddle much like his collection had done before creating his masterpiece.

“You prayed to be healed did you not? Healed of pain, suffering, embarrassment, burden and uselessness? I am granting you answered prayer. You have brought me the finest of offerings and I warmly accept!”

His head now nearing the floor to top off the puddle of self he has created, angst and dread fill his soul. His thoughts spoke to the Doctor one final time, “Who am I to question Your judgment, Your will? And yet, at my end, I still have questions…” The patients’ puddle flowed purposefully and split toward all six legs of the throne with his final piece, his head, solidifying the base of the left leg; his skull poking out just enough for the Doctor to rest his heel, in comfort.

Credit To – StupidDialUp

“You want to hear the scariest story I know?”

“Sure.”

“Is it scarier than the last two? If it is then I don’t want to hear it. In fact, I think I’ll head home. I’m sure I’ve had enough to drink already.”

“Don’t mind him. The rest of want to hear.”

“Wait, is this going to be about more ghosts or vampires or whatever? Because I’m not buying into all this.”

“It’s not like those other stories. I don’t believe in all of that bullshit. But there was something about it that reminds me of those ones…well, just let me tell you how it happened. This all went down only a few blocks from here, actually…”

***

She was a cutter.

She was the only surgeon in the city who didn’t have to worry about keeping her patients alive. By the time they came to her, they were already dead. Her job was just to find out why.

She was good at it. Every fresh cadaver had secrets; by cutting, she discovered them. And she knew as much about the human body as any other doctor. She knew hearts, for example; how they fit together, how they worked, and most importantly, how they could be hurt. The cutter would say that she understood the heart. In a certain sense, she was right.

She knew about brains too, and about circulation, and the metabolism. She knew enough to be sure that the man tied up on the motel room bed had not had enough flunitrazepam to kill him, and that if she waited for long enough he would wake up, though he’d probably feel fatigued, have a headache, and suffer some short-term memory loss. Flunitrazepam, also known as Narcozep, Rohypnol, and Primum, was illegal in the United States, a class of psychoactive drugs commonly referred to as “roofies,” or simply “the date rape drug,” and she had employed it in the most common way, by slipping it into the man’s drink at a bar. She disliked the association with sexual assault, but it was simply the quickest and most convenient way to render a person unconscious.

The man on the bed was also a doctor, a psychiatrist. His name was Walter Graham. He was fifty three, twice divorced, and had no children on account of a vasectomy his first wife encouraged him to get. He was very respected in his field, widely referenced in medical journals for one remarkable case he’d treated. He lived in a condo on Vallejo Street with a beautiful view. He abused prescription painkillers, watched rugby on the weekends, and liked cats. These were the things the cutter knew about him.

In a way, they were alone together. Anyone else who walked in would see only two people in the room. But the cutter saw a third, another woman, a woman who stood in the corner and watched. This other woman (who was not, the cutter knew, really there in any tangible sense but who seemed no less real despite that certainty) would sometimes respond to the cutter’s questions by nodding or shaking her head. Other than that, she did not do much besides watch.

The motel room, which the cutter had paid for in cash four hours earlier, was on the third floor of a dangerous-looking rattrap squeezed alongside nicer buildings between Mission and Valencia Streets. The carpets were filthy, the walls dotted with graffiti, and the rooms had no windows. The black and white television in each room played only two local affiliates, pornographic films, and static. It was a good place to stay if you liked the idea of being murdered without anyone noticing. She’d picked it because it was the kind of place where no one asked questions, even if you came in out of a cab with an unconscious middle-aged man slung over your shoulders in the middle of the night. All they cared about here was taking the money and minding their own business.

Dr. Graham was secured to the bed frame by four pairs of novelty handcuffs that she’d bought in a sex shop on Folsom Street, where she went so that she’d run the lowest odds of running into anyone she knew. She waited for him to wake up. It took a long time. Flunitrazepam, she knew, could last up to twelve hours, but she was the patient type. Patience was a good quality in a cutter. When Graham took the first unsteady steps back into consciousness she sat down next to him. The stained mattress was thin and the bad springs creaked under her weight. He would be confused and prone to panic, and she didn’t want that. She looked at the other woman, who stood in the corner, watching without blinking. “Are you sure this is the best way?” the cutter said. The other woman nodded.

Whispering, the cutter explained where he was and what had happened to him. She warned him that the restraints she’d used probably wouldn’t hurt him but he still shouldn’t struggle. And she assured him that she did not plan to kill him.

“Trust me,” the cutter said. “I’m a doctor.”

Graham, for the most part, kept his head. He licked his lips and when the cutter saw they were dry she gave him a sip from a bottle of water. The first thing he asked was, “Who are you?” She told him her name. He had heard of her. Some of his patients were police officers; one of them was struggling with feelings of guilt over his constant infidelity and as part of an exercise Graham had asked him to list all the women in his life he felt uncontrollably attracted to. The cutter’s name was the first he came up with. Graham told her all of this in one long run-on sentence, babbling and obviously not sure what he was saying by the end of it. He was not yet fully sober. He did not, she noticed, ask him what she planned to do next. Perhaps he knew better. Or perhaps he was too afraid.

The cutter took a sip of water to wet her own lips and then said, “I want to talk to you about another one of your patients. Do you remember Cleopatra?”

Graham blinked, brow furrowed. And then he laughed, too loudly. The cutter shook her head.

“Maybe you’ll remember her if I show you a picture.” The cutter took a folded photograph out of her wallet. The only light in the room was the grainy, unreal blur of TV static, and Graham was still be dizzy from the drugging, so she had to hold it in front of his face for a long time before he made the soft little “Ah!” sound that indicated recognition. “You mean Jane,” he said.

The cutter looked at the other woman in the room, the one who Graham couldn’t see even though she was right in front of him. The other woman nodded. So the cutter hit Graham in the face. He grasped. “Her name,” the cutter said, as Graham winced from the split lip she’d just given him “was Cleopatra. You killed her.”

“What? No!” Graham tried to sit up, and the restraints rattled against the cheap aluminum bed frame. “First of all, you have it all wrong. Second, that was years ago. Third…third…” He paused, unable to focus for a moment, muttering nonsense before his train of thought reconnected. “Third, how do you even, I mean, what’s it to you?”

The cutter unfolded the photograph. There was another woman in it, with her head on Jane’s (Cleopatra’s) shoulder, smiling. It was the cutter.

“We met in medical school,” the cutter said. “Well, I was in medical school. She only said she was. That turned out to be…not a lie, exactly. More like a misunderstanding. Like a lot of things about her and us. Including her name. I guess you think the name Cleopatra is funny? It wasn’t to me. I loved that name. I loved her.” She folded the photo and put it away again. “Until you took her away from me.”

Graham didn’t say anything for a while. The cutter was quiet as well. In the room next door, someone was making a lot of noise. Graham seemed to be preparing his next words very carefully.

“I realize that these are strange circumstances,” he said. “But as a medical professional you should already understand what’s happened here. The woman in that photograph was—is—named Jane Cohen. She suffered from a rare psychiatric disorder, a disassociative identity. ‘Cleopatra’ was the name of an alter ego her subconscious invented. There was no way you could have known this when the two of you met.

“Jane came to me because she said she was suffering from depression. She was wholly ignorant of her real problem, and it was two years before even I began to suspect it. Real disassociative personalities are very rare. In Jane’s case the psychosis emerged gradually; people invent alter egos and fantasy lives for themselves all the time. In Jane’s case it manifested itself in the most extreme way possible. I spent nine years treating her, restoring her to a single functioning identity with—”

“I’ve already read your essays in the journals, Walt,” the cutter said. She stood up. “You’ve done very well for yourself with the story of how you helped poor ‘Jane.’ But you never gave a thought to woman you got rid of. Cleopatra was not an alter ego to me, not just part of some other woman. Even after she left me I still loved her. I spent years trying to find her again after college. And when I finally did, I discovered that she had no idea who I was. She didn’t remember a thing about me. Because the woman I knew was gone.”

Graham tried to sit up again. Next door, it sounded like someone was hitting the wall over and over again. “Listen to me. I knew that Jane had romantic partners under her alternate persona. Part of the treatment was reconciling her primary personality with the actions and relationships of her alternate one. If I’d had any idea that the two of you…that is to say, if we’d known—”

“I know,” the cutter said, nodding. “You did what any responsible physician would do. That’s why I’m not going to kill you.” Graham looked relieved, although she had told him so once already. “Still, you took something away from me. You think you made ‘Jane’ whole, but what you really did was cut her apart. You picked one half of her and you cut the other half off and threw it away. So it’s only fair that I take something from you too. What do you call that in your line of work? Reconciling the schism?”

“Now wait a minute,” Graham said, raising his voice.

