Necrology Shorts Anthology: Issue 3 - Tales of Macabre and Horror

Necrology Shorts

Anthology

Issue 3

Published by Necrology Shorts (www.NecrologyShorts.com)

Copyright © 2012 Isis International & Necrology Shorts

All Rights Reserved

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Copyright © 2012 Isis International & Necrology Shorts

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Table of Contents

The Rain

Closing Time

Red Hour

Taxidermy

Low Ground

Psycho Drama

Confidante

Alternate

Desert Flower

Peculiar Sacrifices

The Megalith

Dead

Selling Out

Death by Water

Unwound

Watchfires

Warehouse Workings

Doom’s Lot

Second Chances: Simple Simon

The Rain

By Walter Kwiatkowski

Darryl Wheeler stood in the doorway staring at the pellets of rain that pounded against the pub window. His reflection looked sadly back at him and for a moment he thought his twin in the mirror was shaking its head at him in pity. I've been clean for six years. No heroin. No coke. Last week, at work, stress was pushing his buttons and he laid into a co-worker. The next day, he was called into the boss's office. He was pointed to a seat and then told that to keep his job; he had to take a psychological test, which he did the next day. He looked down at the evaluation the psychologist had given him earlier in the day. Somewhat paranoid: that phrase went round and round in his head. He had not told his employers his history of drug abuse. As he buttoned up his coat, the threat of yet another termination was rearing its ugly little head. And if that wasn't enough, there was the rain: buckets of it coming down as hard as stones. It collided with the pub windows as if it were trying to smash the glass and flood in.

When the rain hit the city unexpectedly a little after midnight, it was loathing and hateful to everyone. Transients took cover in store shop entrances, covering themselves with cardboard boxes and black plastic bags. Junkies scurried into gaping spaces between buildings, squeezing in with annoyed rats and other vermin. And with a long sticky tongue, the rain found and dislodged the long-legged ladies who walked up and down the street like ducks in a shooting gallery, and smiled knowing smiles.

Pools formed carelessly along curbs, swirling and then rushing like hungry wolves toward the nearest living thing.

Darryl did not know this as he did up the last button... CCR had just finished singing Who’ll Stop the Rain on the bar stereo. The news followed, warning people not to go outside in the rain, but the remaining few patrons and the bartender had other things on their minds. The hands of the clock read three-thirty. At least that’s what time Darryl thought it read, but the dozen or so beer he had slurped down over the last several hours spun his head and blurred the clock hands. Three-thirty. Closing time. He waved to the bartender knowing that he might not be chugging down pitchers of beer for the next little while. He reached unsteadily down into the little waste basket near the entrance that acted as an umbrella stand near the front door step under the yellow awning. Groping for several seconds, he realized he hadn’t brought an umbrella.

The newscast said nothing about rain. It made him angry. With today’s technology you‘d think they could predict a downpour like this. Resigned, he flipped the hoodie hiding beneath his coat up onto his head and stepped out, interrupting thousands of rather large raindrops in their journey towards the pavement. The sounds they made formed an eerie kind of music.

Strangely enough, the city streets were darker than usual. He looked toward the streetlights. They were still standing and alight, but they seemed a blur. I think I drank a little too much... But why the hell not. Celebrate my being fired on Monday.

His leather shoes clicked against the pavement as the rain flooded the curb and poured over the sidewalk. The sole of his one shoe suddenly pulled away from its toe and the water nipped at his sock. He shook his foot

Damn it, he said.

He crossed the street in an attempt to avoid the puddles, but the harsh rain continued.

The lights in the bars that dotted the streets, and that usually stayed open late, disappeared as he walked by. No laughter, no arguments spilling out onto the sidewalk, no curse words emitting from patrons bidding a hasty exit. But it was three thirty am. And this was not a part of the city one wanted to be strolling around in after dark. Only the criminal carnivores spying potential victims from dark cracks and alleyways found pleasure here. But they too had been scared off by the unforgiving rain.

Darryl, now sopping wet, stopped. Rustling sounds drifted from the alleyway he was passing. He turned and looked. From the back entrance of what was probably a restaurant shone a light, beaming in full glory down upon a little man hanging halfway into a small dumpster. Next to him, a rusty shopping cart filled to the brim with bulging garbage bags. The little man's feet dangled over a pair of empty rubber boots. He was tossing items out of the dumpster.

The alleyway appeared to be tapered and sloped. The rain seemed to be collecting along the wall the dumpster was against.

Poor sap, at least I’ve got somewhere to sleep.

Darryl continued on his way, feeling hopeful. Another ten or so minutes and he would be in his warm bed. A long scream suddenly ripped through the monotonous drone of steadily pelting rain.

Daryl stopped. It came from the alleyway. He didn’t want to get involved. Let the police handle it. But he turned and ran back, feeling somewhat sober now.

