Scaredy Cat

I can’t say much about this without giving the game away, but it is a possible scenario I’ve always wondered about. One of those things you’re certain should have happened a hundred times, but never seems to. Anyway, you’ll see what I mean. What would you do in Kale’s position?

This is going to be the last one for quite a while, I’m afraid. I’ve been writing short stories for a year now and frankly I want to get my teeth into something juicier. I’ll spend the next two or three months writing a masterpiece of adventure horror (I hope), and then I might start putting stories up here… after that much time, I’m bound to have a nice build up of fresh nightmares to put down and it won’t be such an effort to think of new ideas. Until then… Thanks for reading!

- Ben Pienaar

Scaredy Cat

By Ben Pienaar

 

She waited for a dark and stormy night to perfect her cliché. Abandoned mental asylum, check; isolated location, creepy vibe, horrific history, all check. Hell, even the front gates were squeaked on their hinges and made them cringe. It was just right.

Kale laughed when he saw it. ‘Damn. You hit the nail on the head, I’ll give you that.’

‘I know, right? Hey Darryn, later we should wait for a funny noise and split up to investigate.’

The three of them settled on the topmost room, where Carla insisted the electroshock had been done. She based her theory on the long metal tables in the adjoining rooms. ‘I dare you to sleep on one, Kale,’ she said. ‘With the door closed, and on the opposite end of the floor to us.’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Really? If it’ll get you off my back, sure.’

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘As long as you don’t wet your pants.’

While the other two laid out the rest of the things, including their own blankets and pillows, Kale set his bed up just where she suggested, on one of the odd metal tables. When he was finished, he closed the door and stood a moment in the little room. It was pitch dark, and apart from a distant peal of thunder, completely silent. He couldn’t even hear the other two. He felt a twinge of dread at the thought of sleeping here for a night, and remembered one of the stories Carla had told him. Thousands of lobotomies had been performed here – some on children as young as four. He shuddered.

They brought in bunches of twigs and logs and lit a fire in the middle of the rubble. Part of the ceiling was caved in, so they set up close enough that the smoke could escape but the rain didn’t spoil the flames. Darryn had brought a bottle of bad quality whisky, and by the time midnight rolled around it was empty and they were drunk.

At two, Kale was sobering up and they were getting tired. Every now and again, he glanced over his shoulder at the network of broken hallways and empty rooms behind him and wondered if they really were empty. Twice he swore he heard movement somewhere in the building, and once he was certain he heard whispered voices. But he didn’t dare say a word to the others – didn’t do anything other than joke and laugh and be fearless.

The clock closed in on three and Darryn curled up in his bed. Carla tucked herself in and fixed her eyes on Kale beneath droopy eyelids. ‘Come on, macho man,’ she said. ‘Time for bed. Don’t let the ghosts get you…’

He laughed, and though it sounded fine and natural to his ears it was hollow at its heart. ‘Yeah, alright. I’m pretty tired anyways. Seeya tomorrow, then – unless you get too scared out here.’

The fire burned low, but it cast odd shadows that jumped into the corners of his eyes as he made his way down a dark corridor towards his end of the floor. There was no one to see his expression now and all the terror was bright and clear on his face. He hadn’t imagined it possible for him to be so afraid, but Carla hadn’t let off on her stories all night and even Darryn had put in a few juicy details of the asylum’s real history. Kale wasn’t usually given to flights of imagination, but it was running wild tonight.

He reached the door to his room and hovered at the entrance for a few minutes, shivering. He considered going back and telling them it was too cold and he needed the fire, but he knew it wouldn’t wash with them. This was the result of his scornful judgements of victims in horror movies: so it was a matter of backing up his big mouth or swallowing his words.

He left the door open and got under the blankets on the hard table, promising himself he wouldn’t sleep. Here in the silence of a place as evil as this – he wasn’t naïve enough to think those stories were false – the comfort of his couch and a box of popcorn were very far away indeed. Out loud, he scoffed at the idea of ghosts and tortured souls, but inwardly he’d always reserved it as a possibility.

His scorn of those timid victims in B movies, however, was completely real. It wasn’t their fear that made him roll his eyes and cringe with frustration – it was their reaction to it. Why couldn’t they just fight? If you can run, fine, but once they have you cornered, and start to close in, axe raised, do you really just curl up in a ball and plead for your life?

He made up his mind then and there that if anyone or anything came for him, he’d fight with everything he had. He wouldn’t be like those people. There was nowhere to run in this place, anyhow.

His decision gave him comfort but didn’t lessen his fear, because now he was sure there really was something around. It was nothing more than a very strong sense – instinctive certainty that his primal brain had not quite forgotten.

No sooner had he registered this than he heard something in the next room that sounded like a heavy body sliding over the cement walls. He broke out in wild chills and his mouth went dry. He sat up in bed, but that was all he dared to do lest he push the covers off and cause a noise; IT might hear him. A part of him was shouting to sprint out the door and to the others, to scream at them to run, get out now, and all their teasing and laughter be damned. For the rest of his life, he wished he had done just that.

A dull thump came next, and he imagined something sliding off its bed and planting its feet on the cold ground. Then the clang of metal on concrete. Didn’t they hear that? How did they not hear that? Should he scream? He certainly wanted to, but what would it achieve? Darryn was built like a stick and Carla was still a girl, for all her confidence. What if this was really dangerous? They might get hurt because of him. In fact, he knew they would – and if he screamed at them to run, he knew it would only bring them to him anyway. He held his breath.

Another slide and a footfall. Something grated along the floor in its wake. Did it know he was here? Could it move any faster?  Should he wait for it to pass by? He controlled his breathing, forcing his mouth closed so that it came out in a suppressed hiss through his nostrils. It sounded loud as a freight train.

Another dragging step and it was at the doorway of its room. He heard the hinges squeak as the door swung open and the hairs on his neck stood up. It had long, heavy strides; its breathing was loud and harsh.

He waited for the next step, and when it came he used the noise as cover to slide off his bed into a semi crouch. Even as he did so his mind was screaming at him that it was coming this way! It knew he was here. Even if it didn’t, surely it would sense him as it passed.

A roar of thunder accompanied the next step, and now he could see a part of its silhouette in his doorway. It was as tall as him; no Carla or Darryn in a monster suit. This was not a drill, there will not be a happy ending, and there was no back up.

He stopped breathing.

It stopped square in the doorway and turned to face him. Perfectly timed, a bolt of lightning flashed across the sky and through the tiny barred window in the top of the room. It lit up a face so hideous that Kale thought he’d go mad with terror right then and there. An eaten up, rotten thing in ragged clothes, its mouth torn at both sides: it looked like the Joker after a week in the grave. Its eyes were wide, and its pupils were so large there were no whites. Its teeth were square at the base and broken points at the end.

All this Kale saw in an instant, and just like that his rational mind switched right off. Despite his determination to fight, had there been the opportunity to run he would have done so, and fast. He would have run until morning and if it got his friends, well too bad, he wasn’t going back without a squadron of armed soldiers at his back.

But there was no way out. It had seen him and he was in a room barely wide enough to lie down in, cornered. Fight or flight was the order of the day and since flight was out of the question…

It had been dragging a fireman’s axe on the concrete behind it, and it was in the process of raising it when Kale threw himself forward. The entire space of time, between its appearance and Kale’s attack, was less than two seconds. In another two he was on top of it, staring with mad eyes and pounding with all his strength.

Seeing it, he’d been certain it was dead already, like a murderous ghost with a solid form, but once his primal brain took over it didn’t ask such trifling questions like how do you kill that which is already dead? No, it just said: Fight for your life. And he did.

Kale was six foot two and well muscled through a mixture of good genes and regular gym visits. He was good natured and by no means a bully in everyday life, and while he was intimidating to most, it took a great deal to make him angry enough to engage in any violence. Now, his life endangered, his mind a chaotic mess of animal terror and his body a cocktail of hormones and adrenaline, he could have torn the tusks from a warthog.

It managed to swing the axe into his side, but it wasn’t a strong blow and the blade only went in half an inch. Kale didn’t even notice it in his hurricane of violence, and he continued to beat the hideous face into ground, turning its features into a mess even after it went limp beneath him.

That something was badly wrong occurred to him as the red faded from his vision and he realised that he was not the only one screaming. Before he’d completely gathered his thoughts, someone tackled him from the side and they went rolling down the hall together. He tried to fight but two or three more bodies landed on him and he was trapped under their weight, struggling to breathe.

Human voices penetrated the fog in his mind. ‘Easy, easy, its okay, it’s okay, calm down.’ He stopped fighting and tried to make sense of it. The bodies on top of him were people, strange men he didn’t know, but living people. A woman was screaming nearby, and Kale thought her voice was like Carla’s.

‘Oh, my god, Jesus is he still alive? Craig, help me! Someone call an ambulance!’

‘He’s… I can’t feel a pulse.’

‘Oh my god.’

They were all strangers – where had they come from? The weight on him was lifting. Lights were turning on and he saw faces of mingled fear and disgust. They stared at him, tensely, expecting him to go attack them, but he held up his hands and stayed on his back. He was terrified, because the truth was dawning on him and he didn’t want it to.

He turned his head because he couldn’t help it and saw them taking a leather mask off a face that was no longer a face but a pile of raw steaks hammered into the stonework. Carla was on her knees with her hands over her face, tears streaming through her fingers. Darryn stood behind her, his arms hanging limply by his sides and horror on his face. He was hypnotised by the corpse.

Kale turned his head the other way and saw a video camera, its lens cracked when the carrier had dropped it in haste. Likewise lay a colourful banner against one of the walls. It was crumpled now but Kale could still make out the writing on it: CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’RE ON SCAREDY CAT!

He put his hands to his face, the adrenaline leaking from his system to be replaced by something far worse, and he began to cry.

Jungle

For some reason, I dislike every fourth or fifth story I write so much that I delete it without ever letting it see the light of day. This was almost like that, but then I amputated a thousand words and figured it wasn’t so bad after all, once you cut to the story. Plus, it was fun to write, and in my experience if it was fun to write it’s usually fun to read, too. Enjoy!

Jungle

By Ben Pienaar

 

Something that was once a man opened two beady eyes and sat up, struggling to breathe; his lungs felt as though they’d been half filled with potting soil, and he could taste dirt in his mouth. The floor was covered in four inches of soil and instead of furniture there were trees and flowers and moss and a myriad of insects. How long would it be before everything ate through the flimsy structure and the whole place came down?

He still looked like a man, but his features had changed: his skin was tinged green and brown and he could feel different parts of himself growing or shrinking, a thousand tiny pressures just under his skin. It was an incredibly unpleasant process, and as he stepped into the mossy shower his face held a scowl.

It was almost as if his pores had expanded tenfold, and the water literally seeped into him. He felt like the thirstiest man in the world drinking a lake by the mouthful. He sighed deeply.

He got out and his eyes fixed on another plant. It was nearly tall enough to touch the ceiling, and several of its branches were covered in red leaves. The roots were wedged in the soil, but he was certain they’d pull out when it woke up and decided to get moving. He watched the limbs curl and twist, as if in the throes of sleep. Rage built in him, and soon he was seething.

When he could take it no more he went back to the bed, where a stained machete lay. His fingers were long and boneless, but they felt strong. He wrapped them around the short handle and spun around, burying the blade in the plant. Its roots tried to pull out of the ground but he stomped on them and hacked again, deaf to the cries that seemed to erupt only in his mind.

Cloudy sap the colour of glue came spilling out, and when he’d finished it was everywhere, sticking to everything. He made sure to chop the roots especially, just in case: he had an idea this plant in particular would prove to be extremely resilient.

He went back to the bed, already feeling exhausted. He needed to sleep for longer, but he fought it because he knew every hour of slumber would take him further and further from humanity. His thoughts hadn’t changed yet, but there was no telling who or what he’d be when he woke up.

So he fought, but in the end the dark mound was irresistible and he stepped back onto it, digging his toes into the dirt and relishing the cool earth on his skin. He fell asleep standing up.

 

The first news reports were amusing. After that they were fascinating – then unbelievable; finally, they were terrifying.

For Gordon Rule, there was only one man on earth who could be responsible. One night, he read an article describing a village that had been completely overrun by a new species of plant that grew fast and fed on man made materials. The village was empty and no one could be accounted for. Gordon decided to pay a visit to his old friend.

Xavier Stein was regarded as a genius by anyone who met him for more than ten minutes. A total of five people considered him a genius. Four of them were his fellow botany enthusiasts and closest friends, who he spoke to once a year, and the other was Gordon, who tended to exchange words with him an incredible once every four or five months.

Gordon was the only one who’d seen the extent of Xavier’s ability, and knew something of the depths of his unrealised potential. Unrealised because he made contributions to the science of botany solely to receive funding. When he ran out of money, he’d publish a paper and pick and choose one of the grants that all but buried him in the wake of it. Gordon hadn’t a clue what he was using his money on, because the papers he published were, for him, child’s play.

The house was a huge wooden thing, built on a hill that overlooked a valley that overlooked the city of Winterthur, Switzerland. It was surrounded by ten foot brick walls which were covered in ivy and topped not with barbed wire but with thorny vines. They had been engineered to have extremely sharp points and a poison that could paralyse a limb for twenty minutes.

The last time Gordon had visited, Xavier had only just bought the place and the extensive gardens barely had a thing in them. Now, as he could see from the thick bars of the front gate, it was a jungle: what had once been a gravel driveway was nothing more than a haphazard footpath. Despite being a respected botanist himself, Gordon did not recognize a single species of plant that made up that jungle.

He pressed the button next to the intercom and a minute later a familiar voice spoke. ‘I know what you’re here for, Doctor Rule. I’m sorry but you’ll have to leave. It’s too late, anyway.’

Gordon tensed. This was not good, not one bit. He closed his eyes and shook his head, remembering some of the more worrying pieces of news. The real panic hadn’t started yet, but if he knew Xavier, it would come soon. ‘You’ve gone too far, my friend,’ he said. ‘They learned their lesson. There are a thousand ways you could use your talents.’

He heard a noise that sounded distinctly like derision, but no reply.

‘Just let me in, please. All I want to do is talk. You know as well as I do there’s nothing I can do to stop you, if your mind is really set on it.’ He didn’t really believe this, but in his experience it never hurt to throw coal on the raging fire that was Xavier’s ego.

‘I’m sorry, I can’t,’ came the reply, and it sounded surprisingly genuine. ‘My friends here are too vicious and I can’t change their minds. They will tear you to pieces if you try to come in.’

Jesus Christ, what has he created? ‘Why don’t you come outside for a bit? Just help me understand what’s going on out there.’

‘Can’t. Same problem.’

He looked to the top room of the house, where Xavier’s study was located. Almost the entire house was covered in some form of ivy or fungus or growth, but most of the window was still showing. A figure watched him.

He pressed the button. ‘I have to see you, Xavier. I’ve brought a knife with me, and I apologise in advance for defending myself against your friends. There is simply too much at stake.’

He had brought a knife – a kind of miniature machete – and he had yet to admit to himself why he knew he’d need it one way or another. He began to scale the front gates when a burst of static and a panicked voice came from the intercom. ‘Wait! Please don’t try, Gordon! You don’t deserve to die!’ No, he thought, just everyone else.

The gates had no thorns, only razor spikes, and he navigated these with ease. When he landed in the dirt on the other side, a wave of fragrances overwhelmed him, so much that he was certain some of it was deliberately engineered. His head ached and his vision doubled, but he took several deep breaths and it faded.

The front door was roughly twenty five meters from him. The path was twisting and overgrown, and it was lined on either side with a bizarre looking plant that reminded him of a bird of paradise. The flower resembled a cone, with the end tapering to a needle sharp point, which sat atop a thin stem. There were hundreds of these all the way down the path, and Gordon didn’t think it was the wind that was causing them to drift here and there like seaweed.

He extended one hand, cautiously, toward the nearest of the flowers. It did nothing, so he touched it with his index finger. It swivelled on the end of the stem and jabbed him with its needle. It stuck for a few seconds, and he watched in stunned silence as the head swelled and reddened. A pink line began to descend the stem, as though it were sucking his blood through a long green straw into the ground.

He broke his paralysis and cut the stalk in half. Blood sprayed from the stump, splattering his legs, and it continued to leak from the head of the plant as it lay on the ground. His blood. He took a step back as several more of them darted and pecked at him like little birds. When they realised he was out of range, they dipped down and sucked what they could from the ground and their fallen friend.

That twenty five meters was starting to look like a thousand, he thought. He flexed his grip on the machete and crouched down like a sprinter on the starting line. He fixed his eyes on the front door and said a silent prayer. The figure watched him from the third story window. He ran.

 

When he woke again, he was no longer a man. He was glad to note, however, that his mind, wherever it was in this new body, was still his own.

His movement was freer now, more flexible. Breathing was effortless, but he didn’t think he had lungs any longer. The thirst was still there, though, and it took another long shower to make it go away. When it was done, he felt as if he’d woken from a coma, which in a way, he had.

His roots were long and agile, and his other limbs had been replaced by similarly agile tendrils. Strangely, they took no getting used to: he manoeuvred his way into the hall and down to the second story, where some light made it past the dense jungle that was the house. As he went, it occurred to him that not a splinter of the original structure was left – it had been replaced by vines and branches and trunks. The balcony was just a haphazard network of stringy limbs.

