SNM Horror Magazine

Page Down to Read the Current June Madness Issue.

*We publish a new issue every month on the 1st of the month. We are here on behalf of the interest of the writers to promote them on a consistent basis. We will feature 8 new short stories every month. Thanks and enjoy the June issue of SNM MAG.

                                                    THEME:

 Insanity, euphoria, dimentia - leading to madness!

                        Current Issue 1

Madness in the Blood -- Catherine Graham 2nd Pl

Crawlspace -- Matthew Lowes 3rd place

Two Words Apart -- Derek Hayes

In The Room No One Sees -- Philip Roberts

                                SEE ISSUE BELOW

Madness In The Blood

 Katie Graham 

           For seven days Jen watched the body count pile up on the news. Five dead on Wednesday, 8 on Thursday, 12 on Friday. The numbers kept going up every day and the numbers went so high that on the seventh day she decided she couldn’t watch the news anymore. She switched it off and went out for a walk, but still she couldn’t escape the escalating numbers of dead people in her city.  People were talking about them at the bus stop, in the coffee shops and in the queue for the cash machine. Everyone could see what was happening but no one knew why…except for Jen.

          She knew the truth and for that reason she didn’t want to be around people, having to listen to their false speculations.  Especially since their conclusions were wrong. She headed back home the way she had come, back across the Kelvin Bridge in Glasgow’s West End. It was here that she encountered the first victim of the terrible mistake she had made. 

         This victim was standing on the railing of the bridge. Still alive, but she could tell it wasn’t going to be for very long. 

          She looked like a student, Jen thought. Jen was a student too, but she didn’t have the haunted eyes that this girl did. The haunted eyes that said the other student’s heart was already dead.  She still looked pretty though. Even through her despair she was going to leave a beautiful corpse. Maybe that’s why so many people were trying to talk her down but they were all wasting their time because she had made up her mind, just like the rest of them had. Then she said the words that Jen had hoped she would never hear again because this wasn’t the first time she’d heard them. It was like an echo from a very close past. Almost exactly the same words that haunted her now. 

          “There’s something in my veins.  It’s eating my joy” And then she jumped. 

          Shortly afterwards Jen felt herself being pushed out of the way by a Policeman.

          “That’s what they all say,” he said to himself.

          Jen replied “I know. It was on the news” but that’s not where she had first heard it.

          The first time she heard about it she laughed.  It was in a meeting for her student magazine. She had taken charge of a column that no one wanted called “The Odd Column.”

          She’d been asked to go see someone she didn’t want to see. A pretentious photographer named Dawn who’d won all the awards the college could offer and had gone into the world and won more. Jen thought her superficial and fake because she was never without a smile. She looked like the happiest person in the world. She was bouncy and full of energy and that frightened Jen because she wasn’t like that. Jen was the darker, more gothic type who believed in nothing except that to be Bohemian and interesting she had to be wary of such types who had happiness to share.  Someone with such happiness did not usually seek out the services of The Odd Column. 

          The Odd Column dealt with the strange, the bizarre and the stupid. Jen had to follow up every lead though because that was what the Odd Column had always been about. So when her editor told her that Dawn was back in Glasgow and had an odd story for the Odd Column, she had to go. 

          “Do you have any details?” she asked.

          “No,” said the editor. “Just that something has eaten away at her happiness”

          Jen laughed.

          “No,” said the editor. “It’s not funny. She said it lived in her veins for about a month before she realized and by the time she found someone to remove it, it was too late. It had eaten every ounce of joy she had ever owned.”

          “That’s a lot of joy,” said Jen, remembering Dawn’s smile.

          “Why did she ask to talk to me?” inquired Jen.

          “She didn’t, she asked to talk to me. She wanted me to take her seriously, but she’s crazy. There’s no way its real. She’s just spent too much time in a scary place.  Now she’s gone mad.”

          “Where was the scary place?”

          “Afghanistan. It’s a war zone.”

“Why did she go there?”

          “Because she said she was sick of people telling her she just took pictures of safe, happy things. So she wanted to go somewhere to prove that she was a serious photographer.”

          “But she won all those awards” said Jen.

          “She wanted more. So off she went to Afghanistan to talk to people caught up in the war. No one heard from her for over a year. She said I was the first person she’s talked to after she got back. And there was something odd about her.”

          “But you don’t want to talk to her?” Jen asked.

          “No. I wouldn’t be able to stop laughing. But I thought of you because you never laugh. You’re the most serious person I know.”

          “Thanks” she said.

          “I'll buy you a pizza if you go,” he smiled. “It sounds interesting.”

          “Okay,” Jen said.  She hadn’t had a pizza for weeks.

          “But you can’t tell her you’re from The Odd Column. She used to be a student here, too.  She knows what that means.”

          “I won’t,” Jen said and set off to the most expensive, most Bohemian part of Glasgow. This was where Dawn Smith lived, in a great big house that her prize money had bought her in the Byers Road end of the Great Western Road.

           She tentatively knocked on the door and could hear someone walking toward it, but no one answered. Jen listened carefully and could tell someone was looking at her through the peephole.

          “Dawn. I’m from the Art College,” Jen shouted. “You asked me to come here.”

          There was more hesitation so Jen stood back as the door was pulled open just a little, as far as a hook and chain would allow.

          “Can we do an interview on the doorstep, through the chain?” asked a woman she couldn’t see but presumed to be Dawn. 

          “No. That’s weird. You have to let me in.”

          “I can’t.  You’re not going to like what you see,” she stated.

          “Dawn, don’t be silly. I’ve seen you before. You didn’t know me, though. I was in first year when you were in third. You were fit to be looked at.”

          “I’m not now.” she said quietly.

          “You can’t have changed that much” Jen said.

          “Okay.  I’ll let you in, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” 

          There was quite a long pause, as if Dawn had run off to find something and then the hook was removed from the door chain. It slowly began to open to reveal a tiny petite figure swathed from head to toe in colorful Eastern scarves over loose fitting Eastern Pyjama trousers and a top. From what she could see it wasn’t very monstrous, but that wasn’t very much. The only visible part of her was her eyes. Dawn saw what Jen was thinking.

          “It’s under the scarves” Dawn said.

          “What is?”

          “I can’t tell you until you know the whole story.”

          “Okay,” she said.

          “I’ll make you a cup of tea,” said Dawn, but I can’t make it without taking off my scarves, so I’ll have to shut my kitchen door on you.”

          Again Jen said that it was okay.

          “It’s a bit dark, though. Can I open the curtains?” she asked going over to the window to do just that, thinking there wouldn’t be a problem.

          But Dawn shouted.  “No!”

          Jen looked shocked and Dawn looked terrified.

          “You can’t let light into my house. It could kill me!”

          “Okay. I won’t do that. I won’t open them.”

          So the kitchen door was shut and Dawn made sure she heard the door click before she began the process of the tea making.

          Jen took the opportunity to take a look around the gloomy living room, but it wasn’t dusty or untidy. In fact, it was spotlessly clean and artfully decorated with Dawn’s photos. Some of them were from her brief career; a lot of them were from her travels to the East. Deserts, Nomads and happy smiling people, mostly.  Poppies and Lapis Lazuli and for the first time in this dark gloom Jen appreciated what people saw in Dawn’s work. It was frozen happiness. For an instant people could catch a glimpse of the state of mind Dawn had lived in. She gave a small piece of her own happiness away with every photo that she took but yet she had remained unchanged…until now. It left Jen wondering what had happened. What could have gone so horribly wrong to create such a frightened creature in colourful scarves? 