“Do you think much about dying, Walt? I do. I’m told that most people in my field rarely do. Makes it easier not to internalize your work. But I think about it all the time.” Graham was saying something, but she talked over him. “Sometimes I think about the soul. I didn’t think there even was such a thing until recently. I’ve been cutting people apart my whole life and I’ve never once found anything that looked like a soul anywhere in them. But now I think there really is such a thing. And I think that even people who aren’t real can have souls. Even someone who didn’t exist can be a ghost. That’s what I think. What do you think?”

Graham didn’t seem to know how to answer, but she hadn’t really been talking to him anyway. From the corner, Cleopatra watched. When the cutter looked at her, she nodded. The cutter turned the television from static to another channel and put the volume all the way up. Human voices through tinny speakers at full blast sounded like shrieking, wordless ghosts. She ducked down, getting something from under the bed. She heard Graham moving, trying to see what she was doing. When she stood up he started to scream; not words, just screaming. The cutter put a finger to her lips, motioning for him to shush.

“I’m pretty sure I can do this without killing you,” she said. “You know the old joke about being a cutter, right? ‘I’ve never lost a patient yet.’” She pointed to his legs. “Do you want me to cut above the knees, or below?”

Graham was beyond answering now; he was just screaming. The cutter hoped that his commotion would not throw her off when she made the first incisions. She was noted in her field for her steady hands. But then again, she thought, as she pulled the chord on the chainsaw and felt it come to sputtering, grinding life in her hands, this was not exactly her normal precision tool.

“Now don’t worry,” she said, pausing with the whirring saw blade just above Graham’s legs. “I’m a doctor.”

From the corner, Cleopatra smiled.

***

“…as it turned out, someone in another room did overhear, and did call the cops, but by then it was way too late to stop her. When we got there…I’ve never seen blood like that. In my line of work you think you’ve seen it all, but that call was the worst I’ve ever been on.”

“Are you a cop?”

“Paramedic. I’m the one who saved the guy. She did a pretty good job on him, all things considered, but he’d still have bled out if we hadn’t gotten there.”

“I remember reading about that when it happened. Two years ago, right?”

“Me too, but how do you know all that other stuff? I never read anything about why she did it.”

“She told us. She hurt herself with the saw so we had to take her to the hospital too. I rode the whole way with her and she told us the entire story. She wouldn’t stop telling us, in fact. Messed my buddy up real bad in the head. He had nightmares for a while. He thought about going to see a shrink, but under the circumstances it seemed…”

“Ill-advised?”

“Ha, yeah, something like that.”

“So you told you about Cleopatra and everything?”

“Yeah.”

“And was there really, you know, anyone else in the room with them?”

“Not when we got there. She did keep talking to someone else in the ambulance, someone she said was there but we couldn’t see. Sometimes I think…no, no, it was all bullshit. That lady was nuts. But she talked a good game, you know?

“So if wanted to know all about ghost stories, well, now you know what’s been haunting me.”

“And I thought I had rough days at work. What do you do after a thing like that?”

“Drink. Speaking of which, anyone want another?”

Credit To – Tam Lin

My wife is going to kill herself in 5 to 7 business days.

I’d found the order for a jug of Xanaphril while clearing the internet history of porn and was contemplating it now. I’d known my wife Cindy had been unhappy but I guess hadn’t registered how much yet. Was this a cry for help? Should I say something or just let it fade into the background noise like all of her other passive complaints?

“Are you ever coming to bed?” Her voice bridges on a shout, causing me to start and close the browser window from habit. A shout. Her deafness is still in full swing, I think to myself.

Cindy had been diagnosed with a rare form of Ménière’s disease shortly after we’d married two years back. What had started as uneasy moments of vertigo and mild hearing loss in her right ear had quickly erupted into extreme ranges of deafness that would come and go randomly; sometimes affecting her for weeks at a time. Worse still were her ‘falling attacks’. I’ll never forget the first time she’d experienced one.

We’d been waiting in line for hours outside the Aladdin theater, shivering and keeping close to ward off the first snowflakes of winter. I remember she’d been talking on her cell phone when just like that she collapsed into the street as if she’d tripped – but we hadn’t been moving. It scared the Christ out of me; I thought she’d suffered an aneurism or stroke or even been shot. Understandably, these periods of outrageous vertigo and difficulty hearing the words from her own mouth were deeply frustrating for her and I’d tried my best to be supportive. But it was taking its toll.

I turn to look at her sullen face. I feel guilty to admit it, but I can hardly stand seeing her when she’s like this. A wise man once said that sadness is a disease. I’d go one step further and say that it’s of the infectious variety. After years of putting up with her, I could go for a handful of those pills myself.

“Ya, just closing down now.” I shut our laptop and slip into bed next to her. She immediately turns on her side facing away from me. Guess no sex tonight either? Ha, and here I had my hopes up, I think bitterly. Just as well. Hadn’t I read somewhere that if a man goes without long enough, he’ll start having crazy kink-fest dreams? I could go for some of that. Bring on the Asian Schoolgirl…minus the tentacles.

But my subconscious wasn’t interested in playing house.

I used to be into exploring all shades of ‘mental awaking’; from failed attempts at telekinesis to lucid dreaming and what I’d liked to call “The God Ticket” – astral projection; the ability to travel anywhere at will. It’d been years since I’d given it any thought until the depressing reality of Cindy’s illness had become more and more apparent. I was never able to successfully ‘leave my body’ but controlling the storyline of my nightly encounters provided a welcome escape. That was, until they took a noticeably violent and uncontrollable turn.

It takes me a moment to realize where I am, and when I do, my stomach clenches horribly. I’m back at University. And those eyes looking into mine… Susan’s. My ex’s. As is common in dreams, I know there are other people around us – that we’re walking to class inside the L.R. Harrison building in fact – but I don’t see anyone else. I can feel them looking at us but it’s

just her and those accusing eyes.

And then the events flash forward. It’s raining and we’re standing under a tree together. I’m hugging her from behind and singing a song about what we’re doing. Her arms lovingly press mine to her chest and she looks up at me again with an expression of betrayal.

“You said we’d be together forever, right? That you love me ‘past the stars’.” Her words form a knot in my throat. I had said that after all; even meant it. But then Cindy had come along and oh how much better things had looked on that side of the wall. Now there was regret and the awful ‘if’.

I want to tell her I’m sorry – that I still love her, but I’m having trouble making coherent thought and it doesn’t matter anyway because

Susan’s hair is practically glowing in the light of the moon. She’s face down on the cement and dear god there’s so much blood. I look at the palm of my hand and find it’s bleeding from some deep slash. She cut me, I think indistinctly, but there is no pain. I feel my body kneel over hers, turning her over. Her face is untouched and as beautiful as ever if not for the oozing gash at the top of her hairline. She opens her eyes again and I can see it – the pain, the question, ‘why?’. I scream my lungs ragged, but not a sound escapes my lips. I want so desperately to call for help, to comfort her, but everything feels distant and I’m not allowed to stop my hands from closing around her throat.

She’s goes on struggling for a few moments, never leaving my gaze when I do the unthinkable. My body leans forward, my blonde hair cascading over her face and at first I think I’m going to kiss her forehead, when instead my lips close around her right eye. Confusion explodes into horror as I feel every muscle in my mouth contract. Pressure builds inside the seal of my mouth until I can feel something round and wet pass from her body into mine. This shouldn’t be possible! I want to vomit. I want to run away. I want to vanish in a torrent of sobs for my lost love.

Then I bite down hard and

I open my eyes. Sweat coats me in a glaze even though the ceiling fan is running at full cycle. Our room is dim with the first light of morning.

“Jesus Christ. Jesus Fucking Christ, what was that about?” Not daring to speak above a whisper.

It had felt so real, even now as the distinctly dream-like elements began to stick out like accusatory fingers. I still feel the high from a liter of adrenaline pouring through my veins and consider calling her just on the off chance that I’d strangled and subsequently sucked the vision out of half of her face.

This thought calms me when I realize how stupid I’m acting. Besides, what new kind of depression would Cindy be thrown into if she caught me thinking about my ex, let alone talking to her again? No, the relief wouldn’t be worth another crack in our marriage. I roll onto my side and caress my wife instead. Her skin is as cold as a frosted window. My eyes fly open and it’s her. Susan.

I immediately leap from the bed, taking most of the blankets with me. Dear God, it’s actually her. She’s naked, her body frozen from rigor mortis in the same pleading position I’d left her in. For a moment I stand there, unable to fully comprehend what I’m looking at -what have I done!? – when my eyes stop on her face and her missing eye.

“What have I done? What have I done?!” The words leave my chest in heaving barks.

I’ve done it. I’ve actually murdered someone. You’ve spent your whole life reading and watching movies about people doing this exact same thing…and now you’re the killer.

I rub my eyes – at tears that refuse to appear.

