It started with a twitching left eyelid. Nothing major. More annoying that anything else. She’d had similar afflictions before, but they usually petered out after a while. This one didn’t.
It just kept getting worse.
The eyelid developed a life of its own, fluttering away seemingly at will. One spasm led to another, then another, until eventually she lost all control of her facial muscles.
The condition spread to her limbs, and all she could do was lie on the floor covered in her own vomit, drool and excrement, her entire body convulsing and contracting.
Demonic possession is no joke.
Boo-graphy: Christian Saunders, who writes fiction as C.M. Saunders, is a freelance journalist and editor from south Wales. His work has appeared in almost 100 magazines, ezines and anthologies worldwide including Fortean Times, the Literary Hatchet, ParABnormal, Fantastic Horror, Haunted MTL, Feverish Fiction and Crimson Streets, and he has held staff positions at several leading UK magazines ranging from Staff Writer to Associate Editor. His books have been both traditionally and independently published, the latest release being Back from the Dead: A Collection of Zombie Fiction.
Back from the Dead — A collection of zombie fiction from British journalist and dark fiction writer C.M. Saunders, featuring two complete novellas alongside short stories previously published in the likes of Morpheus Tales and Crimson Streets, plus a brand-new novelette. Also includes an exclusive introduction and artwork by the award-winning Greg Chapman.
Featuring: Dead of Night: young lovers Nick and Maggie go camping in the woods, only to come face-to-face with a group of long-dead Confederate soldiers who don’t know, or care, that the war is over.
Human Waste: Dan Pallister wakes up one morning to find the zombie apocalypse has started. Luckily, he’s been preparing for it most of his life. He just needs to grab some supplies from the supermarket…
‘Til Death do us Part: When the world as we know it comes to an abrupt end, an elderly couple are trapped in their apartment. They get by as best they can, until they run out of food.
Roadkill: A freelance ambulance crew are plunged into a living nightmare when a traffic accident victim they pick up just won’t stay dead. He has revenge on his mind.
Plague Pit: A curious teenager goes exploring the Welsh countryside one summer afternoon and stumbles across a long-abandoned chapel. What he finds there might change the world, and not for the better.
Dead Men Don’t Bleed: A gumshoe private eye is faced with his most challenging case yet when a dead man walks into his office and asks for help solving his own murder.
Drawn from a variety of sources, all these tales have one thing in common; they explore what might happen if our worst nightmares are realized and people came BACK FROM THE DEAD.
Boo-graphy: Tommy B. Smith is a writer of dark fiction, award-winning author of The Mourner’s Cradle, Poisonous, the short story collection Pieces of Chaos, and the coming of age novel Anybody Want to Play WAR? His presence currently infests Fort Smith, Arkansas, where he resides with his wife and cats. More information can be found on his website.
Poisonous — Following the Quake of ’79, a terrible force came to the city of St. Charles. This was the Living Poison. In Lilac Chambers, it may have found the perfect host. As she finds herself changing, becoming increasingly dangerous to everyone around her, it becomes apparent that her state of being is no accident of nature. She is becoming a prime vehicle for the Living Poison’s destructive swath through the streets of St. Charles. Detective Brandt McCullough has seen the Living Poison’s brutality. John Sutterfield, ringmaster of Sutterfield’s Circus of the Fantastic, is discovering its malignancy festering within the very circus he founded. These two are the only ones who might stand in the way of a force greater than anything they have ever known, one which threatens to wash the streets in red and swallow the city into chaos, but the stakes may be higher than either of them can imagine. St. Charles—indeed, the world—may tremble.
DISCLAIMER: This may be figurative. This may be literal. I don’t know anymore.
I think my house is trying to kill me.
The police won’t get involved, I realize, but at the very least, is there a support group for that sort of thing? It’s not that strange, right? Homeowners have been victimized plenty of times…. and I mean PLENTY of times before. According to the National Safety Council, in 2019, there were 26,200,000 medically consulted, home-related injuries that occurred in the United States, and out of the 26 million, there were 93,700 deaths.
This data, of course, isn’t disaggregated, so it includes injuries and deaths due to poisoning, choking, drowning, burning, and falling. The commonality though is that all occurred inside the home…
…which brings me back to my point.
This house, my home, may be trying to kill me.
What prompted this ridiculous premise? I’m glad you asked. Last week, I was washing dishes, lost in my own daily thought-struggles, when the kitchen sink faucet decided it had had enough and promptly fell apart.