          Dawn appeared at the door but not with the tea. “Could you help me with the tea?” she asked. “I can’t lift it without you seeing what it’s done to me.”

          “It?” asked Jen coming to get the tea. She carried it to the living room and placed it on the table where Dawn promptly sat.

          “You’ll have to pour it,” she said and I won’t be having any because I can’t without you see…”

          Jen got annoyed by this. “Just tell me.  Tell me what it is.” 

          “Okay. It started when I went to Afghanistan. I wanted to see the sky and the sandstone colored deserts and the Lapis Lazuli mountain. And I did. I saw everything that I ever wanted to. I also wanted to see the people behind the war and I did that too. I went into the mountain and got access to people I had never seen before. And I loved every minute of it…until I saw someone being burned alive.” 

          She looked at Jen for her reaction, but Jen wasn’t easily shocked and asked her to carry on and Dawn did. Dawn told her about how she had been traveling across country to go see Nomads with horses when she came across a succession of strange burnings in villages high up in the mountains. Through night and day Dawn and her companions continued through these villages and so did the burnings. 

          In every village there was evidence of the same seemingly ritualistic burnings. Witches of old came to mind, and Pagan ceremonies. Dawn said how she had stopped occasionally to take a photograph but the sadness of the scenes made her stop after a while. She hadn’t come to look for sorrow; she’d come to look for hope. But none was to be found except in the last village she came to where she was invited into someone’s house for a cup of tea. But the calm of that simple tea drinking session didn’t last long because as she left the house of this family, she saw a man being led from his house by a group of what looked like mourners at a funeral. They said prayers and hugged him. They looked like they were saying tearful goodbye.

         Dawn said the mourners led the man to the middle of a town square and that she watched as he shot himself through the head.  “It’s to save the village,” said an interpreter she was traveling with, but he wouldn’t explain any further. Dawn watched a Pyre being lit and the body was mournfully thrown on the fire.

          Quickly they moved and came to the desert landscape with the colourful people she had come to see. She saw the horses running wild and she was happy again. This was what she had come to see and quickly forgot about the burnings and the sadness, until she saw “that thing” for the very first time. 

         Just a fleeting glimpse at first. A bump that appeared then disappeared on the back of her hand. Then it was in her forearm and then gone again. A few days past until she saw it again. This time it was in a mirror running across her face but, to her horror, it wasn’t on the outside, it was on the inside, under the surface of her skin. She screamed and one of the interpreters came running. She told him her story but he showed no sign of shock. He just stared in a sadly detached way. Then others arrived from her traveling party and they turned away from her to discuss the situation. They repeated a word the villagers had used and then they told her that this was the reason why the villagers had burned their loved ones. It was quite common. The way they dealt with it was the best way to keep “the thing” localized in one person and not to allow it to spread to other people.  Dawn realized what they wanted her to do. 

          “I’m not going to kill myself,” she said.

          “It’s for the best” said her translator. “It’s best you do it now.  You’ll save yourself a lot of suffering.”  

“What do you mean?” She asked.

“Over the next few days” He explained, “that thing is going to get bigger and it’s going to start eating endorphins in your brain.   It’s what they do.  They live in your blood and they eat your “happy chemicals.” You’re about to experience misery beyond belief.”

          “There must be another way,” she probed. 

          “There is but it’s not nice” he said. 

          “Tell me,” she screamed.

          “You have to trap it in you arm and then chop it off,” said her interpreter.

          Dawn decided she wasn’t going to do that either, so for the next week she sat with a pair of scissors and set about trying to catch the creature. She cut and jabbed at her arms and legs and face every time she saw the creature rise to the surface beneath her skin. She became so demented that she spent all day doing it and soon was scarred from head to foot. Eventually she agreed that she had to succumb to the arm chopping. Ten days before she was due to leave Afghanistan for good, her fellow interpreters took her to an Army hospital and they performed the operation. They were good at it.  They had performed the operation many times before but would never speak about it. It was a secret of war. They also treated her wounds but they couldn’t do anything about the scars…or the terrible bleak misery that had descended over her entire being.  They were there forever. They told her this fact as soon as she woke up. They also did something more shocking: they presented her with the creature that had done this to her. It was a very pretty and shiny, red iridescent beetle in a jar. They told her about her new responsibility toward this beetle.

          They told her she had to keep it happy, and he showed her how to do it.  Her interpreter took some blood from her arm and mixed it with some brown powder in a spoon and then began to cook it up like a junkie would. This was heroin. The beetle had to be fed this drug three times a day along with some of Dawn’s blood, otherwise it would die.

          “But that’s good, isn’t it?” Dawn asked. “We want it dead.”

          “No.” He said. “You don’t, because it’s got the last of your happiness in its veins and so long as it’s close to you, you get to enjoy the reflection of a happiness that used to be yours. Without this your soul will die. So in order for you to live, you have to keep the beetle with you at all times and you have to keep him fed.”

          “With Heroin?” Dawn Shrieked. 

          “And blood. He needs blood, too. Yours, to be precise. It’s the closest thing to Endorphins you’ll be able to find for him and he looks quite happy on it.”

          “I don’t want to carry that thing around with me. I want to forget about it. How did it get into my bloodstream anyway?”

          “Through the water you drank in the villages, which reminds me…”

          “What?” She asked.

          “There’s one more thing.”

          “What?”  She said       

         “You can’t ever let him go, because if you do, he’ll go to the nearest source of water and lay eggs. Millions of eggs, which will infiltrate the water systems and infect millions of people with the same thing that you have, filling people with the desire to kill themselves all over whatever city you chose to go back to live in.”

         “And that’s the whole story” confessed Dawn abruptly to Jen, pulling off her scarves to reveal that she was covered from head to foot in terrible scars. She did indeed have one arm and as Jen put down her cup of tea, Dawn reached under the table and produced the bottle with the shiny red beetle inside.

         “I’m giving him to you,” she said.

         “But according to what you were told, you’ll die.” said Jen.

         “It’s yours now. It’s what you came for. Here’s your story.”

         Jen laughed. She didn’t know what had happened to Dawn in Afghanistan, but she didn’t believe her story. She took the beetle and Dawn told her it was time for her to leave. The door got shut behind her and the next thing Jen heard was a gunshot, just as she reached the bottom of the garden. The shock of the sound made her drop the bottle and the beetle quickly scurried away.    

         Jen went to the police and was treated to the same disbelief that Dawn had been given by Jen herself. She told them they had to help her find the beetle before it was too late. But they didn’t and when Jen saw the bodies start to pile up on the news she knew why and who was to blame.  She was. If she couldn’t help save her city she didn’t want to have to be tortured by the sight of the horrors she knew were coming. She decided she wasn’t going to be there when the plague got started.

        She stood there on the bridge like the girl who had jumped and wondered whether the policeman would believe her now. Even if he did, how would that solve anything with her or the epidemic she released into the world?

        The last she remembered was her body slicing through the air and the water swallowing her whole. 

                                                             *

Catherine Graham joins us from across the pond in the U.K. She makes a very impressive SNM debut landing second place. This is actually her debut horror story and she is working on completing her debut novel with a target date of September '09. She has a book of published poetry that you can find by simply Googling 'Poetry by Catherine Graham.' She has had one other short story published in The Battered Suitcase Magazine and is just breaking into print. We hope to see more of her work here. We were honored to see her goth it up a bit for her photoshoot!

          www.myspace.com/catherineagraham 

              Catherine Graham

Crawlspace

Matthew Lowes

The mind, like the world, is a house in which our reality lives, and even though the foundation may be sound, there is a crawlspace between the floor and the ground, often overlooked or forgotten, in which dwell things undreamt of.