And what do I do now? The guilt comes in torrents, as if from the beats of some ghastly heart. I could hide her. I’d have to live with the guilt for the rest of my life…but I could hide her, for now. My Susan, I’m so sorry.

I cross to her side of the bed, taking in her beauty for the first time since the last time I’d seen her two years ago. If not for her awkward pose, the dark patches of skin where her body meets the bed and. . .and the empty, half-lidded socket of her eye I’d stolen, she’d pass for. . .a dead body. I wish I could say that she looked like she was sleeping, but that’d be cruel. There is no elegance in death.

Above all else, the unnaturalness of that sunken lid was making me sick (Did I really do that?) and re-covering her with the bed sheet was a welcome relief. The shudder that comes from beneath the white fabric seems to agree.

A second rush of adrenaline washes over my face. I can taste something metallic like blood and my skin breaks out in feverish bumps.

Bodies sometimes move after death, don’t they? I’ve read about that! Sometimes they move and that’s just what dead bodies do.

I took a step back but then another thought crossed my mind: What if she isn’t dead after all? She knows I tried to kill her, so do I have to finish the job now or drop her off at the hospital on the way to prison?

I’m shaking now, I can feel it, literally see it from the way my hand quivers as I raise it. This is the part of the horror movie where everyone is telling me stop, to run away! I’ve always hated the cheap ‘jump’ scares, and here I am about to experience one up close – with my own eyes so to speak. Thinking about eyes makes feel light headed and I push it from my mind.

Slowly, I grip the side of the linen, never removing my gaze from the amorphous shape of my dead ex-lover. My future – everything – hinges on what’s under this piece of fabric. Sucking in a mouthful of frosty air, I slid the sheet back down her body. Down their bodies. There, right before me like the world’s most depraved magic trick laid the bodies of every person I’d ever murdered in my nightmares. My family. My friends. My ex. Their pale bodies tangled; bloodless and naked. Each bearing the unique method of murder I’d put them down with – some missing limbs, others charred and burned. My brother blindly watches me, his face and teeth having been smashed flat with a garbage compactor.

This time I did not scream. Instead, I was overcome with the dizzying sense that I was now standing on the edge of a cliff. You know the feeling you get? Where you’re so terrified of falling that you suddenly become sure that that’s exactly what you’re going to do? That was the feeling. And that’s exactly what happened next – I fell face first into the necrotic pasta I’d created. I opened my mouth, either to scream or to breath, I don’t know, but instead found the waxy flesh of my mother’s leg in my jaws. Vomit rushed out to meet it. I could feel the dead things all around me begin to spasm and writhe. A hand clawed at my thigh; another at my back. I looked up in time to see that

Susan was staring at me, her back arching up into a near sitting position before flopping down onto her stomach. Slowly, painfully – it seemed – she dragged herself over the pile of moving corpses until our noses were almost touching. I wanted hysterically to push her away, to escape, but my arms felt weaker and somehow shorter; my body frozen in paralysis. In horror, I realized the lid of her removed eye was opening and closing like a gibbering mouth and that with each retraction I could see into the private gore of her skull. I desperately tried to look away, but stopped. She’s trying to tell me something.

I could see her mouth moving but I couldn’t hear as if we were miles apart. Furiously, I stared at her lips, trying to make out a word – anything. Around me, the blindly searching hands had found the downy comforter and were in the process of pulling it up over us now in heavy jerking motions. To my left, the closet door slammed open and an avalanche of people I didn’t recognize flooded out. I could feel the blood pulsing in my ears but I still couldn’t put Susan’s words together. “Sea”? “Pay the Sea?” The blanket was crawling over the top of her head now.

Distantly, I realized that the other cadavers were speaking as well – their rotting lips whispering, again too quietly for me to hear. No, I have to focus! In another second, I’m not going to see anything! And there it was. In the last moment, as the fabric fell over Susan’s face – and my head – I’d caught one word: “Cindy”.

They were warning me. My wife was next to die.

* * *

“You were laughing in your sleep again,” Cindy’s voice, just beside me, makes me jump and nearly flip off the bed.

Was. . .that a dream too? Again I find myself in our room; the ceiling fan silent and unmoving. I sit up and hold my face in my hands. How much more of this can I take? Did I kill her or didn’t I? Guilt is still hanging over me like a corpse and I’m not sure if this is yet another dream or not.

Cindy’s burying her face in her pillow looking like she’d just woken from a nightmare herself. It’s obvious she’s feeling sick and there’s the distinct twang of vomit leaping from her hair. But her hearing was back; the worst was behind her again – at least for now.

“Did I say anything?” I ask this, but I don’t listen to the answer. I know what she’s going to say because we’ve had this conversation before.

“Ya…you said Susan a few times”.

A jolt ripples through me, but I do my best to hide it from my face. Usually there’s only the laughing – more of a snicker, really – but this time. . . I’d said her name. In the distance I could hear sirens whip-whirling. Were they meant for me?

I leaned over and gave Cindy the best side-hug I could manage; kissing her forehead. “Oh right, that was Susan from work. Her father just died and I’ve been thinking about the funeral.” It’s a bad lie, but it’s better than the truth. “I’m going to get a drink, want anything?” She shook her head miserably and I headed for the kitchen.

For a good few moments I stared dumbly at the cell phone in my hand, building up the courage for what I wanted to do. I can call Andrew. He’d still have Susan’s number and I can call her and I can go back to sleep. This is so stupid! You know that, so why are you doing this?

If I had to face the possible unthinkable, I wasn’t about to do it alone. I got a tall glass from the cupboard, sloshed a helping hand of vodka into it and filled the rest with orange juice. Dolefully kicking back a mouthful, I turned back to the problem at hand:

I dialed his number.

One dial tone. Two dial tones. Come on, buddy, I know it’s the middle of the night, but you have to sense the urgency I’m sending through this phone, right?

It rang three more times and then went to voicemail. Frustrated, I called again, but still no answer. I stopped, hitching in a breath. Now that I think about it, when was the last time I talked to you, man? With dawning horror, I realized I hadn’t spoken to him in over a month. Not him, not my family either.

In a panic, I dialed the numbers of every person I cared about, everyone that I had dreamed about with mounting dread. Not a single person I knew answered the phone. Of the strangers that did, they claimed they didn’t know who I was talking about – that the number must have been changed. Others came back disconnected.

So I had done it then. Murdered everyone I’d ever cared about, but why? And surely there must have been police investigations! Someone must have found a connection between a massacred family and their only remaining son! But then why don’t I remember anyone contacting me? Am I really that sick of a fuck?

Shock overwhelms me and I crumple to the ground, taking my empty glass with me. Numbly, I try to sit up and realize that I can’t. It’s starting! This must be it! I’m losing control of my body. Lying back down, I roll my eyes in the direction of the phone. I have to call the police. I can’t hurt another person! But the cell phone looks like it’s miles away. I giggle to myself at the absurdity of this and reach for it anyway. My arm stretches like taffy and

There’s a noise from the hallway. Cindy! Oh god, I have to warn her! Whatever is happening to me is almost complete! She has to run! God I can’t stop this monster inside of me!

“Shind-y. . . run for. . .hel-puh,” the words form as the spittle on my lips- indistinct and bursting on the ‘p’s’.

I try to focus on the pink blur of her pajamas when, without warning, she falls to the ground in a fit of retching. No, not now! You can’t get sick now, I need you to run! The world feels tilted on its axis and my body is impossibly heavy. One moment everything seems frozen in place and the next

She’s on top of me. I can feel the heat of her breath; the sour taste of bile cloying in the air. In a heaving belch, she vomits a thick stream across my face, soaking into my shirt and coagulating in my curly red hair. I watch as it runs down my side and pools next to the glass. The glass! The date her pills would ship…I’d made a mistake…had that been the arrival date?

She must have known I was a killer. She’s doing the right thing. The world is growing dim and I feel like I’m floating in a cold river. Breathing is becoming less and less natural for me – less important. She’s looking at me now, her face completely devoid of expression. With my last breath I prepare to whisper, “Thank you”, but then I see it – a cut across her palm. It’s something so simple, so mundane but I can hear the click of understanding as realization falls into place.

The killings won’t stop. I’d spent years of my life trying to escape my body to travel across this world as freely as a gust of wind. It had never occurred to me that I’d actually succeeded, and more. I’d heard it was called dreamwalking – actually living inside another’s dream. But that would be the ultimate freedom. That would be

“The God Ticket,” I mutter, barely audible.

She stops, only for a moment and then leans forward, her blonde hair cascading over my face and at first I think she’s going to kiss my forehead, when instead her lips close around my right eye.