The city was still there, but even at this distance it was clearly dead. Not a single human soul existed there any longer, unless they were trapped in a plant’s body, like he was. Grey buildings were diminished and covered in green blotches, as though they’d caught a disease. The streets were hidden beneath thick undergrowth.

He landed easily in the back garden. Had he still been human, the plants would have devoured him in a few seconds, but now he was one of them. He went around to the front and was halfway to the gate when that exhaustion hit him again and he realised he wasn’t done changing. Would it be his mind this time? He dug his toes into the dirt in front of the gate and prepared to drift away, dread settling over him like a dark cloud.

 

He rested on the front steps for a long time, breathing hard. He was pale and covered in hundreds of tiny red dots where the needles had pierced him. He hadn’t realised how quickly they were able to suck the blood from him – or how many of them there were. The path was splattered here and there with blood.

His head swam and his body felt weak, but after a few minutes the world steadied and he stood up. He took a breath and opened the front door.

The front room was a complete jungle. Whatever floor there had once been was now gone, and there was even a pond at the foot of the stairs. Large insects buzzed here and there, and it occurred to Gordon how insanely out of place everything was. This kind of thick dense vegetation could be found in Congo, or maybe the amazon. In Switzerland? Never.

Everything was alive. Not alive in the way of a thriving bush or blooming flower, but in the way of an animal – in a breathing, hunting kind of way. Disembodied roots crawled in the mud by the pond like caterpillars, and one of them was set upon by a spider made of twigs.

Gordon took one step into the room and three of the buzzing insects landed on the bare skin of his right arm immediately. He glanced down at them long enough to see that they were not really insects but flying leaves with mouths. They were on him for a second before he felt the top layer of skin being flayed from his arm and he slapped at them with the flat of the machete, teeth gritted against a scream. They died easily, and when they fell away they left three circular wounds and a flap of hanging skin.

He decided not to wait for anything else to become aware of his presence, and took a running leap over the pond and onto the staircase. It groaned under his weight, but didn’t collapse. He thumped up to the second floor, where once there’d been a landing with a fireplace and a balcony.

This place was as overrun as the first floor, though he could make out some floorboards under the soil and fungus. Some of the plants seemed to be growing from the light fixture, and some had roots in the ceiling. What kind of nutrients were they feeding on?

Before he reached the next flight of stairs, five cacti scuttled in. They had long triangular leaves lined with spines projecting from their centre, from which a milky eye stared. The eyes fixed on Gordon, and after that there was no time to do anything but fight.

He cut two from the air and sprayed golden sap in all directions. Out of the corner of his eye he saw other plants crowding around to take their share. The next two landed on his left thigh and torso and sawed at his clothes with the spines. The last one hit him full in the face and he chopped it away, before it could take too much flesh.

The surviving two had made deep gashes when he cut them down and stomped on their shrivelling corpses. More blood lost, brilliant. He limped up the next staircase before something else had a mind to come after him.

The third floor held Xavier’s bedroom, a toilet, and a study, all branching off a central hallway. The hallway was comparatively deserted, but by the time he reached the end of it his shirt was being consumed by a sticky leafed shrub and his upper body was missing a dozen circular patches of skin. He was glad he’d chosen to wear boots or the thorns along the ground would have pierced the soles of his feet several times already.

He kicked open the bedroom door and found Xavier sitting at his little desk by the window. A quick scan of the room showed nothing potentially dangerous, which made sense: in the end, Xavier was still just a human being, and his beloved friends would eat him alive just like anyone else.

‘It’s too late to change anything, Doctor.’

Instead of answering, Gordon strode up to the desk and leaned over it, as much to support his shaking arms as to intimidate Xavier. He was glaring, but his whole body was weak and cold as if racked by a fever.

‘I spent a decade creating my babies, and I’ve spent the last five years spreading their seeds all over the earth. I started in the least populated areas and ended in the most densely populated, which is why you’re only here now, at the very end.’ He looked up into Gordon’s eyes, perfectly rational, utterly convinced.

‘Why?’

‘Because the world needed it,’ he said. ‘I see humans spreading like a virus and the earth withering beneath them. A hundred years from now my friends would have been dead.’

‘So you decided to murder mankind to save a bunch of plants.’

He shook his head. ‘Not just a bunch of plants, Doctor. Look around you. These are living, intelligent things. Well, a few are intelligent. Those I chose to guard this house are on par with animals, no more, but the ones in the cities…’

Gordon raised his eyebrows and said nothing. He already knew where this was going; didn’t want to hear it, either, but he had no choice. Besides, he knew Xavier, and once he got talking about his creations, well, there was no stopping him. Even now, at the end of the world, his face was lit with excitement and his eyes were far away.

‘I took every strength of modern technology and made it a weakness. I had plants that grew – no, thrived on metal and wood and concrete. I made spores that floated in the air and grew in people’s lungs. Twenty four hours to death, and there’s no hope of extricating them. I made fungi that fed on bone marrow and moss that absorbed flesh.

‘They grow and reproduce hundreds of times faster than any other living thing in existence, besides bacteria. A single seed planted under a house on Monday leaves a thriving bush on Friday. Nothing is wasted.’

‘People will find a way.’

‘I’ve already seen to that. Plant immune systems are already superior to any animal – and my friends aren’t going to succumb to any kind of weed killer the military might concoct in the short time it has left. Bullets are made of lead, which my friends feed on. Soldiers are human, which most of my friends eat. Same for every man made material or artificial substance.’

‘Jesus. How many did you plant?’

He chuckled. ‘Ah, many. I know that most of the sparsely populated places must have been overcome extremely quickly, or the news would have reached the mainstream quicker. I think it’s because of my friends’ aptitude for consuming everything… including telephone lines and what have you.’

Gordon was standing, staring down at the man he once called friend. Xavier looked back at him and it was only then that Gordon noticed the differences in him: he had a green tint to his skin, and his body was gaunt and stretched.

‘What did you do to yourself?’

‘I made myself one of them,’ he said. He laid something on the desk: it was a syringe full of clear liquid. ‘Of course, I put as much as I can into various water supplies, and I even engineered several of my man hunters to use it in their venom. Sort of like a plant vampire if you will – they bite you and a while later you’re one of them. I only wish I could have guaranteed such a fate for all humanity, but that would have been impossible.’

‘You…’ Gordon struggled with the words, his eyes fixed on the needle. He closed his eyes, thinking of the billions of people who were even now perishing in the most horrific ways. Unable to breathe with lungs packed full of growing spores; writhing in pain as their flesh was eaten from their bones; being chased down by… ‘Man hunters?’ he repeated.

‘Yes, well, I won’t mince words, doctor: I have declared war with mankind. You do not go to war without an army.’

‘It’s not war, its genocide. Against your own species.’

Xavier pushed his chair back and stood up. He looked down at his deforming body, smiling. ‘My own species,’ he said. ‘Maybe, but not for long. Soon I will be one of the intelligent ones. All I’ll need to live will be water, sunlight, and a little nourishment absorbed from the soil.’

‘Isn’t that nice?’ Gordon said through gritted teeth. ‘And what then? You’ll stroll out into your new world and live in paradise?’

‘Precisely. Imagine it: a planet with nothing but vegetation and a few animals, living in that endless cycle that nature intended. We will feed from the earth and the earth will feed from us in equal measures – perfect harmony. No humans, no cities, no factories, no slaughterhouses. Limitless resources and therefore no war. And I want you to join me.’

He picked up the syringe as he said it and offered it. ‘It’s completely painless, and when it’s done, there will barely be a thing on this earth that can harm you besides the passing of time.’

Gordon stared at it for a long time, but all he saw were masses of people, running and screaming and dying. All he felt was the handle of the machete in his right hand, twitching, telling him to end the life of this monster.

He moved as quickly as he could, giving no warning, but Xavier had been expecting it – of course he had. He leaned back as the blade swished in front of his face, and an instant later he’d lunged forward and pierced Gordon’s neck with the needle. He forced the plunger all the way and then threw himself back to avoid the backswing.

Gordon pulled the syringe out, but it was empty. Xavier was breathing hard, but there was no mistaking his triumph. ‘There’s no going back now,’ he said. ‘You and I will be part of my utopia together.’

‘I…’ He couldn’t finish. The blood was pumping through his arteries so heavily that each heartbeat was like a bomb blast. He tried to lift the machete which had somehow gained ten kilos. It was no use: black curtains cut across his vision and then it was all over. He passed out.

 

A lot of time had passed since he was last conscious. Somewhere along the way his eyes had merged into one at the very top of his trunk. He looked down at himself and saw that he was a proper tree man, now: eight or nine feet tall, branches and red leaves and long roots coming off in all directions.

At first he was terrified that he was stuck here permanently, but when he really flexed his limbs he extricated himself without too much effort and found himself standing on two wide stumps with hundreds of roots curling off in all directions like slender toes. His vision was blurry and restricted and he couldn’t hear a thing. Now that he was awake, he saw that it didn’t matter: his sense of feeling was so acute that nothing could move within fifty meters of him without his knowing. If it touched the ground, he felt the vibration in his roots; every movement rippled the air all around him. It was like living in another world.

He was in another world. When he lifted his gaze he discovered that it was only his near sight that was impaired: he could see the city – or rather where the city had been – quite clearly.

The whole world was a jungle, now. Fields, houses, suburbs, skyscrapers – gone. Instead there were trees ten stories tall walking amidst a living landscape. Every inch of it was moving, hunting, eating, consuming – even the long grass seemed alive. The city was long gone – probably eaten up in a matter of weeks by these colossal freaks.

Gordon remembered Xavier telling him that every plant was engineered to consume either people or materials made by them. He remembered Xavier saying that they grew and reproduced faster than any organism besides bacteria, and that they were intelligent.

He stepped over the fence and entered the jungle – or rather waded through it. Nothing attacked him, and he got the feeling he was one of the alpha things on the planet – no natural enemies. He glanced towards the gigantic trees at the bottom of the hill and wondered if he’d end up like them if he waited long enough and drank enough water.

He passed by the first of the horrors of the new world before he’d made it halfway to the bottom of the hill. He felt something on the air and glanced right. Thousands and thousands of people were crowded into an enclosure, which was formed by some kind of solid vine.

As he watched, one of the big trees arrived and a section of the enclosure unwound to let it in. He couldn’t hear anything, but he saw mouths open and felt the vibration in the air. The tree extended four thick arms and raked up a hundred or so people, before turning and striding back towards the city.

It didn’t take him long to find the other horrors. As he neared the city, he saw more pens to hold both people and animals. Occasionally one of the overseers would reach in and pluck one for its lunch. In the city there would be places for breeding, and in the surrounding areas there would be farms of all kinds. What did they feed on? Steel and plaster and plastic? Then that is what they would manufacture. They would mine and farm and slaughter.

In the city, he saw many trees overridden with thick green fungus or spores, and he realised it must be the species engineered to consume wood. It ate at them like a disease.

The steel and skyscrapers and people were all gone, yes – but the city was still here. The horror was still here, too, in spades: the screams of humans and animals tore the air like paper.

As he took it in, what little heart he had left rotted in his chest along with his hope and he found himself wishing he hadn’t killed Xavier, after all. He wished he were down here in the midst of it all, with him, so he could see for himself what he’d created.

‘This is it, Xavier,’ Gordon would say. ‘You succeeded at last.’

He imagined the old scientist saying nothing, his expression first falling and then turning to revulsion.

‘This is what you worked for,’ he would say.

‘Your utopia.’

Playtime

I’m sure I’m not the first one to make this observation, but doesn’t it just freak anyone else out how much trust we put in strangers on a day to day basis. Hell, even walking down the street, in a way you’re trusting everyone you pass to not just flip out and kill you. You’re trusting the people who serve you food not to poison it, the people driving on the road not to collide with you at 100 miles an hour. Crazy ain’t it? Enjoy

Playtime

By Ben Pienaar

 

When he started, the kids were colourful and interesting and funny; they made him see the world a different way. It was one of the reasons he decided to become a kindergarten teacher – that and it was easy, and he was good with kids. At first.

After two years he realised that all the kids were essentially the same. They weren’t individual and interesting – the kids in his second year were just like the kids in his first year: they said the same kinds of things, laughed at the same things, acted the same. The ones with dumbass or abusive parents beat up the others, or were teased by them – sometimes both, but even that stopped being interesting after a while.

As far as teaching went, there were only so many times that you could teach the alphabet and finger paint before you started to get bored. He wasn’t teaching them anyway – he was supervising them, end of story: making sure the parents didn’t have to deal for eight hours, and if something happened to them it wouldn’t be their fault, for once.

It was only a matter of time before he started conducting a few experiments. It began innocently enough: he’d leave the grounds for a while and watch from a distance, see what developed. The kind of things kids got up to when they thought no one was watching was incredible. He managed to avoid serious mishaps by turning up at the right time – although he only did that if it was a kid whose parents would actually care. If it was one of the others…

The Kindergarten was across the road from the primary school, on its own in a little park. There was a sandpit and miniature jungle gym surrounded by tall green bars, adjoining a large classroom full of art equipment and worksheets. He would sneak around into the surrounding park and watch them from behind a tree.

The longer he left them, the wilder they got; the more like animals. They’d exclude a few, and those few would gang up and fight the others, for land: the sandpit or jungle gym or the corner with the hopscotch. Everything escalated. One kicked sand in the other’s eyes; the other retaliated with a plastic spade. The first got his friends and threw sticks; the other got her friends and threw rocks.

The colours drained from them like a pencil sketch doused in water. They were not cute and innocent. Just black and white, mean spirited animals. Rats.

They were his rats, though, and they never disobeyed him. Everything he asked them to do was fun – like the time he brought in a batch of acid and gave them each a tab with their lunch. That was wild. He spent a couple months giving them a different drug every Monday. LSD, Marijuana, cocaine. He could have killed any one of them, and any cop with two brain cells would have seen who was to blame… but they were resilient little bastards.

That was back in his six or seventh year teaching. After that surge of creativity, he’d fallen into a black slump and hadn’t recovered. He started bringing a gun to school. None of the kids or parents ever saw it, of course, and it wasn’t loaded. He’d take it with him when he went out to the park and hide in the trees, pointing it at the kids and pulling the trigger. Hearing that frustrating, dry click.

It got more interesting when he put bullets in it and did the same thing, taking aim and seeing how far he dared to squeeze the trigger. That was a rush, that was almost real, and it kept him going a little while longer.

He had grown to hate them, in his long years. His view of them as bright, capricious children had changed to one of hateful malevolent rats, and his view of himself and his life had changed just as dramatically. The world had lost its colour and become bleak. He’d never got on with people, but now he despised them, and he despised himself too.

When it was time for arts and crafts he sat with the gun in his desk drawer, loaded with the safety off. He thought about how incredibly easy it would be to completely change the course of his own life and countless others. Hell, with a few swift movements and a keen eye he could change the history of the country. Make worldwide news, even. There’d be memorials and candlelit vigils, and why? All because one man moved his arm, stood up, and pulled a little lever a few times.

He’d seen them playing with guns, too. Not real ones, but sticks that looked like guns in their mind’s eye. They’d pull an imaginary trigger and scream Pow! At each other and the victims would dutifully fall down – or, more usually, they’d instigate an intense argument about who shot first and whether or not they should really die.

They didn’t have a clue. They should see real killing; real death and war. See what happened to their goddamned innocence then! See if they were so damned cute then! They should get a good shot of real life, about what the real world was like. God damn! now that would be teaching them. Keep a bullet for himself and who cared what happened afterwards?

Sometimes he opened his drawer and pulled out his gun and thought about it, hard. He was discreet, but a few times he thought he caught a couple of the boys looking at him when he did it, thinking something. Did they know what he was thinking?

‘Alright! Playtime!’ He shouted, because the sight of them scribbling mindlessly on messy scraps of paper was already too much to bear. He considered getting hold of some heroin for next week. The classroom erupted in noise and cheers and they abandoned papers and crayons in favour of flying projectiles and wild screaming.

He left them that way for a while and went out into the park, though for once he didn’t spy on them or conduct an experiment. Even that had lost its charm for him. He stood in bright sunlight, but his mind was overcast and stormy. He saw his life failing, spiralling down, becoming blacker and blacker.

He remembered himself as a rat – child, just like them, and realised they would all become him. He was them, and they were him, and just like that he decided suicide wasn’t enough. This despair was bigger than one person. This darkness was worldwide. He nodded and went inside.

The kids were all over the place, playing with their miniature stick/guns and falling down, not realising they were about to see just what real murder was like. At last he’d be able to show them that, teach them something for once. He sat down behind his desk and watched them jump and crawl and run and shout POW at each other. He smiled, imagining what would happen if he fired his gun at one of them and it just went POW. That would be funny.

One of them dove over a table and crawled around his desk, using it for cover. He was laughing hysterically and calling out taunts. ‘No fair, no fair!’ one of the others called out. ‘You can’t use the teacher’s desk!’

‘Yes I can!’ he yelled back. ‘I can use your desk, Mr. Gallby?’

‘Yes,’ he said, without looking down.

‘SEE?’

He pulled open his top desk drawer, his eye on little Mary, who was pulling another girl’s hair and giggling. She’d be the first to go. He reached into the drawer, felt only a few papers and pencils. Reached a bit deeper and felt the back. The gun was gone.

‘Hey mister Gillby, wanna play?’ The rat hiding beside his desk stuck his head around and looked at him. ‘I found your gun, but if you play I get to use it, okay?’