The grocery cart, the well-used rubber boots, the rubbish on the ground--all there. The homeless creature was not. Darryl scanned the well-lit alleyway. Someone might have wanted to have a little fun with him. But the scream had not at all sounded like fun. Dourly, he went into the alleyway and peered into the dumpster. A half-eaten chicken stared up at him: milk cartons, egg shells, a pizza box, and some magazines. No street urchin. Maybe someone heard him scream and took him in.

He shook his head. Not likely. Sympathy for street people in this city came at a premium, especially in this kind of nasty weather.

The rain that had been rushing towards the tapered end of the alley had lessened. In fact, the swelling had subsided and the rain seemed to be retreating back uphill. But that was impossible. He knew it was impossible. Rain, like everything else in this world, could not defy the laws of gravity. Heroin and LSD could. Worms slithering up and down your arms, under the skin. But he was clean, so clean hospitals envied him.

Darryl didn’t know why he ran, he just did, his broken sole flapping up and down. He crossed on a red light, and stopped when he saw a police car. It sat diagonally on the road, its red top screaming and shining. An officer in a rain poncho looked up at him as he approached.

The cells are all full. Go home and sleep it off, mister, he said.

The words had trouble leaving his mouth. I saw … in the alley…the tramp.

What?

He pointed down the street.

The alley!

The officer swept up his night stick and rushed down the street where Darryl pointed.

That’s when Darryl saw it. The rain. As it rushed along the sidewalk, it began to swirl as if a pair of hands were wringing out a towel. But it swirled up like a typhoon. Darryl gasped because as he watched, what appeared to be a twisted pair of legs and a set of gnarled calloused arms appeared out of the swirl followed by a sinewy body, then a grotesque distorted head with what looked like a set of huge wart hog tusks. These tusks impaled themselves down into the police officer, whose screams reverberated throughout the empty streets.

Darryl turned and ran. As he ran, he saw the rain pounding the streets of his city; saw, puddles stream across neatly trimmed lawns and slide into cracks and under doors, through open windows, into cars. Looking, hunting, preying.

A restless woman, her hands trying to warm her arms on this cold night, stood, without an umbrella, in a t-shirt. The rain formed her hair into strings, and large drops probed her face. She didn’t see the pool of water forming around her. Smelling her. Suddenly arms of water shot up like sticky tongues, grasping her, anchoring her, and pulling her into the large puddle around her. She screamed, and a large eddy opened up beneath her and swallowed her up.

Darryl sprinted the remaining two blocks. He was soaked from head to foot, but he was safe. Thank God, he was safe. His lips needed a cigarette, but had quit those too years ago. Damn.

He leaned against the apartment entrance door and took several deep breaths. He stuffed a wet hand into his pants pocket and came out with a set of keys.

He unlocked the controlled glass door. The foyer was still there, with its plain red carpet and old armchair. He made his way to the elevator, pressed the button and waited. And waited and waited. He hit the elevator door in anger. He looked at the numbers on the top of the elevator. No light was running between numbers. He cursed again, and threw open the fire exit door and took the stairs.

He appeared on the fourth floor minutes later. He stopped for a moment to catch his breath.

He searched for his apartment key on the chain, and after using it, barged into his room, closing and locking the door behind him.

Safe.

He threw off his coat, stared at this morning’s dishes in the sink, went to the refrigerator and pulled out a beer. He uncapped it and took a deep swig. He went into the living room, kicked off his wet shoes, then flicked on the TV.

A woman who looked like she had had plastic surgery to at least 80% of her body smiled directly at Darryl. Rain, rain and more rain. This city has been hit by the biggest rain storm in its history. And it won’t end soon. She added another professional smile, and then said. I hope my hair will survive it. Don, back to you….

He flicked off the TV and sat back on the couch. Did I really see what I saw? Shouldn’t I call somebody? He kicked off his pants and trudged into the bathroom. A shower always cleared his mind. That’s why he always took one before going to work, and after coming home. He turned on the faucets, adjusted the hot and cold, pulled up the shower control and hopped in. The warmth was exhilarating. And he stood under that warmth for what seemed to be the longest time. He felt the hot soothing water pulsing around his ankles. Then, a sudden realization struck him. He looked down. The water wasn’t swirling down into the drain, it was pooling up around him. There was no bath tub plug in place, yet the water had almost filled the tub.

He screamed.

It couldn’t be. It was only the rain. Not the water supply. He lifted one leg and tried to hop out of the tub, but the pooling water shot up like a tongue. It grabbed his leg. A sheer cold numbness covered his skin. Another watery tongue sprung up and grabbed his arm. Another wrapped around his neck, cutting off his air.