Credit To – ARScroggins

I was only nineteen years old – prime of my life I’ve been told – and I had just been thrust into the world of learning labeled college. All sorts of new experiences and new ideas, books and articles, beer and women. The typical undergraduate lifestyle had consumed me and I was enjoying every minute of it. Within the stacks of our library were thousands upon thousands of dusty stagnant books, many of which would have no problem clearing a college bouncer with their last checkout dates, and I adopted the odd habit of checking these decrement books out. Partly for the thrill of the unknown, but mostly I was enthralled by the idea of soaking my mind in the text of forgotten souls, people who at one time were as full of life as I currently was and I set out to bring them back to life.

On this particular day I had just completed perhaps my best theology midterm of all time, answering questions I knew and writing in the inspired way I credit to those dark hidden stacks. I had just completed Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea the day before and despite being inspired to read it again, decided on a short anonymous book in between. I flipped on the row light and the faded colors soaked in the old friend. Typically I just follow my intuition and start looking for an interesting title in what ever column it leads me to. Today was no different than any other and I began my search, scanning the tattooed spines for anything that caught my attention, and it didn’t take long. The Demon’s Apple written by Lucille Molow.

I fell asleep on page twenty, not an uncommon occurrence in light of my sleep patterns, and it didn’t take long for the rem sleep to rev up…

I found myself on a tropical beach populated by a tourist town located at the base of a peninsula a few minutes hike from me, and from this spot up past me and continuing along the shore were cabin houses that are found on the lake shores of Minnesota. Certainly the pine trees were out of place alongside the creamy white sand of the beach, but it was a dream after all. After some wallowing in the waves that washed a pleasant feeling upon my unconscious body I found myself peering out the window of a tree house. It was located on the same slope that I had witnessed from the beach, in the yard of the same cabin that I now accepted as my own. I could see not only the ocean and one side of my house, but also the neighbors yard carpeted with a thick bed of pine needles . At the fence closest to me stood a little blonde girl. She was wearing a pink sun dress with yellow flowers and wore matching bows in her hair. I understood she wanted to play, and I accepted her request.

Her unmenacing head popped up through the trapdoor, and we continued to play, what it was we were playing I cannot remember. I was filled a childish emotion, blissful and ignorant, a great feeling. Soon she was gone and I was left walking the streets of the same city on the same peninsula looking for a good beer.  I sit down and am approached by a nun wearing the full gown and hat, and she sits down opposite me at the table.

“You have been chosen.” The young sister said, her eyes staring gravely into my own. She had a sound of music feel about her, except one of the more solemn nuns in the movie who don’t sing from mountain tops.
“What do you mean?” I thought back to her, as you do in dreams.
“You’ve met a little girl today.” She said with an inquiring tone.
“Yes but what of it, we just played in my tree house.” I responded swigging my beer.
“I know that little girl and have been following her ever since she was my own child in the orphanage. Tell me, did she have on a pink dress with yellow flowers?”
“In fact she did, and matching bows.”
“She always does. Let me tell you what lurks within the body of that little girl. It is not a thing of the earth you know, rather it dwells beyond and under, in the realm of consciousness that humans only skip the top of when dreaming. Some might call it a demon, others may call it simply a bad spirit. Since the beginning of time it has lurked, an anti-angel spawned from the bosom of the universe, striving towards its own selfish domination of any and every. Now, the shell of the little girl has chosen you.” This is easily enough to raise the alertness of any mind, and I quickly deduced the situation for what it was, a nightmare. Whether or not this realization is common place among people I do not know, but for me it became so, and I had learned in my dreams to awaken myself from any situation I was not thoroughly enjoying (unfortunately this often led to premature extraction from dreams I was enjoying because I could not yet fully control the urge to wake up when I realized I was dreaming). Anyway, I awoke on the same couch I had fallen asleep on to the sound of footsteps on the porch outside. I was still extremely drowsy and had to force my legs onto the floor, and use both arms and all of my strength to drag myself to the door.

I could only see out of one eye clearly, and with this hindered aim I reach for the doorknob several times before acquiring it within my grasp. I swung open the door and a rush of familiar faces flooded through. Each enthusiastically greeting my and thanking me for throwing such a great party. It was still light outside and I could see the line of people extending to the street. Before long the door was shut and I had recovered from my rebooting period. I strolled to the kitchen to fill up my glass, admiring my own party throwing abilities as I squeezed past old friend after old friend. The horror struck me again with my first step into the kitchen.

“Hi I’m Molow,” said the most adorable blonde girl I had ever seen, especially in her pink sundress with yellow flowers. I fled, all the while straining to open my eyes. After what seemed like a lifetime of impending doom I awoke on the same couch again. I had the same drowsy feeling and thought to myself, “I need to write down this name Molow for research purpose when my laptop is charged.” Once again being unable to initially walk I just rolled off the couch and carved Molow into the floor. Being as exhausted as I was I allowed myself to fall back asleep, assuming that after being awake for long enough my dream had been reset to the beach again, and I longed for those pleasant waves to wash over my soul. I found myself inside of my cabin this time, gazing out the picture window overlooking the beach and the sea. Even for a long time in dream minutes I stood there watching the birds fly through the quartz air and diving to the rippled surface every now and then. The waves patted the fluffy white beach and I was joined by a little blonde girl standing by my side.

“Why hello,” I thought to her, “Beautiful spot. Your family is very lucky.” I had accepted her as the daughter of my parents friends, I had no reason to be alarmed because we had spent the whole weekend with our families together.

“Come play!” she cheerfully said, and I followed her outside onto the porch and eagerly onto the roof of my cabin for what was sure to be an exciting game. I stood on the peak overlooking the ocean, three floors down to a steep slope inhabited with rocks and pine needles blanketing the area that wasn’t tree trunks. Standing nest to one of these tree trunks, gravely leering at me on my pinnacle, was the nun. The horror hit me again and I looked behind me at the little girl, with a cheerful grin hanging by its corners from two burning eyes.

“Molow comes from an ancient universal word for trickery,” she told me, and I wholly believed her.
“It is only a dream,” I thought, desperately trying to wake up and recover in the safety of my physical couch in my physical world.
“If I jump will I fall?” I asked.

“You certainly would, but does it matter at all?” These words rang in my ears as the most eloquent poetry ever written. I turned to face the drop and decided that the only sure way to wake up was to jump. I had done it before in dreams, yes the impact of the ground is nerve rattling, but it is a sure bet to wrench open your eyes and send your heart racing. It’s because of experiences like these that I never believed the old wive’s tale that if you die in a dream you die in real life. I tell you no lie when I say I have died a plentiful number of times in dreams, between being stabbed in the face, getting ripped apart by a machine gun, and numerous falling instances I have become somewhat unafraid of it. Although the impact of the fatal blow is always bone splintering. Not in a painful sort of way, but more in a vibrating sort of way, like your brain is being shook so rapidly that a pressure builds up in a soda can.

I jumped, in full dread of my soda can finally bursting on this impact, but finally escaping the terror of her matching bows. I bounced off several tree limbs, and died on my impact with a rock. As usual my internal organs were squeezed to almost their limit, and for several seconds I hung in limbo not knowing if I would ever feel the comfort of breath again. To my relief I awoke, and after taking a few seconds to calm myself down I scanned my environment. This was certainly no dust-ridden couch in a scum-ridden college house, but rather the basement of a church with rows of desks all occupied by children, me included.

I got out of my chair, but my actions were not my own. I heard the nun teacher politely ask me to return to my desk and finish my theology midterm. I watched myself as I disobeyed her orders and diligently walked to the front of the room where she was standing.

“Molow, return to thou seat now or I will use thy ruler upon thee rump!”

I watched myself, matching bows and all, continue on my firm course, and slit the nun’s throat.

Credit To – Joe

Edgar raised his head up from his chest; back pressed firmly into his favorite recliner, his entire body drenched in cold sweat. He stared into shadows at the edge of the living room, eyes welling with tears as he lifted the revolver slowly and deliberately to his temple. “Seventeen”, he whispered to the darkness.

The index finger of his right hand had already found its perch on the trigger during the weapon’s ascent, during which he had hesitated no more than a second, his only concern ensuring that the angle he chose would prove fatal. He clenched his left hand into a fist at his side, steeling his will. He inhaled sharply. And with further need of neither breath nor will, he clenched his right hand.

Darkness flashed brilliantly to light from the barrel of a .38 Special, as the gunshot’s dull thunder echoed around the room. The remains of Edgar Freeman slumped sideways in what had once been his favorite chair. The other man with him in that chamber smiled softly, the one in the shadows who had been briefly illuminated by the muzzle flare, that sallow man in the dark suit with the pale blue eyes. He smiled as everything turned gray.
Edgar flailed his way to a sitting position, ripping the covers off the bed as he always did when waking up from that goddamned nightmare. After the fourth night in a row with the same dream, he had taken to sleeping with his bedside lamp turned on. After the sixth night in a row, his frenzy upon waking had sent it crashing to the floor – bulb broken and shade cracked by the impact. Tonight had been the eighth night, and as he recited every vulgarity he could recall into the inky darkness of his bedroom, he swore that today he’d find the time to go purchase a box of light bulbs.