He stared at the boy, expressionless. He tried to think of the best response. Give it back! No, that would never work. Please let me use it? No. In fact, he didn’t know that there was anything he could to do –

‘Mr. Gilby’s playing now!’ the rat shouted, standing up and raising the gun. He turned to face Mr. Gilby, grinning mischievously, some cruel trick playing behind his eyes. He raised the gun.

‘Not quick enough, Mr. Gilby! I win!’

POW!

 

 

Angel

It is what you do that defines you. I think Batman said that, and it is therefore beyond question. This is my way of agreeing with my black caped idol. I have to admit though, writing it made me wonder about people a lot. Remember the last person you met, who smiled and treated you nice and gave you compliments. I wonder what they were really thinking, under that cheerful mask? How many people you meet are sociopaths who just have yet to make their first kill? Or just have yet to be caught? Makes ya think… enjoy!

Angel

By Ben Pienaar

 

When I was a boy, I set my neighbour’s house on fire. Over the course of several months I killed half the pets in the surrounding areas of my neighbourhood. Fortunately, I was a very intelligent young boy, and no one ever found out it was me. No one knew it was me who disembowelled Hamish Donner either, because they never found his body.

 

If you see him on the street, he smiles. He’s always cheerful; tells jokes and laughs and makes delightfully intelligent conversation. In day to day life, he has the charisma of the most charming of politicians, but the real charm, people will tell you, is that he has no idea about it.

People who know him well say he’s a good person. They love him, and they think he loves them too. His tongue begins to wag and everyone leans in to listen, to see what funny or interesting or just plain nice thing he has to say.

He’s a talented diplomat, and rose high in the government. May be president one day, they say. He’s rich, but he gives his money away at every turn and his living standard is modest at best. Entire charities live off his income. No poor man can enter his line of sight and then leave it still poor. He attends church every Sunday, and has friends there too, and they talk about doing good and helping people.

And he despises it.

Every day, he wakes up and begins his perfect, disciplined and virtuous routine. It consists of healthy meals, quality time with his wife and kids, a day of good work, and a night of even more work, perhaps some socialising, and finally relaxing. He does nothing in excess, never speaks badly or behaves immorally in the slightest, and he has only one enemy in all the world: himself.

 

No one knew, and while then I was only a smart boy, I was growing into a genius killer. I had plans drawn up in a secret language in several notebooks, and they were going to deliver me great power, and I was going to do great things. Terrible things, most would say, but for me they would have been great. Death, blood, murder, and absolute power. Like a God.

I was so close, so close to beginning my Grand Plan For Everything when I turned twenty and became possessed. Some hideous thing, a creature of burning light and sickening warmth crawled, slimed its way through my ear and into my brain while I was asleep, and when I woke I was no longer in control of my body.

Some things, I was able to do myself, like get out of bed and shower and eat breakfast. The first thing happened when I was on the school bus and one of the others dared to make fun of me. It had happened twice before, and the first time I’d cornered the one who did it when he was alone and used my knife to scare him very, very badly. The second time was Hamish Donner.

I turned to flip him the bird and maybe yell something dirty at him, a part of me almost hoping to provoke him, so I’d have no choice but to get rid of him in that brilliant, exhilarating way of mine. My hand came up and… waved. I smiled pleasantly, and turned back around.

None of these motions were of my own doing. Mentally, I was screaming obscenities, rushing down the aisle to beat him to a pulp, anything. I sat there for a while, outwardly calm but searching my thoughts for this odd presence I felt. Now it had used its power I could really feel it, an actual weight on my brain, pressing against my skull, pulling wires and reconnecting them in disturbing ways.

What the fuck are you? I asked it.

Your happy saviour, it said, full of merriment, and I was filled with hatred.

 

He has an odd clumsiness about him, some say, though if anything it only serves to make him more endearing. Still, there have been a few near misses, and had it not been for his habit of surrounding himself with friends and loved ones most of his life, he might even have died.

One Gavin Smith recalls him almost falling from a fifth floor balcony, despite the sturdy railing, and only escaped death when Gavin reached out and grabbed his shirt as he went over. Another time his hands slipped on his steering wheel and he almost hit a wall if he hadn’t recovered his reflexes just in time.

 

I try to kill myself almost every day, but after the first few times the Angel was ready for it and now it’s nearly impossible. It has to be distracted somehow, or at least very tired, before I can even begin. Every now and again I get past him, though, and one day I hope I might get through, maybe. All it takes is a break in his concentration and I’ll be… Where? Hell? Shit, I’m already there; it can’t be worse than this.

 

Despite his success, there have been occasional rumours, and strange moments during the course of his career that have sometimes cast only the slightest of shadows on his impeccable reputation. In one bizarre interview, he responded to a question with an expression of what can only be described as utter hatred. A moment later his face went blank, and then he smiled and answered the question normally, later dismissing the expression by saying he had a bad taste in his mouth.

He often demonstrated his love of the people by having private talks to random citizens. One of these, Harry Cane, told his family of a strange and completely uncharacteristic occurrence. All was normal and pleasant, he said, until near the end of the encounter when he said goodbye and extended his hand. The vice president took it, but instead of shaking, he squeezed it so hard that Harry cried out in agony.

‘When I looked up I saw a face on him. Or not a face a – an expression. He was just as happy as a clam, not like anything was wrong but like he was really enjoying it. His eyes were wide open and his mouth was open in this big wide smile like he just won the lottery and couldn’t believe it. He raised his left hand up in a fist and then just shook his head and let go and apologised. Weirdest thing I ever saw.’

These instances, while incredibly rare and hard to find credible information about (as he is of course so well loved) nevertheless seem to be happening more and more as the vice president ages.

 

I try to kill people all the time. Oh, yes, not a day goes by when I don’t try to slice or dice something. Even with my bare hands, if I can cause some good pain in a day, I consider it a big win. If I’m not trying to kill myself, of course. Nowadays, I don’t do that as much as I used to.

The old bastard is starting to get weak. Funny thing about having no real control over my own body: I get to spend every last ounce of energy I have on the fight. Sometimes, I just let myself rest and doze while he’s occupying himself with the day, and then, right when he lies down to get some shuteye… bam! I’m there, fighting him for the chance to grab that letter opener and ram it in my eye.

It’s taken thirty years or so, but I’m getting into my groove now. Conserve energy, strike when he’s weak. Any normal person would have given in after a week, but this guy no, this… thing is supernatural, obviously. I think it’s some kind of Angel. I mean, if Demons possess all the good guys, what else would it be? Supernatural or not, though… He’s getting weak. Every now and again, I catch him off guard, and every time it takes him a little longer to get back control.

Well, fuck him. There’s got to be a balance, doesn’t there? He’s had me, used me for his goddamn good. He took the best years of my life, too. Fine, the next thirty are mine then – if I even live that long. And I’m going to start my Grand Plan. Oh, I bet he won’t be laughing then. I bet he’ll get a spanking when the big guy upstairs realises that he spent thirty years putting me in a position of supreme power on earth only to weaken just in time for me to abuse it.

I bet he won’t be laughing then, hell no. But I will.

 

 

Nightmare

I spent ages trying to think of a good nightmare story. I just had to have one story called ‘nightmare.’ I was sure that whatever story I came up with that I could give that title to, it would have no choice but to be awesome. Almost everything that happens in this story has happened to me in my dreams at some point. I have incredibly vivid dreams, and I die in them on a regular basis, as you will no doubt gather. Whether I succeded in using these experiences effectively for a good story – well that’s up to you, reader. Enjoy!

 

Nightmare

By Ben Pienaar

 

“According to Turner (Herbal, 1568) the nyght mare was a strangling sensation, and in his method of physic (1624), Barrough concurred: Of the mare. – Ephialtes in Greeke, in Latine incubus and incubo. It is a disease, where as one thinketh himself in the night to be oppressed with a great weight, and beleeveth that something cometh upon him, and the patient thinketh himself strangled in this disease. It is called in English the mare.” (Dictionary of Word Origins, Linda & Roger Flavell)

 

“…If you know you are dreaming, you can take charge of the dream action, become the director of your own interior dream movie. Nightmare sufferers can learn to confront their dream monster, turning a raging lion into a mild mannered tabby cat, or reclaim a dream as they’re waking up in time to impose a different ending.” (Good Housekeeping, May 1994)

 

Between drifting off to sleep and waking up, the average human being experiences between three and seven dreams. Upon waking, over ninety percent of these dreams vanish from their mind.

 

One week after his thirty ninth birthday, Kristian Lamark stood in a dimly lit train station. He was on the tracks, and the train was coming: he could feel the vibrations in his feet as it came closer. The glow of headlights hit the wall ahead of him as it neared the final turn. There were people on the platform, and though they screamed and shouted and swore, none dared to come down and pull him away. They wouldn’t have succeeded, anyway.

Kristian stared bleakly at his oncoming death, his mind full of horror. It had been since he woke up that morning, and it wasn’t going away, not ever. It was as though, while he dreamt, some evil pixie had crept into his mind and switched the wires so that he could only see the evil and tragedy of the world. The worst part was, he knew it was all true: he just hadn’t seen it before – hadn’t thought to look at things this way. Now that he’d seen it, there was no going back. Death was the only peace he’d ever know.

 

On the sixth night after his thirty ninth birthday, Kristian Lamark collapsed onto his bed, exhausted, and fell immediately asleep. He dreamed briefly of climbing a tree and then falling a sickening height, followed by another in which he was having a party with a group of people he didn’t like. An hour of unconsciousness passed in the blink of an eye and then he was running down an empty road from monsters, his legs dragging like logs under him. His fourth dream lasted less than ten minutes in reality and hours in his mind, and consisted of him sitting in a barrel while a friend lowered him down a well, shouting nonsense and laughing. This was the last of what he remembered, and the rest of his experiences that night, as with every night, couldn’t have been retrieved from the depths of his mind by any means.

He woke – for that was what it felt like: waking – in a field. Rather, he realised, it was a clearing, surrounded by a forest of thick trunked trees. The land all around him was a lake of long grass, with flat rocks similar to the one he was standing on scattered all around like stepping stones. Here and there a rose stood out of the ground, though the petals were coloured dark purple.

I’m dreaming, he thought. Maybe I should fly? Or wake up? But for some reason neither prospect excited him much, and he decided the best thing to do would be to take a little walk and explore the dream as if it were a real place. That was how he began, but before he’d gone five steps he saw that he wasn’t alone.

In dreams, senses and feelings are not distinct or separate, and everything is experienced at once. In the case of the woman he saw now, standing dressed in black in stark contrast to the sunny blue sky, the feelings he experienced were terror, dread and despair. As far as senses went he smelled something simultaneously irresistible and repelling, like poisoned fine wine.

He tried to wake up and found that it was impossible. For one fleeting moment he had a sense of his body, twisting under the blankets, but then it was gone. No matter how many times he closed his eyes, pinched himself, or willed himself to become conscious, he remained asleep.

When he opened his eyes again, she was right in front of him, seeming to float in the air. She must have been seven or eight feet tall, and the black cloaks she wore billowed around her although there was no wind. They seemed half made of smoke. Her fingernails were sharp and yellow, like her teeth, and her eyes were bloodshot and rimmed with red and black skin. The rest of her face was pale, so gaunt her cheeks were concave.

‘You shouldn’t try that so hard,’ she said. ‘It won’t work and you’ll tire yourself out.’ Her voice was low, and had the husky quality women sometimes get when they smoke too many cigarettes.

‘Who are you?’ he said, squinting into the light until he remembered that really, there was no light, and stopped.

‘Well…’ She smiled with lips that looked naturally blood red. ‘I suppose I’m two people, really. I was a woman called Emily Rhine, in my day. I was murdered when I was twenty five because I failed my test, so… They made me a succubus, and here I am.’ She extended her arms on either side, grandly.

‘You… what?’

‘Failed my test. Yes, that’s why you’re here, I forgot to tell you. You have to pass your test. No, wait…’ She paused, eyes cast upwards, ‘three tests. To earn your right to live.’

‘Wait, hold on. My right to live? Who’s they?’

She sighed. ‘They are Death. I’m not sure if it’s just one thing, or person or whatever or lots of them. It’s sort of a collection, you know? All death. Anyway, they’re my sort of boss, so I run errands like this, along with all the other succubi and incubi.’

‘Okay.’ It’s only a dream it’s only a dream, never fear it’s only a dream a voice ran in his mind.

‘Oh yes, and also I’m supposed to tell you about the tests. You get one every time you sleep, but on birthdays, like today, you get three. I don’t know why, it’s just a weird sort of celebration. Anyway, the tests decide whether you’re going to live or die tomorrow, but the birthday ones decide if you’ll die in the coming year, and if so then when and how.’

He stared up at her. ‘I get these tests every time I sleep? Why don’t I remember any of them? What about nights when I don’t dream at all?’

She dismissed him with a head shake. ‘No, you dream every night, you just don’t remember. You always forget these dreams, which is why we have to remind you every time you have one. Death decides all of them, so they judge you and make them harder or easier depending. Although, they usually start off really easy when you’re young and then get harder and harder. Because otherwise, you know, there’d be too many old people, or something. Sometimes people slip up, or they misjudge you and make a test too hard. That’s why young people like me die, and get sent to be succubi. I think that’s it,’ she finished, grinning like a snarling dog.

He looked around the clearing, taking it all in. He marvelled at the clarity of his vision. Usually dreams were blurry and full of motion and change. But this was serene and constant, and he found that if he desired he could even focus on things like blades of grass or rocks and see them perfectly.

It’s just a dream. ‘So what are my tests?’

‘What?’ She’d been following his gaze and seemed to have forgotten what was going on. ‘Oh, yes. Your tests. This is the first dream, so we do the first one here. And then the next two are in your other dreams, but don’t worry – you’ll still remember what’s going on, I think. Um, so…’ She furrowed her brow and rested her talon-like nails on her scalp. ‘Yes! Willpower, the mind one. Death wants to test your will to live, first.’

Kristian smiled with relief; this wasn’t going to be a problem.

‘The first thing you have to do is cross the ocean.’

‘Alright,’ he said, scanning the wall of trees that encircled them, ‘where is it?’ but when he turned back to her he saw nothing but a thick cloud of black smoke floating upwards to the blue sky.

He chose a direction, figuring intuition would be reliable in a dream, and began to pick his way through the closely set trees. Before long, he was completely lost. He tried to use the sun to navigate, but although the sky was full of light he couldn’t see the sun itself. Three times he tried to fly, but each time he reached a ceiling of branches so thick and numerous he couldn’t manoeuvre past them, and on top of that if he looked down once or doubted his ability to fly even a little, he came crashing back to the ground.

It wasn’t long before he began to despair. How long had he been here, crossing streams, cutting through undergrowth, listening for the sound of waves? He panicked. Had they misjudged him? Did they make the test too hard? Was he missing something obvious?

Tree by tree he traversed acres of woodland, and noted that there wasn’t so much as an ant to be found in all of it. The further he went, the heavier the cover became, and so the darker the forest was. If anything, he felt as if he was going farther from the ocean with each step. He kept getting déjà vu, as though he’d been through a part of the forest before.

This test, she’d said, was a mental one, so the way out couldn’t be mindless searching. He had to think about it. He couldn’t fly out, and he couldn’t run with super speed since he seemed to crash into a tree within two steps. He’d even tried burrowing down under the earth but had encountered rock. No, the real problem was with his mind. Hell, he didn’t even know which way the ocean was, so how could he expect to find it? He had to ask the right question, that was all.

‘How would I find it in real life?’ he said aloud. And suddenly it was obvious. He closed his eyes and found he could hear the sound of running water. When he opened them, the sound vanished. He closed them again, and began to make his way towards the sound. Somehow he didn’t feel a single tree as he went down his path, and at last he heard a splash and felt his left foot sink into icy water.

He considered following the stream by foot, but then he reminded himself it was a dream and he could take some liberties, and instead he lay on his back and let the stream push him gently towards the ocean. He tried to stand only when a wave crashed over his head and he tasted salt.

By then, of course, it was too late. The river had pushed him well into the ocean before the fresh water had diluted enough for him to taste salt, and now there was a strong current pulling at his legs. Flying didn’t work – try as he might, the pull was too strong. All too soon, his every effort was spent on keeping his head above water. And when all the strength he could muster still wasn’t enough, he went under.

He didn’t fight at first, and simply allowed himself to be sucked down while he watched the sunlit surface rise further and further above him. He swore to himself over and over that it was just a dream, that nothing could really happen to him, but then why, why couldn’t he breathe? Was his face mashed in his pillow or under the covers? Was someone trying to smother him?

He fought, kicking upwards with all his might and trying to climb through the water as if it were a solid thing. Somehow, with every stroke the ocean fought back and pulled him harder. The more he pushed, the further down he went. If he opened his mouth and took a breath, would it taste of water or linen?

Black circles began to pop up in his vision. The water was cold here, and dark: the sun was too far above to reach him. Even if he broke free of this suction now, he thought, he’d never make it up there in time. His muscles weakened with every missed inhalation. He made one final push, one all out effort that made his body ache and his eyes blind, and then gave up. The dark washed in.

When his senses returned to him the first thing he recognised was smoke and dread. Emily the Succubus was near. He saw her soon enough, standing on a drift of snow nearby and looking down on him. Where was he?