Below him, an eddy began to appear, swirling faster and faster and Daryl began to swirl with it, around and around. The water turned red below him, and in the fleeting moment before he died, he saw the tusks, sharp and undiscriminating, waiting for him.

Closing Time

By J.M. Jennings

Eric Jenner was beginning to nod when the tires crunched on the gravelly side of the interstate. He jumped awake and swerved back into his place, thankful that no one was around to see him. Or hit him. He had tried turning on the air conditioning to full blast, and that had helped for a little while. Not long enough, though; Jenner was fading, and he knew it. In his twenty-three years of driving big rigs, he had only fallen asleep on the road once – but of course, that was all it had taken, as they say. His souvenirs from that little adventure came in the form of enough metal re-enforcement (pins in the legs, pins in the spinal column, and of course, the ever popular four inch plate in the head) to get him special treatment at airports. Since then, it had been his policy to quit driving as soon as he was even remotely tired; to pull into some hotel and just crash, even if he might only be an hour or two from his destination.

Tonight was different because his destination had nothing to do with his job. He had a feeling that if he didn’t reach Myra by tonight, she would be gone forever. If he stopped now, if he showed just one more sign of anger – even an unintentional one – it was probably curtains for them. She had already started talking about moving out of their house and getting an apartment. Eric had little doubt that if Myra did that, she wouldn’t be moving in alone. Not for the first time, he wondered whether or not he really had been better off not knowing about the man she was cheating with. After all, before that, he had been happy, and had assumed that she was, too.

Now he knew the truth, and he was miserable.

The first drops of rain spattering the windshield jerked him out of his thoughts of Myra, back to thoughts of the road. He didn’t mind driving in the rain most of the time, but then most of the time he was in his Peterbilt rig, and not in this dinky Honda Civic. Plus, he knew that after a little while, rain falling on the windshield would likely become a soothing lullaby, which was the very last thing he needed right now.

He glanced down at the cell phone lying in the passenger seat like the world’s smallest child getting to sit up front. He could call her. If he told her that he was tired and needed to pull off to get some rest, she’d understand. After all, she’d been there, holding his hand in the ICU and crying her eyes out as she stared at the damaged body of her husband. She knew that if he said he needed sleep, he meant it. Every time.

But tonight, maybe she knew something else, Eric thought. Maybe she also knew that she didn’t love him anymore.

So, no phone call. Tonight he would make it home, and he would talk to her face to face. If the stars aligned for him, if he could be very convincing, and most of all, if there still burned something inside her for him, he thought they might pull through.

* * *

He was fading again when he saw the smeared streak of halogen lights up ahead. He snapped awake, mentally gauging the distance to them so he’d be sure to catch the right exit. What he felt now was more than tired. It was an ache, the kind of soulless sorrow that comes from wanting to sleep and being unable to. It seemed he could feel it in his bones, in his stomach, behind the eyes he so desperately wanted to close.

It was a gas station; he could see it more clearly now through the rain. One of those middle-of-nowhere all-nighter joints, he supposed, and shuddered. If there was one job more lonely than his own, surely it was being a clerk in one of these places. He turned his blinker on, too soon, but it didn’t matter. It was almost two in the morning, and he hadn’t seen another car in half an hour. Raindrops fell, scattered, and were swept away by the windshield wipers as he pulled off the interstate, guiding his car mostly by the lights ahead, as if he were a mariner lost in a storm on a choppy sea, and the halogens ahead were the salvific lighthouse.

He certainly felt lost tonight.

The parking lot was rough; there were large cracks in the macadam which held sizable populations of weeds, these pushing up through as if to reclaim Earth for the flora. Caught among them were bits of trash – part of a coffee cup, a cinnamon bun wrapper, a broken beer bottle – souvenirs, no doubt, from this hallowed establishment, carried to a temporary resting place by wind and circumstance.

Eric pulled in, shut the car off, and just sat there for a long moment, hoping the rain would let up long enough for him to get out and go in without getting soaked. It didn’t happen. He reached over into the passenger seat and picked up the cell phone, flipped it open. He had two bars, which wasn’t much, but it would be enough should he decide to call Myra. He could do it; he wasn’t sure how close the nearest hotel might be, but it had to be closer than home.

Besides, this whole thing was probably a waste of time. In all likelihood, it was too late to save the marriage anyway; best for him to get over it and begin the process of moving on.

He put the cell phone back in the seat and opened his door. He would at least go inside and look around for something to wake him up, just to be able to say he tried. Beyond that, he could ask the lonely clerk where the nearest hotel might be – where the nearest town might be, for that matter; he wasn’t really sure there was much out here at all.

