Twisted.2014.12.16.2014 FOR REVIEW Read online

  Copyright © 2014 by Michaelbrent Collings

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author. For information send request to [email protected].

  website: http://www.michaelbrentcollings.com

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  NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the author is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

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  PRAISE FOR THE WORK OF

  MICHAELBRENT COLLINGS

  "[Crime Seen] will keep you guessing until the end…. 5/5. " – Horror Novel Reviews

  "It's rare to find an ending to a novel that is clever, thought-provoking and surprising, yet here Collings nails all three…." – Ravenous Reads

  "Crime Seen by Michaelbrent Collings is one of those rare books that deserves more than five stars." – Top of the Heap Reviews

  "I barely had time to buckle my mental seatbelt before the pedal hit the metal...." – The Horror Fiction Review

  "Collings is so proficient at what he does, he crooks his finger to get you inside his world and before you know it, you are along for the ride. You don't even see it coming; he is that good." – Only Five Star Book Reviews

  "Move over Stephen King... Clive Barker.... Michaelbrent Collings is taking over as the new king of the horror book genre." – Media Mikes

  "A proficient and pedagogical author, Collings’ works should be studied to see what makes his writing resonate with such vividness of detail…." – Hellnotes

  "[H]auntingly reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan or Alfred Hitchcock." – horrornews.net

  "The Haunted is a terrific read with some great scares and a shock of an ending!" – Rick Hautala, international bestselling author; Bram Stoker Award® for Lifetime Achievement winner

  "[G]ritty, compelling and will leave you on the edge of your seat.... " – horrornews.net

  "[W]ill scare even the most jaded horror hounds. " – Joe McKinney, Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of Flesh Eaters and The Savage Dead

  "Apparition is a hard core supernatural horror novel that is going to scare the hell out of you.... This book has everything that you would want in a horror novel.... it is a roller coaster ride right up to a shocking ending." – horroraddicts.net

  "What a ride.... This is one you will not be able to put down and one you will remember for a long time to come. Very highly recommended." – Midwest Book Review

  "Collings has a way with words that pulls you into every moment of the story, absorbing every scene with all of your senses." – Clean Romance Reviews

  Dedication

  To...

  Malina, who has read my stuff from the start and made me feel like I knew what I was doing (for good or for ill),

  and to Laura, FTAAE.

  Contents

  ONE: first SUBJECT

  WHISPERS

  TWO: TAKING PLACES

  THE BLOOD ON HIS HANDS

  THINGS BIG BROTHERS DO

  BIRTHPAINS

  FIRST STEPS

  A MOTHER'S HANDS

  THE BLACK HOLE under the bed

  MOTION UNMOVED

  SCREAMS

  POSTPARTUM PAIN

  HAMMER FIST

  SINGING SOUNDS

  THREE: UNFAMILIAR DEVELOPMENTS

  NOW I LAY ME DOWN TO SLEEP

  DECISIONS, DECISIONS

  ON THE RUN

  ADVENTURERS AWAY

  DOORWAY UNCOVER'D

  VOLUNTARY MADNESS

  MINUTES AND MUSIC

  APPLE TO SONG

  COATS AND SHOES

  MINUTES AND MUSIC

  HOLY PLACES

  LITTLE ONES

  BEDROOM GAMES

  THIRD STEPS

  SPECIAL DELIVERIES

  OUTRUNNING THE DEAD

  SCREAMS AND DARK

  SILENT LAUGHTER

  SAD GOODBYES

  HANDS ON THE WHEEL

  NOT SO PINK

  ALL IN GOOD FUN

  UP AND DOWN AGAIN

  HIDE AND SEEK

  REACHING DARKNESS

  TOUCHES THROUGH TIME

  FOUR: SUBJECTS FOUND

  THE FIRST OF MANY

  CATCHING RIDES

  A FAMILY'S NEEDS

  RING AROUND THE ROSIE

  FLIGHT INTO DARKNESS

  GIVEN IN

  FIRST BLEEDING UNBLED

  FIVE: PICTURE PERFECT

  HOME SWEET HOME

  A BIT OF CHANGE

  GONE JUST LIKE THAT

  THE ONE WHO KNOWS

  DARKFIRE

  THE SAFETY OF THE GRAVE

  APPEARANCES AND BECOMINGS

  FUN AND GAMES

  FLASHES IN THE DARKNESS

  ALONE IN THE DARK

  SIX: FINAL EXPOSURE

  INTO THE UNDER

  UNSTOPPED MOTION

  SELF REALIZED

  PLAYIN' A GAME

  SETTING THE LIGHTING

  EXPOSURE

  TWISTED

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  ONE:

  first SUBJECT

  Though it seems like an odd practice in modern times, it was viewed as normal, even praiseworthy, several hundred years ago. Thus, there were numerous people willing to give assistance as to the various idiosyncrasies involved in this specific subgroup of photography. Perhaps they did not attempt to address the minutiae, but most would discuss general details, and deem it perfectly normal to do so.

