Barely Bound: Tales of Horror

Barely Bound

Tales of Horror

by

Paul Fecteau and John McClenny

Published by eFM Press

at Smashwords

Copyright © 2011 by Paul Fecteau and John McClenny

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 recipient. 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.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book is a work of fiction. Incidents, names, characters, and places are products of the authors’ imaginations and used fictitiously, and any resemblances to actual locales, events, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-0-9836799-0-5

Acknowledgments

Cover Design by John McClenny based upon a photograph by Maggie Pagratis.

Versions of some of the stories barely contained in this volume have appeared in the following publications: The Inflated Graveworm, Demon Minds, The Harrow, The Rare Anthology, Bloody Muse, Darkness Rising, Thirteen Stories, Scared Naked Magazine, and The Project for a New Mythology.

Invocation by John McClenny

Barely Bound

Bound with daddy's belts and straps

leather slick with sweat and things less

quick to flow than water

on skin laid bare to tortures unimagined

in the peace of living rooms

secured by double bolted doors.

Boundaries drawn in crimson

with cotton line and tape and wire

mark sacrificial rites and places.

Breathing altars carved with loving touch

summon sacred lust in the killing.

What razor first inscribes

the blood course over yearning skin

mapping soul to hunted soul.

What tailor sews the pattern

in swaths of pain to shape a perfect shroud.

Blind we live and meet

and greet in darkness for

rituals of coupling in shadows.

Victims seeking victims tied

with spider silk like steel yet

barely bound.

Table of Contents

Jenny Darkness by Paul Fecteau

Revival by John McClenny

The House that Can’t Forget by Paul Fecteau

Personal Demons by John McClenny

Midnight Drive by Paul Fecteau

No Joy in the Rising Sun by John McClenny

Blood Red Blonde by Paul Fecteau

God of Abraham by John McClenny

Midnight Creep by Paul Fecteau

Drifter by John McClenny

Midnight Swim by Paul Fecteau

Resurrection by John McClenny

Splatter by Paul Fecteau

Assassin by John McClenny

Remote Corners by Paul Fecteau

Sanctify by John McClenny

The House Where Night Never Ends by Paul Fecteau

Dead Ringer by John McClenny

Darkness, Ours by Paul Fecteau

Requiem for Bobby by John McClenny

She Knows What You Want by Paul Fecteau

Skeptic by John McClenny

Jenny Darkness by Paul Fecteau

That time is gone when the young women died

Astounded to hear black veins in their bodies

Coil round one another all night.

--James Wright

Someone is after Jenny’s body, so I keep it in my bedroom where there are no windows. I sleep in the living room recliner, awakened by every twig snap. It sounds like my front gate opening, so curtains pushed back and lights off I stare out the window. The tiny point of light that moves from tree to tree could just be a firefly, or it could be the glow of her boyfriend’s cigarette. I have sensed that he has been lurking about since dusk. I do not call the authorities for fear of what he will say.

I go down the hallway to the bedroom to check on her. In the darkness, her silhouette is so slight she might be an extra blanket. I flip on the lamp. She lies, arms at her sides, on my burgundy bedspread. She has on blue jeans and a midlength gray jersey. Her chestnut hair tangles about the pillow. Her eyes are shut because she died in her sleep. Her pink feet look to be turning white.

I saw her convulse and die on my couch. By the late news she had fallen asleep, and I had tossed a blanket over her. She made a choking noise and began shaking, the reaction, I’m sure, to a slow-acting poison her boyfriend put in her beer. By the time I stood over her, she was dead.

When I switch off the light, I hear her speak: Buddy, you gotta help me. He’s coming. Her voice seems just as it did when she was alive, sharp yet musical, except now it certainly comes not from her lips which have no doubt gone cold and stiff.

I turn the lamp back on, but the bulb burns out with a pop.

Buddy, don’t run.

As I stand in the darkness, I marvel that the voice that now makes me tremble filled me with excitement only this morning.