Involuntarily recalling the stranger in the dream’s inappropriately sweet smile, he reminded himself to ask the clerk for their highest wattage.
After a warm shower and a few minutes collecting his thoughts on the side of the bed, Edgar set about his day. Nearly-tasteless scrambled eggs and coffee which would have been merciful if it had been tasteless comprised his breakfast, and his thoughts turned to how absurdly better Haley’s morning meal would have been. Whatever other problems they had, Haley’s cooking had been beyond reproach. He would regularly wake to the mouthwatering aroma of a nutritious breakfast which she had prepared for him – usually egg whites on a wheat English muffin with a tall glass of orange juice – at least before the morning sickness had started and kept her occupied in her prayers to the porcelean goddess for her first waking hour of every day. All this, he reminded himself bitterly, was in the past now.

As the Vice-President of Marketing for the second largest athletic apparel company in the country (and, as he thought of himself, a reasonably attractive man) Edgar was more than used to the occasional flirting – both casual and aggressive – from young female interns and employees within his department. It came with the territory, and it was never anything he couldn’t brush off. Thoughts of either taking it further than flirtations or reporting it to Human Resources very rarely crossed his mind; the former on account of his pregnant wife, the latter on account of the ego boost it provided. One month ago, however, Edgar began an affair with a particularly buxom college intern named Samantha. Above and below the brassiere, she had been nothing special; just a warm body to quell the urges to which Haley had been unwilling or unable to tend after entering her third trimester. Even the sex was unremarkable.

Their first rendezvous took place in a motel a few blocks away from the office, the type of place with bay windows overlooking less than scenic freeway overpasses, and even the roaches use black lights before scurrying under the unmade bed. As a cursory nod to legitimacy, the establishment stopped short of offering rates on a per-hour basis – a fact known because Edgar had inquired upon checking in.

After that first encounter, the two grew bolder and less discerning in their indiscretions. Edgar’s office came next, and that time had been a little more satisfying – a combination of the danger and the skirt Samantha kept on at his request. But boldness turned quickly to carelessness, and Edgar was an apprentice of infidelity less than two weeks before Haley discovered his betrayal.

Whether it was a whiff of unfamiliar perfume or a phone call from one of Edgar’s jealous rejects who had spotted the two of them around the office, his adultery with Samantha was soon the topic to which Edgar returned home from work. The accusation was on her face the minute he walked through the door. He had come home late from a particularly wild romp with Samantha, and the words from Haley’s trembling lips quickly disclosed exactly how much she knew.
It would have been pointless to lie – she had too many details and he too little imagination – so Edgar confessed, and made a perfunctory effort to justify his behavior. She cursed him with a severity and intensity which Edgar had never seen from her before, and in her final words to him she made it clear that she was leaving, and that she would make sure he would never in his life have a role in raising their child. Despite his heartache at the prospect of losing Haley, Edgar had spent too long in a cutthroat business to take threats passively, even from his wife. He laughed bitterly, and reminded her of the quality of the lawyers within his means. When he was done, Edgar said with words he instantly regretted but found himself powerless to silence, she would be lucky to get weekends and a few holidays with the kid.

That was a lie and he knew it, but at the time his main objective was to get off the defensive and regain the upper hand in the fight – maybe even make Haley reconsider her choice to leave. He would happily cut some hefty checks to a marriage counselor if it saved him from the much larger ones in the form of alimony and child support. But something in the way Haley was smiling at him suggested that he had misunderstood her intentions. And as he realized far too late; if he had been more observant, he might have noticed an empty hook on their key caddy, and connected it to that sardonic grin she was wearing.

She hadn’t left right away, like he had expected. Isn’t that always the way it works in the movies and on television? The guy comes out of the bathroom or back from the bar a little while after the fight to find the gal’s suitcases dusted off and bulging with all the expensive clothes he bought her over the course of their relationship? Her haughty and defiant, him prostrate and pleading?

Edgar would have never played the latter role in his life, but he had fully expected the former from Haley. Instead, an hour after he walked away from their screaming match to take a much-needed shower, he stuck his head into the living room to find her sitting in his favorite chair (what a bitch) staring off into space and rubbing her (Goddamn is she ready to pop) pregnant stomach.

As far as Edgar was concerned, that was the end of the first of presumably many arguments on the subject. He ascended the stairs quietly, and slipped into bed. The day had been long enough, and she clearly wasn’t going anywhere or she would have left already. Haley never came to bed, but neither did he hear the front door slamming behind her before he drifted off – so it seemed she had decided to stay at least for the night. All will be well, Edgar told himself as sleep overtook him. But I doubt she’s going to fix my breakfast for a few days.

The noise which ripped him out of that deep slumber came just after five o’clock in the morning, according to his alarm clock. By the time consciousness took hold, the sound had died as quickly as it came. He stood reflexively, and scanned over the bed with eyes barely awake enough for even that simple task. Eventually determining Haley’s side to be empty, Edgar shuffled out the bedroom door and down the stairs to determine what caused the sudden clamor.

He didn’t need to reach the bottom of the staircase, or allow his eyes further time to adjust, to know that she had decided to leave him after all. One glance into the living room cleared up any doubt on that subject. There were no bulging suitcases, or haughty looks – just an unlocked and opened gun cabinet, a crimson splatter on the wall, and a steady trickle of the same beading down the side of his favorite chair and pooling on the hardwood floor beside it.

After a moment of shocked paralysis, Edgar lunged for the house phone in huge, desperate strides. The rapidity was not for the sake of Haley, through whose newly-ventilated skull he could clearly catch glimpses of the televised presidential debate at the far side of the room, but for her blameless passenger of seven and a half months. He gave all the pertinent information to the infuriatingly indifferent emergency control room operator, and waited in the hallway with the front door flung open wide.

The gunshot had drawn a crowd of early-waking neighbors to the driveway in front of the Freeman residence, a phenomenon bred not out of bravery in the face of danger but from the casual ignorance of danger reserved exclusively for neighborhoods peopled by the wealthy and sheltered. They eyed him accusingly, none with less than dawning suspicion in their gaze. Edgar raged at them for this; first with harsh thoughts, then with guttural growls and impotent flailing. They would collectively step backward when his fury and frustration flowed strongest, and advance again when the yelling waned in ferocity – a human tide of slack-jawed gawkers.

The spectacle was temporarily dissolved by the wailing siren and subsequent appearance of an Advanced Life Support ambulance, from which paramedics rapidly spawned just a few minutes after Edgar’s conversation with their dispatcher (another feature exclusive to the type of neighborhood in which Edgar and Haley Freeman resided). The crowd made way for the emergency vehicles, but soon found a new vantage point on Edgar’s lawn.
The paramedics discovered Edgar’s wife slumped over in his recliner, and strapped her lifeless form into a gurney. Once she was properly secured, they wheeled her rapidly out of the house and into the back of their ambulance. Edgar jumped in as well, and there was no time to either ask or answer any questions before the crew slammed the bay doors and sped off toward the county hospital.

Between checking vital signs and attempts to keep oxygen pumping into the corpse of his wife for the sake of her unborn child, Edgar noted the cautious glances being shot his way by the Paramedics – as well as the blue flashes from multiple police vehicles following close behind the ambulance. I didn’t have anything to do with it, he wanted to say – to scream – but in the back of his mind he knew that was just a degree or two away from being precisely the truth, and so he remained silent.

He had thought they would throw the handcuffs on him as soon as they arrived at the hospital, but instead the throng of police officers just explained they would wait with Edgar while the doctors did what they could for the baby – and maybe get some information from him if he felt up to talking. Edgar nodded assent, largely because the officers bore all the mannerisms of men who intended to get some information from him whether or not he felt up to talking.

They stood outside the operating room, lined up in the viewing area. The officers gave Edgar his space; his face mere inches from the glass, taking occasional breaks to wipe the window off with his sleeve after frantic breaths had fogged it to the point of opacity. They questioned him hesitantly; he answered them hastily and with little regard for the words he used. His concerns were elsewhere, and he knew there was nothing he could unintentionally blurt out to incriminate himself. He watched as the surgeon made a large incision into Haley’s lower abdomen (at least she’s sedated for this, Edgar thought insanely) and set about removing the baby from her womb.

Within a few minutes, everyone in the viewing area knew everything they needed to know. The officers knew that Haley had apparently died at her own hand (the autopsy would either confirm or deny that), that she had likely done it as a result of her husband’s infidelity, and that Edgar had seen little or no warning signs leading up to the suicide. Edgar, meanwhile, knew that the baby was alive but fading fast, that the baby was a boy (they wanted the gender to be a surprise, one of the few things on which he and Haley never disagreed), and that the baby was being placed in an incubator as a last-ditch effort to save its life.