  Others were more specific in their instruction, to the point of unhealthy fixation, as in this now-famous example:

  If the subjekt is styff, then it will be sympler. No stand will be nesesary, e'en tho' I rarelee use them. For in my hands the dead chyld sits easy, and my love holdz him fyrm.

  - Silver, Charles M.

  (afterword by Dr. Charlotte Bongiovi),

  (2003) Berkeley, California,

  Memento Mori, Notes of a Dead Man,

  Western University Press, Inc.

  WHISPERS

  It was small, it was dirty. There was barely enough room for the boy to crawl, and there was no way at all that he could hope to stand.

  That was right, he knew. Though young, though still a boy in the eyes of the world, he had seen enough in his life to know this: he was where he should be. He was on his knees, and that was the way Daddy wanted him. On hands and knees, crying and begging. Pantaloons tearing, vest and jacket fast becoming shreds of cloth.

  And he was not the only thing that crawled down here. Many-
legged creatures writhed over the boy's hands, into his clothes, through his hair. He could feel them touch his skin and bite his flesh. Spiders, perhaps the long centipedes that he had seen hidden under his home. The bites burned.

  Blood dripped from the boy's nose and mouth. From a cut beside his blue, blue eyes. From too many places to count or contemplate. It splashed on his hands, rolled in thin rivulets to the earthy soil below his palms.

  The boy crawled forward. Didn't know where he was going. Didn't care. Just hoped. Hoped he could crawl fast enough, far enough, to get away.

  He whispered as he crawled. Words that no one could hear but him. Words that the earth sopped up as quickly and completely as his blood.

  He wanted to fall. His sides hurt where the kicks had rained down. His face hurt where the fists had fallen. Again, again, again. And then he somehow got away.

  And he ran. Ran blindly, and found himself in this dark place.

  This place where he crawled, and bled, and whispered.

  Light seeped into the crawlspace from behind him. He hoped that didn't mean he could be followed. Hoped that didn't mean there was a hole large enough for a man. A man inflamed by desire, enraged by injury.

  The boy whispered, crawled, bled.

  Blood.

  Tears.

  Sweat.

  The dirt drank it all in.

  And then the whispers, nearly silent, turned to a scream as the wood above the boy's head collapsed. Splinters bit at his cheeks, more blood rained.

  A hand punched into view. Bloody from slamming through the floor that was the ceiling off the boy's short-lived hideaway. The hand was one the boy knew well, from the thick black hairs on the knuckles to the well-bitten fingernails…

  … to the stubs where two fingers had been lost in a mill accident, long ago.

  The three remaining fingers grabbed the boy by his thick, blond hair. They yanked upward.

  The boy screamed. His head hit the remains of the wood planking that topped the crawlspace. It didn't fit through the small hole that the fist had created.

  It didn't matter. His head went through anyway.

  The boy whispered. A few last words.

  Then the three-fingered hand gave a final pull. The boy seemed to fall up, as though the earth had forgotten how to hold onto him. He tumbled through the wood, out of the crawlspace.

  Into waiting arms.

  The boy screamed again. A scream of terror that became pain, a scream of pain that became rage, a scream of rage that returned to pain once again….

  And then, at last, the screams ended. No more whispers, no more shrieks.

  But the blood still flowed, and the soil drank its fill.

  TWO:

  TAKING PLACES

  This, of course, is one of the only – if not the only – example of this type of memento mori. But it is also one of the most fascinating, in that it melds obsessive concern with technical details with an equally frenzied need for what our primary subject terms "the artystry."

  No fewr than twelv lamps can be used and if possibl twente is bettr. The lite is of corse of critickal import, no less than the lines of the boys jacket, the fall of the girls skyrts.

  If theyr eyes are opin, the lamps kin be moved close, to giv a pleasing refleckshun on the darks of the eyes. If they are closed, then the lamps shuld be moved back, becuz to much lite will wite the linez of there buetifull faces and the colour in there cheekz will be lost fore'er.

  This MUST be avoided. The childrin are dead. But their soulz are alive. They are inosents with God, and sinse I sent them there I must also giv them propr funeral servis and memorials of artystry and luv.

  - Silver, Charles M.

  (afterword by Dr. Charlotte Bongiovi),

  (2003) Berkeley, California,

  Memento Mori, Notes of a Dead Man,

  Western University Press, Inc.

  THE BLOOD ON HIS HANDS

  There are so many things they don't tell you about having a baby. Or if they do, it glances right off you, bullets bouncing off the impervious armor of inexperience.