  --Samuel Bjorn, Auxerre University

In the moments just before sleep, a noise could be anything: ice-cubes dropping from the automatic ice maker, the wind brushing branches against the exterior, or the creaking of wood as the house settled. This was different though. Whatever it was woke Michael as if it carried a tell-tale sign of an intruder, a quality of non-randomness, a certain sense of deliberateness or intent. He sat there in the dark, his wife curled at his side, listening, and half wondering if it was only a dream. Then he heard it again.

The sound was a sort of scuffling and flopping, like a wet dog shaking and shuffling its feet with excitement. It lasted only a moment and then silence. He couldn’t tell where it had come from. “Deidre,” he whispered, gently touching his wife’s side. “Wake up,” he said with urgency in his hushed voice.

He could see the outlines of her face in the almost complete darkness, illuminated as if by some trace of moonlight that penetrated the closed blinds of their bedroom. The lids of her eyes broke open slightly, but for the darkness he could not see the eyes within, just black pools as if her sockets were empty. Her voice was creaky with sleep. “What is it?”

“I heard something.”

“What?” she said, sleep beginning to leave her voice.

“Listen.” There was silence. Then for a brief moment Michael heard it again, a scuffling sound somewhere in the far reaches of the darkened house. “Did you hear that?”

“Don’t know.” Deidre was fully awake now. “What do you think it is?”

“It sounds like there’s somebody in the house.”

Deidre sat up and the light revealed her troubled eyes.

“I’m sure that’s not it, though,” Michael reassured her. “I’ll go check it out.” He started to slide out of bed, but Deidre grabbed his wrist for a moment.

“Be careful. I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to you.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing.”

Michael treaded softly down the hallway, consciously trying to stay calm in the face of a creeping fear. His heart pounded in the darkness. When he reached the kitchen he flipped the switch and the whole room was flooded with light. It hurt his eyes for a moment, but everything looked normal. It was probably nothing. They had only been there a few weeks and they were still getting used to the sounds of the old house.

Despite his relief, as a matter of course Michael went about checking every room in the house. He turned the light on, looked around, turned the light off and moved on. After checking the front and back door he headed back to the bedroom. As he crossed the living room though, he heard the noise again, this time closer. It was a loud scuffling flopping sound. So suddenly did it break the silence that he shook with fright and frantically looked around the room for the source of the strange sound.

There was nothing out of place; no stirring of movement, no sign of an intruder. The sound continued intermittently. There was something about it that unnerved him. The sound seemed almost repulsive, disgusting. He peered out the window, into the fireplace, and looked everywhere. He listened intently, trying to figure out where the damned thing was coming from. Standing there, it finally dawned on him as he looked down at the hardwood floor beneath his feet. It was coming from underneath the house. There was something down there in the crawlspace.

Their house sat on a foundation and between the sub-floor and the ground was a crawlspace. The first time Michael peered into it he immediately understood why. There was about three feet between the underside of the floor and the bare ground. It was a dirty hole; a cramped expanse that spread across the entire house, riddled with obstacles, infested with cobwebs, dust and darkness. It ran a maze of water pipes and heating ducts. 

One look was enough for Michael to know that he didn’t ever want to have anything to do with a crawlspace. Being mildly claustrophobic, a tight space like that was bad enough, but add to it dirt, old nails, scraps of fiberglass insulation, spiders, rodents, and who knows what else, and there was no way that Michael would ever go in there. He left that to the house inspector, who apparently crawled around down there before giving it the okay.

As he stood in his living room, listening to the strange noises coming up through the floor, Michael wondered if the inspector could have missed something. It didn’t sound like anything that could be missed though. An animal must have gotten in there. After a few moments the awful noise died down again. Michael sighed, told himself it must be an animal and headed back to the bedroom to tell Deidre.

Tomorrow he would have to call somebody out to take a look. He kept trying to picture what kind of animal it could be. It was definitely bigger than a rat. Maybe a raccoon, he thought, but nothing seemed to make sense, nothing seemed to fit with those terrible sounds. He fell into a restless fitful sleep in which he tried to figure it out, but from the darkness of unconscious all that came was some indescribable presence, as terrible and formless as the darkness itself.

                                                             *

The following day, while Deidre was attending classes at law school, Michael called Pest Arrest and made arrangements for somebody to come out and take a look under the house. Michael worked out of a home office, writing code for a local software company. One of the advantages to working at home was that it was easy to take care of these things. Pest Arrest actually had a guy there that afternoon.

They stood in the garage together, where there was access to the crawlspace underneath the stairs that went up to Michael's office above. The guy from Pest Arrest was suited up in a pair of coveralls, a face mask and safety glasses. He armed himself with a big flashlight.

In the back of his mind, Michael could hear that noise he heard last night. He looked at the flashlight. “Aren’t you going to take a trap or something?”

“I’m just going to take a look, hon. You said it sounded like a raccoon?”

“I don’t know. It sounded like something was...down there. Maybe some kind of animal, but I don’t know.”

The guy switched on his flashlight. “I’ll check it out,” he said. He stepped into the crawlspace, bent down onto all fours, bellied into the dirt and disappeared headfirst in the darkness.

Michael waited. He peered into the hole once but he couldn’t see anything but a patch of dirt and some distant random flickers of the man’s flashlight. He could hear him crawling further and further away. After a few minutes, he called into the hole, “How’s it going down there?” …No reply. He called louder. “Do you see anything?”

“I still have to check the back,” a voice called from a distance that seemed too far to be under his house. “I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

Michael waited for what seemed like a long time. Suddenly the man’s head popped up from the hole to the crawlspace. “I found a kitty,” he said. As if to explain he lifted his hand and tossed the desiccated carcass of a cat onto the garage floor. It hit the floor with a sickening brittle thud and slid a little on the concrete. It was barely recognizable as a cat at first. All of its fur was gone. The skin was black and shriveled up around its bones like dried leather. The body was intact, laying on its side in the position it must have died in, paws curled, head back, mouth open. It had the appearance of an unraveled mummy, the picture of a drawn out, perpetual moment of death. “Sorry,” the guy said, as if suddenly realizing that it might be considered rude to toss dead animals around somebody else’s garage. “I thought you probably wouldn’t want that left under there.”

“Of course,” Michael said.

“That cat’s been dead for a long time. I didn’t find any recent signs of an animal,” the guy said, writing up the bill on his clipboard.

Michael didn’t say anything for a moment; he just stared at the mummified cat. “He probably crawled in there to die,” he said, still lost in his thought. “Cat’s do that. They know when they’re going to die and they go away someplace to be by themselves.” There was a strange compassion in his voice, a sadness that followed his train of thought. The cat’s shriveled face bared its bone white fangs at him. Its empty sockets seemed to look at him.

                                                               *

Later that night, Michael finally had a chance to tell Deidre about the exterminator. “All they found was a dead cat.”

“It was a cat?”

“No this cat had been dead for a while.”

Deidre thought for a moment. “Well, that’s good.”

“What is?”

“It was probably just the pipes or something.”

“It wasn’t the pipes. There was something down there.”

“Well, whatever it was it’s gone now, so you can forget about it.”

