The Spinetinglers Anthology 2011 Read online

  His vision seemed to zoom forward of its own volition. He felt dizzy with the speed of it. The thing on her head was slug like, but scaly and wet. It had stubby, three fingered claws that dug into each side of her face and a thick dark proboscis that it inserted through the crown of her head. It had a long tail that wrapped tightly around her pale thin neck, and it was feeding from her.

  It was sucking the energy straight out of her, drinking her life force and bleeding her dry. And as if that wasn't enough, it had some kind of pulsating tube pushed deep into her lungs from behind, through which it excreted oily black shit.

  And no-one else could see it.

  Carlos stared, open mouthed as it flicked the air with stunted useless leathery wings.

  “You want a fucking photo mate?” Her helper's voice grunted angrily.

  “What?” Carlos gasped. “Oh, no, sorry.” He turned away and walked quickly for the exit, barely suppressing the urge to lift his hand to his mouth.

  He half walked, half jogged home. No simple task for a man of his size. He barged inside the house and then stood breathless with his back to the door. His wall mounted telephone was flashing the fact that he had one new message. He picked up the receiver and poked at the buttons.

  Yulia's voice spoke to him. Her guttural Russian accent grated on him like an embarrassing memory.

  “Typical Carlos. Only bloody calling when you wanting something. Can't believe you actually try this thing. Am halfway through translating. I put in email this part. You know what these are, yes? Special, for seeing the ghosts. You must be bloody madman!” The phone went dead.

  He played the message again, and then a third time, just to make sure he'd heard it right.

  The lenses were made especially for seeing ghosts. That's what Yulia had said, no matter how much he tried to re-hear it in his mind.

  He lurched to his laptop and jabbed the power button. He tapped his fingers impatiently on the desk top while he waited for it to boot.

  For seeing ghosts, he repeated in his mind. Is that even possible? Surely not.

  He went straight to the email application and pulled down Yulia's message. He opened the attachment and started reading.

  It began with a brief history of Kirlian photography. Carlos made notes to Google with. Apparently this Kirlian bloke had discovered a means by which to photograph the electromagnetic corona produced by living organisms. By coating photographic film and applying various voltages he captured images of what he believed to be the human aura. By refining the coating compound he was able to narrow down the field frequency.

  That was in the late nineteen sixties, and things had progressed considerably since then. Another mad professor, Andre Maslik, had taken up where Kirlian left off and developed special lens coatings that could react to very subtle and exceptionally high frequencies...

  “It isn't the lenses.” Carlos whispered to himself. “It's the bloody soaking solution.”

  And this wasn't a product... It was a field trial.

  He'd signed up for a fucking field trial.

  He scrolled down to the ‘directions for use' section’ He read a few lines. His heart nearly dropped out of his arse. How could he have been so fucking stupid?

  The lenses were just a delivery system designed to hold the fluid against the cornea until it had time to... penetrate. “What does that mean?” Carlos muttered, his mind denying the obvious.

  “Dosage, dosage...” He chanted, scanning the document further until he found it.

  “One drop in each lens, then no more for six weeks, after which a further drop may be administered if required...”

  He'd thought it was rinsing solution. No wonder the bottle was so small. He'd put four drops in each lens for two consecutive days! Did that matter?

  “Of course it does! Silly bastard!” Carlos shouted at himself.

  He opened his browser again and typed ‘Andre Maslik’ into the search bar. Google returned perhaps ten links, one of which was a news item issued in Ukraine. He flicked to the page and block copied everything into an online translator. He scanned the resulting text.

  Andre Maslik was dead. He'd been discovered in his bathroom only three days ago. Police were viewing the circumstances as suspicious. There was a small picture. Carlos gasped.

  It was the zombie twins from the pub.

  Carlos flicked back to the Google listing.

  Last on the list was a forum showing several recent references to Andre Maslik. Carlos clicked the link and searched through the latest posts. Again he block copied everything he found into the translator.

  The last few entries almost took his breath:

  -------

  ‘Is it true, what they are saying in the news, that Andre is dead?’

  -------

  ‘Yes, I believe so.’

  -------

  ‘And is it also true, what the others are saying. That when he was found, his eyes were missing?’

  -------

  ‘This has not been confirmed.’

  -------

  ‘And that they were later discovered in his stomach?’

  -------

  There were no further entries. The final one had been posted yesterday evening.

  Carlos sat back in his chair. He wondered if there were others out there like him, tasting the sourness of rising panic in their throats, not knowing what to do next.

  His eyes were found in his stomach, Carlos reminded himself. How can that happen?

  He needed to hide. And where better than the vodka bottle? It had never failed him in the past.

  He stood up and walked toward the kitchen. He pushed open the door and then fell back. Standing in the kitchen was Andre Maslik. His skin dust white and flaking. Where his eyes should have been were dry and blackened voids. His purple mouth was locked in the endless repetition of words that Carlos could neither hear nor read. Andre walked towards him.

  Carlos staggered backward, sick with fear. He backed into his desk which rocked violently. His printer sprang to life churning out page after page of text:

  Do not see....

  Do not see....

  Do not see....

  Do not see....

  Do not see....

  Do not see....

  The screen of his laptop followed suit, flashing endless lines of white on black.

  “Alright! Alright!” Carlos screamed, raising an arm to his face, panic cracking his voice. “I get the fucking message!”

  The printer stopped. Andre was gone.

  Carlos panted heavily. He was about ten seconds from a heart attack.

  He gathered his thoughts as best he could and set off up the stairs. He headed straight for the bathroom mirror and with trembling fingers, and taking several attempts, he pinched out his lenses. In the medicine cabinet was a large bottle of his old lens rinsing solution. He popped the cap, opened his eyes and squirted his eyeballs as vigorously as he dared. He didn't stop until the bottle was empty.