  And this makes sense. Indeed, it is a truth of human nature: we understand from within the sum of our experiences. One who has never been to war cannot truly understand the filth, the hunger, the fear, the excitement. One who has never truly loved another cannot comprehend the breathless anticipation that turns over time to a secure sense of belonging.

  A person who has never had a baby cannot really understand what having a baby entails. Not just the entirety, but the small moments.

  Blake Douglas thought that he would be prepared this time. It was, after all, his second spin on this particular merry-go-round. The first baby had come eight years before, and though it had been a while he could remember much of it with the clarity of a vision from God. Moments burned in his mind.

  He remembered the sounds. The low beeps of heart monitors: one for Alyssa, one for the baby that kicked restlessly within her. The restrained walla-walla-walla of nurses and doctors coming in and going out. Once in a while they said something to him or Alyssa, but mostly they kept their own counsel, like priests and priestesses in a religion whose bloody altars had somehow survived to modern times.

  Then the feel of Alyssa in his arms as she pushed. His right arm around her back, his left cradling one of her legs as she drew into a tight ball. The sweat that dripped down her forehead, down her neck, mingling with the sweat on his body. One more way he and she were then and always would be joined.

  And the smell. That most of all. The antiseptic scent of the hospital. The heavy cologne of one of the doctors, so thick that Alyssa finally demanded he leave and only come back "after he had taken a bath and didn't smell like an ad for a European travel agency," which didn't make too much sense but was vivid enough that the doctor left and came back a half hour later smelling like soap instead of the latest Calvin Klein concoction.

  The biggest smell was the baby himself. That was also the biggest surprise. Blake expected the crying, the blood, Alyssa's final sigh/scream of release as their new son's feet slipped free of her body. He expected the love that washed over him when he looked at the tiny body – though that feeling came much stronger than expected.

  But he didn't expect the little thing in his arms to smell so bad. Acrid, a smell that tugged at his nostrils and pulled the corners of his lips into a frown.

  "What is it?" said Alyssa. Her words slurred a bit – exhaustion, the halo of pain recently past, the drugs.

  "Nothing," said Blake. But of course it was something. He pasted a smile on his face and concentrated on the love he was feeling and tried to ignore the realization that he was holding something that had just spent the last nine months swimming in a very confined space. A space that had to be mostly comprised of the baby's own bodily wastes at this point.

  No wonder the kid smelled bad.

  But it didn't matter. Smell could be washed away. Love couldn't.

  And it all wrote itself across his mind. Memories that etched new furrows through his brain, formed new creases in his frontal lobe.

  Creases that, he hoped, would cut down the other ones, the older ones. The ones that carried memories of his own childhood.

  They didn't. The couldn't.

  Just as the greatest future experiences can never be truly understood, so the worst past experiences can never be truly erased.

  But because he'd been through the process before he thought this time, this time, he would be ready. Would understand. It was a little girl, but other than that, it was all going to be something familiar and easy.

  And the beginning was the same. The low sounds, followed by much louder ones. The feel of his wife's skin as she pushed. The cries. The baby coming into his arms.

  But she didn't smell.

  I guess maybe little girls are cleaner, after all.

  The thought was strangely disappointing. Maybe it was sexist of him, but he didn't like the idea of him and Mal being the two hulking, sweating, stinking creatures in
the house while Alyssa and the new baby remained in pristine perfection. Because families worked and played together. They should get dirty together, too.

  Then he realized he was being silly. Was ignoring the obvious. Was avoiding his daughter's eyes.

  Why would I do that?

  He looked at her. Her eyes were closed, which was hardly unusual: many newborns didn't open their eyes for several minutes.

  But as he looked, one eye cracked. Then the other. Narrow slits that couldn't see much. But they opened, and for some reason that mattered to him. Mattered a lot.

  And the love came over him. Just like it had with Mal. Blake felt light, like he could do anything. And heavy, because he might well have to do everything.

  Children: one more thing that made you into a man. And one more thing that made you realize your own childhood was long gone and would never come back again.

  A good thing in my case.

  He smiled at his baby. Then at Alyssa. She was waiting patiently. This was part of the deal: she got to carry the baby for nine months, he got the first few moments the baby came outside. Not that carrying a baby was all wine and roses, he knew that just from watching her.

  But she told him how special it was, how sad it sometimes made her that he would never understand it. And told him early in her first pregnancy – Mal – that she wanted him to have this first moment. And he was glad.

  Then his moment was over. He handed the baby to Alyssa. She was tired, her complexion was blotchy. She had put on makeup a few hours before labor started and she came in, but even Maybelline's top experts had yet to come up with labor-proof foundation or mascara.

  Her hair was a wreck, too: stray strands of blond hair streaking in every direction like the baby's spirit had ridden down on a lightning bolt and Alyssa had managed to get a hand on it before it dissipated.