‘You’re on a mountain in this one,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why. I think the snow might be part of the challenge.’

He rolled onto all fours and gagged, trying to vomit the four litres of salt water he was sure he swallowed. Nothing came out.

‘Jesus, it’s cold.’

‘Yes. It tends to be up on mountains. There’s a blizzard on now, too.’

‘Is that the test? Cold?’

‘Some of it is, probably. This one is the physical part, you know.’

It occurred to him that he was naked, and for the life of him he couldn’t recall if he’d been that way when he woke up or if it had just happened then. Snowflakes stung his skin like wasps and the wind howled in his ears. Don’t worry. You didn’t drown, remember? And you’re warm in your bed at home now, not cold at all.

‘How can it be physical? I don’t even have a real body here, right? A dream is a dream; it’s all in my head.’

She cocked her head to one side and thought about it. Behind her, the full moon hung in a starless sky. ‘A real body? But isn’t your real body only in your mind also?’

‘What? No.’

‘How do you feel anything, then?’

‘I… What do you mean?’

‘When you feel pain or cold or whatever, your body tells your mind, and your mind makes you feel pain. As long as the last step happens, the rest is irrelevant. That’s what I think. Only the last step is important. Weren’t you drowning a minute ago? Was that real?’

‘Well, no, I was dreaming, right?’

‘But were you suffocating?’

He paused. ‘Yes, I was.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I… felt it.’

‘Well there you go. That means it must have happened for real, or you wouldn’t have felt it.’

For a minute he was lost for words, and then the cold set in with a vengeance and he hunched over, teeth chattering.

‘Oh, that reminds me,’ she said, staring absentmindedly at the moon. ‘You should probably get moving soon, for your test.’

‘Why, what is it this time? I have to climb a mountain? Bury myself in snow?’

‘No, this one is… Wolves I think.’

His mouth fell open, and as if on queue a howl split the night and sent wild shivers up his spine. It wasn’t far away. He turned around and saw that behind them, the mountain was a mostly shallow slope down towards a shaded forest, and that was where the sound had come from. Another howl answered the first, and then another, and they made an eerie but strangely beautiful song. A deadly song.

‘Where do I go?’ he asked.

She half smiled and jerked her head in the opposite direction to where the howls came from. Incidentally, that looked to be the top of a sheer cliff. When he ran up the slope and stared over the side, he saw that it dropped hundreds of meters before panning out and joining the land. A crystal blue river ran over it like a ribbon.

‘I’m going to die again, aren’t I?’ he said half to himself.

‘That’s up to you, sweetheart,’ came the dry answer. He almost didn’t hear her over the sound of the wolves. They sounded like they were almost at the top of the mountain already, only just out of sight and closing fast.

‘How are they so fast?’ he almost shouted at her.

‘Dream,’ she reminded him. And that was all there was time for because a second later the pack leapt the last snow drift and there was nothing left to do but jump. He turned and threw himself over the edge – and then the air turned to honey.

Now rather than falling, he was swimming through air thick enough to drink. Time had warped somehow, so that although he seemed to travel slowly and the wolves flew over snow as if they had wings, they weren’t catching up with him as fast as they should have. In relation to them, he was moving fast enough to stay just ahead of their snapping teeth, but as far as he could tell he wasn’t moving at all.

He stroked as hard as he could, his heart bursting with the effort and his mind blank with panic. His feet tingled behind him as he sensed jaws snapping closed inches from his bare toes. Almost worse than the fear was the cold. When he was only standing still it had been uncomfortable, but now that he was out in the open it assaulted him from all sides, slicing into his skin and wrapping around his bones. He could no longer dismiss it as just a dream anymore: this feeling was real enough for him.

When he looked behind him they were still close. Drool fell in tendrils from their panting mouths and froze immediately into solid icicles.

With each stroke his arms and extremities numbed. Exhaustion – and how could he feel tired if he was asleep, anyway? – set in and he swore he could feel the fluid on the surface of his eyes freezing over. He was weakening fast. The wolves were almost level with him: one of them had hold of his right foot and had torn most of it to shreds, but he hadn’t felt it because of the numbness. Most of his lower leg was blue.

The utter dread of impending death set in. The clear and horrifying knowledge of: I am going to die now, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. There was nothing around him but darkness, though somewhere far below him on the arctic plains he saw the flickering orange light of a fire.

Everything but his head and chest was numb. As the wolves surrounded him and began to pull parts of him in separate directions and into separate stomachs, he had time for one last thought: I was supposed to let myself drop.

After a brief slice of death, which was a welcome respite, he woke. The numbness hadn’t left him, and he rolled over in bed, panicking. Then he realised he’d been lying with his right arm across his body, completely cutting off the circulation. Also, at some point in the dream he’d kicked his blanket off and his whole body was covered in goose bumps. A cool morning wind blew in from the open window.

He sat up, rubbing his eyes and waiting for the blood to pour back into his limp arm. It was taking too long, so he got dressed and stumbled to the bathroom, blinking in fresh sunlight as he went and trying to forget his nightmare.

He looked in the mirror and saw a thirty nine year old who looked sixty. Since when was that much of his hair grey? And what were those crow’s feet doing there? He shaved with a shaky left hand, cutting himself twice, which was twice more than usual, and then picked up his toothbrush. Then he opened his mouth and it fell out of his hand and into the basin.

His teeth were crooked, broken and black. His gums were pale and his saliva was red with blood. Horrified, he reached up to touch one of his teeth and his finger went into it, simply mushing it like soft clay. The one next to it dislodged and fell into the sink. Before he could snatch it, it clattered around and disappeared down the drain. He looked up into the mirror again and now he began to notice other things. His eyes were blood shot and cloudy. His skin was loose.

He pushed away from the horrible vision and staggered into the hallway, his numb right arm swinging uselessly at his side. His whole body ached with every step, but that arm was painless, and when he forced himself to look at it properly he saw why.

The whole thing was black. Parts were bulging or pockmarked like a barren wasteland that had been ravaged by nuclear bomb blasts. Either gangrene or cancer or something else, he didn’t know or care. It was spreading.

He tore off his shirt and saw the sickly skin of his upper arm turning grey and then darkening. Miniature mountains of flesh rose and fell and craters appeared, and then the flesh that surrounded these areas became infected. It was like watching a horrific time lapse episode of a nature documentary – a rotting corpse, perhaps.

He ran down the hall, but the black had started on his feet also and he fell halfway to the front door. He crawled on, leaving his left foot and three of his right toes behind him. The dream! They’d judged him and he was going to die. Maybe he’d come back as an incubus himself, but he didn’t think he wanted that.

No, he thought: screw that. Screw them – if he was going to die, he’d do it on his own terms and if they tried to bring him back, he’d do it again.

He changed course at the door and went into the kitchen instead, barely noticing the pieces dropping off him as he went. He yanked open the cutlery drawer so hard it flew into the fridge and splintered, scattering knives, forks and spoons all over the tile. Unfortunately, his only working hand went with it.

His legs were mostly gone but there was enough left for him to pull himself up onto the sink with his elbows. The black had reached his torso. Screaming with rage at the injustice of it, that he should die because of some arbitrary test, he thrust his head through the glass window and then began to violently shake it back and forth.

The shards broke and cracked, but their jagged edge did the work he couldn’t do with his own hands. There was a moment, bizarrely, where his head was hanging from the thread of his neck and he could see the blood fountaining out onto the neatly cut lawn outside. It was a beautiful sunny day; not a cloud in the sky. It was all over now, he thought, and he was damned if they’d get an ounce of satisfaction from it. He closed his eyes and went defiantly away.

He did not die, of course, and when that baffling truth struck him he opened his eyes and saw once again the clear blue sky. But, he realised, this was no longer the sky of the suburbs: it was the sky of his dreams, the one that hung above the field of dark purple roses. He was lying on his back, so he sat up and rubbed his eyes. His head was still solidly on.

Emily was standing on one of the flat rocks nearby, her hand shielding her eyes from the sun as she scanned the trees for something. He sat up and went to stand beside her.

‘What are you looking for?’ he said. She turned, clearly surprised, though he also detected a deep note of sadness in her eyes.

‘You,’ she said.

‘Oh, okay. Well, here I am.’

‘Yes.’ She looked down and didn’t say anything.

‘So? Is there another test? You said three, right? I passed, didn’t I? I did alright, I mean I had a few stumbles but at the end there I made it. I didn’t let the cancer take me after all.’

She gave him a smile so tragic he read the truth in it and his stomach dropped out of him.

‘Wait, come on. I fought every step of the way, I got through the forest, I cheated death! What more do you want from me?’

But she only shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Kristian.’

He stared at her, lost for words. It’s only a nightmare, he thought, just a really bad, terrible nightmare. That’s all. She cocked her head to the side and he was horrified to see a black tear roll down her cheek.

‘How?’ he said.

‘Well,’ she began thickly. ‘The first test was whether you’d die the coming year or not. You were so close, really you were – just inches away from passing. But Death just told me it wasn’t enough, or it might have been if only it wasn’t for the others…’

He tried to keep his breathing slow, but the smell of her was suffocating.

‘The second one was about when and, well, you were supposed to drop. If you made it to the fire it might’ve been a whole twelve months.’

‘But I got?’

‘Um. I’m so sorry. Tomorrow.’

‘What? As in, when I wake up?’

‘Not immediately, no, but definitely some time before you go to sleep.’

‘Jesus.’

‘The last one was how.’

He looked up sharply, remembering the horror of rotting at hyper speed, and knew that if it started happening like that again he’d surely kill himself.

‘Not the cancer. It’s got to be suicide. Oh Kristian. If only you’d gone through the front door instead, there was a man with the cure just walking by.’

‘A man with a cure for cancer?’ Kristian said through gritted teeth. ‘Just walking by?’

‘Dream, remember?’ she reminded him. She was looking at him with a mixture of pity and love, and he found he detested her immensely. Now that she’d told him all of it, he decided it was bullshit anyway. Suicide? He couldn’t think of anything that could happen to him in the space of a day – at least anything realistic – that would make him do that.

‘I won’t die, not tomorrow, not till I’m a hundred, and there’s no goddamn test that can make me. I’m not coming back as – as one of you things.’ He almost expected her to fly into a fury, or even tears, but to his surprise she only gave him another sad smile and said, ‘I hope not Kristian. I really do.’

He opened his mouth to reply and realised the world was drifting away from him. He sensed his mind changing, moving from the clear world of the dream to uncertain reality. His memories were beginning to disappear already, and he knew there was no way to stop it from happening. It was hopeless, and if this was all for real – if they really meant what they said…

He had to preserve a thought. If he could do that, maybe it would be okay. No need to remember everything, he told himself, just preserve one single thought that might save him, just in case.

So, as he ascended from the land of sleep and into the brief darkness that precedes waking, he thought, and he thought hard: Life is worth living. That was all, and he repeated it to himself as many times as he could, trying to believe it even though the reason for it evaded him with each passing second. Life is worth living.

 

***                              ***                              ***

 

Life just wasn’t worth living. Not with everything he knew now. Where the knowledge came from didn’t matter to him, and he didn’t know anyway; what he did know was that since he’d woken up it was there, and it made every breath an effort. There was no way he could last another day like this, let alone the rest of his life.

The train rounded the corner and he stared into the headlights dreamily, deaf to the screams of those on the platform, which were mostly drowned by the metallic roar. That was when he turned and saw a man with ragged clothes reaching towards him with one hand. The other held a bottle in a brown paper bag.

From nowhere, his thought returned to him. It was like a boomerang he’d thrown upon waking and then forgotten about until now, when it came spinning through the ether toward him. Life is worth living.

In these last slow motion moments, he turned the thought over in his mind and realised in an instant that it was true – of course it was true. How could he have thought any different? How could his mind have been so dark? The world was not hell, not the evil, tragic place he’d been so sure it was a second ago.

The screech of steel brakes filled the air and deafened him completely. He was already turning then, lunging for the platform, where the man still had his arm out, though it was a hair’s breadth from being severed by the train. He’d make it, he was sure. He might lose his legs, might never walk again, but he’d make it and live his life.

Then he met eyes with the homeless man and saw the truth. Even as he reached for the extended hand, the man was pulling it back so it wouldn’t be hit by the train. Kristian opened his mouth to scream at him, to shout his last message, but before he made it to the end of the first word he was cut short.

e

 

Into Dark

Ever been lying in a dark room long after bedtime, whole house asleep, certain that some razor toothed monster was lying under your bed? Waiting for you to fall asleep, maybe roll over and drop a hand over the side of your bed, when it’ll seize it’s chance to grab you and pull you down and tear your insides to ribbons before you can open your eyes? And when you scream your breath catches in your throat and even though you should be dead you’re still alive and you can see parts of yourself spilling onto the carpet, and all you hear is the monsters greedy chewing as it gorges itself on your liver? Well, if you haven’t had that feeling, you will now. Enjoy!

 

Into Dark

By Ben Pienaar

 

He and his brother were in separate rooms, but even so the sound of whispering reached Graham, through the thin walls or maybe a vent in the ceiling. The sound simultaneously woke him and froze him in place with fear, even though by now it wasn’t unfamiliar.

 For the past week, around three or four in the morning (Graham’s watch glowed in the dark), he heard his older brother whispering to someone in the adjacent room. He almost never heard the someone’s voice, but when he did it made him sick with fear. Not necessarily because of that dry inhuman accent it possessed, but the fact that it was there at all. Because if it wasn’t, Graham would have been able to tell himself his brother was all alone in the next room and talking in his sleep.

 Tonight, the whispering went on for less time than usual, and at about four thirty there was silence. Graham lay in bed and stared at the little glowing stars and planets on his ceiling and listened to his heartbeat. He thought about going over to the other room, but decided against it; why face that sickening, insurmountable fear, when he knew he was just going to wake up tomorrow feeling fine and rush down to see Terry already eating a bowl of Froot Loops and reading a comic?

 So instead, he closed his eyes and went to sleep. And the next day, his brother was missing.

 

***                              ***                              ***

 

 The police searched Terry’s room and the house inside and out, from all angles, exhaustively. They found absolutely nothing. The window was open, but it hadn’t been forced and it was too tiny a gap for anything larger than a cat to fit through anyway. The family had no enemies and no one had a bad word to say about Terry. There were no similar disappearances in the area, and no suspects. If Terry had vanished into thin air, he wouldn’t have left less trace.

 Every night at three in the morning Graham sat up in bed, wide eyed, ears straining to the point of pain for the slightest sound. He heard his heart thundering, his breath rattling, and the blood rushing in his ears, but night after night he heard nothing else. Not a whisper.

 After a month, he too was losing hope. He knew something had taken his brother, if not what or where, but he couldn’t tell a soul. Even at twelve, he knew that if step one was telling someone that his brother was kidnapped by a disembodied whisper from the dark, step two was seeing a counsellor and step three was going to ‘special treatment’ and worst of all, ignored.

 Instead, he clammed up completely when it came to his brother. He became dark and sullen and his grades descended three letters of the alphabet. He did see Counsellors, as it happened, but not one of them could get more than a sad little smile and a hello and goodbye. Smart, very disturbed, but not seriously damaged, they said. Give him time, they said.

 That was fine by Graham, because it gave him a chance to search for his brother in earnest and care about nothing else. Bad grades, no friends, depression, isolation? All normal for a boy who’d just lost his older brother. Maybe not so much after six months, or a year had gone by, but he was certain by then he’d find him. Dead or alive.

 Graham didn’t share the view the police had – that his brother had either been kidnapped by someone or run away. The latter he knew wasn’t true, and the former implied that the culprit was human, someone based in this reality. No one who’d heard that thick sliding whisper would believe that. So where had his brother gone? Into the dark. The whispers had only started late at night, when the air was so pitch black it seemed solid. And they never went till dawn – in fact by the time the first hint of light in the sky showed the whispers had always stopped. So his brother had gone into the dark, and the only way to find him was to follow, come what may.

 It was winter, so there was no shortage of darkness, and what he had Graham made the most of. His curtains were always drawn and he taped the corners to the walls so not even starlight could penetrate. After he got home from school he would eat a hearty a lunch so that his parents wouldn’t nag him too much to come down for dinner. Then he’d close and lock his door, cram some clothes into the crack under the door, and turn off the light. By now he’d already taken down the luminous stars and planets from his ceiling and thrown them away.

 There, in the quiet dark, he’d wait, and think. It occurred to him to wait in his brother’s room, but somehow he didn’t think it mattered. The whispers came in the dark and that’s where he had to be. But they didn’t come to him, and slowly he despaired.

 He never expected to hear his brother’s voice again, but he did. He was walking home from school one day. It was overcast and raining heavily. He’d forgotten to bring his raincoat and he was soaked through, but still he dawdled along the sidewalk, shivering slightly and staring at the slabs moving under his feet.

 ‘Gray!’ It was definitely Terry’s voice, the one he used when he was trying to whisper and shout simultaneously. Graham turned so fast a jolt of pain shot through his neck, and he took a step back into the gutter. The voice had come from the alley joining the old Chinese Restaurant on Way st. It was a narrow alley, and though he could usually see right to the end, on an overcast day at five o’clock in the middle of winter it was black as a sewer.

 ‘Gray,’ the voice said again, though this time it was fainter. Graham stared into the darkness, wanting badly to run forward and grab his brother, but he couldn’t. For all his desperate searching, he realised he’d never expected to find anything. He never really believed that something so horrible could be true. His brother was really there, out there in the dark.

