Hindered Souls: Dark Tales for Dark Nights, page 15
Ten Mississippi.
My legs pump, my heart and lungs expanding with the effort. I feel so alive. More alive than I can remember. I can’t help myself: I call out to him. But I know instead of a voice, all he hears is the primal howl of a predator signaling the beginning of the end.
Wait. I no longer hear his clumsy steps or his pathetic mewling. I stop, sniff the air. My head snaps to the left when I pick up that glorious scent. Has he pissed himself?
I approach slowly, straining my ears. He’s no longer moving and his breath sounds wheezy as he forces large gulps of air from his plump lips. I hope he hasn’t fallen and injured himself. That would be disappointing, to end the game when it’s only just begun.
I circle the smell, giving him a wide berth. He’s nowhere to be seen. Moving in closer, I slap the trunks of trees and push aside briars and bushes. Come out, come out, little piggy. I want to play.
A squirrel chatters angrily in a nearby oak. Something has disturbed, something doesn’t belong, it complains. I grin. My oinker has found himself a hiding place at the base of a tree. A nice little hollow. He’s quite compacted in there, but fit he has.
Stupid piggy. Now you’re cornered.
Pacing, I run through the options. Attack now or wait? Better to wait. Lull him into a false sense of security. Terror spoils the meat, anyway. He’ll come out eventually. The volcano in my stomach protests my decision, but I back off. I find a nice vantage point halfway up a nearby tree and settle in. My ability to be patient is something I pride myself on. The trick of hunting is to know when to strike. Too early or too late and the prey will slip through and escape.
I always get my prey.
The forest slowly returns to life as the boy calms. The birds chirp, the chipmunks scurry, and the squirrel soon forgets the intruder and goes back to building its nest.
And still my little piggy stays hidden. If it weren’t for the noxious smell of child’s breath trailing out of the hollow, I would think he’d died of a heart attack in there.
Night falls. I will have to stay awake, protect my prey, lest some other animal moves in on him. The piggy is awake as well. I can hear him in there, whining for his mama with every little twig snap and scuttling leaf, his teeth chattering from the cold. Underneath his incessant crying, I can hear the soft lapping of pond water. My stomach growls again. No fish tonight. Tomorrow I eat pork. I smile and relax against the tree.
A distant yell wakes me. I immediately tense, cursing myself for falling asleep. My eyes strain in the dim light of early morning. Is he still here? The call comes again and another echoes it. A search party. There’s a shift in the hollow. He’s there and he hears voices, too. Not long until he comes out now. And a good thing too. I’m almost out of time.
Ah, there he is, poking his head out like a mouse. Come here, little piggy.
As he squeezes his bulk from the hole, I lower myself silently to the ground. When he pauses, I pause.
Why hasn’t he answered the calls?
He moves toward the pond, kneels on the bank and peers into the murky depths. The light is sparkling on the water now, and he seems mesmerized by it. I watch him from a few yards away. I should attack now, while his back is to me, but I’m curious. A little piggy such as this should have already run squealing toward those insistent voices.
His head cocks to one side and he reaches into the pocket of his tattered, piss-stained cargo shorts. My stomach screams. He stops, tenses, hand still in pocket. Has he heard me? No. His muscles visibly relax and he pulls out a pocket knife, the blade glinting as he inexpertly pulls it open, then turns his attention back to the water. I tremble with glee. I should have known my little piggy would want some breakfast before the harrowing trip home. Trust me, little piggy, you’ll need a lot more than a four-inch blade to spear one of those fish.
He leans over the water. I crouch to the ground, ready to pounce. I’ve got to be careful. One wrong move and he’ll end up in the water. And no one wants wet meat.
I charge.
His reaction time is slow. I’m almost on him when he starts to turn and I prepare myself for that wonderful look of fear in his eyes.
His gaze meets mine as I lunge at him.
Something’s wrong. Instead of wide-eyed terror, he’s squinting with determination. It’s too late for me to stop.
I don’t feel the blade as it enters my neck. I only know it’s there because that’s where he pulls his hand from, his palm slick with scarlet.
I slump to the ground and he stands, a mixture of shock and relief written on his face. Tears well and the first fat drop rolls down his cheek just as my vision tunnels.
Well done, little piggy. Well done.
****
Reporter: “Local scout slays escaped child killer on the banks of Almanac Pond. How the brave boy triumphed over the beast tonight at eleven.”
Your Own Worst Nightmare
by Kristyl Gravina
Alice was in the passenger seat of the white jeep. A man was driving. They were going home after a family dinner. He was telling her about how her sister had tried to seduce him while Alice went to the bathroom. He said it all happened while her mother had gone to clear the table and her father was answering a phone call in the other room. He seemed upset because Alice was not reacting. Strange she thought. I don't have a sister. Suddenly the jeep swerved and hit a low wall, and went straight into the sea below. She watched slowly as the man beside her, unable to unlatch his seatbelt, drowned in slow motion. First he moved fervently, trying desperately to free himself until he could no longer hold his breath and gulped in painful gasps until he was motionless, his eyes glazed. On the other hand, she didn't move. She saw the water around her turn crimson from the gash on her head until slowly, she too lost consciousness.