But Michael couldn’t forget about it. In fact it was all he could think about. He lay awake most of that night, listening for every bump and sound, his ear trained downward for any noise. Every now and again he thought he heard it, fainter than the night before, somewhere beneath the floor of the house. He woke Deidre once or twice, but she couldn’t hear it. She just mumbled for him to go back to sleep.

The following day Michael didn’t touch his work. He wandered about the house, searching every place, listening to every wall and floor. He went around the outside of the house, shining a light into the darkness behind every screened vent in the crawlspace and saw nothing. For hours he searched online, looking for information on every possible pest or animal that could get into a crawlspace. He even looked into possible plumbing and structural problems, but found nothing useful.

Finally, he took his flashlight and went into the garage. He removed the boards that covered the hole under the stairs and for a long time he stood there, flashlight hanging uselessly at his side, and stared into the blackness of the hole. After a while he gathered his courage, turned on the flashlight, and bent down to look inside. From there he peered all around, as far as his light would show him. He didn’t know what he expected, but he was surprised to see nothing, just the same dirt and darkness that was there yesterday.

He said nothing to Deidre that night, but the thing in the crawlspace was ever on his mind, growing in his awareness, tickling the drum of his ear, consuming more and more of his thoughts. In the following weeks he fell further behind in his work. He called out Guardian Pest Control and then Kill ‘em Dead, but they found nothing.

Soon Michael was waking Deidre up several times a night. “I can’t sleep,” he would say. “I can hear it,” he would say, sometimes shaking her violently. “Listen, listen!” But she could never hear it. His eyes went bloodshot. The sheets grew salty from his sweat. “It’s there,” he[d whisper. “There’s something down there.”

Deidre became increasingly irritated at Michael and all of the disruptions in her sleep, especially when she was up late working on assignments and leaving for school early. When she wasn’t irritated, she was concerned. Michael was getting almost no sleep at all, and he too became more and more irritable. They began to fight over sleep, over dinner, over his work, over almost anything, and especially over the crawlspace.

When they made up afterwards, they talked about how much stress they were under, about how things would be better in the summer. But the thing in the crawlspace never let Michael forget. In fact, he began to hear it more frequently. Sometimes as Deidre slept he would slip from her arms and wander the house, listening, following its movement. He heard it beneath the living room first, then the kitchen, then the spare room, then his office, and finally the bedroom too, sometimes right beneath their bed. Soon he began to notice a smell also. Wherever it was, a pungent, nauseating smell was seeping up through the floor.

One night Deidre awoke and found Michael on his knees in the living room, crawling around with his ear to floor. She watched him for a moment, not knowing whether to be confused, sad, or angry. But it was three in the morning. She had to be up at six, and she had just about had it with this. “Did you not want to move here? Is that it?”

Michael looked up, startled, as if he hadn’t even realized she was there. “What are you talking about?”

“Sometimes I feel like you’re trying to mess things up for me. Every time I have a lot of work to do something comes up, some problem with the house.”

Michael got up off the floor. “It’s not the house,” he said, desperately trying to make her understand. “It’s the crawlspace. There’s something in there. I can feel it.”

“What Michael? What’s in there for Christ’s sake?”

“I don’t know.”

“Michael, I’m scared. I feel like this is really a problem.”

“I know. I fear it’s something horrible.”

“No, Michael. The problem isn’t with the crawlspace. It’s your obsession with it. Listen, maybe you should see somebody.”

Michael backed away from her. “You want me to forget. You would like that wouldn’t you, if I forgot all about it?”

“Yes,” Deidre said flatly. “I would.”

Then Michael looked at her as if he were seeing something he had never seen before, as if some deep realization dawned upon his addled brain. “It’s you. Somehow it’s gotten to you,” he said.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, but I can’t take this any more. I love you, Michael, but I can’t take this. This weekend I’m going to that conference. When I get back you’re either going to stop this nonsense or you’re going to see a therapist.”

                                                             *

Michael found himself standing beside the bed in the darkness. It was as if he had awoken there from some dreamless sleep of which he had no memory. He had no idea how long he had stood there or what he was doing. Had he been sleepwalking? Then he remembered. He had been listening to the thing in the crawlspace. With his ear pressed against the floorboards he could hear it, mere inches away, as if pressed against the opposite side of a pane of glass. There had been something more than the horrible scuffling, something more than the putrid stench that seeped between the cracks. As those things faded into the back of his mind, there was a voice, a whisper in the darkness. Even now it seemed to whisper from the black recesses of his memory.

When had he first heard this whisper? Was it just this night, or was it some nights or weeks ago? He couldn’t remember. His gaze fell upon Deidre, sleeping soundly in the bed, her peaceful face illuminated by a pale ambient light of indeterminate origin. There was such a perfect grace in her repose that he felt overwhelmed with love for her. There was almost a palpable sense in his heart, a sort of pulling ache, an unquenchable longing to draw ever close to her, to bask in the beauty of her presence. He felt on the verge of epiphany, as if rising above the confusing morass that was his mind of late, into the midst of at least a moment of utter clarity.

His gaze fell down then, and he followed it, all the way down to his right hand, which hung at his side at the end of a limp arm, loosely grasping the handle of a .38 caliber revolver. Michael never owned a gun, and this one felt a million miles away, completely disconnected from his body. Yet there it was in his right hand. Slowly, as if the neurons of his brain were trying to play catch-up, he began to feel the solid, metallic, horrible weight of this strange object.

Then, as if from the fog of insignificant memories he vaguely recalled going into Sport One and purchasing the gun some two weeks ago. How could he have forgotten such a thing? He could only assume that he had bought the gun to protect them from whatever was in the crawlspace, but what was he doing standing here with it?

He looked from the gun to his sleeping wife, and suddenly he imagined something infinitely more horrible. It’s not her at all, he realized. It hadn’t gotten to Deidre at all. It’s me, he thought, my God, it’s me. And with this realization came another kind of clarity in which he knew exactly what he had to do. Whatever happened, he could never let Deidre come to harm. She was leaving for the weekend on Friday. It was now 3:30am on Thursday. The first thing he had to do was stay awake.

Michael didn’t sleep at all, and for two days he tried to show Deidre that things had taken a turn for the better. He didn’t talk about the crawlspace, or the noises he still heard down there in the night. In the dark, while she slept, he lay awake with cotton stuffed in his ears to ward off any voices from below. Even as the bags beneath his eyes grew and his face became gaunt and his body hollow, he told Deidre that he was feeling better. “I think everything’s going to be fine now,” he said. “I’ll catch up on some work this weekend.”

Perhaps she hadn’t noticed how tired he had begun to look, or perhaps she was just happy to hear that he was doing better, or relieved not to hear about the crawlspace. When Michael dropped her off at the airport she touched his face, her eyes filled with a loving warmth. “Get some rest, Michael,” was all she said.

“I love you,” Michael said.

“I love you too.” She kissed him, then got out of the car. She looked back once as she passed through the doors of the airport terminal. Her smile and her brief wave were full of hope.

                                                            *

The thing in the crawlspace didn’t seem to awake before 10:00 pm. Michael waited. He sat at the dining room table, drank coffee, rubbed his eyes and waited. More than once he was startled by some twitching movement from the corner of his eye. He attributed this to a lack of sleep. His thoughts were lucid, but sluggish, as though they had joined in some slow pantomime parade. The gun and a flashlight were on the table in front of him. He planned to take care of this thing once and for all.

