DarkFuse Anthology 5 Read online

  Table of Contents

  DARKFUSE

  Volume 5

  Other Books In This Series

  The Ritual

  Hair

  Whispered Sweet Nothings

  Trashtown

  What Lives in the Trees

  Antibody

  About the Editor

  About the Authors

  About the Publisher

  DARKFUSE

  Volume 5

  Edited by Shane Staley

  First Edition

  DarkFuse, Volume 5 © 2016 by Shane Staley

  All stories © 2016 by individual authors.

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

  www.darkfuse.com

  Twitter: @darkfuse

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/darkfuse

  Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/jOH5

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Other Books In This Series

  DarkFuse #1

  DarkFuse #2

  DarkFuse #3

  DarkFuse #4

  Lights Out, Happy People

  Jeremy Thompson

  The building is nondescript, devoid of architectural flourish. No sign marks it an asylum. The squat white edifice could be anything from a daycare to a pharmaceutical research center. Actually, it’s a little of both.

  The entrance is locked. Fortunately, I require neither plastic badge nor keypad code. Insubstantial, I enter the waiting room, finding it bright and clean, carefully scrubbed. At the receptionist’s desk sits an attractive Hispanic, her face a study in boredom. The upholstered benches are empty, visitors being few and infrequent.

  The receptionist feels a sensation, like a water droplet splashing her arm.

  Flowing past another locked door, I enter a cheerfully painted corridor, its polished stone floor reflecting fluorescent lighting. Therein, I pass many closed doors, each with its own keypad and badge scanner. I pass the kitchen and dining room, the laundry room, and a number of therapy rooms, all similarly locked.

  Ah, here’s an open door: the dayroom. A fetor spills out the doorway, spoiled food and unwashed flesh. Smears and handprints ornament the walls.

  The room is dominated by a large television, rows of benches set before it. Upon these benches, twenty-three patients sit quietly, watching Looney Tunes hijinks. Some wear pajamas, others hospital gowns. One drooling, completely hairless fellow wears only a pair of stained underpants.

  The audience consists mainly of depressives and schizophrenics. The depressives stay mute, barely perceiving the cartoon. The schizos, however, talk back to the program. Half of ’em aren’t even seeing Daffy Duck right now; they’re conducting videoconferences with relatives and long-dead celebrities.

  I manifest on the screen, a howling static rictus. The audience hoots, screams and jabbers, until the television goes off.

  Why is the dayroom open so late? you might wonder.

  Last night, a depressive killed herself. Somehow, she attained a bottle of sleeping pills, and swallowed it entirely. Who stole ’em from the pharmacy, and left the bottle waiting on her pillow? Who painted the air with beautiful miseries, as she wept, cursed and giggled? I’ll give you one guess.

  Learning of the suicide, many patients couldn’t cope. Having doubled down on individual and group therapy sessions already, the staff decided that extra lounge time might soothe their restless spirits.

  Two men play chess at a corner table, with the smaller of the two going through a series of taps, flicks and scratches before each move. Obsessive-compulsive disorder, as I’m sure you’ve guessed. The chess pieces are large and ugly, constructed from spray-painted Styrofoam.

  At another table, a glassy-eyed woman assembles a puzzle, what could be an orchid. An elderly man hovers over her shoulder, intently observing.

  Some patients stand around talking, like guests at a cocktail party, with only their shabby attire branding them as mentally imbalanced. Just outside their circles, a tattooed war veteran shuffles intermittently, his countenance vacillating between rage, fear, elation and boredom in rapid succession. Post-traumatic stress disorder, obviously.

  At the room’s periphery, a smattering of orderlies, nurses and psychiatric technicians hover, observing the patients. The psychiatric techs hold clipboards, jotting sporadic notations.

  The dayroom is off-limits to visitors, but I exist imperceptibly. Thus, I smack the war veteran forcefully, and then push a jittery crone onto her rump. I birth pandemonium, hurled accusations leading to punching, scratching and biting. The orderlies swarm in, dragging patients apart, too late for one eye-gouged shrieker. Pink sludge drips from her socket, blood mixed with vitreous humor.

  The veteran bashes his head against the wall now, again and again, trying to knock my voice from his cognizance. “We await you in Hell,” I whisper, repeating it until he falls unconscious, into sweet shadowy oblivion.

  * * *

  Exiting the dayroom, I follow the corridor. It terminates in a dead end, locked doors branching right and left. Leftward lies the female department. Passing the threshold, I come upon a nurses station, wherein a stern-faced spinster scrutinizes paperwork piles.

  I hit the papers like a hurricane, spinning them into fluttering chaos. The nurse curses as they fall, her bloodshot left eye twitching. Beholding her baffled fury, I voice a cackle.

  Doors trail both sides of the hallway, with laminated glass windows installed for patient observation. Only a few are open, revealing featureless rooms, unadorned save for dressers, televisions and beds. Within one, a half-nude woman flicks her tongue suggestively, registering my disembodied presence.