Yes, I know. I know. There would be a lot of that going around in a house that had been built in the late ’60s with appliances that hadn’t been updated since the ’90s.
But it’s the timing, you see, the fact that I was right there when it happened. Part of the faucet, a piece of the aerator from what I can tell, spat out from the spout, and the force of the water was so strong that I was drenched within seconds, water everywhere. Naturally, I slipped around on the floor and then fell right on my ass. For a woman well into middle age, I mean, it felt as if I’d broken not only my tailbone, but basically all the other bones and cartilage, tendons and innards, self-pride and spirit.
I’ve been hobbling around like an old lady. It takes some time for me get up the stairs.
Speaking of stairs, my sisters and I, and probably anyone else who’d been a kid in this house, have fallen down the stairs. There’s no carpet there for traction. It’s just wood, a slick surface. When you fall, it’s one of those full body slides where you’re reaching out to grab hold of the bannister as your legs slide out in front of you, and you butt-plonk down those stairs while you’re attempting to hang on and pull yourself up. Then you just bump all the way to the concrete floor below.
I have fallen down those stairs a total of eight times in my life. I’ve counted. Number eight was this morning. We’ve always known not to wear socks, and I don’t anyway. Still, it didn’t matter, even with calloused bare feet.
I fell down those stairs, and I heard someone laugh at me.
The laugh wasn’t coming from outside the house. Listen, I’ve noisy neighbors. I’ve heard them chortling and hollering over their shitty top 40 tunes on repeat every weekend. It wasn’t them.
I heard the laugh clear as day, right at my side, while I sat there on the floor in stunned silence. I thought it might be me. I’m forever questioning the last sliver of sanity I’ve left. I’ve been known to laugh at my own antics because I’m just hilarious. However, it wasn’t my voice, and my mouth wasn’t open. In fact, my teeth were grinding, my jaw tightly clenched.
I knew the laugh though. That witchy cackle followed by a mischievous giggle. That sound. My childhood summers came scuttling back to remind me this was home. It always was.
Did I tell you about the drywall incident? A giant piece of the breezeway ceiling broke over my head, the dust of it momentarily blinding me. By the time I could see anything, my eyes burned. The damage was all over the furniture, all over my hair and clothes. Everything looked as if a sack of flour had exploded everywhere and had left pieces of ceiling strewn about. You’d never know it happened. The last of my savings for the month repaired and cleaned it up.
Sometimes, when I wake up in the morning, I find myself unable to breathe only because I’m face down in my pillow. For the record, I never go to sleep on my stomach. It’s wretchedly uncomfortable. I’m a side sleeper, and I had never once woken up in any position other than on my side; right or left, it doesn’t matter. Ever since I’ve been left totally alone in this house—with no family, friends, or even a boyfriend—this moment where I’m suffocating has become a random occurrence without any sort of routine so that I cannot predict when it will happen, ever. I just have to take my chances when I go to bed.
My mother died from a lung disease. Her lungs scarred over and just ceased to function. She was basically suffocating all the time, and it’s what eventually killed her.
So, obviously, waking up with a mouthful of pillow terrifies me.
I knew what I was getting into. The dead came with the house. It’s not complicated. Family who’d loved unconditionally, who’d loved true, had lived here. I’m writing this from a room where others had passed away. Once, after a memorial service, a few pipes decided they’d had enough and water trickled from the ceiling over the breakfast table. A cousin said the house was crying.
I spend a lot of time on the laptop my workplace loaned me so that I could effectively work from home. There are days, however, when I feel as if my body is stuck in sludge, unable to move—like the desk chair, armchair, sofa, or even my bed, wherever I am working, is intent on keeping me there. I try to get up, but my legs feel as if they’re loaded down with weights, and I swear something has a locked hold around my wrists, like whatever’s there wants me to finish the work completely. I appreciate that something’s there, wanting me to keep busy, but I’m not intent on dying while I’m working, unable to get up to keep myself nourished.
Oh, and by the way, the house doesn’t have a pool, but even still, it may as well drown me. There’s a basement filled with piles of junk, and, on occasion, it floods. The water coming in is from either A) stormwater running down the walls or B) the HVAC drain pump. There’s a lot of exposed wiring too. I found that out quickly.
Maybe a fire is in the cards for me.
