Lucid Screams Anthology, page 1
LUCID SCREAMS
Red Lagoe
Lucid Screams
Copyright ©2019 by Red Lagoe.
All rights reserved.
Cover and interior art & design
©2019 Red Lagoe
Previously published stories by Red include:
The Haunting Murder: published by Z Publishing House, 2018
Luna’s Lure: published by Owl Hollow Press, 2018
Best Seat in the House: published by Trembling with Fear, 2018
Abandoned Souls: Originally published as Missing Souls by Z-Publishing House ©2018 Red Lagoe
Malignant Roots: published by Crystal Lake Publishing, 2019
Helping Hands Retreat: published by Toasted Cheese Literary Journal, 2017
Odor Mortis: published by Crystal Lake Publishing, 2019
Memory Lane: published by Crystal Lake Publishing, 2019
ISBN (e-book): #978-0-9988531-3-0
ISBN (paperback): #978-0-9988531-2-3
LaRed Books
Table of Contents
Introduction
LUCID SCREAMING
THE HAUNTING MURDER
LUNA’S LURE
THE GREAT AMERICAN ECLIPSE
BEST SEAT IN THE HOUSE
ABANDONED SOULS
MALIGNANT ROOTS
HELPING HANDS RETREAT
SEVERED CONNECTION
ODOR MORTIS
SLICE
INTIMIDATING SMILE
THE ASTRONOMER’S MISTRESS
MEMORY LANE
BRUSH WITH FATE
EMPTY NEST
About the Author
CONTENT WARNING
From the deepest chambers of my black heart, many thanks to:
My critique group friends at Tidewater Writers who have picked apart my first drafts over the past few years—especially my regular victims: Tony, Kate, Melina, Rick, Marilyn, and Amber;
Hampton Roads Writers, who offer free and affordable workshops and professional critiques;
Crystal Lake Publishing for the fantastic career mentorship program—career mentor Joe Mynhardt, and editing mentors, Kenneth W. Cain and Monique Snyman;
Katie and Sandy, my proofreading goddesses;
My number one fan and always the last eyes on my stories, Donna McCracken;
And to Jason, who never doubts my capabilities.
Introduction
STORIES PULL US INTO a dream world where we can escape our problems. Horror, however, does not take us away to spectacular, feel-good lands. It drags us into the darkest depths of our imaginations.
Horror—even when told in fantastic stories of sci-fi or dark comedy—can force us to face our fears, our tragedies, our inner demons. We must stare those beasts in the eye with each turn of the page, and in doing so, we might discover reflections of our inner selves. Shameful slivers of our humanity buried deep beneath our more presentable exteriors. Shocking, formidable splinters that deserve to stay buried. But, more than likely, we’ll find strength in ourselves where we didn’t know it existed.
When horrors of the real world find me, I can close my eyes and pretend it’s all a dream. But in doing so, I am silenced, shriveled in the charred black caverns of despair. Instead, I choose to open my eyes. Lucid and screaming into the face of fear, I challenge the abysmal void, even if I have to burn my own heart to shed a flicker of light.
In the utter darkness, we can always create light.
Fear not, these stories are not all downers, full of dread and hopelessness. A few of them are fun supernatural tales of ghosts, aliens, pizza, and even a penis. Yeah, you read that right.
Kick back, open your heart and mind to the genre, and learn a little about yourself. At the very least, you’ll learn I may not be right in the head.
-Red Lagoe
www.redlagoe.com
WARNING
If you don’t like trigger warnings, turn the page, and don’t read the following paragraph:
Some of the following stories may contain content deserving of trigger warnings. To be respectful of those who have experienced the trauma of losing a child, a list of stories with warnings is available at the back of the book.
Click HERE for content warnings.
LUCID SCREAMING
THE WALLS ARE BLACK now that the kids are gone. Funny thing is, I don’t remember painting them.