Edgar stood outside the room, the police now keeping an even more respectful distance as he watched his infant son die. There was little commotion about it, and little the doctors could do to prevent it. The child’s eyes opened once the entire time, and the next thing Edgar knew they were pronouncing the time of death as 5:46 AM. They just cut him out of Haley at 5:29, Edgar thought frantically. My kid – my son – was alive less than half an hour. I didn’t even have time to name him. A girl and Haley names him, a boy and I name him; that was the promise we made since we couldn’t even fucking agree on names. Edgar slammed his fist against the wall, and distantly felt his knuckles grinding. As he fell to his knees, his hand hurt far less than the scalding hot tears welling behind his eyes.

That was two weeks ago. Today, Edgar ate nearly-tasteless scrambled eggs, and drank coffee that would have been merciful if it were tasteless. Eight nights now he lived with the nightmare of killing himself destroying any semblance of sleep. Eight nights now he lived with the man in the shadows of that nightmare smiling at his decision to do so. Light bulbs, a huge box of them, highest wattage the hardware store sells, today after work. Edgar again reminded himself of the errand as he threw on his jacket and walked out the door.

Work went much the same as always, only with the added distraction and morbid water-cooler fodder provided by his wife’s suicide. It was annoying, more than anything.

Edgar first became consciously aware of a man’s form standing just outside the threshold of his office’s open doorway when he glanced at the clock to determine exactly how far into the night he had been lost in paperwork. He came to work at dawn and knew it was now certainly dusk, at a minimum. The day had been typical office fare for the return of a bereaved coworker – mindless platitudes and weightless sympathy, empty words from the empty hearts of people paid just enough to pretend to care but not enough to do so convincingly. There was no telling exactly how long the man had been silently standing in the darkness of the hallway, but Edgar recollected the first vague feeling of being watched a few minutes prior. Everyone but the night shift security guard had left hours ago, giving him a welcome respite in which to concentrate and catch up on missed work. Or so he had thought, until this new interruption.

“Hello?” Edgar hesitantly greeted the interloper, fearing the inevitable next in a long line of ham-handed jabs at emotional consolation.
“Evening, sir.” the reply came, grating and phlegmy. His eyes still attempting to adjust to the drastic change from the brightness of his office to the hallway illuminated only by the ambient moonlight leaking in from sporadically-placed windows, Edgar judged by the unfamiliar voice that this was either a stranger – a vendor, perhaps – or a colleague with a particularly nasty cold that he’d better not be spreading around.

“Step inside, I’ve been burning holes in my retinas under this lamp for the past two hours, I can’t see a damned thing out there.”

“Really can’t stay,” the man intoned, practically gargling, “just passing through”.

“Yeah, I know what you mean; it’s been quitting time for hou… have we met?” Edgar’s eyes had begun to adjust, and he grew uneasy. The stranger was still dim and blurry, but clearly wearing a dark suit of indeterminable quality. Another minute and it would be clear if this was some sort of tight-assed internal auditor from the 14th floor, or another detective sniffing around after Haley’s death. Whoever it was, the suit betrayed him for a stranger. Fridays around the office were always Casual Day, when even the senior executives wore polos and khakis. The man was showing no signs of leaving, so Edgar made his eyes’ next mission determining whether or not he had one of those idiotic access badge lanyards they all had to wear around the building.

“I’m new. I’m a messenger. I’m here to deliver a package.”

Edgar cocked his head, dubious. A courier in a three-piece suit? Pull the other one. No badge, either. Edgar did not reply, hoping the (Process Server? Jehovah’s Witness?) stranger would state their business and move along.

“You work such long hours. Don’t you miss your family, sir?”

A knot materialized in Edgar’s throat, and he sat bolt upright in his chair. After the initial shock wore off, Edgar softened his posture, quickly convincing himself of the question’s innocuous nature. A labor union representative – of course. He slipped in here to try and play on some suit’s delicate sensibilities, blather about unpaid overtime and kids tucking themselves into bed. Just trying to get us to abolish our non-unionizing clause with factory workers. “I receive fair compensation for the work that I do, as does everyone in our employ. So no, I’m fine, really. Thanks.” That should get the point across, he thought with a certain grim satisfaction.

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that. Well…” The stranger turned slightly as if to leave, paused, and leaned his head inside the office for the first time.

“They certainly miss you.”

The words scraped like icicles up the length of Edgar’s spine, gripping his skull with tendrils as cold as the grave. The face was gone from view as quickly as it came – the form of the man as well – but the hideous visage remained burned into Edgar’s brain, and in the recesses of his mind he was acutely aware that it would be etched there until his dying breath. The eyes were of a milky blue so pale and distant they suggested blindness, but met Edgar’s with an unerring gaze that insisted they saw him very well indeed. The rest of the face was unburdened with such signs of vitality. His skin was sallow and sickly, and even at a distance it appeared to be the texture of well-worn leather. The man’s cheeks and eye sockets were sunken, the flesh drooping loose in these places, yet drawn tight against the skull around his forehead and mouth. Gaunt and cadaverous, every feature from the greasy, matted hair, to the quivering wattle of flesh when he spoke was identical to that of the dark stranger in Edgar’s recently acquired nightmares. But everything else was peripheral to the all-encompassing terror which he felt at seeing those damned eyes. There was something unpleasantly familiar in them, something horrible which he found himself powerless to name or explain.

Once he regained control of his frozen limbs, Edgar lunged toward the doorway where the man had stood moments prior. The elevator hadn’t dinged its arrival, and the stubborn latch on the stairwell door hadn’t let out the audible clack customary to every opening and closing. ‘He’s still somewhere on this floor’, Edgar thought frantically. The idea gave him strength, but no real clarity of purpose. He knew only that he needed to confirm that the stranger’s presence here was more than merely a result of his overtaxed mind and guilty conscience. There were no desks, no bathroom stalls, no supply closets left unsearched by the time Edgar’s frenzied investigation reached its fever pitch. Motivational posters tacked to the walls of overbearingly congenial and downright suspiciously diverse businesspeople smiling and clasping hands warmly seemed to be mocking him, silent conspirators against Edgar in his quest. “Sure we know who he is and where he went,” Edgar could imagine them saying, “but we’re too busy leveraging our synergy and engaging in value-added interfacing to dialogue on your initiative.” He dragged both hands through his hair, gripping thick handfuls of it and tugging slightly. His visitor, if something more than a delusion, had departed unseen and unheard. Edgar could feel his heart pounding wildly, seemingly slamming against the back of his ribcage. He stopped only to grab his briefcase before sprinting down the stairs to escape the increasingly oppressive emptiness of the office.

The executive parking deck was windowless, and thus even darker than the building from which he had just departed. It was barren except for him and his Lexus, and likely had been since the security guard made their most recent tour through it hours ago – the guard having shut off all but the emergency lights on the way out. Despite that small assurance, Edgar found himself casting furtive glances over both shoulders, and quickening his pace each time they revealed a total lack of reason to do so. He had never been a superstitious man, any fear of monsters had been laid to rest long ago by the waking horrors which walk amongst men brazenly in the daylight. Student loan debt, insurance premiums, layoffs, mortgage payments – life, Edgar had learned decades ago, sports fangs and claws that make laughingstocks of those belonging to the vampires and werewolves man invented to cope with it. And yet, he scolded himself while fumbling nervously for his keys, all it takes is a little nudge from the imagination to awaken that primordial terror – to populate the uninhabited darkness with things which have no right to exist.

He was five feet from his car and had just unlocked it with the electronic remote attached to his keys when he heard the scream. It was high-pitched, womanly, terrified, and resonated from the office area directly behind him. ‘Did Haley scream that way right before she pulled the trigger?’ Edgar thought wildly. He stopped in his tracks, turned sharply, and saw nothing. Then, as if in response to his silent inquiry, the gunshot came. Edgar snatched the cell phone from his pocket, frantically calling 911 for the second time in as many weeks. He flipped the phone open to his ear, but the operator requesting the nature of his emergency sounded a thousand miles away. The clacking, dragging footsteps coming down the corridor from the sound of the shot and toward the executive parking garage, however, sounded very close indeed. Edgar dropped the phone and practically dove into his car. His foot was on the accellerator as quickly as he could throw the vehicle into gear.

The roads outside the office were illuminated solely by street lights and the occassional flash of a passing motorist’s headlights. The sun had vanished below the horizon hours ago – when people in khakis or sensible skirts departed on a fourteen hour break from pretending to care about each other’s children or gastrointestinal complications, and left Edgar alone with two weeks worth of backlogged paperwork. Stress, Edgar attempted to convince himself, can make you see things. Stress, he rationalized, can make you hear things. Emotional trauma. None of it took any pressure off of his mind or the gas pedal as he sped toward home.