  I’ll return momentarily, but first I have appointments within the violent patients ward, behind yet another locked door. Therein lie the feral ones, dangers to themselves and others. Their bodies exhibit self-carved symbols; their eyes shift left to right, right to left, sometimes both directions at once.

  Imagine you’re confined in a straightjacket. Now imagine that you suddenly feel fingers inside of the jacket—tickling, pinching and slapping. There’s no one in sight, yet you can’t escape the sensations. It would set you off, too, now wouldn’t it?

  Others I speak to, claiming to be an 18th century ancestor who’s returned to possess them. They scream until their throats shred, until their overseers pour in, jabbing with needles of tranquility.

  * * *

  I flow back into the female department, into a certain locked room. Therein, I encounter a bed-bound woman: scrawny, wearing a hospital gown stained and soiled. Her ragged black mane cascades onto varicose thighs. Within a lined octogenarian face, her eyes are deep-sunken.

  I coat her countenance like a porcelain mask. Replicating her skull’s contours, I sink subcutaneously, into flesh dominion. Opening Martha Stanton’s eyes, I grin up at the ceiling.

  * * *

  Tomorrow, Carter—the decrepit remnants of an ex-husband—will arrive, to park himself patiently at my bedside. Squinting through his thick lenses, wearing his stupid visitor sticker, he’ll say what he always says: “Douglas died years ago, Martha. It’s time for you to move past it, to come back to the real world.”

  He’ll spill out the usual pained confusion, unable to understand that I cannot think as he does, that this body’s personality burned up long ago. Eventually, he’ll sigh an
d leave the room, to talk with a green-scrubbed orderly in the hallway. Thinking themselves out of earshot, they’ll recite the same old script.

  I’ll hear the usual buzzwords: “catatonia,” “institutional syndrome,” and all the rest. Finally, the orderly will escort Carter out. Driving tearfully from Milford Asylum, he’ll swear never to return. He always does.

  Such a sad man, so broken. I think I’ll save him for last.

  The Ritual

  Jennifer Loring

  He pushed the gas pedal all the way down to the floor. Never fast enough. Maybe something in the two cars he kept out front, something he could use to improve the engine. He buried the needle of his ancient Datsun and passed front yards and playgrounds as the beast inside him cried out for sustenance.

  Houses flashed by. He did not look at their judgmental clapboard facades, their ostracizing sameness. Pills rattled in their amber bottle on the passenger seat. They made him sick, worse than the damned cancer itself.

  You deserve it, the people within those houses would say. You should’ve died in that fire. He wanted to burn the evidence, his neighbors said; they told the papers as much. But there was no evidence because there was no crime, unless thought itself had become unlawful. Yet he had sought to scorch the impurities from his mind and body with those purgative flames, and for a time, it had worked. In the hospital, pain taunted him like a schoolyard bully. It relentlessly prodded his nerves until his screams woke the entire ward and the nurse added more morphine to his IV drip, which slowly pried away each agonizing finger.

  He glanced at the face in the rearview mirror. Fifty-five, close-cropped hair like iron needles driven into his scalp. Shiny pink skin where flames had incinerated several layers of flesh. He should’ve died in that fire.

  That was the whole idea.

  In another life, he would still be a teacher. He locked away the demon feeding on him, bound it in chains of propriety and social orthodoxy. But they invaded his dreams at night with their slender, coltish legs and bright eyes and cotton-candy colored T-shirts that barely concealed the embryonic buds of their breasts. Their coquettish pink mouths whispered his name in his ear. His cock a throbbing red club, a weapon with which to choke them, to make the whispers stop.

  God help him.

  Faster.

  * * *

  He returned home with plastic bags bulging—gifts for my granddaughter, he explained to the clerk who tried not to make eye contact with him, though he read the grotesque fascination on her face all the same. And anyway, he hadn’t seen his granddaughter since her birth. He put a record on the player and sank into his tattered, vintage leather armchair. Those candy-colored colts from his dreams barely knew what a record was except as an artifact of their grandparents’ old age.

  I am so lost to the world with which I used to waste so much time, Kathleen Ferrier sang in German, the vinyl crackling beneath her warm contralto. She was dying then, the same black beast that gnawed upon his digestive tract having already taken one of her breasts. Only 41 when she died the following year. And the music was like God’s love, wonderful and tragic all at once.

  * * *

  Bears lived in the woods surrounding his cinderblock cabin, which used to provide shelter for hunters braving the cold, dense pine forest. No windows faced the dirt road, and the suburbanites who walked their dogs so close to his home—did they hope to catch him in the act? Kill him, even?—told themselves their pets shied away from the area because they’d caught the scent of larger animals. Yet inevitably, they cast their suspicious gazes at the nearby gravel pit, and he could almost hear their thoughts: He buries them there, doesn’t he? All the cops have to do is look.