Sunrise squeezes through the blinds and orange light streaks the breakfast table. Lily and Ben stare at their dry bowls of cereal. There’s no milk. I forgot they were coming to be honest. How am I supposed to remember when it’s my weekend or their dad’s?
“She didn’t get groceries.” Lily’s words sizzle in the air. She’s always putting me down for not being a good enough mom.
“That’s okay, Mommy.” Naïve unconditional love adorns little Ben’s smile.
Lily rolls her eyes—black eyeliner smudged into burn-marks around them.
I point to the mess on her face. “That looks trashy.”
“Like you should talk.”
Orange sunlight from the kitchen window spreads onto my hands, lighting the peaks of my bulging veins. Crinkled, bruised skin takes the appearance of some alien terrain. Looks like I shot up. Back then, when the veins in my arms were blown, I’d go for the ones in my hands, but I haven’t done that in a long time.
I leave the sunlit kitchen and sink into the living room couch. My dark walls provide relief from the heat seeping through the windows. Even though it’s morning, the clock on the old VCR still blinks 12:00 like the thing froze in time when Joe and the kids left. He used to fix that stuff, but now he’s got some sweet little thing downtown, and all the home repairs are my responsibility. It took all my strength and sanity to fight for the right to see my own kids every other weekend—no wonder the house is falling apart.
“Mommy, look!” Ben says.
“What?” My voice hits barren walls. Walls that used to hold memories of Joe and the kids, but I can’t find the time to hang everything back up again. Not really sure where everything is, come to think of it.
“Come see what I built with my Legos.” Ben approaches the couch.
I turn to face him, but he isn’t there. “Ben?” The house echoes his name in my stolen voice. I push myself up from the couch and scan the room. “Ben?”
Lily, standing in the kitchen doorway, silhouetted in a column of sunlight, crosses her arms. “What are you looking for, Elaine?”
“Call me Mom.”
“You lost the right to that title.” Her words burn my heart.
“Where’s Ben? He just asked me to look at his Legos.”
“God, Elaine. That was forever ago.”
“That was just now.”
Lily gives me a once-over from head to foot. “You’re using again, aren’t you?”
“No. I gave that up. You know that.”
She scuffs at some crud on the floor with the toe of her boot. “You sure about that?”
And for a moment, I’m not certain anymore. Fresh bruises indicate I may have stuck myself recently, but it all seems so foggy. A haze of fragmented memories wisp away with Lily’s next question.
“Do you know where your kid is?” she asks. “Do you even know what time it is?”
“Watch it, young lady.”
“Or what? What could be worse than right now?”
“Damn you, Lily.”
“No. Damn you!” The morning light reflects off her eyes, full of rage and cutting through me.
I turn away from her contempt and continue my search for Ben.
Lily follows with her judgement in tow. “This place looks like shit.”
“Lily!” I whip around to give her a piece of my mind, but instead I ask, “Can you help me find your brother?”
Out the foyer window, the rising sun has disappeared, turning the landscape beyond the front porch into a colorless void.
“What’s going on?” I back away from the door as nightfall darkens the house in an impossible time shift. “Ben?!” With each shout of his name, my pulse intensifies.
Lily shakes her head. “Losing track of time, Elaine? Maybe if you could stay clean when your kids are visiting. Why do you even bother having us over?”
“Why do you even come?” I say. “You’re eighteen.”
She snarls. “I can’t leave you alone with him in case…” She scuffs at the crud on the floor again. Blackened crust peels back from warped linoleum. Lily nods her head toward the hallway. “…in case you forget you’re responsible for taking care of him.”
I push past her and head down the hallway toward Ben’s room.
“I wouldn’t go in there if I were you.” Lily’s irises are feathered with a strange orange light. I pause, heeding her warning as her intensity sears my soul.
Within the hall’s blackness, I reach for the knob to Ben’s door. The landscape of my hand hasn’t changed. Orange-topped mountainous veins—as if sunlight was still dancing across them, yet there was no light in the hallway.
I pull my hand from the knob to shake away the illusion.