Speaking of fire, don’t get me started on the old stovetop. The kitchen was close to being burned to the ground on more than one occasion.
My immediate family members—hell, everyone who knows my situation—don’t understand why I don’t just up and sell, why I don’t just…leave like a normal person.
But there are other factors to keep in mind. I mean, everyone’s gone, and they’ve left their shit behind. It’s just too much.
And I think it’s all trying to kill me, all of it, every last piece of it. It’s the fuel of the house that keeps it from being anything but a house. My body will then have to be excavated because it will undoubtedly be buried underneath everyone’s stuff.
All of their unloved, unwanted stuff. More and more stuff.
They were smart, staying away from here.
I hope I’ll be waking up tomorrow so that I can start worrying all over again.
It’ll be Monday after all, and my house is always hungry.
Reception — While her rehab counselor’s advice replays in her mind, Ansley Boone takes on the role of dutiful bridesmaid in her little sister’s wedding at an isolated resort in the middle of hill country, a place where cell reception is virtually nonexistent and everyone else there seems a stranger primed to spring. Tensions are already high between the Boones and their withdrawal suffering eldest, who has since become the family embarrassment, but when the wedding reception takes a vicious turn, Ansley and her sister must work together to fight for survival and escape the resort before the groom’s cannibalistic family adds them to the post wedding menu.
Red Station — There is a house overlooking the vast, rolling plains. A home station where a traveler will be welcomed with a piping hot meal and a downy bed. It is a refuge for the weary. A beacon for the lost. A place where blood and bones feed the land.
For four stagecoach passengers… a doctor in search of a missing father and daughter… a newlywed couple on the way to their homestead… and a lady in red with a bag filled with secrets… Their night at the Station has only just begun.
Lukas finally stopped. He had run into darkness, oblivious to the onset of evening, and he shivered under the cloudy night sky. Cold sweat coated his aching body. Breathing heavily he surveyed his surroundings. In the intermittent moonlight he struggled to find the familiarity that he had hoped for. Nature’s insatiable hunger had been hard at work, evidenced by the invading vegetation that choked the site. Still, he wouldn’t allow it to crush his hope that this was where he would regain his innocence, where he would find a spark of childhood joy to reignite his humanity. He wasn’t beaten yet.
Steeling himself he pushed on between the trees. Branches stroked and prodded him as he went, mocking him and testing his reserve.
“I’m not afraid”, he mumbled to himself.
At last he spotted a building. Its windows were smashed, and faded graffiti scarred the walls. He peered inside. The corrugated plastic roof had collapsed in places, admitting just sufficient light to cast a shadow on the floor’s carpet of detritus. Judging by the up ended chairs and ragged serving counters it had been some kind of food outlet once. A scraping noise came from deep within the structure, fleeting, too brief for him to locate the source, but discomforting enough to persuade him to move on.
Edging along a barely recognizable path took him past a series of rusting playground rides, now strangled by bushes and grass. He stopped at a small roundabout and, on a whim, took a seat. Looking down he saw that the patina of rust snaking across the ride matched the dry blood on his hands. He imagined himself abandoned here like everything else, rotting as he waited for time to deal its final blow. He pushed the ground with his foot and span. The shadows blurred as he turned, false images flashing across his mind.
For a moment he thought he saw his father’s face, framed by the same anger he had seen the last time that he had been here. In the evening, after that fateful visit, the beating had been worse than usual. Blow had followed blow, accompanied by his Father’s customary copious tears and cursing.
“Why? Why did she have to die?”
Lucas didn’t know the answer, had never known the answer. As he grew older and understood the moist mechanics of childbirth he still didn’t know why his mother had left him to face this life alone. That hadn’t stopped his father from endlessly asking him the same question.
Movement amongst the upper branches of the trees, perhaps just a startled bird, caught his attention and he looked up. He twitched, uncomfortable in the open air, rendered unsure by the vastness pressing down on him.
“Your mother’s in heaven now.”
How often had he heard these words? Intended to comfort, they had the opposite effect. This dead woman that he had never known haunted him from above, watching him and, to his mind, judging him. As he had no idea what it was that she wanted, this left him eternally frustrated at his own inability to satisfy her needs. At least he had the clouds to obscure him this evening. The roundabout came to a halt and he stepped off.
