Dread Softly, page 1
Dread Softly: A Collection by Caryn Larrinaga
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Copyright © 2021 Caryn Larrinaga
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No Soliciting © 2020, first published in They Walk Among Us: A Collection of Utah Horror
Empire of Dirt © 2021, first published in Dread Softly
The Fishermen © 2017, first published in Apocalypse Utah: A Collection of Utah Horror
The Devil’s Way Out © 2021, first published in Dread Softly
Family Time © 2020, first published in The Witching Time of Night
Watchers’ Warning © 2019, first published in From a Cat’s View Vol. II
Until Death © 2020, first published in The NoSleep Podcast
A Friend in Need © 2018, first published in A Year of the Monkeys
The Bump © 2020, first published in Mother Ghost’s Grimm: Volume 2
The Thing Inside Jacky Jensen’s Garage © 2020, first published in The Function of Freedom
Inguma We Trust © 2021, first published in Dread Softly
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The use of any real company and/or product names is for literary effect only. All other trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners.
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Cover by Rooster Republic Press
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Print ISBN: 978-0-9990200-7-4
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-9990200-6-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021908374 (print)
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A Twisted Tree Press Publication
North Salt Lake City, UT
www.TwistedTreePress.com
Praise for DREAD SOFTLY
“A stunning collection of stories.... Each page turns another corner through Larrinaga’s dark and vivid imagination.”
—Sonora Taylor, award-winning author of
Little Paranoias: Stories
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“These 11 tales are delightfully dark and full of unnerving surprises”
—Well Worth a Read Reviews
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“Larrinaga has a way of taking you into strange, fantastical POVs without ever making you wonder how you got there…”
—Fallen Fiction Reviews
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“A captivating collection”
—Margin of Terror
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“Disturbing scary stories told without relying
on guts and gore”
—Advance the Plot Reviews
For Joe.
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I can finally admit that your Goosebumps collection was better than mine.
Content warnings are listed at the back of the book.
Contents
Acknowledgments
No Soliciting
Empire of Dirt
The Fishermen
The Devil’s Way Out
Family Time
Watchers’ Warning
Until Death
A Friend in Need
The Bump
The Thing Inside Jacky Jensen’s Garage
Inguma We Trust
Story Notes
About the Author
Also by Caryn Larrinaga
Acknowledgments
Call me Captain Obvious, but I love horror. I sometimes feel like I shouldn’t. It shouldn’t make sense for someone with this much anxiety to seek out stories about nightmare scenarios and terrifying creatures. But for some reason, watching someone navigate an exorcism or unravel a vengeful ghost’s secrets is a great antidote to my real-life worries.
I think it started with my dad. In fact, it might date all the way back to a night in the late ’80s when he rented House and The Gate to watch with my older brother and me. He probably thought that, as they were horror comedies, I wouldn’t be so scared. (Flash forward to thirty-plus years later and I still don’t trust bathroom vanities with mirrored doors or the jagged pits uprooted trees leave behind.) But despite the uptick in my nightmares, I was also instantly addicted to that feeling. I couldn’t resist seeking it out again, the same way I can’t resist eating way too many fancy pastries even though I know I’ll be paying a horrible price for it within a few hours.
My mom picked up the baton once the horror bug burrowed its way into my brain. She helped me find books to feed the addiction, like the ever-classic Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz, Great Ghosts by Daniel Cohen, Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn, the Scary Stories for Sleep-overs series, stacks of Goosebumps by R.L. Stine, Bruce Coville’s Book of Ghosts, the Point Horror series (especially Funhouse by Diane Hoh), and so many others. I read them over and over. Ghosts, monsters, haunted objects, zombie children—I couldn’t get enough.
Being a spooky little girl didn’t come with many perks, but arguably the best one was developing an invisible magnetic field that drew me to other weirdos. Exhibit A: Joe Fisher, with whom I spent my elementary years trading paperbacks, crafting mocktails with rad names like “Avenged Murders,” and trying to figure out what the hell was going on in Altered States.
My horror circle soon expanded to include Jill Johnson, who introduced me to the world of Vincent Price and has always been down to rent random videos (the more absurd the premise, the better). Weekends in junior high meant raw cookie dough, Fun Dip, and scary movies. As adults, we revisit that magical formula as often as we can (but we bake the cookies before eating them now).
In college, I met my all-time favorite horror-binge buddy and married his pants off. Horror is always the number-one genre in our house, best enjoyed with a bowl of slightly over-salted popcorn, a cat on my lap, and Kelly Burt by my side. He listens to each of my stories, often more than once, and helps me push through the blocks to say exactly what I’m trying to say.