I hadn’t heard from her in a month when she called. She gave me a Sunday morning pitch I have become used to: Nursing a hell of a hangover, buddy. Want to watch TV? Jenny has always called me buddy, and we have always watched TV. We met several years ago at the public library, and she has come over a Sunday a month or so since.

Hardly ever have we spent time at her house where amidst cramped spaces stuffed with jars of spice her dusty books made me sneeze. I ran a finger over their leathery spines that bore either titles in foreign tongues--like De Vermis Mysteriis and Cultes des Goules--or in runic symbols. A couple I couldn't help but pull from the shelf with an inkling of recognition. I had heard about The Profane Virgin, though not its companion The Eternal Profane, both by Lawrence Enochs. Sex is a doorway, was the quote I remembered.

Jenny's promiscuity troubled me little. I was her one true friend, a role I had never played for another. Then, on the Ides of March, she got a new boyfriend.

I have not met him, but he has threatened me in my dreams. He drifted in the window as a cloud of dust one day at dawn and told me not to be calling Jenny. He made no specific threats and nearly sounded as though the only thing bothering him was that I was tying up the line.

I didn’t stop calling her because he told me to, but it was because of him. It got to where all she would talk about was him. I would just lean against the kitchen cabinet and imagine her lying on her tummy on her bed, cord twisting around her bony finger, her sock feet scissoring the air.

Of all her boyfriends, she talked about him the most, but somehow without saying anything important because when I hung up the phone I had no idea who he was. She used the words dark and deep, and he is from the university, but other than that I can’t recall a thing she said. When I saw the patch of mingling motes over my bed, heard a whining buzz like a mosquito, smelled smoke, I still didn’t know what he looked like, but I got an idea that what he was capable of could be very ugly.

Buddy, look what he’s done to me, I hear her say, though the room is still dark, and I can see nothing.

He’s coming to do worse, worse than you could ever imagine.

I entertain the notion that she has been in a catatonic state, and I get on the bed and pick up her hand. Cold.

I’ll do anything for you, just keep him away.

I am on my knees by her side, holding her long, cold hand between mine. I tell her I’ll do anything to save her soul, keep her body from him.

I knew I could count on you.

I know that any moment he may attempt to force his way in.

You can stand up to him.

She seems to have forgotten, or maybe she didn’t really know, that he has chased me away before, that in one instant I could have taken her away from him if I had only said stay with me, stay out of those dives on Delmonica Boulevard, stay away from those clean-shaven, dark-eyed spectres you take to the alley.

She drove me out to the country on a cloudy April Fool’s Day. Her rusty Pinto popped gravel down Clutter Road and then kicked up clods as we turned on to a neglected offshoot that wound to a lonely hilltop and a long-abandoned, nameless graveyard. She jumped out of the car and flitted among the two dozen pre-Civil War stones that tilted this way and that beneath the open sky. A light drizzle began, and we sat on a fallen headstone, its inscription unreadable. There, beneath the cemetery’s only tree, a towering and protective oak, Jenny leaned against me.

One kiss is all it would have taken to break his spell, but he sought to prevent that. A teen girl, dress in tatters about her, walked toward us. Her cloudy eyes were vacant, but she seemed to be speaking: her lips, dark upon her pale face, moved, but no sound came out. Through shredded silk upon one breast appeared scratches. She wore one shoe; her other foot was bare and black with dirt. Down one thigh and across her knee ran blood, bright red, the only color in the black and white scene.

I don’t know for sure that Jenny saw her, but she followed me without question as I ran back to the car. Nightmares that I had thought finished years before I even met Jenny re-awakened, and I never sought to sit too close to Jenny again, never even envisioned that kiss that had seemed a mere raindrop away that day in the cemetery.

It tortures me to think that I had Jenny as close as I have her now. I move over her and place that kiss on her lifeless lips. It is not enough or too late. All that is left is for the boyfriend to put me away too, and that starts with the sounds of doors being kicked in. Someone shouts, Police.