Upon his frantic arrival, Edgar knew something was wrong before he ever burst through the front door. He hadn’t turned any lights off since the nightmares started, much less when he expected to be out past sunset, and yet he found himself fumbling around the darkness of his hallway for the lights. When his blind groping finally brushed across the light switch, there was very little surprise in finding the knob broken off – following the day’s events, it would have been a bigger surprise if the switch had been in working order. Instinct told him to turn and flee the house, but the flashing red number ‘one’ on his answering machine called with an even greater urgency.

Despite his hand’s anxious trembling, Edgar’s finger struck the Play button with unerring precision, a motion he had grown well-acquainted with over the past two weeks. People he hadn’t spoken to or thought about since practically before meeting Haley had seemingly not forgotten him, and had spent the interval between his wife’s death and now calling to offer their condolences. Their concern only served to compound his feelings of guilt with each message – what had he done to deserve such loyal friends? He fully anticipated another instance of the same consolation, when one of the last voices he would ever have expected emanated from the machine.

“Edgar?” the voice’s normally chipper lilt came, tinged with an unmistakable edge of caution. “It’s Samantha. I know I shouldn’t be calling you. I’m probably the last person in the world you want to hear from right now, and I can’t tell you how sorry I am for what happened.” There was a pause and what sounded like a sob. Edgar thought this was quite possibly the most real, orgasm-less emotion he had heard from Samantha since they first met. “Sorry for everything, really. I… we… we couldn’t have known how this would end. But I know I have no right to call. I’m just worried about you, is all. I laid out of work today because I heard you were coming back, and thought you didn’t deserve to have to bear seeing me on top of everything else… I could only imagine how hard it must be for you right now… and to tell the truth, I was scared to see you. Scared you might point at me every time someone asked, or something… I know, it’s stupid. And selfish. But I came by the office just now to pick up some work to take home with me, and I saw your car in the parking garage…”

Edgar eyed the time of the message on the answering machine. She had called sometime between the end of his frantic search of the office, and before he made it to his car. Which means that she was there right about the time that…

The voice on the machine had kept talking, and Edgar found himself now listening more intently than ever, his knuckles turning white from clenching the kitchen counter so tightly.

“…saw your office light was on, but you aren’t anywhere around. And man… this place looks like a tornado hit it. Someone really tore through here. I thought about you right away, so that’s why I’m calling. I don’t know if this is long overdue, or if I should have just done a quick fade and found another job and never called you again, or what… I mean, what’s the appropriate thing to do here? I can never make things right, but… I’m just so sorry, Edgar. Please call me back when you get this. I miss…”
‘Miss’ was the last word spoken by Samantha – unless one counts a bloodcurdling scream, following which came the sound that silenced whatever would have come next. The gunshot rang out like a thunderclap, and lost none of its horrible potency on the way through the phone lines to Edgar’s answering machine. The ensuing silence was deafening, and Edgar stood rigid in front of the machine, bent forward and staring at it intently – as if he expected it to begin displaying visual clues as to what had taken place. He got audio instead.

“Miss you, yes. You are very missed, indeed.” The male voice, undeniably the same as earlier that day, gargled as it chuckled into the receiver. The machine beeped, and a solid red zero informed him that he now has no unheard messages. But to Edgar the zero represented far more than that. It seemed almost an answer to not just how many messages he had, but to every question that mattered. What, why, who, how? What’s left, what matters, what will tomorrow bring? Nothing but zero, of course. Just a big blood-red negation.

Edgar released his death grip from the counter, and groped his way into the darkness of the living room. He passed another light switch on the way, noted with no real interest that the switch had been broken off of this one as well, then flopped down into his favorite recliner. “I have had”, Edgar whispered into the emptiness of the house that would never again be a home, “a very tough month.” The answer to his presumedly receipientless statement came in the form of a chuckle from a dark corner of the chamber. Edgar felt every muscle in his body go tense, and he lost all control of his bladder. He could not possibly have cared less about the latter, he merely stared into the darkness and waited for whatever must come next as the warmth spread across the front of his pants.

The man in the shadows stepped forward and Edgar winced away, sinking as deep into the plush chair as he could dig himself. The stranger, simply put, had gone from looking like his flesh was preparing to free itself from its Earthly prison – to actually having accomplished the task. Edgar was staring at the face and body of a man who had begun to lose some very respectable chunks of himself. Like butter melting in a warm room, some of it actually sloughed off as he made a methodical exit from the darkness.

“I know you’re wondering why I’m here, and why the past few weeks have seen your life seemingly spiral out of your control. At this point it comes down to fate. Fate is like playing tug-of-war with an adversary significantly stronger than you: There will always be times when you feel the rope inching your way, your heels dug in and your earnest exertions yielding the result you’ve worked so hard for, the victory you know you deserve. But even the times in which you feel the most control, the firmest ground, those are merely your opponent adjusting its grip. But this doesn’t preclude what you might call free will; the choices people make are what set fate in motion, and those are the pivotal moments.” He paused, then seemingly as an afterthought, “Like you, renting that motel room. Very few things from that moment to this one have been in your control, and none of them of any consequence. Your whore is dead now, and killed by your own gun. Her right eye looks a great deal like your answering machine, now. Just a big red zero. No new messages. By dawn, you’ll be in a cell. Your wife found out about you and the whore a few weeks ago. Maybe she took her own life, maybe you had a role in that. The whore, though… she was murdered. There’s not a jury in the world for whom your guilt is anything but a foregone conclusion.”
“Why.” Edgar breathed the inquiry flatly, incapable of inflection. He had never felt so tired – so completely drained and hollow – in his entire life. With each word the pale stranger spoke a deep burning emanated from every muscle in Edgar’s body, and yet the frantic scurrying of his mind remained as strong as ever, desperate to place those eyes he felt he knew so well.

“Why what? Why did you stray from the wife who once loved you? I couldn’t help you there. Not that knowing would change anything for either of us. But that isn’t the most important ‘why’ for you, is it? You want to know why this is happening to you, why I’m doing this. But for some reason you’re afraid to ask me who I am, the true question behind the ‘why’, to which I can only say that you must answer for both of us.”

The stranger resumed his lumbering gait towards Edgar, halting and awkward as he tottered ever closer. Edgar’s mind was drawn deep inside of itself to access the half-recalled memory of something he saw years ago in a mid-dawn walk across the parking lot on his way into work. A tattered salt-and-pepper moth, deceased at the base of a light pole; a coroner’s inquest doubtless would have revealed an acute case of banging one’s self repeatedly into a domelike miniature plastic electrical sun. Then came a stiff breeze which sent the moth airborne, flapping and tumbling toward Edgar’s path through the parking lot. The breeze settled, and the moth resumed being a body perfectly at rest; as all dead things should, Edgar reckoned, unless acted upon by an outside force. An unseen force, in the case of the moth; and, Edgar again reckoned, in the case of the man now standing before him. Because in his movements, Edgar saw that moth very clearly. These were the movements of something which once lived, and was now being acted upon by an entirely different unseen force – one which could only approximate the mechanisms of the vessel it now controls. The wind had been the name of that force driving the moth back into a perversion of life, but to name the force which could do the same for a man?

After a moment of silence which seemed to stretch for hours, Edgar met the stranger’s pale blue eyes with the last shred of courage he had. “Death?”

Then, a little more confidently: “You’re Death.”

The stranger laughed uproariously, his gaunt frame convulsing with the rhythm of his dry, wheezing cackles. The withered flesh of his face stretched away from blackened gums and all-too-white teeth in the most hideous approximation of a smile Edgar could have ever imagined. After his laughter subsided, the dark man spoke, wiping away tears which were not there. “You misunderstand me. It wasn’t my intention to be cryptic; I was merely requesting that you provide me with a name. This body, I’m approximating. It’s the body I might have had, had I lived to grow into it. But the eyes, they’re the windows to the soul so they say, and I had hoped you would remember mine. I forgive you though. You saw me only briefly, and under duress. But you were supposed to name me. Dying without a name was the worst part.”

Comprehension more horrible than the bewilderment had ever been began to spawn in Edgar, as an icy, all-encompassing chill washed over him. The man clapped him gently on the shoulder, and leaned in close, placing four pounds of cold steel into Edgar’s open palm. “I told you I was a messenger, and now my task is done. Mom asked me to give you that. She says to hurry. She promises not to be too hard on you if you come home quickly.”

Edgar quivered helplessly; his eyes had begun to water and burn, searching for any sign of consolation in those of his son. He parted his lips as if to speak, but could not find the words. His silent plea’s response came in presumably the most compassionate tone manageable by his visitor, “It’s not terrible there, it’s just…” The corpse-thing’s head cocked to the side, a very boyishly quixotic look in those pale blue eyes. “Gray. It’s gray there. Time moves much slower, if at all. They show you things. They’ve shown me all I would have known in the life which your actions denied me.” Venom in that decaying voice now, and Edgar knew that pulling the trigger himself would be the only mercy granted today.