As the hour grew late a familiar haunting sound returned beneath his feet. He could not say at what moment it began that night, only that around the hour of eleven it was there. It scuffled in the dirt below with some sort of monstrous appendages that would occasionally flop and thud against the underside of the sub-floor. For Michael, who was already resolved upon his actions, there was nothing to be done but to carry out his plan before it was too late, before something stopped him from doing so, before he fell asleep, before that thing took control of him forever.

He noted where the sound of the thing was loudest, then took the gun and flashlight and went into the garage. His breath became rapid and heavy as he cast aside the boards that covered the opening to the crawlspace. With his right hand he pointed the gun down into the hole. With his left he aimed the flashlight. A small patch of featureless dirt was illuminated in the beam, beyond whose radiance lay in utter darkness. He leaned in toward the hole and tentatively craned his head down for a better look around. The crawlspace was a cave-like fissure between house and the ground. From the entrance he couldn’t see very far into the darkness, but what he did see was only boards and dry dirt as his light would allow. He took a deep breath to suppress the claustrophobic panic that began to tighten his chest.

With some effort, he lowered himself through the hole in the floorboards, crouched, bent, and crawled into the narrow dark space. The gun felt solid in his hand, more solid than anything, even the ground beneath him. He gripped it tightly, aimed the barrel down the shaft of light that his flashlight cut in the darkness. It was an old house, and here you could see the tangle of water and gas lines, air ducts and wires that had been added on and cobbled together over the years. Parts of the ground were covered with dilapidated plastic, but most of it was just bare dry dirt. Pipes angled and crisscrossed the space just below the joists that had held up the floor. All between those joists hung an endless array of cobwebs like some lacy three dimensional net.

Despite the preponderance of webs, however, he saw not a single spider, nor any other living thing. The space looked to be somehow abandoned, deserted and accursed. Somewhere off to his left at the back of the house was the dining room where he heard the thing loudest. His light, now shaking in his trembling hand, illuminated nothing now but greater darkness.

There was an almost physical pain that arose from the thought of going further into that hole, and an unnatural terrifying fear at what he might discover down there. After a few moments, however, he gritted his teeth and began to crawl.

Soon the feeble light that drifted in through the entrance began to dwindle, and he found himself in the midst of a darkness greater than any he had ever known. It was a long journey across the crawlspace, seemingly longer than possible. With every step he pointed the gun around him, shining the shaking light in every direction. Unsettled dust clouded the air, his eyes, his mouth and his lungs. He carefully bellied under the pipes and air ducts when necessary, edging ever further into the depths of the crawlspace, but he did not hear or smell or see the thing that had finally driven him to this place.

As he reached the very back of the house, all was still silent and he almost thought that it was over, that it had only been in his head, and that everything was going to be okay. For a moment he could imagine making the return journey and emerging into the light a whole person again. It only lasted a moment though, for just as these thoughts came to him, a putrid smell began to invade his nostrils. He heard a loud scuffling behind him and a flopping sound, as if a vast multitude of inhuman limbs were whipping to and fro against the ground below and the boards above. Michael froze. His eyes grew wide with an unearthly fear. He had forgotten everything: the light, the gun; his entire purpose!

Unaware that he was even controlling his muscles, feeling almost as if it were against his will, he turned. He lifted his light, feeling the full doom of destiny upon him, and there at last, in the darkness he saw it. A horror beyond words!

                                                               *

Michael Hastings was found in the crawlspace beneath his house; his eyes eaten out by some animal, so that only empty sockets stared out from a face twisted and frozen in a silenced scream of terror. The flashlight by his hand was still switched on, but the battery had long run out. By his right hand was a .38 caliber revolver from which no shots had ever been fired. An autopsy had revealed the cause of death as cardiac arrest.

Just why he had crawled under the house with a gun, or what caused a healthy man to suddenly die so abruptly, no expert or authority could fully explain. Only Deidre knew what had really happened. It haunted her day and night. She soon dropped out of law school. She sold the house and moved back home to live with her parents. Although she tried desperately to put her life back together, she could never forget. She could never stop thinking about the thing in the crawlspace...

                                                             *

Matthew Lowes claims third place with this creepy, eerie offering as he makes his SNM debut. He is the author of numerous published horror, fantasy and Sci-Fi short stories. His works have been published in Worlds Apart, AlienSkin, Anotherealm, Universe Pathways, Planet Magazine, and now SNM Horror Mag. Matthew has a BA in English from the University of Wisconsin and also an MA in Teaching. He is also an alumni of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. He is now working on "book two" in a trilogy of epic fantasy novels. More information on his books and stories are posted on his website:

                 Matthew Lowes

Two Words Deep

Derek Hayes

          At eighteen, I stood staring into the bathroom mirror. I felt like I was six again and it was the first time I heard the word freak.

           I was in the bathtub with my little brother. William is what I called him. My parents never seemed to give him much attention, so I thought it was my job to take care of him. He never asked, but I always washed him when we took a bath. As I rubbed the soap-soaked sponge over William’s tiny face, I could hear my parents arguing in the other room.

          “It’s not fair,” I heard my mother say, her voice cracking.

          “Jody, be honest,” my father said. “He’s a freak, for God’s sake. Can’t you at least see that much. I mean, what was the first thing the Doc did when that fucking thing came out of you. You remember don’t you?”

          I didn’t know what they were talking about, so I ignored it, and continued playing with my foam blocks.  I dunked them under the water for a moment, before hanging them on the tub wall, one by one in the shape of a castle. It seemed as if William had smiled at my creation, so I smiled as well. He began to cough, a hacking, wet sound, and I knew there would be something coming out of his mouth at any moment. I grabbed some toilet paper, folded it over three or four times and wiped around his open lips careful not to push any of the mucus back into his mouth. A noxious brown-greenish liquid trailed off the tissue, hanging like a wet spider-web until it splashed into the soapy water. The smell reminded me of when dad came home in the morning, instead of late at night. He’d always lift me up and I could see a crusty outline around his lips that begged me to wipe it away, yet his breath smelled the same as William’s mucus and I could never make myself encroach upon it.

          I stood in the tub, the water splashing against my shins. I shivered and William felt the same chill.

          “I wonder where Mom is with our towel,” I said to William.

          He made no effort to reply, his tongue hung limp between his lips. His strange eyes crossed; his head rolled around in a choppy, awkward circle.

          “William, cut it out, I’m going to--”       

         The door flew open and the knob slammed through the wallpaper and sheetrock where it became lodged. The force of the door crashing through the wall reverberated, knocking my foam-block castle, William and me back into the tub. We ended up sitting paralyzed, facing the darkened doorway.

          There were no lights shining behind the figures that outlined the doorframe, but the bathroom light and the steam from the tub displayed my parents in a way that I will never forget. My father’s gritty hand was wrapped around the back of my mother’s neck. All of his teeth were visible, clenched and white against the dark hair around his lips. My mother was hanging like William’s tongue, only attached by my father’s hand wrapped around her neck.

          “Do you see that, Jody!” my father screamed, pointing at William and me with one hand while violently shaking my mother with the other. Her hair whipped in front of her face. I would have been surprised if she could see us at all. “That’s supposed to be our child. That fucking freak! If you want to waste your time trying to get that, that…thing to work in this world, then go ahead. But I won’t be around. You can bet your sweet ass I won’t.”