Alice woke up in a sweat. Another nightmare. Who was the unfortunate girl going to be this time? She looked at her alarm clock. It was still very early but she decided to take a shower and start getting ready for work. She could not sleep again after such a dream. She turned on the TV to watch the morning news but there was nothing in particular. Not yet she thought.
She was on edge all day, thinking about her nightmare. Finally, two days later she saw it on the morning news. A twenty-year-old woman along with her twenty-two-year-old boyfriend died the previous night after the jeep they were into crashed into a wall and fell into the sea. The young woman died of head injuries while the man drowned. They had been on their way home after having dinner with the girl's family. Exactly like the dream she thought.
That night, she dreamt again. This time she was on a bridge. She was crying and she felt a terrible sadness in the pit of her stomach. Suddenly she was falling; falling until she was sucked into oblivion.
She awoke gasping for air. She made herself a cup of coffee and decided to watch television. Even if she could fall asleep, she did not dare for fear of having another nightmare. The next day she heard her co-workers talking about someone who committed suicide that night. That was fast she thought.
Alice felt helpless. She knew what was going to happen but she never knew who these women were. She wished she could do something, warn them. But warn who? And if she did tell someone, wouldn't they think she was a lunatic? Some nights she desperately tried not to fall asleep but in the end exhaustion took over. She could not stop the dreams.
She awoke from another nightmare. She went into the kitchen to fetch a glass of water when she noticed that something was amiss. The light above the kitchen worktop was on. She thought she had turned it off but perhaps she had missed it. She had been so tired lately. She made her way towards the refrigerator when she felt the hairs at the back of her neck rise at the realisation that she was not alone. She froze.
"Hello there” he said, from somewhere behind her.
She turned in slow motion. In a split second he stabbed her with one of the kitchen knives. For an instance she felt a sharp pain spreading over abdomen until she felt darkness take over.
Once again she awoke with a start. Her heart was racing. It was still 1am. She went into the kitchen to make herself a drink. Another long sleepless night she thought. Suddenly she realised there was a light on. It was then when she heard the voice behind her say, "Hello there."
Sideways Glances
by Brian Hamilton
It started small, as these things tend to do. I think I started to notice it a few years ago. It came in small, little moments. Just brief enough to make me think I was just seeing things.
I’d catch movement out of the corner of my eyes.
You know what I’m talking about. That feeling you get when there’s something just on the edge of your peripheral vision. Waiting. Hiding. The hair on the back of your neck stands up, and for a moment or two your hearts racing and trying to claw its way up and out of your throat. Then you turn, fast, hoping and thinking that you’ll catch whoever’s there.
Only it’s nothing, and you breathe just a little easier, knowing you’re just acting jumpy.
For you, this happens once every so often. Maybe once in a lifetime. If you’re really lucky, you may not know what I’m talking about. I envy you. I really do.
Because I used to be like that. Used to be able to laugh it off. Used to be able to dismiss the raised hairs and quickened pulse as nothing more than a personal failing, the remnant of a younger self that so easily jumped at shadows.
It happened in the darkness. As it always does. I was an insomniac, never getting enough sleep, prone to nighttime wanderings through the city. I’d go out for walks in the park at night and see something move out in the grassy areas by the small lake as I strolled by, or deeper into the trails that led off into the paths untouched by the overhead lights. It worried me, but for different reasons. Saner reasons. Was it some homeless man staggering up to ask for change or food? Perhaps it was lovers, entangled in a passionate embrace? Or was it a would—be robber, brandishing a knife or a gun, trailing me and waiting for the right moment?
But it was nothing. Always nothing. I tried dismissing it all as the confused delusions of a sleep deprived mind.
But these sightings increased in their frequency. I would be lying in bed willing myself to sleep, the small electronic clock counting away the minutes until I would have to get up to go to work. From just to my left, I would swear to have seen someone walking past my bedroom door, down the hallway leading into the small kitchenette. I would get up, terrified, and make my way after the figure, turning on as many lights as possible. But there was never anyone there.
Sometimes, I wished there was.
From then on, the sightings got progressively worse. I would be sitting on the subway, watching the stations flash by, brief islands of light. Something would catch my attention in the darkness in between, something crawling for just a moment. I would turn, try to see what was out there, but the train always moved too quickly. The same would happen if I took taxis; little flickers of movement in the depths of side alleys as we drove along. I imagined, for some reason, hands—hands with too many joints on their fingers, with long, greasy nails. Reaching out of those dark corridors, grasping, wanting.
They started to get closer. I had to stop using the little closet where I used to keep my coats and vacuum. I’d open the door and in the brief second before the light flicked on, something would move, something that was squeezed in tight between the side walls of the closet and the door frame. I kept my coats out, hanging them around the apartment at random. The vacuum was abandoned.
I began to see a psychiatrist, who thought I was suffering some kind of stress-induced disorder from working too much. He told me I needed a vacation. I took a week off, but by the end of it I could barely sleep, always seeing something shifting, moving just at the edge of my vision, always there in the dark. I went back to him. He wanted to talk about my parents.
I dropped the shrink and visited an actual doctor.