  But they would find nothing. Everything locked away in spaces only he knew of, like the demon feasting on his soul. Hiding in plain sight as the worst monsters always did.

  Overnight it had snowed another four inches, adding to the six inches of powder that already coated the world. He walked out into the backyard and lay down in the fluffy white field. Cold burned like a cleansing fire in his nostrils, burned going down his throat and into his lungs. He opened his eyes and stared up into the gleaming yellow face of God until his eyes watered, and moved his arms and legs up and down. The cherub took shape beneath him and he smiled, for there was still something pure within him, a promise of Heaven despite all his sins.

  * * *

  A tow truck dragged away the two junkers. He found an old but functional replacement and hoped it contained what the Datsun needed.

  He used to leave precisely at seven a.m., but now that winter break had begun, they flitted about in front yards he could see from his own and along the streets of town, a plague. No, not a plague, for he was the one who was ill. He must remember that, or it was all for naught. Desperation compelled him to make his trips every two hours, or sometimes every half hour on the worst days. Different stores each time, though there were only so many within reasonable driving distance. They mustn’t detect a pattern in his purchases.

  He was close now, felt the slimy black fiend devouring him from the inside out. Shitting blood every morning. Yet even now, the relentless compulsion to drive, to act out the ritual when he should have been lying in bed waiting to die. His son would come and clean out the place as quickly as possible. His son believed what they all said. Your father, that crazy old hermit in the woods. I heard he used to teach. I heard what he did. Say, did they ever excavate that gravel pit?

  So little time left to make them understand. Temptation itself was the serpent’s whisper in his ear, but after the incident that cost him his job, he had never touched. Had never acted upon them with the desires that held him prisoner. It wasn’t their fault. Something had broken inside him, and he made the necessary sacrifices in response. They would never know what he’d done to protect them.

  * * *

  He rolled up all the windows, sealed the inside and outside with duct tape, then started the engine. It roared into life with vigor it hadn’t possessed since he bought it in that other lifetime. The pills lay beside him on the seat. This is why he did it, they would say. He didn’t want to rot away. But they would also say it was guilt, and that wasn’t so far from the truth. A man could live with himself only for so long, and he had grown too sick for battle. Just one option remained if he lost the will to fight the demon. Like the thing annihilating his colon, his very life was a tumor he must excise from society. How perfect, how beautiful, was God’s irony.

  He leaned back and closed his eyes. He didn’t deserve such a peaceful end, they would say. But peace was a comfortable myth invented by the self-righteous. The war inside him raged even in those terminal moments, when he dreamed of coltish legs and bright eyes and budding breasts.

  Someone, someday, might look under the floorboards and gaze in horror. Bright blue eyes and shining nylon hair in the darkness, greeting the glow of a flashlight. He gave each of them a name.

  Dolls in cheerful dresses, which below the waist he had torn apart with scissors or even his bare hands. Each genital area gouged with a knife or scissors, or burned to blackened, melted goo with a lighter, until the legs dangled from their butchered artificial crotches. Love and hatred, irreconcilable. His gift of life to the real girls whose names the dolls bore. The townsfolk would stare again at the gravel pit, now grown over with wildflowers and grasses, a meadow just as it had been many years ago. An unmarked grave.

  But they would recall no unexplained disappearances or unsolved murders as long as he had lived there. It had always been for the girls. His corrupted body and mind the ultimate sacrifice. The ritual completed at last.

  Hair

  Mike Thorn

  Tonight, Theodore voluntarily ingested hair for the first time.

  He hadn’t seen a barber in years, and it showed, but he made no effort to keep his locks from landing in his meals. He always let his bangs hang untethered as he tended to the pans on his stove top; the decision to leave his mane untied while cooking had excited him fo
r quite some time. Truth was he loved nothing more than gliding his utensils through a plate of hot food and uncovering a hair curled between the ingredients, or rising from the sauce like some illicit secret.

  In the past, he’d always left it at that. The discovery of a hair was exciting in itself, even dangerous. Tonight, though, when he saw not one but several of his own hairs twined around a spear of asparagus, he made no move to pick them away. He felt the familiar physical reactions: accelerated heart rate, a warming face, the prickling alertness that seemed somehow to bring every follicle on his flesh to life.

  And rather than cutting the sensation short, rather than riding the wave of excitement and then, post-climax, removing the hairs and going on with his meal, he smiled to himself and nodded. His life as the manager of a dirty, dead-end rock and metal T-shirt shop simply didn’t afford him enough joy. What could be wrong, then, with allowing himself such real, palpable elation when it presented itself? He pierced the asparagus and lifted it from his plate, watching as the hairs swayed slightly from its shaft. Then, careful to avoid allowing the greasy threads to drift uneaten from the vegetable, he plunged the fork into his mouth, closed his eyes, and chewed.