          My mother’s sobs grew in intensity and I could hear her choking on them. My father let her go and she dropped like a corpse onto the floor. I had never seen my father like this; I wanted to ask him something, I wanted him to lift me up, and I wanted to wipe that crust off of his lips, but I couldn’t. He stood there panting and gritting his teeth for what seemed like a long time before turning around and walking out into the darkness.

          I stood up, horrified by what I had just seen. I knew it was my fault, but I couldn’t understand why. I thought it was strange that he had only mentioned one person, considering William was with me the entire time. I could hear my mother stirring as I rose again from the tub. She looked at me and I could see the pain in her eyes as she tried to smile.

          “Stay right there, baby. Mommy will be right back,” she said, as she got up and left the bathroom.

          I did as I was told and when she returned her hair had been put up in a ponytail, revealing a fat blue bruise on the top of her left cheek. She handed me a towel and I wrapped it around myself and William. My mother left again and returned with a small step-stool that I used to reach the sink to wash my hands and brush mine and William’s teeth.

          I stepped up and looked at myself wrapped in the light-blue towel. My hair dripped bits of water onto the rim of the white porcelain sink. I waited a little while for my mom to get me my toothbrush and squeeze some mint-jelly onto it. But she just stood behind me, breathing slowly, staring at us in the steamy reflection of the mirror. I stared at myself for a while, noticing that I had covered William’s face with my towel. I loosened the left-side of the towel to reveal his shrunken head attached to my shoulder.

          In the mirror, I felt ashamed. I let the towel drop to the floor, as my mother’s footsteps faded from the bathroom and vanished into the dark.

          Believing that I was alone, I recalled my father’s screams and realized that I was the freak he was talking about. I was the reason he just left me, my mother, and William alone. I felt William’s head tilt back, his wide open mouth revealing row after row of deformed teeth jutting out in improper directions. I could see for the first time why his tongue was always hanging out of his mouth; the inside was so crowded by teeth that provided no room. His eyes were mismatched, not only in color, but in their oblong shape and differing distance from the top of his skull. His hair was sparse, as if suffering from old age, and it clung to the wrinkled flesh that covered his misshapen head.

          In the mirror I was staring at William, my little brother, who could not control the movement of his head, his mouth, or his eyes. His ears were absent and he began to look less and less human as I stared. I closed my eyes and began to cry.

          “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I don‘t know what to do,” I chanted through sniffles and tears.

          I opened my eyes, tears mingling with the bath-water still drying on my face, and saw my mother standing behind me. In the mirror I saw her lift her right hand and reach towards William. Her face contorted as she came closer to where my shoulder met his head. She began to shake, bringing her left hand towards her face to cover her mouth, clenching her eyes shut completely before her warm hand rested upon our wet flesh.

          “I’m sorry baby, mommy’s so sorry,” she said, pulling her hand away from her mouth and reaching towards her pants. I didn’t know what she was trying to dig out of her pocket, but she was having a difficult time getting whatever it was.

          I turned around, hoping to help her, but as soon as I did she wailed, dropping a shiny object and falling to the floor.

          “Mommy,” I said, “What’s the matter?”

          I dropped off the step-stool and inched closer to her, but she kept backing away. I didn’t know what to do, I wanted to hold her or be held. I wanted her to tell me everything was going to be okay or that there was nothing wrong with me, or something; anything except this constant backpedaling.

          “Mommy?” I said, again, desperate for some connection.

          “Just go to your room and go to bed, baby. This will all be over by tomorrow.”

          Scared and feeling utterly alone, I listened, stepping into the darkness beyond the bathroom. I looked back for an instant and saw my mother search the bathroom floor for a moment, before rising to her feet. As she stood, I caught a glimpse of her now steady hand grasping the long handle of a butcher’s knife before she reached back and slammed the door shut.

          Too scared to do anything but go to bed, I spent the rest of the night assuring William that everything would be all right by tomorrow; like Mommy said it would. Nothing to worry about, I told him. I remember thinking in vivid detail before I fell asleep, that maybe, just maybe, this was all a dream.

          “How wrong could I have been, William?” I asked. I was  eighteen again feeling just as terrified as I was twelve years ago.

          I came to accept the reasons that my mother killed herself that night. My therapist told me that it wasn’t my fault, and I believed her; respected her. I loved her for that insight. All of her questions allowed me to talk, spill myself to her, but she couldn’t help me anymore. Nor could my estranged father, the ghost of my dead mother, my doctors; not even William.

          Looking at William for the last time, I felt ugly, disgusting. A monster, a freak, a disease that needed to be eradicated.

          “William,” I said feather-soft. “If you’re really there, little brother, show me that you’re alive.” My words broke down a bit, my voice crawling toward a darker place. “Speak to me William. Come on! Shake, move, spit, anything. Please for the love of God, do something! William!? William?” I asked for the last time, crying with my hands clenched around the white porcelain sink.

          I looked back at us in the mirror, praying I would hear him speak, utter a single word so I could go back to believing that he was real. No luck. His eyes stayed blank and his tongue just hung there, limp and dry as a thick desert worm.

          If I was going to accomplish anything, I knew I had to act and not just mull around thinking about it for eternity. It was tonight or never. I gave him twelve years to show me. Twelve years of a boy whose name was never heard. I, Bradley, never existed; only Freak, only Two-Heads, only Voodoo-Boy. And I couldn’t live that life anymore.

          I released my grip on the edge of the sink and bent down to reach the hedge-clippers I had purchased a week ago and sharpened this morning. With shuddering hands I pulled open the blades and slid them around the point where William’s head met my shoulder. I could feel the edges already digging little slits into our flesh. A small trail of blood trickled from each side, one sliding down my bare chest, the other disappearing behind me. I inhaled as much air as my lungs would hold and shut my eyes.

          I crushed the handles in between my palms and punched my fists together, meeting almost no resistance until both blades met. I could feel the flesh pinched between them. The pain was far more than I had anticipated. I felt the warm blood cover both my back and chest, before hearing it drop onto the cold floor. I didn’t think I’d be able to pull the handles back out before I went into shock. My arms began to feel heavy and they fell toward the sink holding the clippers. I had wrenched William’s head from my shoulder, flooding my mind with fresh pain and covering the sink in red ichor.

          My eyes started rolling around in their sockets and my entire body began feeling heavy and limp. The clippers crashed down into the sink, causing William’s face to turn toward my own. His strange, blank eyes stared up at me. I watched in horror as his mouth opened wider than I had ever seen. Row upon row of teeth beckoned me as I crumbled to the floor, drowning in William’s wretched, agonizing screams.

          The next thing I remember, I woke in bed unable to lift my left arm. I  could overhear people talking, unintelligible words for the most part, but one I knew like a second heartbeat. “Freak,” they said, as clear as spring water at dawn.

         “Freak,” they said followed by something new: “Murderer.”

                                                              *

Derek Hayes makes not only his SNM Mag debut, but lands his first ever published story! This one was pretty polished and he demonstrates some good writing prose for his first story. He hails from a small town in Massachusetts and is currently enrolled at Goddard College earning a BFA in Creative Writing. He is working on two novels, along with various shorter pieces, and poetry. More of his dark weavings can be discovered on his website and readers can email him direct with any comments...

                www.silentepitaphs.com 

dhayes@silentepitaphs.com

Derek Hayes

               In the Room No One Sees

                        Philip Roberts

         Wanda knelt down and stared at the small, quivering lump of skin growing out of the wall. The bulb of flesh was no larger than a quarter, like a giant boil, the texture bumpy, the tone a dark pink.