My daughter’s eyes swirl with flames.
“What’s happening?” I ask.
A tear trickles down her cheek reflecting a blinding yellow light.
The door to Ben’s room opens, but the light switch on his wall doesn’t work. The room reeks of burnt plastic. A scant amount of street light seeps in his bedroom window, revealing a blackened tower of blocks as tall as Ben. Behind his bed, in the corner of the room, a shadowy space draws m e toward it.
“Ben?” I whisper and turn to Lily, but she is no longer with me. With trepidation, I close in on the charred corner. A small pile of something is bundled within the darkness. I kneel down to investigate and a tiny figure takes shape. A small burned body, curled into the corner.
Heart seizing, body temperature rising, I back out of Ben’s room. Sweat drips down my neck and my clothes cling to my body.
“Lily!” I stumble into the hallway.
As I approach her bedroom door, my pulse pounds between my ears. Heat radiates through the wood, and though it is hot to the touch, the door opens without burning my hand.
A pile of books and a laptop sit on the floor in the middle of the room. Like the blocks, they are crusted in a coat of black char. Once-green walls are now glazed with a coal-colored film. Streetlamps from outside highlight a lumpy mass in her twin-sized bed. My pulse goes thick and murky, slows beyond my ability to feel it as I approach her frail remains.
A guttural screech leaves my body. An unrecognizable voice howling from within, mourning, admonishing, cursing.
Stick marks in my hands bleed and drip to the floor.
Fire creeps along the ceiling, filling the room and lighting the bulges in my bleeding veins.
I burst from Lily’s room, blood flowing from my hands. Escaping the flames, praying for this to be nothing more than a hallucination—or better yet, a nightmare—I make it to the front door.
Morning sunlight pours inside again, stealing away the darkness.
On the doorstep, Joe holds a bouquet of roses in his arms and he falls to his knees weeping. I try to open the door, but it won’t budge, and despite the violent shaking of the knob and thrusting my body weight against the flimsy door, I can’t seem to get his attention.
“Joe!” I bang on the window, but he doesn’t respond.
He sobs, crumpled on his hands and knees. Then he lays the bouquet on the floorboards out front, stands, and wipes away his tears. On the street, a woman waits for him beside his car—his sweet little thing.
“See you next time, Mommy,” Ben says, appearing behind me, untouched by the fire.
I collapse to my knees to hold him, but he vanishes before I can wrap my arms around him. The emptiness within my outstretched arms seeps into my soul and fills me with sickness and aching—worse than the most painful withdrawal.
Lily stands beside me, facing the window.
“Lily?” Her name swims within the void behind my sternum. “What’s happening?”
She tilts her head with a sympathetic shrug. “This is your weekend. Not ours.”
I edge toward her, hopeful to embrace my beloved daughter for the first time in ages, but she shakes her head with disappointment and disappears before I can get close enough.
The floor rushes up on me. Fire creeps into the living room, painting the walls black as it spreads.
“Joe!”
He walks away unresponsive. In the back seat of his car, my children sit bathed in the morning sunlight.
As they pull away, the house fills with smoke, and I crawl toward my bedroom for my cellphone to call for help.
A memory takes hold of my consciousness…
I was in my bedroom, searching for a good enough vein, but I had blown them all. That alone was a sign I shouldn’t have been trying to shoot up that night.
A banging on my door sent me scrambling to hide my syringe.
“Mommy! Come see what I built!”
“Not now, Ben.” I knew I should stay clean since it was my weekend with the kids.
Lily’s voice joined Ben’s outside the door. “Come on Ben. I’ll tuck you in before I start studying.”
I released my held breath and hesitated for a moment, debating whether to suffer through the night of withdrawal, or take the last little bit. The kids’ footsteps faded down the hallway, and I injected the last of my stash into my bloodstream.
