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    Dark Paths
    Dark Paths
    Dark Paths
    Ebook97 pages1 hour

    Dark Paths

    By Terry Hayman

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    About this ebook

    Explore the dark places of the human heart with stories ranging from classic horror to Greek myth, to modern warfare. Follow a blind vampire into a part of town other vampires avoid in “A Different Hunger." Live the terror when a suburb's forgotten citizens rise up for revenge in “The Shopping Cart People.” Find out what finally happened with Medea in “To Ride the Serpent Once More.” Explore mini dimensional rifts that bring in vampires in “Peter and the Vampires.” Finally, see what’s really going on in the Middle East in “So Hot.” You’ll come out of the darkness a different person.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFiero Publishing
    Release dateJan 14, 2011
    ISBN9781458041753
    Dark Paths
    Author

    Terry Hayman

    Raised in five different countries and currently living with his family in one of the most beautiful places on earth, Terry is a full-time writer and actor who accepts struggle, believes in goodness, and seeks truth always.

    Read more from Terry Hayman

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      Book preview

      Dark Paths - Terry Hayman

      DARK PATHS

      Terry Hayman

      Copyright © 2011 Terry Hayman

      Published by Fiero Publishing

      Discover other titles by this author on Smashwords.com

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      Author Foreword

      A Different Hunger

      The Shopping Cart People

      To Ride the Serpent Once More

      Peter and the Vampires

      So Hot

      Afterword

      Author Foreword

      Horror fiction, dark fantasy, dark fiction of any genre waxes and wanes in popularity through the years. And changes form. Now, going into the second decade of the second millennium, vampires, werewolves, and demons are as often objects of sexual desire and love as they are monsters, and true evil is often epitomized by the knife-wielding maniac, the secretive sexual predator, the faceless corporation/government.

      Does this mean we’ve conquered our fear of the magical unknown or just amped up our justified paranoia about real danger? Have we abandoned superstitions or just responded to a media that shoves documented terror in our face 24/7?

      Whatever the cause, whatever your particular shift in fears, you can trust that humans will always find a way to wreak horror on one another. What interests me, as a writer, is both the why’s of that and our response to it. Unlike in an immediate, life-and-death situation, these stories give us a chance to experience and analyze, question our values and resolve, go into the dark and come out the other side again.

      So here in this short collection I’ve given you a few ways in and back again. Sometimes through classic horror, sometimes just through the darkness of a character’s heart.

      What follows, for those interested, are the geneses of these stories:

      A Different Hunger – I was raised with Dracula and Salem’s Lot and, only grudgingly, Anne Rice’s vampires. But when vampires started showing up everywhere and sparkling in the sunlight, I swore I’d never write a vampire story. Yet here’s one I sold to Dreams of Decadence anyway. The challenge to myself that got me to write it? Give it a different spin. How about the vampire’s blind and has a social conscience? Yeah, I can run with that...

      The Shopping Cart People - Two things that scare me are the creek behind our house at night and shuffling poor people who might be crazy and have good cause to be really ticked off by the rich fools passing by them each day. From there it was a pretty simple What if?

      To Ride the Serpent Once More – This was actually written for a bad women of fantasy anthology. Not classic horror, but the way societies have treated (and continue to treat) women has often been horrific. In a way, the same revenge impulse powers this story as The Shopping Cart People.

      Peter and the Vampires – It’s the other story of this collection that explores dark places without necessarily asking you to fear them. I thought, let’s say you had this device that tapped into a parallel dimension and just took little bits from it...

      So Hot – This one, about a soldier in Iraq is the most disturbing one for me because of all the very sick research that led to it. I was invited to submit to an anthology of war stories. I started digging deeper into the online record of the war in Iraq. And what I found was that while the televised news and press reported at one level, the actual fighting soldiers were posting endless digital albums and videos of the most atrocious, mind numbing, sick stuff. No censors to tell these nineteen and twenty-year-olds they couldn’t develop or print those pictures/films, so they just recorded and posted them. A vomit-worthy treasure trove.

      All of these stories are a way into the darkness and back out again. Mentally take my hand and let’s go down together.

      -Terry Hayman

      January 14, 2011

      It's a part of town most vampires avoid because the food is tainted. Drugs. Alcohol. Despair. But it's here that the blind, undead artist, born with no optic nerves, comes to fill a hunger that has nothing to do with blood, though blood will be spilled...

      A Different Hunger

      Terry Hayman

      Copyright © 2010 Terry Hayman

      I touch the taxi driver beside me and tell him to pull over. He does and I roll down my window.

      Will I get out here again?

      The rain has become a fine mist against my face. I stretch my nose out into it.

      On such nights as these, they say, the streets here shine like floating ghosts in the street lamps. The boarded-up buildings groan over them as if about to collapse into soggy cardboard, mix with the slush of wrappers and needles and forgotten foods and used condoms that wash along the gutters.

      It is a graveyard of concrete and glass, they say. Except those who live here are worse than undead; they are unclean. They shamble in and out of alleyways, collapse down against the bricks to spike needles into their veins or gulp the last of their bottles, scream at the cars, stagger against the weight of the rain, and look around too lost to move.

      They say.

      But I, born with no optic nerves, cannot see these things. Instead I reach my dampened face and nose out the window and smell the blood of the unclean, the pathos, the painful, feeble beating. And because I have already fed until my face is flush and warm, I know it is not the lure of easy kill which calls me. It is a different hunger.

      I open my door and step out.

      Hey! $18.50, bud! says the driver.

      I turn to him as a rush of darkness. He has leaned out after me and my hands snap around his head. I begin to tilt it back, exposing a neck I’m sure is pocked with shaving nicks and hair. It smells unwashed but the vein of this man’s life beats strong in my ears. Clean blood.

      I have no money, I lie. Clearly a lie, for the sports jacket I wear easily costs double this man’s monthly rent.

      O-gh...ay.

      The second I withdraw my

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