When I line up so many incredible, loving, supportive people like this, it actually doesn’t feel weird at all that I love horror. I love it because of them, because I associate it with some of my favorite people on the planet.
How could I not love it?
I have to thank C.R. Langille, organizer for the Utah chapter of the Horror Writers Association, for helping me along the path from horror fan to horror creator. The UHWA’s open call for their annual horror anthology inspired me to write short horror with an eye toward publication, and I’ve since tricked C.R. into being my critique partner as often as I can. He helped me with many of the stories in this collection, and they shine more brightly because of his thoughtful insights and pitch-perfect suggestions. I’m so grateful for his generosity.
I’d also like to thank the publishers who gave these stories their first homes, including The NoSleep Podcast, Post-to-Print Publishing, Nocturnal Sirens Publishing, the UHWA, the League of Utah Writers, Infinite Press, and the Salt City Genre Writers.
Huge thanks to my incomparable editor, Jennie Stevens, for helping me take a jumbled collection of stories originally published in different places and giving them a cohesive style. Thanks also to my proofreader, Beverly Bernard, who stood as the final guard between this book and your hands.
Last but never least, thank you for reading my stories. It means so much to me. Maybe it’s cheesy to say, but you’re the reason my author dreams came true.
And with that, I’ll leave you with some of my favorite nightmares. 🖤
No Soliciting
At twelve o’clock in the afternoon, just as it had every day for the last five weeks, the bell rang. Doris scowled at the front door from her indentation on the sagging couch and braced herself for the subsequent rings.
“Go away! Go away!” Frankie shouted from his perch.
“Frankie, quiet!” Doris hissed.
Her admonition made no difference. The parrot hadn’t listened to her in twenty-five years; why on earth would he start now? And no matter how much either the bird or the woman told the salesman to leave them alone, he paid her even less heed than Frankie.
The doorbell rang again.
“Ma’am?” The salesman’s voice pierced through the reinforced door. “I know you’re in there. Please, I’d just like to talk to you for a few minutes about your home’s security.”
Doris rolled her eyes and turned her TV’s volume up as far as she could stand it. She had never stood on her front porch while the TV was on—or ever, come to think of it—but she felt confident the salesman could hear the soap opera stars shouting about the main character’s sister returning from the dead. Doris grinned, imagining the salesman getting sucked into the story but never having the satisfaction of knowing how it ended. She would turn the volume down before any kind of big reveal. It would be easy; she could always feel them coming, the way the mood of the music would shift and intensify right before the surprise came.
The faint sound of a fist pounding on the door reached her ears through the noise from the television set. The doorbell rang a third time. A minute later, the top of a blue baseball cap bobbed past the front window, away from the porch.
Joints creaking, Doris struggled off the couch and shambled to the window. The salesma n, a youngster somewhere in his early twenties, stopped at the end of her long driveway and looked back at the house. She didn’t hide herself. He knew she was home. He knew that she knew that he knew, but it didn’t stop him from harassing her day after day. Had she been so headstrong in her youth? The twin veils of time and malnutrition obscured her memory. A hundred years was far too many to reflect upon with such an empty stomach.
“Go away!” the parrot shrieked.
Doris snorted and turned away from the window. “Stupid bird. He’s gone. For today, anyway.”
Not bothering to turn down the television, she shuffled into the kitchen. A frying pan with a thin layer of oil waited on the gas stove. She retrieved her last packet of meat from the old, grumbling freezer and threw the steak into the pan. As the thigh sizzled and hissed, a jagged grin spread over her wrinkled face. Her freezer was empty. The next delivery would come tonight—fresher meat, and the extra little something she had ordered. Soon, she would have peace again.
Too excited to sleep, Doris perched on a short wooden stool by the back door, watching as the second hand of the big clock over the stove ticked closer to midnight. The hour came, and she craned her neck, straining to hear the telltale sounds of her monthly delivery.
There would be no knock, no doorbell ring. The faceless, nameless courier never deviated from the routine. Every thirty days, he left sixty cutlets of fresh meat and any other requested sundries—pellets and produce for Frankie, poison for the rats in the basement, cooking oil—in the old wooden box on the back porch. Doris would confirm the delivery with a phone call, usually the next morning, and the money would get transferred from her account to the company’s.
In over two decades of solitude, Doris had only needed to change this service once. A few years into their contract, the first company had gotten lazy, started cutting corners with the harvest. She had felt the age of the meat at once; her joints had locked up, and she lost several teeth. It had taken all her energy to telephone the remaining brethren in her little book of contacts—even then, too many names had been crossed out—but luckily, one other of her kind smart enough to close themselves off from the world had recommended an alternate service.