Smoke fills my lungs. Crawling my way down the hallway through the thick cloud, I cough, conjuring a continuation of the memory…
As I lay in a heroin-induced fog, a cigarette that dangled from my lips fell to the bed. It burned a small hole into the comforter. The blackness spread across the fabric, the smoke gagged me, and I allowed it to as I melted into the comfort of my bed.
The memory lifts again as I crawl out of the fire and into my bedroom.
Inside has been untouched by flames. It’s peaceful, but the smell of death lingers. I sit on the edge of my bed and forget for a moment why I entered, or what I was doing.
A burned body lays beside me—a charred frame with a melted rubber tourniquet around her arm. I lie beside myself as the cigarette from my memory burns a hole into the mattress inches away. The fire ignites, but I remain in my bed.
Facing the ceiling, I become one with the scorched body. Paralyzed. Engulfed in the raging flames. There is no way to escape this bed, or this house, or my mistakes.
Bleeding veins pop and boil. Flesh blisters in the searing heat, and skin—once warm and welcoming for my newborn babies—peels and melts away from muscle and bone. Agonizing cries are choked by the billowing black smoke.
However, the sounds from the next room burn more than this fire. Lily, as she awakens to the flames, cries out for help. Then Ben’s sweet little voice joins in. Their shrieks of pain and desperation are a red hot spear, pulled from burning embers and thrust through my heart.
Unrelenting screams torture me, and I burn. While listening to the terrified calls for help from my children, I burn. With no mother to comfort them, to save them, they suffer, and I burn, again and again.
I wake up and shuffle through the living room in a haze. Orange sunrise filters in the kitchen window as the clock on the VCR blinks 12:00.
The walls are black now that the kids are gone. Funny thing is, I don’t remember painting them.
THE HAUNTING MURDER
FROM THE YARD, Hank heard them coming—a distant, electrical hum on the horizon. As the smoky, black mass in the sky encroached, the screeching static pierced his ears. A myriad of crows undulated above as they closed in, then roosted on the towering rock walls surrounding him. Interlaced with the voices of the crows, a woman’s gasp screeched. A familiar, breathy shriek. Hank squeezed his temples to make the hallucination of her voice cease, but it persisted.
Each fall for as long as Hank could remember, sixty thousand crows swarmed the city of Auburn during their migration, isolating their murder to the area around the maximum security prison. And each year, Hank avoided them because of what happened decades ago while twelve year old Hank sat on his bike outside the walls.
The silhouettes of the naked trees against the setting sun were adorned with false leaves—black, flapping wings took the place of the fallen foliage. Through those snaking black branches, he hurled rocks. One after the other, until his stone finally smacked into a crow. Gravity yanked its body from the branch, and the bird hit the sidewalk with a meaty thud.
Hank ran to the fallen bird as it twitched and gyrated, unable to lift itself from the cold cement. Black beaded eyes reflected a glimmer of the orange sky and the image of Hank’s sardonic glare. He stumbled back, shaken by his own reflection. As the fallen crow’s tremors pulsed to a stop, and before it took its last breath, Hank rode away. The birds overhead screamed and furiously shifted positions on their branches as he pedaled down the street, leaving it to die alone on the winter-parched sidewalk.
He never intended to return to those walls because of those angry and sorrowful cries, but justice summoned him back for his final years.
While he paced the prison yard, sixty thousand squawking screams judged the man inside, who had more than the blood of an old bird on his hands now. Hank blocked out his senses with his hands over his ears and his eyes shut, but feathers thrashed near his face, demanding his attention. A single swooping crow landed beside him.
Its black and gray eyes mirrored the overcast sky, seeking answers, but Hank had none. He searched for his own reflection, as if to see the same child’s visage from years ago staring back at him, but it was not there. Instead, a soulless void filled the crow’s eye, until it appeared to him—not Hank, but someone else—as a projected image deep inside the tiny, cloud-reflected orb. A closer investigation revealed the gaunt and blood-soaked woman in the green dress. Hank staggered backward as the crow took flight to the top of the wall, cawing in that ghostly woman’s voice.