The visitor turned, staggering clumsily into the darkness toward the edge of the room, as Edgar sat and examined the loaded revolver. His would-be progeny had almost completely exited from sight, and spoke without any discernable emotion. “One more thing. After they cut me out, how long did I last on that incubator? She doesn’t know, but I thought you might. I tried my best to hang on, but it couldn’t have been long. Fifteen minutes? Twenty?”
Edgar raised his head up from his chest; back pressed firmly into his favorite recliner, his entire body drenched in cold sweat. He stared into shadows at the edge of the living room, eyes welling with tears as he lifted the revolver slowly and deliberately to his temple. “Seventeen”, he whispered to the darkness.

Credit To – Dave Taylor

Don’t read this because it actually works. Now youve started reading, you can’t stop. A girl named Kathy drowned to death. If you email or repost this comment to three more videos, tommorrow will be the best day of you life. If you don’t repost this comment on at least three videos, Kathy will come for you when your sleeping. This is so scary because it actually works

Billy examined the message. He hummed and hawed over it, scratching his chin. On any other day, Billy would have done what the message said. After all, he didn’t want to die within three days, and he did want to have the best day of his life “tommorrow”.  But today was different. Today, Billy was eight years old, far too old to be dabbling with such nonsense. He had tried repeating similar messages in the past, and his only reward had been dozens of people on the internet sending him nasty replies.
Hesitantly, Billy placed his mouse over the red X at the top right of the email and pressed it down. The email closed, and as it did, Billy felt shivers run down his spine. But Billy was too old to be scared by such nonsense. He got up from his chair, and headed to the kitchen to find his mom.
His mom was preparing a delicious tuna casserole, Billy’s favorite. “Now, Billy,” said his mom, taking the steaming casserole out of the oven, “Remember, this is for lunch tomorrow. Don’t eat it before bed, or it will give you nightmares.” His mom left the room. “I’m going to work now. Make sure you’re in bed in a few minutes, alright?”
Billy nodded.  Billy’s mom left the house, and he heard the slam of the front door. Billy was all alone now. It was time for him to go to bed soon, and he didn’t want to have any more frightening thoughts. But the casserole… it looked so good! Surely, thought Billy,  a simple taste would have no effect on me!
Billy took a stepstool and sampled the irresistible tuna casserole. It melted into his mouth, and filled Billy with a sense of euphoria. Surely, another taste couldn’t hurt. Billy cut himself a slice and took it to his bedroom. After messily devouring the meal, Billy fell asleep.
~
Billy awoke with a start. He heard a noise in his room. It was a creeping, sloshing sound, like the sound of a boot sinking into a muddy puddle. At first, Billy thought that it was his mom coming home from work, but after checking the digital clock that glowed bright red in the darkness, he realized that his mom wouldn’t be hoe for another few hours.
The sloshing sound continued. Billy sat up straight, listening intently to whatever it could be. He crept downstairs, and saw muddy footprints leading straight into the front hall of his house. He gasped. Now, Billy was frightened. Now, Billy felt like a child, too young to be a part of such a frightening world. He considered bolting out the front door, but Billy calmed himself down; maybe it was simply his mother, home early, after all.
Billy crept after the footprints. Billy knew that his mother would never trek such a mess through his house. But Billy still had to be sure. The footprints came to a dead stop in the kitchen. Billy poked his head through the doorway and turned the lights on. There, sitting on the kitchen table, was a girl about his age, eating the tuna casserole.
Her hair was matted, wet and black, her skin, fetid and rubbery, and her eyes glowed as red as his alarm clock upstairs. Billy gasped, startling backwards and crashing against the wall, sliding to the ground. The girl got up off of the table and steadily advanced towards him. “What’s wrong with you?” she said, “I’m just-”
Billy wouldn’t listen to the she-witches’ horrible taunting. He tore past her, and grabbed the nearest weapon in the room: the tuna casserole. Using the brunt of the glass container, he smashed it over the girl’s head. A steady stream of blood poured from it, and the girl lifelessly collapsed to the ground.
The tuna casserole was now spread all over the floor, messily decorating it with bits of cheese and fish. Billy took a sigh of relief, as any moment now the girl would evaporate into a puff of black smoke. However, the girl just lay there lifelessly.
Billy thought, for a moment, that he had made a mistake. He kicked the girl a bit, but she continued to lay there lifelessly. Looking outside, he noticed that it was raining, which probably explained her hair and the boots. Billy shook the girl frantically, but there was no response.
Billy started to cry, and as he did, he noticed the girl stirring. Still not sure of what to think, Billy grabbed a piece of glass from the shattered casserole. He grasped it so hard that blood formed at the edge of his hand. The girl rose up, and one of her hands shot towards Billy. As she choked the life out of him, she reached down and began eating the tuna casserole.
~
Billy awoke with a start. His chest puffed in and out as he steadied his thoughts. Looking around, he perceived that the previous events had all been a horrible dream. There was no crazy demon ghost girl after all. He sighed in relief, but noticed something wet on his hand. Looking at his hand, he saw the glass he had taken from the tuna casserole, and the blood that had formed after he pierced his skin by holding it too hard!
~
Billy awoke with a start. Before doing anything else, Billy looked at his hands. Completely c lean, he thought. Absolutely no blood, no signs of conflict, everything was right with the world. It was still dark out, but his mother would be home soon. Billy looked around, and then let himself relax. “Thank God I’m done with these nightmares,” he said.
“Don’t thank Him yet,” said a voice coming from the doorway. He looked up and saw the girl again, this time holding a butcher’s knife.
~
Billy awoke with a start. Not ready to be fooled again by his dream, he first checked his hands: clean, free of blood. He looked at the doorway: vacant, not a soul in sight. He held his breath and listened for muddy footsteps, but not a single one was heard. Terrified, Billy crept out of his bed, and decided to wait on the couch for his mother to get home.
He grasped the metal banister and began his slow descent downstairs. As he did, he looked around, desperate for signs of foul-play. When none were spotted, Billy made it to the couch, and waited for his mom to come home.
After a few minutes of tense, nerve-wracking waiting, the door swung open, and his mom, back from her night shift, greeted him with a smile. “What are you doing up so late?”
Billy’s eyes were filled with tears. “I’ve… I’ve been having these terrible nightmares. I accidently had some of the casserole, and… and…”
Billy’s mom shook her head. “Billy. You haven’t been having nightmares. You ARE the nightmares.”
Billy’s mom’s head exploded into a writhing snake with matted, wet hair and a venomous bite. Her arms twisted into laughing clown heads, while the rest of her body oozed red pus. Billy screamed as it descended upon him.
~
Billy awoke with a start. For a few hours, he was too afraid to do anything but silently sob to himself in his bed. He didn’t care anymore, he just wanted the nightmare to be over.
Billy knew that this was a nightmare. Sure, there were no signs to prove it, but there would be soon. Undoubtedly, there would be soon. Billy ran downstairs, just as his front door opened. “Billy!” said his mother, “what are doing racing around the house at this time of night?”
Billy ran past his mother, knowing that soon she would become a nightmare. Billy only had one destination: the luger that was hidden deep downstairs, in a safe. Billy knew that if he could get his hands on that gun, he could blow his brains out, and the dream would be over.
His mom chased after him, screaming things that his mother would scream, like “Get back here, Billy!”,”You should be in bed by now!”, “You ate the casserole, didn’t you?” and “Where are you going?” Billy made her no mind, and headed into the basement.
He spotted the safe. Billy’s mom couldn’t keep up with him, and was now only walking after him. It would give him enough time to do what he needed to do.
Billy knew the combination to the safe, although his mom thought that he didn’t. The luger was his father’s, and now he planned on putting it to use. His inputted the combination, and took the gun out of its place, right as his mother burst through the door to the basement.
“Billy!” she cried, tears welling up in her eyes, “Put that gun down this insant! NOW! NOW!”
Billy wouldn’t fall for her tricks. He placed the gun to his temple and closed his eyes. “BILLY!” yelled his mother, frantically. “NO! NO!”
Billy pulled the trigger. The bullet went clean through his brain, and his lifeless body fell to the floor.
Billy’s mom collapsed to her knees and cried, reflecting on what a royally idiotic idea keeping the luger downstairs and assuming Billy didn’t know about it was. After hours of crying, she phoned the police.
The police showed up, asked her questions, and took her into custody. Billy’s body was sweeped up, and would be put into the newspaper. People from all over the world would wonder what brought this boy to such a tragic end.
Aw, who are we kidding.
~
Billy awoke with a start. He rubbed his temple and sighed. “That is it,” he said, “No more God damned tuna casserole before bed.”