          Who could say what expression she had on her long face? She reached a shaking hand toward the lump of skin. Her fingers jerked back before they could touch it. Her rise was so abrupt she nearly lost her balance.

          “It’s nothing,” she whispered to herself. There was nothing. This thing just didn’t exist, so why would she waste anymore of her time?

          The room she left—and made sure to close the door—was a bit of a study. She had to walk through her bedroom to get to the room at all, which was just perfect for her needs.

          “Good morning,” Shelby said with her usual indifference. A plate of toast and a mug of coffee along with the paper in front of her ensured she would offer Wanda only a precursory greeting. This would certainly be the most interaction they’d have all day.

          Wanda said nothing. She left before Shelby could say anything else.

          Less than a year had passed since their joint home rental had begun.

          Shortly after moving in, Wanda had come home to find Shelby in her study. It had been the last of any true remnants of their friendship. The reason Shelby had been in the study, in search of something she believed was mistakenly unpacked in her room, was meaningless. The yelling match that ensued was not.

          Wanda’s hands clung tightly to the wheel, fingernails bitten down to stubs, mouth firm as she attempted to sing casually along with the song on the radio. Singing along felt normal like what she would do on any other day because today was…another day.

                                                             *

          The mound of flesh was just a little larger. It didn’t appear to extend any further out from the wall. Outside her window the sun was almost gone. A horrible day of forced normalcy was now behind her. No one at work had suspected anything.

          She reached toward the flesh with her right hand while biting lightly on the nail of her index finger on her left hand. She felt the flash of pain as her teeth dug in a little too much and the warm, rough sensation of the flesh growing from her wall.

          What answer was there? What rational solution could she possibly come up with to describe what she was staring at? She needed an answer to find a way to make this clear; to make her understand.

          She sucked on the end of her index finger to stop the bleeding while she took up a seat at her computer and started to search. Outside her window the sun sank and the moon inched its way up the sky while the streetlights turned on. Somewhere else in the house Shelby turned out her light. The minutes and hours marched onward as always.

          After five hours Wanda pushed away from her computer without an answer. Everything about the world felt perfectly average except for the thing behind her.

          “Grab a knife,” she said. Yes, cut the damn thing away and be done with it…but to confront it would be to admit it was there. Flesh didn’t grow from walls. What sane person could possibly believe that to be true? To confront it was to admit there was something to confront.

          She turned off her computer. She brushed her teeth for the night. She did everything she usually would on any other night including closing the door to her study. This wasn’t about hiding anything. She always closed the door.

                                                             *

          “You seem a little nervous,” Pete said to her, his head cocked a little to the side.

          They sat alone in the long booth that had just an hour earlier been filled with Wanda’s other coworkers. They always went out together in this group on Friday nights. To refuse to make friends, to refuse to join in with the social activities of the others would call attention to her.

          Now she stared hesitantly at Pete’s reassuring gaze and did her best to swallow down the tension. This tension had nothing to do with whatever Pete had apparently seen, but rather with the anxiety created by him seeing anything out of place.

          “I don’t know what you mean,” she laughed without a hint of anything but jubilance in her voice.

          “Guess it’s just my imagination. You just seemed…strained, maybe, for a second there. Looked kind of out of place on you. Figured I’d ask.”

          “Just getting a little too lost in thought, I suppose. Don’t you worry about me.”

          He wouldn’t get any other answer. To let anyone close to her would require potentially opening up.

          She understood as well her near total privacy created conflict with her appearance of complete normalcy, which is why she crafted her public image with such precision to ensure no one would ever give her the very look Pete had. Only people like Shelby knew anything otherwise which was why Wanda loathed so deeply her decision to share the home and hated Shelby herself even more.

          “I think I’ll head home,” she said. Pete let her go with only a goodbye, but in his eyes she could still see the same look, the same consideration that had led to his earlier question, and she hated it. Once the wheels began turning there was little she could do to stop them.

                                                               *

          Her true home and the place of her birth lie nearly halfway across the country. She had once fled from all the talk, the accusations, and the vast history surrounding the last name Westbie. Patricia Wanda Westbie was just as dead as the late Arnold Westbie.

          She stared down at the frightened ten-year-old child she had once been. This child pulled closer into the corner between the wall and a bookcase, nearly lost in the shadows cast by the only light of an overturned lamp; its crooked shade skewing the glow of a single bulb.

          Up above her hung the still form of her father, his chubby face made fatter by the skin of his neck being shoved upward from the rope digging in. His hands hung stiffly by his side, body clothed in only the thick, natural hair nature had given him.

          To his daughter he had been kind. To the only person left in his life he had been as sweet as any human being could ever be. Even as the mind deteriorated and his life crumbled away, to her, he was the only parent she had ever known, and the center of her life.

          And then the people entered to take her away. She clung to his legs in desperation while the figures filled the room. The murmur of their talk hummed incessantly like a room full of insects. All of the future gossip about both her and her father began at that moment, at the first discovery of the truth. Arnold had hidden everything from the world, all of his troubles held squarely on his shoulders, but now the truth was known and from it eight years of torment was to follow before the cocoon that was Patricia Westbie would finally burst open to allow Wenda West to escape into another life.

          She awoke as she always did right as they pulled her away from her father. She awoke to the last sight she would ever see of the man.

          A knock came at her door.

          “You were screaming,” Shelby said when she opened it.

          There was a point before the day when Shelby had been discovered in Wanda’s study that this supposed friend would’ve shown a hint of concern. Shortly after they moved, when the reality of Wanda’s seclusion became more apparent, Shelby had sat down with her to discuss this abnormality, and request that Wanda open up to her to help.

          Shelby was, after all, a therapist; something Wanda hadn’t thought to consider before moving into the house with her. At the time, given Wanda’s financial situation, it would have appeared odd for her to refuse to share the burden of rent, or so Wanda had thought.

          Of course, Wanda’s screaming rant upon seeing Shelby in the study had driven away whatever drive Shelby might’ve had to help and  all she saw on Shelby’s tired face was annoyance at having been woken in the middle of the night. Whether Shelby was a good enough therapist to have provided any help to Wanda was debatable. Whether Shelby was petty enough to withhold any further offer of help due to hurt feelings was not.

          “I’m sorry,” Wanda answered and closed the door shut before Shelby could say anything else.

          Wanda stood in her study for ten full minutes after that staring at the nearly five-foot wide section of her wall that had been engulfed by the growing flesh. It was much thicker than normal skin, perhaps three or four inches tall, but it didn’t appear to be getting any taller, merely wider.

          She pressed her hand firmly against the skin to feel the warmth. As she pulled her fingers back she saw the slit begin to form in the middle of the flesh. It tore loose to reveal tiny, jagged protrusions that had to be teeth. The split remained open for only a few seconds before the flesh sealed itself.

          In the bathroom she threw up as silently as she could. Her bathroom was also adjacent to her bedroom and on the other side of the second floor from Shelby’s room. She couldn’t stop her body from shaking. The time was past three. She had to be up in four more hours for work.

          She sat on the corner of her bed in the dark and stared at the closed study door. Her father had been seeing a psychiatrist without anyone’s knowledge. After Arnold’s death, little details about these meetings had managed to slip through the town, much to the supposed surprise of the psychiatrist himself, who claimed he had never uttered a word about it to anyone. Not all of the facts were accurate, of course, many merely lies that felt real -- and so became fact when no one could dispute them.