 ‘Terry?’ He replied at last, unaware that he was whispering.

‘I’m scared Gray. I can’t see anything in here.’

 ‘Where are you?’

 ‘I don’t know… Somewhere under the bed. Did you look? I didn’t believe their lies so they took me.’

 Graham took two steps forward, trying to home in on the location of the voice. He hovered on the brink of the alley now, hesitant to venture further, even though it felt like the two of them were standing only a few meters apart.

 ‘How do I get there?’

 ‘No! Don’t come, just get me out of here! If you come we’ll both be lost. Get me out!’

 ‘I’ve got to go after you.’ Graham said. His whole body was tensed now, as if he was prepared to run headlong into the alley. He wondered if that would even work.

 ‘If you… Wait. Something’s coming…’

 Graham held his breath and tried to listen into the dark, but before he could hear anything a car drove past behind him. Then there was only silence, dragging on for minute after minute. He wrinkled his face at the stench of what he thought must be rotting shellfish and eggs from the Chinese Restaurant.

 ‘Terry?’

 ‘Bring a light,’ came the soft reply.

 Graham stood at that alley for a long time, but he didn’t hear anything else besides the pattering of rain on concrete.

 His mother’s mouth fell open at the sight of him as he came through the front door, soaked in water and late, but before she could say a word he dropped his bag at the front door and hurried upstairs. ‘Don’t worry about dinner for me!’ he called from the hallway.

 He ruffled around in the bathroom until he found the candles and matches they kept there in case of a blackout. He took the matches and headed into his bedroom. He locked the door, pushed the clothes under the crack, and just like that he couldn’t see a thing. He flopped onto the bed and stared at nothing.

 ‘Terry?’ he whispered after a while. There was no response. He tried again every ten minutes or so for an hour but nothing happened. No secret world opened up in the dark – he didn’t feel himself being sucked into another dimension. Maybe he did have to go to his brother’s room, after all.

 He wondered about the darkness, about where it was and what lived there, and soon his wonderings turned to daydreams, and his daydreams became real dreams as he passed into slumber. At length, they became nightmares.

 He woke again, and it was immediately obvious to him that he’d been asleep for several hours. The house had that dense silence it only got when it was late at night, and the rain had stopped. He got the feeling someone had shouted his name, but he wasn’t sure if it had been in his dream or not.

 ‘Terry?’ he whispered, forcing himself up on his elbows and trying to get accustomed to the dark. Of course, it was impossible. Even the light in the hallway was out, and there was no moon tonight. No light from anywhere.

 It was only then that he really thought about the things Terry had told him in the alleyway, and he recalled one strange remark in particular. I don’t know… Somewhere under the bed. Did you look?

 He hadn’t looked, had he? You were too afraid, a voice in his mind told him. Because secretly you knew that’s where it was all along.

 The more he shook the remains of sleep from his mind, the more things, small as they were, he noticed. Did he smell some remnant of that alleyway? Those rotten shellfish and eggs he’d been sure were from the Chinese restaurant? Why did his hand feel warm when he held it up in front of his face and ice cold when he let it dangle over the side of the bed. And why, when he did that, did he suddenly feel the urgent need to pull it away and hide under his covers?

 Graham pushed the covers down to the end of the bed, exposing his damp clothes to the air. With a force of will that only another young child in a similar situation could comprehend, he got off the bed and then lay down on the floor beside it. In the dead of night, lying beside that gaping abyss beneath his bed, Graham understood fear.

 I wouldn’t believe their lies so they took me. They Took Me. He pushed open the matchbox and was glad to see it was completely full. He struck one and felt utter relief as the warm firelight surrounded him. For now, the smell of rot and icy air was gone, and he was only here alone, in his dusty room.

Using his free hand to cup the flame though there was no draft, he wiggled sideways until he was exactly centred under the bed, and there he stayed, match warming his skin, hypnotising him. He waited.

 The flame burned low, chasing his fingertips as they ran from it, until at last there was no more wood to burn and it guttered out. Graham’s stomach clenched tight and he felt sheer fear take hold of his lungs. ‘I’m coming for you, Terry,’ he whispered, as the ground fell away.

 The carpet seemed to twist and turn under him, softening and dampening, and then it dropped and let him slide into it. If it weren’t for the cold, he’d have imagined himself dropping into the mouth of some great toothless beast. He came to a stop, curled up in a ball and propped up against something hard and jagged. It felt like a frozen thornbush.

 This place was quiet, but not quiet enough. There was breathing apart from his own. It was wet and thick, but thankfully it didn’t sound close. It didn’t sound aggravated, like it knew where he was. From the sound of it, he was hidden away somewhere, a hollow or a cave separate from the rest of it.

 Without thinking, he popped the matchbox open again and lit one of the matches. For a moment, he was certain something had seen and attacked him in the split second its light sputtered into existence. His feet jerked out and his back came down hard on… carpet. He was back in his room, staring at the underside of his bed.

 For a moment, that was where he remained, breathing hard. As much as he loved his brother, the first thing he felt was incredible relief to be out of that foul smelling place that emanated evil so clearly it shocked him. But the hope was there, too. Bring a light, Terry said, and so he had. And now he knew, no matter how far he ventured into that place, he’d have a way back.

 Graham closed his eyes and blew out the match.

 This time, when he stumbled to the end of the short ride he hit that jagged thing a little harder and felt one thorn pierce his arm. He pulled away, biting his lip, and collided with what felt like a slippery boulder the size of his head. A moment later, it rose on a hundred stick thin legs and scuttled over his back.

 Graham tucked the box of matches into one pocket and decided to proceed on all fours. He was shivering now, and gagging on the stench. It was so concentrated here that it was barely recognizable from what he’d smelled earlier. Like that voice, this was a thing not of the Earthly world. It was the stench of demons.

 He was following a feeling rather than any actual sense of direction, specifically the feeling of wind. If he could get somewhere out in the open, maybe it would be easier to get his bearings. In the back of his mind was the hope he’d be able to see something somehow, but of course that couldn’t be possible, not if the slightest light transported him home. No, this was the Land of Dark: there was no light here.

 He followed the light whistling wind up a slope and through a tunnel so tight he almost suffocated going through it. When he broke out on the other side, the wind was all around him and he realised he was out in the open at last. He looked up, hoping to see a sky of some sort, perhaps with a few stars and planets hovering… but of course there was only nothing. A deeper black, perhaps, like the kind you saw when you looked out over the ocean on a moonless night.

 The things were all out here, too. He couldn’t exactly hear them, or not clearly (though there was that odd slithering somewhere behind him), but he could sense them. Great shapes, predators and carnivores. Any prey that existed here must be dead, or dying. Imprisoned, like his brother. Graham became suddenly more conscious of the blood leaking from his arm and he wondered if they could smell it. He certainly could. He raised the wound to his mouth and began to suck.

 He stopped after a minute or so as it occurred to him what he was doing. Even then, it took another minute to convince himself that the delicious substance melting on his tongue was his own blood – it felt like trying to gather willpower enough to step out of a hot shower on a winter night.

 He dropped to his knees in the mud – everything seemed to be made of mud – and gasped for breath. How long had he been here? Hours? A day? Surely not even that long, and yet he was sure it was changing him. He had to think.

 He slowed his breathing and tried to concentrate on his senses. He didn’t have his eyes, so what did he have that could help him find his brother?

 ‘Terry?’ The vastness swallowed his voice, and he heard nothing back for a long time. Then, at last, so close it seemed almost in his ear, his brother replied.

 ‘Gray! I’m here, follow my voice.’

There was something wrong with that voice, though. There was no question it was Terry speaking, but this was a different Terry. This one sounded happy, even excited. He knows I’m here now, Graham thought, that’s all it is.

 There was no time to ponder it then, because Terry’s next words chilled him to the bone: ‘Hurry, Gray, they know you’re here now.’

 They did, too. He could hear them coming – could almost smell them over the putrid offal stench of the world. He dropped lower to the ground and slid through the mud (if that’s what it was) grabbing anything he could for purchase. Down an embankment here, across a patch of razor sharp rocks, through a cobweb full of stinging ants. These were the pictures he conjured in his mind as he went, because in the absence of sight he had to revert to images he knew, though the realities of these things would have horrified him far more than his mere imagination, had he known it.

 He was close to his brother, very close, when a hand shot up out of the mud and grabbed his ankle. He gasped and then cried out aloud as he felt nails dig into his flesh. He twisted around and clawed at the hand, but then Terry called out to him: ‘Stop! It’s me, Gray! I’m down here, in a cage.’

 Graham stopped his frantic clawing and instead gripped the hand with mad relief. ‘Terry! It’s really you!’ He felt for some kind of opening, but the ground here was not solid. Instead, his hand slipped over what felt like thick steel bars, with a gap only large enough to fit his wrist and perhaps his forearm through.

 He reached down into the cage and felt his brother grab hold of him almost desperately. His nails were so long they made shallow cuts in his arm, and his skin was so cold. The things in the dark were close now. Another minute and he’d feel hot breath on his feet, and a minute after that the only thing left of him would be the part of his arm in the cage with his brother. Then he felt Terry’s teeth on him and had time to think maybe not even that before the pain hit.

 Instead of distracting him, the pain shot through him like a bolt of electricity and focused his thoughts into perfect clarity. This was not him, he knew, but the demon he was becoming.

 In all his wildest dreams, Graham never would have believed that one day his life would depend on whether or not he could strike a match one handed in less than a minute. He jammed the box into his mouth, afraid that if he laid it down it might get wet or fall through the bars of the cage. He pushed it open and several matches fell down through the bars. He drew another out and pushed the rest back in. He tried to strike and the match broke.

 Terry’s teeth hit bone and dragged a little before he began to close his jaws. Now Graham did see stars and planets, but these ones were all in his mind, as brightly as they shone. He opened the box, drew another match, and tried again, gently. It didn’t strike, and the box slipped halfway out of his mouth. Something was clawing its way up a steep incline behind him – he heard its irregular steps and frantic breathing and imagined a sick three legged dog.

 Terry tore his mouthful free. Graham didn’t scream like a boy but roared like a beast, and it was the demon’s rage and sheer focus of energy that rose up in him. The world slowed to a crawl, and when as the matchbox fell from his open mouth he caught it a second before it would have slipped between the bars. In a flash he’d opened it, snatched four or five matches in a go and closed it. He jammed the box in his mouth and struck again with all the matches, hard. Three snapped and two lit. The fire exploded in the darkness like a sun, and just like that the cage bars disappeared along with the wild shrieks of hungry monsters and everything else that lived in the dark.

Carpet slammed up against Graham’s back and his vision returned to him. Still gripping the guttering matches, he pulled his brother – who was still clinging to his mutilated arm, out from under the bed.

 The thing that Terry had become was so far changed from the brother Graham had known that besides the familiar red pyjama pants he was wearing when he disappeared, he was unrecognizable. He had a huge, misshapen mouth filled with razor teeth, skin paler than paper and eyes like jet.

 Had Terry not been blinded by the flare of the match, Graham would have stood no chance. But the effect of seeing a flash of real light, no matter how small, on a thing that had seen nothing but pitch black for over a month, was akin to a person staring at the sun for several minutes. It wasn’t simply blindness but pain, and while Terry shrieked and struggled Graham pushed him into the closet and slammed the doors.

 He braced against them with all his might and held them closed against the first assault. He didn’t wait for a second, but grabbed his small wooden desk (with his unmauled arm), and dragged it in front.

 After that, he collapsed on his side and watched the carpet soak up congealing blood from the wound in his arm. The howls and cries of his mutant brother took second place to the rush of blood in his ears and intense nausea. The world went white for a split second. When the room came back to him all was silent and he realised he must have fainted from shock. His arm was heavy and hard to move, as though the pain had numbed the muscles. His hand hung limply at the end of his wrist, the crucial tendon digesting somewhere in his brother’s stomach.

 Without standing – he thought he might vomit if he did – Graham turned his eyes upwards and squinted in the dark. The closet doors were splintered and broken badly, with considerable cracks from floor to ceiling, and the desk was now sitting a good inch back from where it had been. There was no sound.

 Shaking, he got onto all fours and crawled over to his door. He reached up with his bad arm – it couldn’t support his weight – and flicked on the switch. He half expected to hear that terrible shrieking again, and the deadly sound of snapping wood as Terry broke free for good. It didn’t come.

 He crawled back to the closet, squelching through the half dried blood and not caring, and used his shoulder to push his desk out of the way, inch by inch. At last the doors swung open and the real Terry fell out.

 If possible, he looked even worse than Graham. They were both as pale and sickly as each other, but Terry had been reduced to skeletal proportions. There couldn’t be so much as an ounce of fat on him, and his torn pyjama pants hung from bony hips. He was covered in a thousand little scratches and punctures, some old and some fresh. His eyes, once clear, looked milky and unfocused, and his teeth were broken and cracked. But when he blinked and glanced up at Graham, he was once again Terry.

 ‘You got me out,’ he said. His voice was so broken it was a whisper, and it would stay that way for months afterwards.

 ‘You tried to eat me,’ Graham said, lifting his arm up. Terry looked as though he was going to throw up so Graham put it down again. A second later they were chuckling like the school boys they were, and more than a little of it was the bright, persistent light that flooded the room. Even the bed held little shadow now, and the Land of Dark seemed further away.

 Moving with shaky energy, Terry went to the curtains and tore the tape on the bottom corners as he parted them. Fresh dawn light flooded the room, and Graham didn’t think he’d seen anything so beautiful in his life. He stood up with one hand on the desk for balance and grinned widely at his older brother. Soon they were laughing again, each infecting the other with his own mirth until they were both on the floor and had to stop for fear of passing out.

 ‘What happened to you in there?’ Graham asked after a little while. They were sitting beside each other on the bed, unable to take their eyes off the sun as if to do so would cause it to vanish.

 ‘I can’t remember much. They kept me in a cage with a couple of other kids, I don’t know where from ‘cos they didn’t speak English. They ate the kids one at a time. Just reached in and chewed them. I remember bits dropped down through the bars and I…’

He didn’t finish the sentence, but Graham knew all too well how it ended. He remembered how his own blood had tasted in the other world, and how pain had felt.

 ‘Anyway, they went off again and never came back. I think something bigger ate them.’

 ‘What?’

‘I dunno. But I think in that place, everything eats everything, and there’s always something bigger. I think it was hell, Gray.’ 

Graham thought the smell alone was enough proof of that statement.

 ‘I started turning pretty fast,’ Terry went on. ‘I remember talking to you, but it was like a dream. After that I don’t remember anything until I woke up in the closet.’

 ‘Wow.’

 ‘Where do you think it was, Gray? That place?’

 Graham shrugged. ‘The Dark,’ he said. ‘It was the Dark.’

 

 

 

 

 

   

I’ve Seen The Ghost

This one started off on a bizarre premise and then, halfway through, turned into something else entirely. Reading back over it, it almost looks like two separate stories, haphazardly melted together. Both of the characters in this are disturbed in their own ways, so don’t be too quick to pick sides… Enjoy

I’ve Seen the Ghost

By Ben Pienaar

 

She made a few mistakes that would have been innocent enough if he hadn’t already picked her out. As it stood, they would cost her dearly. She took the bus home, which was bad, and she got off a stop early to walk off the burger and fries she’d had for lunch, which was worse.

 He got ahead and waited at a payphone nearby, with his back to her and his eyes on his watch. He was an exact man, and he didn’t make many mistakes. Not that there were many to make: she was a woman of routine, and like all of his victims, she would become a victim of it, too.

 Her routine was flexible in some ways, but not all. Every morning, she took one of the bottled waters from her fridge and kept it unopened, until after her lunch break. Usually the salt from the fries left her thirsty and she’d drink the whole bottle in ten minutes, which meant she’d finished it at about one forty. It was now six twenty, and she was starting to stumble.

 She hadn’t felt sick all day, but suddenly her stomach wasn’t agreeing with her, and her mouth was numb. This was important in case she tried to call for help. He waited for her to pass him and then put the phone down. She’d stopped near the alley and put her arm out for balance. It rested on the trunk of an old brown car that looked like it had seen too many years. His car.

 He saw her sinking slowly to her knees and stepped up in time to catch her before she hit the ground. He eased her into the back, giving the area a quick check before he closed the door and got into the driver’s seat. The whole thing lasted about eight seconds. He’d set up a place close, but not too close. A fifteen minute drive out of the city, then into the parking lot of a factory scheduled for demolition. He dragged her into an empty office on the ground floor, where he’d left all the other equipment.

 She was going to wake up in about ten minutes, maybe more if he’d miscalculated her weight. But then, he was careful as well as exact, and within five minutes her hands were tied to one of the exposed rafters overhead and she was half standing in the corner of the room. He took another moment to blindfold her thoroughly, padding, duct taping, and then tying a cloth around her head.

 She began to wake, shifting uncomfortably in her position, her feet looking for purchase and finding it uncertainly on the rough carpet. She groaned. He ran off the check list in his mind: black clothes, gloves, tools? Check. Bag for disposal and place to dispose? Check. Woman immobilised? Check. It was time to have some fun.

 ‘Hello, Miss Hopkins,’ he said, adding an unnatural rasp in his voice. He’d seen in done in the new batman films and thought it would be perfect for him, too. It served to both inspire fear and disguise his voice. ‘How are you today?’     