Jenny, I say, tell me what to do. Jenny? She says nothing, so I take her in my arms, and that’s when the officers open the door and peer at us in the beams of their flashlights.

Step off the bed.

I hold Jenny, but they grab me. A big cop puts handcuffs on me. The other officer is a woman, and she feels Jenny’s neck and says, She’s dead. Been that way awhile.

The cop pushes me down the hallway into the kitchen where red and yellow light flashes across the walls. I scream.

The boyfriend hovers as a cloud of dust around the cookie jar.

I scream, He did it, but no one pays attention.

I am taken outside and stuffed in the back of a police car. I push my face into the cool vinyl seat. At first the gibber on the radio drives me mad. They talk about my past, about a girl whose dress had been ripped, her legs bloody. I begin sobbing and slowly everything fades to silence.

I look up a long time later when I hear the stretcher clattering down the driveway. The medic stops suddenly. I can see the slight contours in the dark plastic bag, hints of small feet, breasts, and her head. The medic lights a cigarette. He turns and looks into the police car. His face seems featureless, blank, expressionless until he winks at me.

Revival by John McClenny

The first faint shadows of dusk waited silently for their cue as a caravan of yesterday’s automobiles created a small fortress of order in the green shaded chaos of a spring-kissed pasture. Somber hues of dusty black and dark blue with edgings of rust dominated the random selection of Detroit’s finest of years gone by. Two travel trailers that may once have been white followed the newest pair of autos but a decade of Carolina clay and gravel topped back roads had eroded their paint into a generic soul-weary, bone-tired, dust brown. Crystal orbs rimmed in tar speckled chrome formed a line of potential light pointed at a more or less flat area of grass a few yards beyond a border of five strand barbed wire fence. Without any obvious signal the vehicles disgorged their passengers in a wave of antlike activity. Rolls of olive drab canvas and sections of unidentifiable wood materialized alongside a pair of rusted flatbed trailers. Mystical trails flattened the wild grass in intricate patterns on the perimeter of the canvas sheets as practiced hands set stakes in the rain-soft ground and willing arms drove twelve pounds of wood and steel against the battered oak.

In the final fading glory of western light, Brother Daniel opened the dented door of his metal clad home on wheels. Hair, glory red as the paling sunset, created a slightly greasy halo above his pale countenance. Hanging in irregular bangs the wispy strands shadowed narrow, deep set eyes that might be blue in better light. Headlights from a passerby on the highway briefly caressed a billowing canvas sign being strung skillfully between two telephone poles set in the fence line. Repent! The Beast is Upon You in red block letters, scrawled across the soiled white background. Below it on a tastefully small, pristinely clean rectangle of cloth in precise black letters the reader was informed that Brother Daniel Frazier had come to preach revival and set the local sinners back on the path of the Lord. Benny and Dray, the youngest members of the troop, extracted battered bicycles from the back of a trailer and pedaled briskly toward the first of a line of dimly glowing street lamps. Posters announcing Revival Tonight - All God’s Children are Welcome fluttered in the speed breeze of their passing, held down by the weight of a rust browned claw hammer and a Gerber’s bottle of blue tacks. Tonight’s crowd would be small but tomorrow evening when the sun set, the tar and gravel road would be lined for a mile in autos and trucks of every description.

Rust tight hinges crowed their agony in the gathering dark as the second travel home spewed a fetid breath of stale vapor into the warm grass scented evening air. Sister Madeline twisted her bulk through the narrow door without further insulting the threadbare choir robe she wore. The last time she had stepped on a scale had been at the truck weigh station at a cotton gin outside of Murfreesboro, North Carolina, on her way from the tent meeting to a toilet the gin’s owner let them use. She didn’t realize it at the time but the scale operator had measured the worth of her girth at three hundred and seventy-seven sweat slick pounds. The news had gotten around Murfreesboro before the meeting that night and the crowd contained more than the usual fearful faithful. Several of the so called wild elements joined enthusiastically in the praise of God and Jesus until the time came for Sister Madeline to sing. Given