          If she asked anyone about this, would they see what she thought they would? Would they ask in revulsion what that thing was on her wall, or would they merely confirm what Wanda was beginning to suspect and prove her to be the freak her fellow students had once called her?

          To even discuss this was a sign of her instability. What she dealt with simply wasn’t possible. Everything she had ever believed about life told her this mass of flesh wasn’t real. This thought actually comforted her. If it wasn’t real there was nothing to concern her. 

          It only took her five minutes after that to fall asleep.

          The next morning she didn’t even bother to go into her study before leaving for work.

                                                             *

          “Are you sure you’re okay?” Pete asked her mid-morning, bent over her desk. This intrusion not only made her more nervous, it drew a deep anger in the back of her mind she hadn’t felt in years.

          “Fine, really. Didn’t get much sleep is all.” A very normal reason to look different, but Pete wasn’t convinced.

          “It’s more than that. You’ve mentioned late nights before and there’s just…something is different about you. You seem nervous.”

          There were so many reasons to give, normal things to say, something that would make him stop, but Wanda couldn’t think of any of them. Her mind refused to give her anything but the image of a mouth splitting open on a wall of skin.

          “I need to get this done,” she said with more force than intended. Immediately she wanted to take it back.

          Pete left her, but not before glancing back at her. His first destination was another desk where whispers began.

          All day she felt them spreading. All around her the hushed murmur continued to grow like a patch of skin on a wall. She stopped even trying to work halfway through the day. What point was there? There was nothing she could do but stare at the computer screen and try to wish it all away.

                                                           *

          In the living room Shelby sat on the couch watching the news. Wanda paused in the doorway to stare blankly at the screen while trying to muster her will to speak.

          “Yes?” Shelby asked her with clear annoyance.

          “I just needed to…I felt like coming in here.” Wanda attempted to smile. Shelby didn’t return the sentiment.

          “You can’t have the TV. I’m not changing around my schedule just because you feel like watching something.”

          Had Wanda not hated Shelby so much already, she might have been taken back by the venomous look in Shelby’s eyes and the complete lack of any attempt to be cordial.

          That’s when the rage swept through her, embroiled her very thoughts with the desire she had to never be around Shelby again. And in that moment she accepted fully the reality of what existed in her study. “I need to show you something,” Wanda purred soothingly; her voice suddenly dripping with sugar.

          “I’m busy.”

          “There’s something wrong in my study and I wanted you to tell me what you think.”

          The word study brought the desired reaction. Shelby followed Wanda without much argument up the stairs and into Wanda’s bedroom. Merely seeing the room again seemed to be enough to gain enough interest from Shelby to drive her into action.

          Wanda opened the door into the dark room.

          “What is it?” Shelby asked, already moving into the room, flipping on the light while behind her Wanda didn’t move. She stood perfectly still with a smile on her face and her hand on the door until she heard the hitch in Shelby’s throat.

          And then the door slammed shut.

          She didn’t open it through the first few seconds of her screaming. Nor did she when another sound like something being torn apart made her smile sharply flee. The cries took on another tone, like screaming with a throat full of water, until the sounds were gone altogether. Wanda heard nothing at all.

          The purpose had been to frighten Shelby to prove Wanda’s sanity and gain a bit of vengeance. Now she slowly opened the door to the dark streaks of red smeared across the brown, carpeted floor.

          The entire wall had been engulfed. A single long bloody line ran down the middle of it where a mouth had certainly formed. There was nobody left. Only a few scraps of clothing remained of Wanda’s roommate.

                                                            *

          She sat on the edge of the couch. In front of her she swore she could see her father’s bloated face staring down at her, his nude form suspended from the ceiling.

          “You know what I heard,” so many people whispered some ten years ago.

          She could call the police. This wasn’t just in her head. She could show them what was going on; show them this horrific scene. But to show anyone was to completely upend her entire existence.

          How many people would approach her after that? How many would spread her name and how quickly would they come to realize the real name she had left behind? How long before the corpse of Patricia Westbie was marched before the world, before her very coworkers? Wanda West would become just as dead as Patricia; only moving on would become harder. There would be no cocoon for her to tear free from this time around.

          Whether or not this had been her fault didn’t matter. The freakish nature of it all would still be attached to her and her name. She would never be able to move about through the perfectly ordinary life she had made for herself.

          That very thought infuriated her. She wanted to destroy whatever continued to grow inside her study. Tear it loose from the walls and bury its corpse in the backyard. Shelby had moved away, she would tell anyone who asked, never to be seen again.

          Shelby had the beginnings of a drinking problem. Anyone who knew her at all knew that, and maybe she had gotten just a little too drunk and found her way into a ditch.

          The illusion vanished just as it began. How could they not question when Shelby vanished? It wouldn’t take much for them to discover her past.

          The only weapon in the house was a steak knife. Briefly she recalled seeing her red-faced father screaming profanities at a neighbor who had called him crazy.

          Wanda opened the bedroom door and lit up the enormity of the aberration on her wall. An eye split open near the growing mouth. Her blade tore through it.

          A ripple of pain rolled through the monstrosity. Wanda let the blade cut swiftly through the skin while the mouth seemed to extend out towards her. Thin walls of wet skin lined with teeth shot forward. She brought up her arms in time to stop the teeth from tearing through her face.

          Deep within the folds of skin she saw the tattered body of Shelby still close, stuck between two layers. The knife tore one of the layers away and allowed Wanda to latch her fingers onto Shelby’s wet wrist. As much as she had hated the woman in his life, Wanda couldn’t bring herself to allow her roommate to be devoured by such a creature.

          The body pulled loose and landed harshly on the floor along the wall. More pain tore through Wanda’s arms. She turned her attention away from Shelby and back toward the creature.

          Through the pain of so many vicious cuts Wanda had never stopped swinging her arms, screaming as she did, aware of the spit running down her chin, of the pumping blood hot in her red face.

          Her vision blurred, head foggy; the blade still thrashing through the air in front of her, tearing repeatedly into the massive wall of quivering flesh as the bloody mouth closed.

          Mid-swing her feet got tangled up and dropped her backwards. The world exploded from a single point in the back of her head where it collided with her desk.

          She couldn’t lift up her arms. Through the wave of coming tears she saw the deep, jagged cuts running up the inside of her arms where her blood pumped out of her and soaked into the carpet. In front of her there was nothing but an empty wall, the monstrosity gone from wherever it had come. Near the wall she could see Shelby’s ragged corpse. She felt a sudden wave of relief for the horror she had spared her friend, even if Shelby would’ve been unaware of it.

          Patricia Westbie let her eyes rise to the bare feet dangling above her head, blocking out the glare of the light directly overhead. She wanted to reach up and touch them, to hold onto her father’s legs as she had done on that terrible day, but her arms still refused to respond.

          Instead she let her head fall back and her eyes slip shut. Death was such a common thing. Everyone died. She escaped into normalcy with a smile on her face.

                                                            *

Philip Roberts lives in Overland Park, Kansas and holds a degree in Creative Writing with a minor in Film from the University of Kansas. As a beginner in the publishing world, he is a member of the Horror Writer’s Association and has had numerous short stories published in a variety of publications, such as the Beneath the Surface anthology, Byzarium webzine, The Tabard Inn, and now in SNM Horror Mag. More information about his works can be found here on his website:

                        www.philipmroberts.com

                 Philip Roberts

*Drop in and Check out the Authors on Lilith's Interviews.