 ‘Wha?’ She was still struggling to keep her position, her knees shaking. She was still groggy, probably hadn’t quite realised her situation yet. Her hands were straining against the binds and confusion began to register. He went to the old wooden table opposite her and sorted through his tools, excitement building. He wondered if she’d scream loud, or plead with him. At length, he picked up thin, curved blade that could cut through flesh like butter.

 ‘Where am I? What’s… What’s going on?’ Her voice was harsh with fear, and he saw a light sweat on her brow, hidden by the long dark hair.

 ‘Well, let’s analyse the facts, shall we? You are a woman of science, aren’t you?’

 She didn’t respond, but he noticed she’d stopped struggling and was standing up straighter. Terrified, but composed. That, he didn’t like so much – but never mind, they always screamed in the end.

 ‘You are restrained and heavily blindfolded in an isolated location. You are a woman between the ages of nineteen and thirty. Your kidnapper is speaking in an obscured voice, and sounds relatively intelligent… If I do say so myself.’ He chuckled. ‘You were taken on your way home from work, after nightfall. Does any of this ring a bell?’

 She stared in the direction of his voice, her face blank with shock. ‘Holy shit,’ she said. ‘You’re him? You’re the Ghost?’

 ‘Yes, that’s right. Though I wish they’d come up with something better. Ah well,’ he waved a hand dismissively. ‘Media.’

 Bizarrely, she began to laugh, tentatively at first, and then hysterically. She shook in her bondage, letting out shrieks of laughter, and when it died down at last she looked almost sick with herself. She stared blindly at the ground, suddenly deep in concentration.

 He watched all of this patiently, not knowing whether to be annoyed or amused, and when she was done he leaned forward and cut a line straight down her suit top, severing the buttons so it fell open but no touching her skin. She gasped, but otherwise gave no reaction.

 ‘What was the meaning of that outburst?’ he asked, honestly curious.

 ‘I… I guess I’m just relieved.’

 ‘Is that so?’

 ‘Well, you never kill, do you?’

 ‘Not yet. I fashion myself as more of a catch and release kind of person. Murder is messy, after all.’

 ‘Exactly. Besides, it’s all about causing pain for you, right, Mr. Ghost? You wouldn’t murder unless it was necessary. So no matter how bad this gets, I’ll still end up alive.’

 He nodded to himself, a small smile playing across his lips. ‘You do seem to understand me very well, Miss Hopkins, though I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised considering your profession… But I think you’re dismissing the pain a little too easily.’

 She looked slightly worried at those words, and seemed on the brink of saying something, but a second before it reached her lips she shut them and shook her head. ‘You won’t believe until you see,’ she said, and at that cryptic remark, fell silent.

 He was certainly curious now, but above all else he was frustrated. Small electric pulses of anticipation set his hairs on end and had him licking his lips. To hell with this, he thought –time to play the game.

 He usually liked to start slow, but not tonight. He lashed out with the blade and cut a neat crescent out of her shoulder. She didn’t make a sound, but her head flicked up to look at him and she said, quite calmly: ‘you just cut me, didn’t you?’

 Irritated, he sliced again, and this time he made it a long one, from her left breast down to her right hip. That one was deeper, too, and blood descended from the gash like a red curtain.

 ‘Oh, that was big. I think I might faint.’

 He stared at her for a moment, but all he could see in her face was a kind of nervous fear, like someone waiting for a root canal, an unpleasant but necessary ordeal, to be over. Usually, they were desperately pleading with him by now, or at least screaming at the top of their lungs in agony.

 ‘What game are you playing, bitch?’ he said, and this time that rasp in his voice came naturally. ‘You think you can take away my joy by clamming up? Like you could possibly keep your mouth shut for ten minutes under this blade? Have you even seen some of my victims?’

 She nodded, and he saw with some satisfaction a sickly expression on her face. ‘I know all that. It’s just… You don’t know about my condition, do you?’

 ‘What?’

 ‘Of course, you’d never have picked me if you knew about it,’ she went on. ‘It’s a genetic disorder called Congenital Insensitivity to Pain. I’ve had it since I was born.’

 He said nothing, and the silence hung over them like death. Her voice beginning to shake from fear, she hurried on. ‘I have to check myself for injuries daily, head to toe. When I was a kid I used to hurt myself all the time and the wounds would get infected because I didn’t know –’

 ‘Stop.’ He said. She closed her mouth, and the look on her face was almost apologetic.

 Slowly, quietly, he sank into a crouch in front of her and rested the point of his knife in the flesh of her thigh. He applied pressure and watched the point disappear under her skin and pierce the tissue beneath. He looked up at her face.

 ‘Why are you biting your lip?’ he said.

 ‘The blade… it’s so cold,’ she said.

 He drew it out and felt the base of it, which hadn’t entered her yet. It was cold.

 He stood up and threw it into the corner of the room with wild fury, and then let out a stream of the vilest curse words he knew at the top of his lungs. ‘What the fuck are the odds of that? What the fuck are the odds?’

 She cringed away from him. ‘I don’t know, like, I don’t know, one in a million or something. It’s really rare. I’m sorry.’

 ‘NO! Fuck that. You’re sorry. Bullshit! You better scream or you’ll be my first murder, you understand? Scream like you’re dying or believe me, that’s exactly what’s gonna happen.’

 With that, he ran to the table, picked up a pair of scissors and turned on her. The Ghost was an angry man tonight, that he was, but he was also a careful man, and though he tore her skin and sliced her in his rage, he kept away from the arteries.

 She screamed alright, but in her fear she overdid it, or at times forgot and then underdid it, and even when it seemed right it was still horrible, wrong, unsatisfying, because he knew it was all a lie. At last, he threw  down the scissors roared in pure fury.

 And then, a split second later, it was all gone. He looked at her hanging there, bleeding in a few places, terrified but also sickeningly, frustratingly, without pain. He looked at the floor and shook his head, before going over to equipment table and picking up a syringe. He pushed the plunger and flicked the needle. There wasn’t much in there – this mixture was of a very different order to the one he’d given her earlier that day. When he jabbed it into her neck, she didn’t react, but she was out in less than a minute, and in two he’d cut her down and taken off the blindfold.

 In twenty, the place was wiped clean of any trace of him, and in twenty five, he was gone.

 

Jenna Hopkins woke up after about half an hour and realised she could see again. The Ghost had left the light on and the fluorescents stung her shrinking pupils. That was the first of the pain to return to her, and the least of it. As it came, she crawled to one corner of the room and stayed there until she’d accounted for all of it and found she could take it, after all.

 Waves of it rolled over her and then settled into a dull ache. His cuts were numerous but shallow. Still, those last screams had been genuine, and she was sure he’d have known it if only he hadn’t already believed her lie. Oh, but it was close. The scream she’d turned into a gasp, the neutral face she kept while she squirmed with agony beneath the surface, each moment a hair’s breadth away from betraying herself. If she had, she’d surely have ended up like his other victims, alive but torn beyond recognition.

 There was something else, too: She knew his voice. In his moments of rage he’d screamed in his true voice, and she heard not only his tone but the slightest Dutch accent.

 The pain was becoming background noise now, except that hideous throbbing where he’d pierced her thigh… And how she’d wanted to scream then! Her mind had gone blank in that moment, but her face had remained a mask. She wiped the tears from her eyes and stared around the room, not looking for anything in particular and not missing anything, either.

 She found what she was looking for without even moving from her little corner, because it wasn’t in the room at all but on her. She remembered him screaming at her, feeling something wet land on her right foot, and there it was still, diminished but far from evaporated. His rotten saliva. She stood carefully and, supporting herself on her good leg, dragged the other along the floor, being careful not to let any of it slide off her skin.

 He’d left her bag undisturbed just outside the office door, and before tying her to the rafters he’d taken off her reading glasses and folded them neatly on top of it. She didn’t put them on now, but took the lenses from the frames. She scooped up as much saliva as she could on one and then pressed the other on top, like a blood slide.

 DNA and a Dutch accent. Was there anything else? She had to think now, while the

memories still burned fresh in her mind. She slid down in the doorway again to ease the pain in her leg. She closed her eyes and thought, long and hard, the lenses held tight in her hand. Yes, there was a smell, too. A faint cologne. She didn’t know the name, but she’d smelled it before and it wouldn’t take long to find it again. Like wood and almonds, very distinctive – and expensive, too; few people would be able to afford such a thing. Then there was his breath. He’d come very close to her at one point, and she’d felt his breath on her neck. She was tall for a woman, but he must be short for a man, somewhere between five seven and five nine.

She thought of these things for some time, and almost swore she could see him in her mind’s eye. A small, quiet man, probably well presented and conservative. By his voice she’d put him no older than forty and no younger than twenty five. The profiler studying the case had already filled in the other basics, but these details would narrow the search immensely. Then there was the saliva. It wasn’t quite as much as she’d been hoping for, but it was more than enough to go on.

 Clothes torn, covered in dried blood and shaking from cold and shock, Jenna Hopkins smiled to herself. She was mad – sure she knew she was mad in her own way, but look where it had gotten her. Look who it had gotten her!

 She got to her feet and picked up her purse, before staggering for the exit. Her stride, uncertain and pained at first, grew steadier as she went. She’d been expecting worse, after seeing the previous victims, but those same pictures had given her the strength she needed. The press wouldn’t need to hear any of that, of course, or that she’d been aware of him days before he attacked – not of who he was, but of his presence. They needed to see her as the sharp witted victim, not a woman obsessed to the point of madness as she really was. Not that she thought and planned and that she’d perfectly predicted his reaction to her ‘condition’. Who was going to believe it, anyway? No one would buy that book.

 She made it out of the factory and stumbled out towards the road, where someone would see her covered in blood and pale with shock, and take her to the hospital. She’d be mad at first, almost babbling with fear, and that wouldn’t be hard at all after what she’d just been through. She wouldn’t remember a thing at first, except the importance of the lenses. Then the other details would slowly come to her, and she’d tell her story reluctantly, embarrassed. Let the media talk of her bravery and clear thought under pressure – her own modesty would only serve to make it more plausible.

 She hit the road and her face became a mask of blank terror. She made sure to lean too much on her bad leg once in a while to make her slip a bit and wince. The good Samaritan would be interviewed extensively as well, so it was important to look as traumatized and wounded as possible.

In ten seconds a car skidded to a stop beside her and a man got out. He stared at her for a moment, unable to believe what he was seeing, and then he rushed forward with his arms outstretched. She stumbled again and let him catch her, at which point she broke down into tears which were, to her credit, mostly real.

 ‘Jesus lady, what happened to you?’

 ‘The Ghost,’ she said, her voice weak with terror. ‘I’ve Seen the Ghost.’ She wouldn’t remember this later, but when it was retold to her she would nod, looking thoughtful and a little disturbed, and it would eventually become the title of her tell all novel.

 She let her full weight rest on him as her body gave out, but she made sure she kept a solid grip on the lenses in her right hand. The man laid her down gently and called for help, even as he took a mobile from his pocket and dialled an ambulance.

 Not long now, she thought. Not long now.

   e sHekajdfs

 

Wizard

Again, I created this idea with two things in mind: Magical Horror, and the desire to focus only on story. The setting and other details just kind of happened naturally and I ran with it, and to my delight the premise was given to a fairytale structure. Hopefully I made something original out of what could easily have become cliched, but you be the judge, reader. If you feel a twinge of the creepiness I felt when I wrote it, I did my job.

Wizard

By Ben Pienaar

 

He took up in a lanky wooden tower by the river. No one knew what it had been used for originally, only that it had been abandoned and that now it was being put to evil purposes. This last was clear to everyone in the village, though the ‘Dark Man’ as some called him had only lived there for the latter half of autumn. It was enough.

Mitchell left the village with a lot of resolve and a little dread, but by the time he reached the heavy front door he had none of the former left and most of the latter. He tried not to think of his dear brother Marcus gibbering in his bed, or of the priest Matthew Kendall, who’d returned from his own quest to the tower with eyes that were all pupil and a mouth that preached only death and the devil.

He knocked and the sound echoed like a giant drum through the structure. His other hand was curled around a sawn off shotgun behind his back, and he also had two sharp knives tucked into his belt, which he could wield well enough. Nevertheless, he was afraid. He’d determined not to leave unless he be dead or mad, or had driven the wizard from the village, though that last hope seemed very unlikely to him now.

‘He works with fear, he works with fear. Remember that Mitchell son, and you’ll be fine.’ He was muttering this way when the great door swung wide open, and he was greeted by no one. The room beyond was dark and musty, and crowded with a million objects.

Mitchell raised the shotgun to his chest and swallowed dry. Then he stepped into the room, put his back to the wall, and tried to look everywhere at once. The door swung shut with a bang that made him jump a foot in the air. He was on the point of pulling the trigger when he realised there was no one there.

The room was so full of things that Mitchell could have called it a storeroom except that it was right here in front of the house. His eyes, flitting nervously over every nook and cranny, picked up dusty skulls with glass eyes in the sockets, a broomstick covered in thorns, three crystal balls of each primary colour and a glass box full of dead insects, among other things. There was an opening to another room on this floor, but somehow he sensed it was empty: the only presence in this place besides him seemed to emanate like a powerful stench from the helix staircase beside a portrait of a skinless man.

As if listening to his thoughts (and who knew, maybe he was) the wizard spoke. His voice was deep and serious, but it sounded put on, as though the speaker was struggling desperately with hysterical laughter. It seemed to be coming from the room on the second story.  ‘A mean intentioned guest is it who enters with a weapon drawn, Mitchell Scott.’

‘Show yourself,’ Mitchell said, and heard a low chuckle in reply.

‘Why? So you might blow half my house away with that crude tool of yours? That would be a bother, and I’d have to take your own house to replace it. I doubt your pretty wife would much like that.’

He gritted his teeth and relished the small rage that took the place of some of the fear. ‘I’m coming up, you bastard, and your mind tricks won’t work on me, so you best run.’ Before he could take a moment to think himself out of it, he rushed forward and up the steep stairs, eyes and gun aimed up as he went, primed for the slightest movement. He heard a flapping sound and felt a whoosh of hot air, but when he reached the second story, the wizard had gone up the next helix to the topmost chamber.

This room was shaped like an octagon, with two opposite sides taken up by the stairs and the other six lined with floor to ceiling shelves. Each wall seemed to hold some new and wonderful thing, and at a glance Mitchell realised what the place was. ‘Temptations of the devil,’ he whispered under his breath.

The laughing voice answered him from the top room. ‘Oh, you’re a fast one, Mitchell, and a better man than your dear priest. Matthew stood where you are but ten seconds, before he dropped his great cross and sold his soul for the thing on the window sill.’

There was only one window in the room, and its sill served as part of a shelf which seemed to hold nothing but tiny marbles of different colours. There was one empty spot in the centre, a tiny circle where the dust had not gathered.

‘Do you know what they are? Oh yes, I can tell you do by your silence. You know what all these trinkets and fancies are, don’t you? It must be difficult to stand so still when you’re so close to your dearest dreams.’

Mitchell swallowed and forced himself to shut his eyes against the marbles, which shone so brilliantly in the morning light that they hurt him. Once he was blind, he found he could think again. ‘They’re whole worlds,’ he said.

‘More than that, they are universes. No, they are infinite realities, and each one is a heaven greater than anything your mind can comprehend. Paradises of all different kinds, and all eternal. Unfortunately, they all show an unpleasant truth to those who look at them too long, and I think you’ve seen it already, though you don’t quite believe it yet.’

Mitchell nodded, but didn’t answer. He’d seen it alright, and he did believe. He’d fixed his eyes on the black marble and seen what lay beyond the grave, and it was simply this: nothing at all. No thought or memory, heaven or hell; nothing. And the only escape would be to pick up another marble and put his soul inside it, so that he could live forever in heaven while his body on earth remained empty, a tool for the wizard.

‘Never,’ he whispered.

The wizard laughed. ‘No, not never, dear Mitchell. In fact, I think a few more seconds would have done it. Half a glance into the nature of one of those worlds there and you’d have stopped at nothing to get it. Even I wouldn’t be able to stop you then, if I ever wanted to.’

Mitchell’s breathing was coming harshly, and he was sweating. He had the shotgun aimed at the foot of the stairs, and he began to slide his shoes off his feet with his eyes squeezed tight. He had to keep the wizard talking, or he might glide quietly down and finish him now.

‘Your trinkets are nothing but shiny toys to me,’ he said, and began to tip toe toward the staircase.

‘Are you sure? What about that shelf with the red and blue fruit? Eat one, and you experience the accumulated pleasure of a lifetime with each bite. Or what about the rocks below them? Put one in your pocket and every pain and sadness you feel will seep into it and leave you for good.’

‘That… isn’t enough. I want more. What else do you have?’ He paused while he spoke, and then continued across the room when he was sure the wizard’s voice was no closer.

‘See the shelf that holds the coins? The gold coin is worth whatever you want to buy with it, and reappears in your pocket with every use. The silver you give to your love and you both shall live as long as that love endures. Or take the bag of copper and give one coin each to an enemy…’ He didn’t elaborate that last, but Mitchell knew well enough what it meant.

His toe hit the bottom step and he winced and opened his eyes. The wizard wasn’t there.

‘I’m coming up, devil,’ said Mitchell. He waited, half expecting a cry of rage or surprise from above, but there was only silence. He raised the shotgun and came on, much slower this time, keeping both eyes on the rickety path ahead of him. He reached the top without incident, and stood on the threshold of the top room in the tower, and there the dark man waited for him.