Walking through the trees he caught glimpses of battered faces staring out at him. Cracked frogs and broken rabbits, once blessed by the attention of excited young humans, could now only dream cold plastic dreams of anyone taking joy from their existence. Whatever soul their makers had invested in their creation was now cast into oblivion. Lukas thought it seemed like a waste.
Skirting a rank pool with the festering remains of a Viking longboat at its centre, he emerged from the tree line into open space. The clouds were clearing a little now and moonlight fought its way through the gaps to give everything an ethereal shine. A giant figure’s fiberglass corpse lay with its arms outstretched, flaking eyes staring straight up. Lukas paused. Something about the thing’s open hands suggested that it was pleading for help. He shrugged apologetically and walked on.
He passed more abandoned buildings and destroyed rides. A layer of ugly entropy covered them all. Nature had done its part with rain, creeping vines and fallen trees, but it was man’s need to add to the decimation that disturbed him most. The park had clearly been a focus for mindless vandalism over the years.
A breeze blew through the site, carrying the faintest traces of distant voices with it. Lukas stopped to focus on them but couldn’t distinguish any meaning. He picked up his pace.
Finally he reached the slide where it had happened all those years ago. He could still hear the boy’s screams as if it were only yesterday. It was a sound that stayed with him day and night. Sometimes it woke him from his dreams, leaving him breathless and unable to get back to sleep. Even now, wide-awake, it was startlingly vivid. Lukas had just finished his descent of the big blue and yellow slope and was begging for another go. The storm clouds were gathering over his father’s face when a greater event overtook them.
The crowd dashed towards the lake, drawn by this inhuman guttural shrieking, and Lukas instinctively turned to follow them. Before he could move his father put his hand on his shoulder.
“No. Don’t go…”
It hadn’t been necessary to get closer. The horror was clearly visible from where he stood. A young boy covered in blood, the screamer, sat bobbing up and down in a small plastic boat. Where his arm had been there was only a fleshy eruption of torn flesh and jagged bone. The limb itself, torn from its rightful place by some kind of mechanical malfunction, floated silently in the shallows. Time had seemed to slow down, coming in stops and starts. Adults with expressions of disbelief, other children weeping and vomiting, the flickering images blinding him. He felt caught in the harsh disconnect between the pleasure of the ride moments before and this new obscenity.
Now, almost twenty years to the day, he stood here again. The slide down which the small boats had rushed, before bouncing across the water, was covered in moss and filth and the lake itself dark and brackish. There was no joy left here. This was a graveyard and nothing more, yet he felt something stirring deep within. This was where it had changed, where he had changed.
He walked up to the water’s edge.
“I’m not a bad person”, his Father had said.
Lukas had laughed at that.
“You’re not a person at all.”
His Father had stared at him then, unable to come up with anything to contradict the assertion. He had aged in the five years since Lukas had seen him last. The bags under his eyes had grown leathery and his skin had gained a ghostly pallor. There had been less to him than he remembered. Although always a thin man, now he was verging on skeletal. His smell was still the same though. That had struck Lukas as soon as he pushed his way in through the door. Cheap rolling tobacco and sweat, the dry reek of doubt.
Lukas had been surprised by how easily the blade slid into his Father’s chest. He had been expecting some kind of resistance but there had been none. Blood had oozed from the wound rather than gushing, and silence had fallen over the small apartment. The old man had looked at him with eyes that continued to express a lifetime of disappointment, of disgust with his only child. They had widened slightly and then closed forever.
He stepped into the cold water. It only reached to his knees. Several steps took him to the looming framework of the launching tower. The steps at the rear were gone, presumably taken away to prevent what he now had in mind.
The voices on the wind were getting louder now, closer. They were gaining on him. He didn’t have the energy or inclination to run. Let them come.
Metal creaked in protest as he hauled himself up the flaking paintwork. The aging steel cut into his hands as he ascended but he paid it no mind, his attention focused on reaching the top. The ride had haunted his dreams for so long now he half wondered whether he was awake or asleep, despite the cold breeze that scratched at his face.
Getting into the small yellow boat was a tight squeeze. He worried that it might launch itself before he was ready, but soon sat looking down over the shadowy waters below.
“There he is. Up there.”
The beams from his pursuers torches flickered over him erratically as they struggled to restrain the sniffer dogs that had led them here.
“Come down. We need to talk.”