She suggested MRI scans, just in case there was something physically wrong with my head. The first visit was fine. So was the second. During the third test, one of the nurses must have accidentally hit the lights on his way out. The room was plunged into darkness, and I was trapped in a tight cylinder with the shifting movement just beyond my feet. I couldn’t raise my head to see what was there. So I began to scream. That got the doctor’s attention, and the nurses ran back in to pull me out. After some hasty excuses about panicking in tight spaces, I left and didn’t go back again.
It progressed. Got worse. Soon it wasn’t just in the darkness that I’d see movement. I’d get up to go to work, turn on all the lights, walk out into the hallway and see something move around the corner into the kitchenette. I’d get onto the subway car and in the middle of the station I’d see someone standing in the gap between cars, only to turn and see an empty space. I’d be at work, notice someone about to walk into my cubicle, spin in my chair to face them and find myself speaking to empty air.
I bought a dog. For protection, I thought. Some mutt from the local pound. I named him Winston—he looked like a Winston. I took care of the old guy, spoiled him like his previous owners never had. He slept on my bed, at my feet. And for a time, it worked. I stopped seeing shadows at night. I could ride the subway without falling out of the small seats or tripping over another commuter after seeing something press itself against the glass in the darkness between stations. I even convinced my manager to let me bring Winston to work, telling him it was a new therapy method. My coworkers loved him.
And then, one morning, after another night’s rest, I woke up, looked down at the familiar lump at the bottom of my bed, and started to scream. Winston was dead, his neck snapped, head twisted at a wrong angle, tongue lolling stiff over my left foot. His dull eyes stared at me, accusing. I wrapped his body up and put him in a dumpster behind the apartment complex.
I told my coworkers he had passed from old age. They offered their condolences. They didn’t stop the shadows from coming back, now more often than ever before.
I couldn’t work. I was often too afraid to leave my apartment. When I made it in, I would find myself constantly turning away from my computer screen to try and catch whatever was tormenting me. Eventually I leapt onto a woman from HR who had been coming to see me about my workload. I wrestled her to the ground, screaming, “I’ve got you now! I’ve got you now!”
Apparently I had foam flying from my mouth. It didn’t go over too well with the higher ups. I was fired.
I stayed in my apartment for a while longer, using what money I had saved up to keep my bills paid. First the internet and cable were turned off, then the electricity. And during all that time I was still seeing movement. All the time. I sat on my bed with the covers pulled up and over my head for hours, my eyes shut as tightly as I could manage until all I could see were those flashes of light in the darkness behind my eyelids.
It was only a matter of time until my landlord kicked me out.
I took to wandering the streets. I lost contact with my friends and family. What could I have told them; that I was going insane, slowly but surely? I tried to stay out of shadows and would sleep under lamps and other lights whenever possible. When I was chased away, I slept in back alleys when I was too exhausted to care anymore. I was beaten up by thugs and other homeless, had my belongings stolen from me on multiple occasions, was forced to do some things I don’t want to describe for little bits of money or scraps of food. I scared people by shrieking from time to time when I thought something was finally going to take hold of me from just outside of my sight.
One day I stumbled across an old straight-edge razor in someone’s trash can. It was rusty, but the blade was still sharp and I cut my thumb while handling it. It was a chance, I saw. Maybe I could run it across my throat, or down my wrists. Sweet oblivion. But I was a coward. I still am. I didn’t want to die, but I didn’t want to see the movement anymore.
I must have scared everyone in a block’s distance as I cut out my eyes. I screamed, cried, begged and pleaded with myself to stop. My eyes, cut, ripped out, were crushed from my own twisted writhing. As I laid on the ground of that back alley I realized it was what they wanted all along.
They—whatever they are, or aren’t—didn’t want me to stop seeing them.
As it turned out, I can see them better now than I ever could before.
Old Timer’s
by M.R. Tapia
“Everything we do prepares us for death. That’s what I’m afraid of: meeting my death. That’s when I’ll face my consequences for my sins. Believe it or not, but I was not a good person. I’ve always had a good heart, but a good person I was not. Nope, I was a mercenary of Death. I worked in the human liquidation business. Do you know what that means?”
I shook my head, No. I had heard that his stories were quite peculiar, but I hadn’t a clue where this one was going.
“Well, too put it to you frankly, I was a contract killer.” His words softened, his gaze lost somewhere down the street. His words crawled in and out from my ears, making their way to the nape of my neck, there they trickled down my spine. I wasn’t sure why he was telling me this. Not sure if he was even speaking to me anymore or just confessing to the breeze.
“Death has influence over everything we do in life. And life eludes us all at some point. There’s no evading it. I never tried. I not only confronted it. I enforced it. I was dubbed the Waterman. My specialty was drowning them, with any form of liquid, not just water. But that’s what I was dubbed. You see, I did my stint in the military. It was what you did back then, you defended your country in time of war and in time of peace. I was a Green Beret during Vietnam. I was good at what I did, but I felt that it wasn’t life. So I spent the first couple of years after my honorable discharge as a mechanic. That’s when I received the call. It was some man who knew about me, about the military me. The info he shared about me was leverage for our meeting.