The new company proved to be excellent. They sourced the meat only from the most reputable morgues and guaranteed harvest and flash freezing within forty-eight hours of death. They were discreet and diligently protected the privacy of their customers.
Best of all, delivery was never late.
A low thump sounded from the porch. Doris’s black eyes lit up with excitement. It took all her willpower to wait a full five minutes, a window of time required by the delivery company for their staff’s safety. At last, she unfastened the chain, released the four dead bolts, and opened the door. With as much speed as she could manage, she ferried the packets of meat from the delivery box into her kitchen. Beneath the last paper-wrapped package, she found the thing she had been anticipating as much as—more than, really—the meat: a small magnetic sign.
After relocking the back door, she carried the sign through the house to the front entryway. It took several long minutes to get the steel slab open. Unlike the locks at the back of the house, these hadn’t been turned in too many years to count.
At last, the door opened, and Doris slapped the new sign on the front with a triumphant, “Ha!”
Silver letters spelling NO SOLICITING gleamed in the moonlight.
“Let him try to come now,” she told Frankie.
The bird, asleep in his cage beneath a white sheet, didn’t answer. It was for the best. She wouldn’t have liked what he had to say.
Doris broke her fast early the next day, heating the oil on her stove well before the normal hour. Wielding her butcher’s knife with more energy than usual, she cut the steak into thin strips and tossed them into the pan. The aroma wafting upward told her this meat had come from someone who’d been alive less than two days before. It was markedly more fresh than what she’d been eating the past week, and she felt its effects mere minutes after finishing her meal. The inflammation in her joints subsided, the skin on her hands smoothed out, and her mind sharpened. She stood in front of the mirror by the front door for a while, admiring the difference in her face.
She didn’t look a day over eighty.
“Hey, old lady!” Frankie squawked from his cage.
“Oh, shut up.” She touched the corners of her eyes, where deep crow’s feet betrayed too many decades of glaring at the bird. She wondered what she would’ve looked like at sixty, fifty, or even thirty-five. With enough fresh meat, could she see?
It would have to be quite fresh, her sister’s voice purred inside her mind. Not even dead a minute, and raw, so very raw—
“Quiet!” Doris shouted. She glared at her reflection, seeing far too many of her sister’s features in the face that glared back. But wrinkles had never softened Ethel’s face; her skin had been smooth as glass when she went mad.
From the box above her head, the doorbell chimed. Doris jumped, staring at the door with wide eyes.
“Ma’am?” the salesman’s voice called. He knocked a few times, then rang the bell again. “Hello? We’re having a sale on motion sensors and cameras. You can’t put a price on your safety!”
Doris glanced at Frankie, her mouth open in hopeless shock. The salesman stood on the porch, inches away from her NO SOLICITING sign, ringing her doorbell with impunity. She backed away from the door, grateful for her fresh breakfast as she crouched on the floor beside the bird’s cage, something her knees wouldn’t have let her do the day before.
“What do I do?” she whispered.
“Eat him! Eat him!” Frankie suggested.
Doris smacked the bird’s cage. “Don’t be absurd.”
“Eat him!” the bird urged again.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Doris said. “You’d love to see me go insane, leave this house on a binge like your old master.”
Frankie bobbed his gray head in his cage.
“What, you think someone will come rescue you? Take over your care and feeding when I’m gone, like I did after Ethel? There’s nobody left who even knows we’re here, you stupid creature.”
The parrot held still a moment, head cocked to the side as though considering her words. Then he blinked his yellow eyes and screeched, “Old lady, old lady!”
Doris balled her hands into fists and shuddered. If any meat aside from human flesh offered her any sustenance at all, she would eat the damn bird and be done with it.
“I should leave you on the porch,” she told him. “Cage and all. Let this foolish salesman take you home.”
As though in answer to his title, the nuisance outside rang the bell again. After a moment, he beat on the door, pounding against the metal.
Doris shook with rage. From the height of the sound, he had to be banging his knuckles right on top of the sign she had stuck there the night before. There was no question; he saw the words, but they did nothing to deter him.
Each knock reverberated in her bones. Her teeth rattled, and she dragged her nails from her shoulders to her elbows. “Go away!” she screamed at the door. “Leave me alone!”
“Sounds like this is a bad time,” the young man called. “I’ll come back another day.”
At that, anger took over Doris’s body. She leaped to her feet, and her hand closed around the top dead bolt.
“Open!” Frankie screeched from his cage. “Open, open!”