He was soaked the moment he stepped out of the car, and as soon as he shut the door he ran up to the awning, passing through the heavy sheet of drain water and gasping at the cold. He almost ran head first into the payphone, and wouldn’t that have been hilarious, he thought. He took a moment to shake himself off, wringing his hands, running them through his hair, wringing them again. Now his hair stood up in dripping spikes, and the skin of his palms was shriveled with moisture. It occurred to him that he was wide awake now, and that he could probably go another twenty or thirty miles in this condition.

But no; he was here, so he might as well get something to drink. Not coffee – Eric hated coffee – but something caffeinated. Maybe a Coke.

He walked to the front door, which was glass crisscrossed with black iron bars. Charming, he muttered, and stepped in.

* * *

The music hit him first, the smell second. Of the two, the music was more recognizable – he thought it was George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The smell, though familiar, eluded him. It conjured strange scenes from his youth, existing as a cloudy ectoplasm enveloping the stage during certain scenes of the mostly-forgotten play of childhood. It was inane, alien, yet powerfully close. He both wanted to inhale deeply to explore its singular bouquet, and at the same time vomit it from his nose and thrust himself back into the night, where the rain-washed air would smell fresh and vivid and above all things right.

This smell was not right. It was wrong.

He stepped across the threshold, and above him a small grouping of jingle bells shivered into action, hailing his arrival by cutting harshly across Gershwin’s roving piano solo. They died out quickly, and the sound of the rain was slowly enveloped by the sound of the door whooshing shut behind him. Another tinkling of bells, and he was fully inside the store.

Something else felt wrong about the place immediately. Not only did it not smell right, but he seemed to be entirely alone. No one stood behind the counter; there were no patrons in the aisles. He hadn’t seen any other cars in the parking lot, so he supposed that made sense, but…

I’ll be right there, a raspy voice said, and Eric jumped. He looked in the direction the voice had come from, and saw an open door with the word OFFICE printed on it. On this door were a multiplicity of signs, including such witticisms as THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES, and PROBLEM CUSTOMERS WILL BE TAKEN OUT BACK AND SHOT. Oddly enough, these signs cheered Eric a little. They seemed to take a little bit of the creepy out of it, in some way he couldn’t quite put a finger on.

He turned toward the first aisle, and was startled to see a man-sized hourglass. Most of its sand – which was brown rather than the usual white – was in the bottom glass. On the top glass was a sign written by hand: TIME UNTIL CLOSE. This one seemed a bit less cheery than the ones on the office door. Eric shuffled past it toward the rest of the aisle and began walking down it, his eyes catching on things here and there. Car equipment on the first aisle: everything you could possibly need from jumper cables to air fresheners. There were sunglasses and phone chargers, phone cards and sun visors, ice scrapers and ice chests. It all seemed perfectly natural; if you were coming into this gas station, you were likely on some kind of long trip, and who in the world liked to take a long car trip sans those special accoutrements one could acquire most conveniently at a convenience store?

Eric smiled, moving on. He found that he had been wrong about the rain waking him up fully – he felt almost as tired now as he had in the car. Maybe a Coke wasn’t going to do the job. As a general rule, he tried to stay away from caffeine pills and energy drinks (he secretly suspected that cancer or something equally vile resided within such products, and that to use them even sparingly was to take one’s life in hand), but maybe tonight was the time for that rare exception.

The end of the first aisle ended up being the porn section. This was the part of any convenience store which he – and, he assumed, most self-respecting people – tried to skirt around, not because he had no interest in such things, but because it was uncouth. Now, of course, it was just him and the as-yet absentee clerk. The urge to look was primal, had been ever since he was a youth. Around about the time that that smell reminds you of, wouldn’t you say, a voice in his head intoned. He took a faint sniff of the air, dismissed it, and looked at the porn rack, checking over his shoulder first to make sure that he wasn’t being watched. There was no sign of the clerk yet.

What he saw surprised him; he had been expecting seedy stuff – this wasn’t a bookstore, after all – but he hadn’t been prepared for this. In place of the Playboy and Penthouse brand of magazine there existed a rack of sadomasochist literature. Magazines devoted to bondage and torture, leather and chains and spiked heels abounding. Women with barely-blurred breasts caught in vise clamps; men holding paddles with what looked like blood on them. There were faux vampire magazines; Goth dominatrix women with pointed teeth leering out from studded leather corsets. There were even a couple of magazines in what looked like Russian Cyrillic; one showed a man hanging himself, one hand on the rope, the other in front of him and – but for the carefully-placed shrink wrap one could be certain – probably on his penis. The other magazine featured three women, naked and not blurred out at all, sitting in a circle. Scattered among them were fake body parts. One of the women held a severed human arm up to her face, and was chewing on it. Eric raised an eyebrow; evidently, cannibalism had entered the world of porn since the last time he’d checked.

He moved on down the aisle, coming to the cooler, and by way of the cooler, to the portion of