Lukas closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He thought of how his Father’s corpse had looked when he left; quiet at last. His had been the final and most prominent of the voices that needed silencing. Over the years he had found nothing calmed his mind like helping his abusers find eternal tranquility. He didn’t understand people well enough to understand why he seemed to attract their contempt but he knew how to make it stop. They had craved his attention and he had given it to them.
“Get down from the tower or we’ll shoot. We know what you’ve done so come quietly.”
He opened his eyes and smiled before slowly shaking his head. Putting both hands down on the rail he pushed. Wheels that had been frozen in place for an age protested at the unexpected disturbance. He pushed again and they came free. Lukas laughed as the tiny vehicle edged over the drop and started to move. He threw his hands up and reveled in the pure joy that flooded over him as he accelerated downwards. Free at last.
Bullets whistled through the air, finding their homes in his neck and chest but he was still smiling as he fell sideways into the shallows. His pursuers released their hounds and they splashed enthusiastically towards their target, growling and waving their tails, but he was already gone, never to return.
Boo-graphy: Andrew Freudenberg is a writer of dark fiction. He dwells in the South West of England with his Ninja-Wife, numerous offspring and several ridiculous dogs.His work has appeared in numerous anthologies, and his solo horror collection, My Dead and Blackened Heart, was published by The Sinister Horror Company.
My Dead & Blackened Heart — 14 stories of terror, dread and fatherhood.
From the isolation of space, to the ever-watchful eyes in a darkening wood, Andrew Freudenberg takes us on a journey exploring the themes of friendship, fatherhood and loss, as we pick through the remains of his dead and blackened heart.
“Overhead the lighting operator switched everything to green, just as two enormous mortars fired shredded silver paper in a plume over the crowd. Sarge blinked, attempting to clear the salt lacing his eyes.
For a moment he thought he saw paratroopers descending from above, but shook off the hallucination and turned his attention to the stalls. A group of youngsters were caught by Doc’s spotlight for a split second, their eyes wide with wonderment and a touch of fear.
It was enough to send Sarge back to the jungle, back to the children in the village. Their eyes had been the same, gazing up at him intently, even after he had slaughtered them with his bayonet and laid them all out in a row. At the time it had seemed the kind thing to do, a mercy killing of sorts. After all they had executed everyone else, so who would have looked after them?
There was something complete about leaving them lying peacefully amongst the burning buildings.
It had been a Zen moment.”
Featuring the stories: Something Akin To Despair, A Bitter Parliament, Charlie’s Turn, Pater in Tenebris, Milkshake, Nose to the Window, The Cardiac Ordeal, Meat Sweets, Scorch, The Teppenyaki of Truth, Before The Meat Time, Hope Eternal, The Last Patrol & Beyond The Book.
‘My Dead and Blackened Heart’ is available from Amazon in paperback and hardback, the latter featuring both bonus stories and a commentary on the book’s creation.If you’d like a signed copy, contact the author. If not, feel free to say hello on Facebook anyway.
These days when I’m not writing, I keep chickens, read books like Mary, Who Wrote Frankenstein and The Gashlycrumb Tinies to my daughter, forget to pull a daily tarot card, and tinker with a dog food recipe concocted to make my beagle live forever.
Most of my work comes from gazing upon the ghosts of the past or else into the dark corners of nature, those places where whorls of bark become owl eyes and deer step through tunnels of hanging leaves and creeping briars only to disappear.
Something Borrowed, Something Blood Soaked — A young woman’s fears regarding the gruesome photos appearing on her cell phone prove justified in a ghastly and unexpected way. A chainsaw-wielding Evil Dead fan defends herself against a trio of undead intruders. A bride-to-be comes to wish that the door between the physical and spiritual worlds had stayed shut on All Hallows’ Eve. A lone passenger on a midnight train finds that the engineer has rerouted them toward a past she’d prefer to forget. A mother abandons a life she no longer recognizes as her own to walk up a mysterious staircase in the woods.
In her debut collection, Christa Carmen combines horror, charm, humor, and social critique to shape thirteen haunting, harrowing narratives of women struggling with both otherworldly and real-world problems. From grief, substance abuse, and mental health disorders, to a post-apocalyptic exodus, a seemingly sinister babysitter with unusual motivations, and a group of pesky ex-boyfriends who won’t stay dead, Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked is a compelling exploration of horrors both supernatural and psychological, and an undeniable affirmation of Carmen’s flair for short fiction.
Meghan's House of Books 