It was the first time Mitchell had ever seen the wizard up close, and it was every bit as terrifying as he’d feared. Nothing to do with appearance; yes, he did have a smile as wide as his face full of black and yellow teeth, and he was two heads taller than Mitchell – but the real source of menace was just a feeling that came from him. It was that presence he’d felt when he first entered the tower, so thick in the air it was intoxicating.

The top room was the tallest in the tower, and the pointed top was several more feet over even the wizard’s head. There was a small window near the top, but every other inch of wall was taken up with shelf after shelf of potions. Hundreds, maybe thousands of tiny glass bottles covered every possible inch.

‘This is where the magic happens, young Mitchell,’ the wizard said. ‘Potions for every conceivable thing. None of them are labelled, but each bottle is unique, and each solution has a distinctive colour and smell, so that only I know which is what, and what does which.’

For his answer, Mitchell aimed the shotgun at the wizard’s chest and put his finger on the trigger. Why was it so hard? His head was spinning and he felt almost drunk, his limbs moving as though they had hundred pound weights dragging from them.

The wizard shot a long spindly arm to a nearby shelf and seized a beaker of charcoal black liquid. He did not bother uncorking it but simply crammed the whole lot into his mouth and crushed it between his teeth. Mitchell felt the heaviness retreat from his finger and he pulled the trigger.

The shot was so loud in the small room it seemed that every bottle there should have shattered in a hundred pieces. They did not, of course, and neither did anything else including the wizard himself. Mitchell stood at the top of the stairs for a moment, eyes wide, waiting for the dark man to look down, his smile faltering, and see pools of blood wetting his black cloak.

It didn’t happen. The wizard continued to watch him as he chewed the last fragments of bottle and cork in his mouth and then swallowed them, with visible effort. He breathed a sigh of relief when he was done, and a stream of red fell from his lips. For a second Mitchell nursed a hope, but then the wizard rolled his eyes and said: ‘It’s the cork that’s the hardest to chew, you know. The glass is easy, though it stings more.’ He wiped the blood from his mouth and then shook his head. ‘Ah, poor Mitchell. All of that will and bravery only to learn that your weapon is useless against me. What do you propose to do now, I wonder? Attack me with those knives of yours? Run?’He raised his eyebrows, genuinely curious. In truth, it was the latter option that Mitchell was thinking of now, but he could feel the heaviness resting on him again and he knew that the wizard would catch him within two strides.

‘Not sure? Well, let me tell you a little story, brave Mitchell, and then I will make a suggestion of my own, and you can decided what to do after that, yes?’

Mitchell nodded, lowering the shotgun. His face was white, and though he told himself there was hope, he didn’t believe it. He was sure the last things he’d see and smell would be those sharpened black teeth and the stench of the wizard’s breath.

‘Now, firstly, I should tell you just how old I am. Six thousand, three hundred and seventy nine years!’ He gave a short laugh. ‘I know, I can hardly believe it myself! But anyway, for the last century or so I’ve been travelling the various parts of the world searching for someone worthy. So far, it’s been very unsuccessful. I arrive in a town or village or even a city. I terrorize the common folk, murder, mischief, and destruction – install a healthy fear, you know. Then, I wait for the brave champions and challengers to confront me. Most never get past the room of temptations, which is understandable, I suppose. The ones that do, however, I offer them their chance.’

He paused, and winked at Mitchell. There was an awkward silence, until Mitchell realised he was waiting for him to say something. ‘A chance for what?’ he said.

‘Why! To become my replacement! You see, there are only a very small number of us dark wizards in the world, but we serve a valuable purpose. Without us, there wouldn’t be half as much evil and horror in the world as there is. Unfortunately, it’s a tiring task, and even though it’s fun, there comes a time in a wizard’s life when he must retire and hang up the old cloak, etcetera.’

‘You want me to take your place.’

‘Yes! Don’t worry, no training required. It’s easy once you get the hang of it.’

‘And just what makes you think I’d do a thing like that? What, you’ll kill me if I don’t? Well I’d rather die a thousand deaths than serve you.’

He cackled and then dropped suddenly to the ground, cross legged. Even seated he came up to Mitchell’s waist. ‘Oh I won’t need to threaten you, lad,’ he said. ‘That’s already done. You won’t leave here unless you attempt my final trial, the last test of your worthiness. If you fail, you’ll die, too. If you succeed… Then you’ll follow in my stead whether you like it or not.’

‘Fine, then. What’s your test?’

He patted the ground in front of him and fluttered his eyelids. Mitchell laid the shotgun against the wall, feeling like a starving man setting aside his last meal, though he knew it was useless now. He lowered himself to the cold floor and sat cross legged, opposite this thing that seemed to feel every inch of him with billiard ball eyes.

When he was seated, the wizard shuffled uncomfortably close to him and then leaned forward and whispered: ‘The test is…’ A smell of rotten fish wafted from his mouth. ‘You have to kill me.’

He leaned back and waited with his mouth open and his eyes shining like someone who thought they’d just told the best joke in all the world and was waiting for raucous laughter. Mitchell only stared back, blank faced. He felt what he supposed a mouse might feel as it tried to crawl away from a playful cat. ‘I have to kill you?’ he repeated.

‘Yes! But here’s how it’s done. You must pick two potions from the shelves in this room. Then, I drink one and you drink one. It is a test you see, because using only intuition, sight and smell, you have to choose a potion to kill me and one that won’t kill you. Although, I can’t vouch for what kind of side effects it might have. Only a good potential wizard would have that intelligence, you see. Once I die, you will then become the new wizard.’

‘No. I won’t.’

‘Oh, right, I forgot to explain that part. In short, you will. In long, you will because the murderer of the wizard then becomes the wizard. Now, the books you find in the basement should be more than enough to get you started. After that, the natural powers will save you from your inevitable mistakes, and the rest is good clean fun! Have no fear – experiment! Who knows what delicious anarchy you can concoct?’

Most of that had gone over Mitchell’s head, because his thoughts had frozen at the point where the murderer became the wizard. What was that? Some universal law? A bluff?

‘Now. Go.’ These last words were said with such harsh fury that Mitchell almost toppled backwards down the stairs in surprise. His leg flew out to the right and knocked the shotgun over with a clatter. When he looked up again the wizard was leaning back on his hands almost casually, watching him.

Mitchell tried desperately to think in the heavy silence that followed. What could he possibly do? The wizard had lived six thousand and some years, what chance did he stand against that? The dark man had made it impossible for him to do anything except what he was meant to. Of course, he could still try to run, but whether he was caught or not the wizard would only find some other poor fool to try his ‘test’ on.

At length, Mitchell stood up and turned to the wall immediately on his right. He forced himself to calm down and think. The wizard was smart alright, but he’d given him a room full of potions and promised to drink whatever Mitchell set before him. That was something, wasn’t it? What if there was one that gave him super speed? Or the ability to fly?

So he searched. Bottles of every shape and size, containing liquids of every colour. Some fizzed when he uncorked them, others let out a stench of oil, or roses, or rum. Some were thick and others were lighter than water. How on earth was he to know which were deadly and which were not?

The deadly ones will surely be the worst smelling, the most vile and disgusting, the voice of reason spoke in his mind. So, those with the best effects must be the sweetest and most alluring. Simple. But a glance at the wizard changed his mind. This was a test after all, and surely he wouldn’t be the first to think the obvious. It had to be a trick, and the opposite was true: the sweetest were also the deadliest.

Mitchell spotted a small, square bottle near the floor on the left wall. It was filled with light blue liquid. When he opened it, the liquid fizzed quickly and then stopped, making a sound like a match being struck. It smelled of chocolate. ‘This is yours,’ he said, lifting it from the shelf.

The wizard smiled and clapped his hands politely. ‘Very good, young Mitchell. There’s hope for you yet. No doubt you’re remembering the temptations on the floor below us. You know you cannot escape that way, after all. And when you’re wizard, all those things will be yours to explore at your pleasure.’

The next potion should have been easy, but only if he were playing by the rules. As he went from shelf to shelf, smelling and uncorking and weighing bottles in his hands, he sensed the wizard growing impatient. He’d already gone past several vile smelling concoctions, and though he’d chosen none of them, he’d paid careful attention to each: they were the way to break the code.

The potion he stopped at was silvery white – the colour of lightning. It was a tall, slim bottle, and when he took it from the shelf it was so light to the touch it felt empty. This one smelled like burning rubber and electric fire. This was the one.

‘I’ll take this,’ he said at last. The wizard must have heard the despair in his voice, and he seemed to relax at last. He gestured for Mitchell to sit down and Mitchell obeyed quietly. His heart felt like a stone in his chest.

‘Ah, don’t look so down, now! Be happy, brave Mitchell. You’ve proved yourself worthy where plenty others failed, and now you get to reap the rewards! Just think, thousands and thousands of years, as many as you want, total freedom and joy and none of the pesky trappings of remorse or fear. And thanks to me, you can’t even blame yourself for becoming a monster. I forced you into it, you see.’ He winked and raised his glass. ‘Now, time to drink, lad. I suppose you don’t really have to drink yours if you don’t want, but suit yourself. You picked well – might as well enjoy it while you can still appreciate the small things in life.’

And without another word or a moment’s hesitation, the wizard uncorked the bottle in his hand, drank the blue liquid in a single swallow and ended his six thousand year life. He coughed and an arm of flame shot from his mouth. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘I wish you hadn’t chosen this one, though. You’ll make a worthy wizard, boy, that’s for sure.’ He cackled and then broke out in another coughing fit, this one bad enough to turn his face dark red.

Mitchell watched him die with bitter, bitter satisfaction. The wizard was barely aware of him at all, and in a few moments he was writhing about on the floor, hacking up blood and clutching his throat. His eyes swelled to the size of peaches and turned black. Then, to Mitchell’s horror, they became like liquid pools in his face and spilled onto his cheeks. When it was all over, he lay on his back, smoke pouring from his throat.

For a brief moment, Mitchell thought he could hear the dark man laughing from beyond the grave, and then he realised it was himself. The transformation had begun already, and who knew how long it would take? There was no time to waste.

Choking back his hysterics, Mitchell opened his own bottle and downed it in one. Before it had gone all the way down his throat, he was searching the shelves again, grabbing bottles, inspecting them, and throwing them aside.

The first potion he found within seconds. It looked like liquid gold and smelled like burning pine. It was a good smell, but not a great one, and that told him it wouldn’t be a quick death. He gulped it down in a flash.

It was then that the first potion hit. He was reaching for another bottle when the air’s viscosity changed, first to that of water, and then to honey. He panicked, but when he saw the way the bottles fell and shattered in slow motion he realised it was not the world that had slowed down, but he who’d speeded up. The lightning drink had given him speed, even though it felt to him like torturous slowness.

Now, he couldn’t leave by the second floor. He’d made it through – barely – on the way up, but if he tried it again, under this terrible illusion of slowness, he would surely give in to temptation. No, there was only one way out of here, and that was the window.

In his mind, it took him another five minutes of painstaking searching to find the bottle he wanted, though in reality it could have been mere seconds. This one was completely transparent, in a pyramid shaped bottle. It was so light that one didn’t drink it so much as breathe it in.

He picked up the shotgun, aimed it at the small round window in the ceiling, and fired the second barrel. The bullet was so slow to his eyes that he caught a glimpse of it as it hit the glass and sent the shards floating out into the blue sky beyond. He watched them fall like feathers through the air, fascinated.

The last potion was working on him now, and when he leapt for the window it was as though gravity no longer existed for him. He sailed through the tiny opening, breaking the remaining glass from the frame, and then he was outside, three stories above a field of thick green grass. He did not quite fall but rather floated down toward the ground. For a long time he drifted through the air and watched the clouds in the sky and waited to hit the ground, and it occurred to him that this would be the last moment of true peace he would ever feel.

It seemed he had hours to manipulate himself in the air and so when he landed, it was lightly, on his feet. Then he was running, and fast too, because he could feel the poison working on him now, cramping his stomach and sending wild pains up his spine. They were ever more agonizing because they took so long for him to perceive. His death would have been slow, sure, but now it was going to be even slower.

His house wasn’t far, but as it happened, he didn’t need make it all the way. Mary was waiting for him by Kendall’s corrupted church, standing on the hill with her arms crossed against the cold wind.

He reached her and they embraced, and now he felt truly grateful for that slowing of time. Looking over her shoulder, he saw that she’d thought to bring a long steak knife with her, just in case. Naturally, he grabbed it and brought it up to slit her throat.

‘Mitchell?’ she said, feeling the weight of it leave her side. He stopped, horrified.

‘Jesus, it’s happening already,’ he whispered, almost to himself.

‘What?’

There was no time to tell her, none at all, and it was harder still because he had to speak in slow motion just to make himself understood. He dropped the knife and watched it turn slow somersaults through the air.

‘If I live, I’ll become the wizard,’ he began. He grabbed her shoulders to make sure his hands didn’t do something else evil. ‘But listen quickly. At the bottom of the tower are books. Read them all and they’ll tell you about his potions. You can use them to cure Marcus and maybe even Matthew Kendall. You can undo everything he did.’

He bent double as another cramp ripped through him and sent ribbons of fire streaming through every organ and artery.

‘Mitchell, what is it? Jesus, what did he do to you?’

‘NO! It was me, bitch.’ He clamped a hand over his mouth and she stepped back, horrified.

‘I’m sorry! It doesn’t matter – I’ll be dead before I’m evil. Mary, read the books, save the others. Use it all to help the village and then burn the whole tower down. You hear me? The whole tower!’

‘Yes, I hear you. Mitchell, what’s he done to you? What’s going to happen?’ He’d bent over double and she stepped forward to put a hand on his shoulder.

‘Please Mary,’ he said with great effort. ‘You have to go.’

A ball of fire exploded in his stomach and he went down to his knees, his jaw clenched tight. He could feel blood leaking from his tear ducts, and he kept his eyes down so she wouldn’t see. ‘GO!’ he cried.

Tears streaming down her face, she turned and started off towards the tower.

‘Mary!’

She twisted around.

‘Close your eyes when you pass the second story. Don’t you dare open them, understand?’

She nodded.

He was sprawled out on the grass now, and when he looked up at her again, his eyes and mouth seemed to have doubled in size. ‘Come back here, whore! I’ll spill your blood with my fingernails and lick the wounds.’

‘I love you, Mitchell Scott, and God save your soul,’ she answered.

‘God’s as real as a filled in hole, love,’ he said. She turned her back and ran for the tower.

The wizard stood up and rose his right hand, not sure exactly what spell he mean to cast but confident it would come to him soon enough. Then something burst inside of him and he collapsed into the grass. When he opened his eyes again he was Mitchell Scott for the last time.

By the feel of it, something was slicing his lungs and liver into mince meat, but Mitchell managed a smile with every cut. ‘Try that move, you sly bastard,’ he said. ‘Check mate. No wizards in this part of the world, so enjoy your time in hell.’

He rolled onto his side and watched his wife run for the dark tower. He knew she would do what he said, but he also knew she’d be smart enough to read the books and take the best of the potions. Everything was going to be alright after all.

He turned on his back and stared at the sky around the same time his lungs ignited and made his last breath burn.

Mitchell Scott died alone on a green hill, and his last thought was a vision of his own son, flying like an angel through blue skies and white clouds. The wizard died with him, and his last thoughts were not so pleasant.

Rebirth

The horror of extended life is a theme I often write about, but I think I gave this one an original twist. It came to me in a roundabout way when I was standing on a twenty first floor balcony and imagined what it would be like to jump off, because that’s just the kind of dark stuff I think about all the time. Enjoy!

Rebirth

By Ben Pienaar

 

It was the middle of another cold winter when Reginald Hays decided the time had come to end his life. It wasn’t that there was nothing left to live for – it was just that there was no longer any time. He was losing his mind, and quickly. A matter of months, he was told, before he’d be a confused old man, with no memory or notion of who he was or what he’d done in his life.

He’d written his memoirs and left them on the desk for his son to find the next day. Along with his will, those pages contained a solid record of his life and left no mad adventure omitted, and there were plenty of those, too. It was because of them, and because they were written down at last, that he could consider suicide.

The last lines of his memoir were a note to his family that said: If you mourn me, or shed a tear, I’ll consider it an insult to my memory and haunt you once I’m dead. I’m happy: I’ve lived a better life than anyone could hope for and lived far longer than I deserved, as you’ll read here. Now get on with your own lives and forget about mine – my book is written, get to yours. Love you all.

 It was cold but honest, like him. His book was written alright, and at times he thought it had far too many pages. He was tired.

He pushed aside the sliding door of his apartment and stepped out onto the balcony. The wind was ice cold here. Too long exposed and your fingers would turn numb. He took his last cigar out of his mouth and dropped it off the side. He leaned over the glass barrier and watched the red spark diminish as it blew down thirty three floors. He tried to make his final thoughts deep and meaningful, but in the end all he came up with was: people are mad, and good riddance to all of them.

He leaned a little further and saw cars the size of his fingernails. The sight gave his heart a kick, but nothing he couldn’t handle. Even when he pulled himself over so he was practically upside down and then let go, the terror was just a backdrop to the anticipation of peace, pure and simple. Reginald was not a religious man, and all he wanted was a nice long sleep and some quiet. The darkness was in his mind as he fell, and the street opened its arms to him like an old friend.

He hit hard and felt not a thing.

Between that moment, and the moment of his rebirth, there stood an eternity. Reginald saw only white at first, and even had time to ask himself why, if he was dead, he was still thinking. Then memories began to return to him.

Reginald was not really Reginald at all. Or rather, he was, but he was also billions and billions of others. In the life before, he had been Kjorn Harolson, a Danish Vikiking in the tenth century. In the life before that he was a nameless woman living before the invention of the wheel. Before that he was a weevil. All of these lives came to him in a storm, a wild hurricane of emotion and memory.

He was, in short, experiencing an identity crisis beyond anything anyone had ever felt before. This consciousness, that until a space of time too small to mention had believed it was Reginald Hays, was in fact everything that had ever lived. He’d been every human being, animal, insect and bacteria that ever existed. In a split second he experienced every memory he’d ever had. The murderers and the victims, the tortured and the sadists, the holy and the evil: He was life itself, and everything it consisted of.

A voice cried out in the whiteness: ‘NO! Not again, please! Let it be over now, I cannot live again!’

But the voice went unheard, and then his time in the void was over.

 

Somewhere far away, hundreds of years later, the consciousness that was once Reginald Hays opened his eyes on a new world. There was another minute or so in which he still had his own mind, and a part of those memories he’d seen in the white. He saw the nurse lay him on a soft bed and tell the mother she’d just had a baby girl. A feeling of terrible exhaustion stayed with him, one that came from living so many billions of consecutive lives and knowing that he had many more billions remaining.

He opened his mouth and squalled and wailed and cried with everything he had left, and then he was delivered into his mother’s arms and the memories faded slowly.

And so, baby is born.

Death by Candlelight

Can’t exactly pin down where I got this idea from originally, whether it was a movie or book or what. The gist of it was, a demon enters a small boy in order to possess him and cause mischief/blood and whatnot. Only the kid is a complete sociopath, and the demon enters his mind only to discover that there’s nothing there for him to work with, so he just gets trapped. Intriguing, is it not? Here’s my take – enjoy!

Death by Candlelight

By Ben Pienaar

 

She wasn’t what he expected – she was far too young. The way he’d heard it she was one of the world’s top forensic psychologists. Novels written, theses published, PHDs all over the place, and you didn’t get to do that unless you were at least forty. This woman was mid twenties, maybe. Wearing red and a smile like she didn’t know what she was here for.

‘You’re miss Jenkins?’ he was unable to keep the scepticism out of his voice, but it didn’t seem to faze her.

‘Call me Joan. You must be Pat McBain.’ She shook his hand hard, like a man, and fixed him with a solid stare.

‘Okay, Miss – Joan I mean, right this way then.’

Soon they were a level down and navigating the hallways and cells that made up Werton Maximum Security Penitentiary.

‘Now I know you’ve done your research, uh, Joan, but you should know that reading about Rod Hytes is very different to meeting him. Very different. I mean this is a man who – ’

‘Is the absolute personification of evil, who can look right into my soul and show me my worst nightmare, and has completely terrified and or baffled the previous psychologists who came to interview him?’

For a moment, McBain was speechless. Usually he could keep up his stories for a good ten minutes while he took her the long route around to the isolation cells, slowly and expertly building the legend behind Rod Hytes until she was trembling in her shoes.

‘Uh. Well yes. I guess that’s the gist of it.’ He decided to take the short route, and a few minutes later they were moving through solitary confinement. Rod was not here, because he had shown such an aptitude for escape, craft and sheer violence that they’d been forced to create another cell at the far end, which had a constant guard set at the first door.

‘Okay, so we’ve been through the usual safety stuff. I think you’ll be fine, personally, but just in case,’ he handed her a small panic button. ‘Press this if you get worried, you’ll have an army in there with you before you can blink.’

She took it and dropped it almost casually into her pocket. They were right outside the door now, the guard standing a few feet away and staring determinedly at nothing. The whole place smelled like a mouldy gutter, but she was glad none of the prisoners could see out and leer at her, though McBain was doing plenty of that all by himself.

Something passed over her face that looked like horror and McBain almost stepped back in surprise.

‘You alright, Miss Jenkins? You look a little pale’

‘What… Um, what has he done before?’ she asked awkwardly. An odd question, but incidentally it was just the one he wanted. He smiled and reached into his pocket, feeling for the little square Polaroid.

‘Well, there’s only been one incident that I don’t think you would have heard about since they kept it on the down low, sort of, but one time Rodney got out of his chains and got hold of his interviewer. The guard inside moved forward to stop him, but he’s a quick bastard. Took both of them out. It was a while before two guys went to check in on them, and he almost got them, too, but luckily backup was nearby. I was working then, took this picture with my phone just a few minutes after he got dragged out of there.’

He drew the picture out, but she put a hand on it and looked away. ‘Please don’t. There’s no need.’

‘Let me guess, already seen it, huh?’

She made no reply and he slipped it back into his pocket. ‘So you’re really a psychic, huh?’

‘Not the way you think of it,’ she said, as colour slowly returned to her face. ‘Otherwise, why would I ask a question if I could just look into your mind and read the answer?’

He hadn’t thought of that, but he raised his eyebrows and said, ‘well?’

‘I only get flashes of relevant things. I get the gist of it, the essence. People’s thoughts are messy and cryptic. Mostly when I read you I can only see my own cleavage and the fond memories of that excellent sub sandwich you had for lunch.’

His mouth fell open.

‘At any rate, that picture certainly stuck out and I wanted to know about it. You wanted to shake me, Mr. Mcbain, and you have, so let’s go on shall we?’

After that, there weren’t any hold ups, and as McBain ushered her into the next room, Rodney Hytes was chained to the table, awaiting her. Mcbain closed the door and she sensed his relief immediately.

Rod looked average, in every respect, which was largely why he’d gotten away with so much before someone had twigged that something was wrong. He was five ten, black hair and brown eyes, medium build, normal looking Caucasian. Asked for a description, any witness would likely as not reply: ‘Uh, I dunno, really. Average? Normal? You know, just your normal every day guy. Nothing special.’

He smiled when she sat down, and it was a warm, genuine smile, but with nothing at all behind it. She didn’t look into him just yet. That was her rule.

‘Hello, Rod, My name is Joan,’ she said.

‘Nice to meet you, Joan. I’d offer my hand, but both of them are manacled to the table.’

‘That’s alright. Now I’m afraid I’ll have to start with the usual questions, which you’ve probably answered a hundred times before, but we’ll get to the interesting things soon, I promise.’

This was not reading, quite, but just a kind of intuition she had which told her what to say to which people. It was a sense of character she’d been born with, and one she used well.

‘That’s fine. How about I get you started?’

She raised her eyebrows.

‘My first kill was a cat at the age of five. My first real kill was my best friend, Zane, when I was ten; I slit his throat with a steak knife. I kill humans because they’re the best challenge, the most fun, and yes, even though I’ve been caught now, I still think that forty years of killing was worth it. No, I don’t regret anything, and I do see myself as a monster, though I feel no shame about that.

‘If I could change anything, it would be the day I got caught. I should have bitten Detective Gerald’s throat out just to get my last kill in before I got locked up. Let’s see now…’ He paused, tapping his fingers on the table and watching her through slit eyelids. ‘What was my favourite kind of killing? Death by candlelight. Agonizing, that one, very interesting but difficult to pull off. You have to be patient. Do I believe I am a god? No. Does that about cover it?’

She looked down at her short list of beginner questions. Why do you kill human beings? Do you regret anything? Are you a God? Etc. He’d effectively answered every one of them in the exact order she’d planned to ask them. She looked up at him, and he only grinned back, his hands firmly resting on the table.

‘Are you like me?’ she asked.

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. I often hear I’m very similar in some ways to people.’

‘But you know what I mean. You know, don’t you?’

‘I thought you were a psychic, Joan Jenkins. Why don’t you just open your mind to mine and look for your answers that way?’

‘You’ve just eliminated the need.’

‘Have I? I think if anything I’ve increased it. What would it be like to look into the mind of someone just like you? You thought you were unique, until you heard about me, and I thought I was until I heard about you. I’m already in yours, all you have to do is come into mine.’

She took her phone from her pocket and pressed a button before laying it down on the table in front of her. She usually trusted her memory enough not to need any recordings, but in this case she found herself wishing she’d turned it on earlier. She didn’t want to miss a thing.

‘Mr. Hytes has just given me reason to believe that he has a talent not unlike my own,’ she said, continuing to hold his blank gaze. ‘He has also invited me to read him.’

‘And refuses to answer any further questions unless she does,’ he added. There was a small smile playing on his lips.

She scowled, but made no reply other than to rap her fingers thoughtfully on the table and look at him. She had been reading people’s minds since she was ten years old. Some people she could slip in and of like a comfortable pair of slippers, and stroll down the hallways of their minds at her leisure. Others were like puzzles or labyrinths, or just hurricanes of chaos and mess. These she could read just fine after a fashion, too, and enjoyed the challenge.

Like any house (or labyrinth), how far you went inside depended on what you saw and how easily you could extricate yourself. Looking too long in a messy or insane mind could leave her feeling dizzy and disoriented for an hour afterwards, and it was for that reason she spent most of her time reading only surface thoughts, peering through the front door as she had a minute ago with McBain.

With serial killers, that didn’t work so well. Their surface thoughts were just as deceptive as their fake smiles and mannerisms. If you wanted some real insight you had to dive right in, swim to the deep end and sift through whatever you found drifting at the bottom. And this was the Rodney Hytes. She decided to take it slow.

She leaned forward, got comfortable, and met his clear green eyes. The surface thoughts were there, and as she went through them she was unnerved to find that most of them were to do with her own thoughts. He was reading her mind, and not just a little, either: these were some of her childhood memories.

She forced herself to ignore it. She was here to read him, after all. What did she care if he saw her whole intimate life? It was a nasty feeling – sickening, even, but in the end it didn’t matter. She dipped her feet a little deeper into the pool of his mind and then recoiled, as if from physical cold.

He chuckled at the look on her face. ‘Don’t be afraid, dear. I know I’m a bad man, and I’ve done some nasty things, but you’ve surely seen worse.’

She had at that, but that didn’t stop her from putting a hand over her mouth when she began to look into his memories. They were all there near the front of his mind, laid out for her in a neat and clear collage. That kind of clarity could only mean one thing – he thought of these memories often, and fondly.

After five minutes she didn’t know if she could take any more, but she went on because she had to, because she was so damned fascinated. Each memory came with a plethora of sounds and smells and visceral feelings. Not emotions as such, but the quick beat of a heart, the hunger for blood and the lust for pain, just as simple and infinitely crueller than the instincts of an animal.

His favourite, she found, was indeed death by candlelight. She knew this not from the numbers of memories she saw of it but what she felt when she went into them. Each scream and crackle of skin had brought him something, not enough to be called pleasure, but satisfaction. Each death had lasted many hours and he’d drunk them in with endless thirst. She was revolted at herself, now, because by witnessing these memories she was also sharing them with him, experiencing them for herself almost as surely as if she’d been standing in the room with him all those years ago.

And they went on, and on, and on. He’d done more than he was convicted for, far more, and before long she was lost in his mind, wandering in horror and mounting dread. This, she thought, was still not the bottom – this was barely a foot under the surface, and it was a mind that ran very deep indeed.

She went deeper, and found him trying to resist her. This was it, she thought – this was where the real learning happened. She’d get another book or three out of this man alone, that was for sure. He’d been far into her mind, too, but he’d grown bored there, and now he was panicking, trying to pull her out.

In the room, both of them were tensed, sweating, their eyes watering. His hands strained against the chains while hers were clenched in fists. Both of them stared into each other’s eyes and minds, oblivious to reality.

She pushed him and felt him give way and then yield completely, as if his consciousness was disappearing.

She went deeper.

Beneath those memories were others, and then others beneath them, boring or inconsequential ones that he’d forgotten. She reached the last of these and pushed it aside like a curtain that opened on a dark room.

She went on, searching the emptiness for something he’d tried to hide, but there was nothing. Beyond those memories and base feelings, now far behind her, there was nothing but black. She found herself falling, and this was a physical sensation, so much so that the Joan sitting in the cell lurched forward and made a choking sound, her blind eyes widening.

She needed purchase, something to hold on to, but all of a sudden there was nothing there. He was completely empty inside, and how could you find your way out of an empty house if it was infinite? It was an infinite house without doors or windows or floors, and she was lost.

She blinked and forced herself to breathe again. The room came swimming back into focus. She looked up at Rodney and was pleased to see that she’d wiped the smile off his face. He was sitting back in his chair with an unfocused gaze and sweat on his brow.

She turned off the recorder on the phone and put it in her pocket. It had been pretty useless in the end, since they hadn’t been saying anything. (So she thought, but when she played it back again later she heard his voice whispering get out, get out over and over and her own repeating the phrase help me).

She stood up and he seemed to shake himself awake at the sound of the chair scraping back. He looked ill. ‘What did you do to me?’ I feel bad. What did you do with my mind?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Bye now.’

She knocked on the door and McBain opened it almost immediately. He showed no surprise at her expression, but when he saw the state of Hytes he couldn’t help but stare. The murderer was twisting in his seat, only semi conscious and muttering things under his breath.

‘Jesus, what did you do to him?’

‘What do you care? He’s a murderer.’ She pushed passed him, and was on the point of leaving when one of the guards outside the door reached forward and held her back. ‘I’m sorry ma’am but protocol insists that Mr. McBain escort you out of here. In the event of a riot or other altercation it is best to have at least one prison staff member with you at all times.’

She glared at him but it was easy to see he meant what he said, and was prepared to enforce the law however he had to. She rolled her eyes and waited.

McBain had gone straight into the room, and now he began to call for the prison doctors in a shaky voice. The guard who had grabbed her arm turned quickly and pressed a red panic button on the wall. In the meantime, Rodney was growing more and more restless. He fought his chains, and uttered pitiful moans. ‘Oh, God, oh, God, what have I done?’

It grated in her ears. By the time the two nurses and four extra guards arrived, his voice had risen to a fever pitch and he was thrashing about in a violent seizure. McBain’s efforts to calm him had ceased – he simply stood in one corner and stared.

Joan tapped her feet while the nurses argued with the guards about whether they should untie him or not. The nurses won out and there was the sound of clinking as McBain unlocked the chains.

Although all four guards had been holding on to different parts of Rodney’s body to keep him from escaping, it was barely a second before two of them lost their grip on him, one was struggling with his left arm and the other had him in a crude headlock.

It was not enough. Rodney Hytes lifted his right wrist up to his face and bit it. Surprised, the guard pulled back on his neck and the motion liberated a large chunk of flesh and opened the artery. Spraying blood, he kicked off the table and the three of them rolled onto the floor, while the remaining two guards waited for their chance to strike with their batons.

No one was quite sure later whether Rodney’s arm had just been slippery with sweat or whether the guard had loosened his hold as they crashed to the ground. Whatever it was, he managed to head butt the man behind him into semi unconsciousness, slip his left hand inside the headlock, and tear out his own throat.

In the brief but sickening ruckus that followed, both of the guards outside had rushed in to help, though by that time there was nothing left they could do except gawk. It was a messy death, and even the nurses, seasoned veterans both, where white in the face. It was several minutes before McBain stepped out of the cell and realised that Miss Jenkins was nowhere to be seen.  Fled in terror, he believed – and who could blame her?

Joan drove to the park near her house, more out of habit than anything, and found her usual bench. She sat down and stared at the lake, thinking. Anyone who knew her well would have found this behaviour extremely odd, because Joan only ever sat on that bench to write, and when she was deep in thought usually her face was animated with a hundred conflicted expressions.

She wondered at herself, because she felt so calm, yet the Joan of an hour or so ago would have been barely able to contain herself after seeing a thing like that. But why? It’s only a bit of blood, and he was a murderer anyway. Nevertheless, she knew it was true. Perhaps she was in shock?

She thought the truth was that Rodney had affected her mind, somehow. That morning, she’d been nervous about the speech she was scheduled to give later that night at her book signing, but now, no matter how she thought of it she found she didn’t care enough about it to be nervous.

My feelings are gone, she thought, without the slightest sense of loss or grief. I have to be careful, or…

Or I’ll do something evil, is what she meant to think, but the thought ended up finishing itself with or I’ll get caught. That thought – that she was free to do something which could warrant getting caught – sent a chill up her spine. Did that count as an emotion, she wondered? It was hard to remember how they really felt; it was like trying to remember being hungry when you were full to bursting.

She tested herself by thinking about murdering her mother, who she had loved dearly two hours ago. She searched herself, but she might as well have been thinking about putting the rubbish out. Then she thought about how exactly it might be done – what kind of reaction she might get – and that spine tingling chill happened again.

It brought to mind the images and memories she’d seen in Rodney’s mind, only this time they did not bring a sick feeling to the pit of her stomach. While the rest of her thoughts and memories were grey, these shone colours in high definition. And they gave her so many ideas!

Before she got into any of that, though, she’d have to try a few tests, dip her toes a little, practice not getting caught. It would be hard to restrain herself at first, but she was a disciplined woman.

Death by candlelight. That’s the best one, he said. She made a mental note to try it when she got the chance.

A little while later, Joan got back into her car and drove away, no longer feeling quite so disenchanted with the world. There was good in it, after all.