  He rolled his eyes and blinked hard. Silently praying that this was enough to undo the damage.

  He washed his face, relaxing a little under the distraction of the cool water.

  He patted his face dry with a towel and walked into his bedroom.

  His old glasses were the cheapest available on the opticians cut price rack. He'd been pressured into buying them as a backup when he bought his old contacts. He had to rummage about in the dark recesses of his bedside drawer to dig them out.

  At minus five dioptres the lenses were heavy and thick and they made his eyes look two feet further away than the rest of his face. The frames were square and made of black wire. The weight of them always made his nose ache.

  He put them on, grimacing in the knowledge that he now looked like a bloody child molester.

  He walked slowly down the stairs to the living room. He knew as soon as he began to push the door open that there was something in there. Breathing deeply, Carlos looked around the door.

  Andre was standing in
the middle of the room but this time he'd seen fit to invite a few friends. A young woman wearing a flowery dress, sores weeping on her grey face, shuffled toward him in silence. Behind her a young man, the whiteness of bone protruding viciously from one side of his broken neck and rope marks tracing a reddened path up his face. There were others also, as yet out of focus, but all coming for him and all mouthing endlessly, ‘Do not see...’

  Carlos did the sensible thing. He turned and fled.

  “The hospital.” Carlos gasped to himself as he ran down the street. Surely they'd have something to wash this stuff out of his eyes, and it was only about a mile away.

  It was little short of torture, asking his overweight, middle aged, couch potato body to carry him an entire mile without stopping for a pint and a pie. His chest heaved and his legs burned. His glasses, cold in the night air, condensed his sweat, making it impossible to see. But he didn't stop. Not once. Until he found an entrance to the hospital grounds.

  The casualty department was on the other side of the complex but he needed to be near other people so he decided to walk through the building.

  Not knowing his way around he drifted into the nearest corridor. There were several wards branching off to each side. He glanced sideways into a set of double doors, hoping to see a member of staff who could give him directions.

  There was a bed in a side room. The woman lying in it looked skeletal. Her arm rested on top of the bedclothes, the skin hung from it in a baggy flap. You didn't need a PhD to know that she hadn't long left. Her family were standing around the bed, waiting in silence.

  One of them moved aside slightly and Carlos caught a glimpse of something. He stepped closer to the door. The people in the room were too preoccupied to notice him.

  It was another one of those slug things. Like the one in the supermarket, but more developed. This one had bigger wings, and eyes. White, moist, weeping eyes that rolled in loose sockets either side of it's bulbous head. It sat hunched on her belly, it's proboscis pushed deep into her vagina and it's rectum piercing her liver.

  Carlos shrank back. He walked further into the ward, looking desperately for someone to help him.

  They all had them.

  Every single patient had one of these disgusting creatures attached in one way or another. One man had a small one, a young one Carlos guessed, hanging from his face.

  They were some kind of ethereal parasite, leeching unseen and unfelt from their victims. Growing ever stronger on the life energy of people that didn't even know they were there. Their hosts merely suffered, and died.

  Carlos walked over to a man who had one of the parasites hanging from his back. It fed from his throat, excreting into his stomach. Carlos looked closely at it. He leaned toward it and looked into its pearly white eye.

  It saw him. And it was afraid.

  In a frenzy of flapping leathery wings it withdrew its proboscis from its host's throat and set it high in the air. The man began to choke and convulse. Carlos looked around him as the other creatures did the same, each one curling back and holding it's damp bristled feeding tube erect, and each host falling one by one into convulsion. Suddenly there were hospital staff everywhere as the whole ward devolved into chaos.

  Carlos simply stared. What were they doing? Then he realised.

  They were calling out. God alone knew what sound they would be making if he'd had the ears to hear them.

  An unseen darkness descended on the room. A black light that only he could see. The creatures before him were merely larvae. Foetal masses that used human souls as placenta. Foul infants whose only defence was their invisibility.

  The black light became brighter, if such a thing were possible, and Carlos knew then that something terrible was coming and that its only purpose was to defend its children.

  Do not see...

  Carlos ran out of the ward and down the corridor. He knew now that Andre had actually been trying to warn him. Some things just don't want to be seen, so keep your fat fucking nose out! Why hadn't he written that on the sodding printer?

  He ran into the nearest toilet cubicle and locked the door. He sat down on the pedestal with his head in his hands. What the hell was he doing? Whatever was coming after him inhabited an entirely different spectrum! It was probably completely unaware of the hospital building and more than capable of passing through its thick stone walls like piss through a sieve.

  As the first teardrops formed on Carlos' eyelids the black light found him.

  So intense was it that even the harsh brightness of the toilet cubicle light was cancelled out in Carlos' stricken consciousness.

  There was an angel in the light. Terrifying in its dark brilliance it hovered above him as he cowered. Huge and graceful it's glistening wings seemed to devour everything that they touched. It's face was almost bland in its calmness, almost human in its beauty.

  It occurred to Carlos that if this was what those slugs grew up to be, then maybe it was worth a few souls.

  The dark creature regarded him closely, searching him, but for what?

  For weakness. Carlos knew then that he could run, but he couldn't hide. This was a breeder.

  The angel writhed and squirmed, bringing forth a long ovipositor with which it probed him. Carlos felt nothing. The sharp tube danced around his body, back and forth, up and down...

  Eenie... Meenie... Miney...

  The tube struck violently into his chest. Carlos felt a crippling cold that crushed his heart like a steel fist. He couldn't breathe. He could barely move.

  A stillborn scream left his throat. No-one would hear it.

  ‘Do not see...’ A voice in his mind insisted. ‘Do not see...’

  Carlos threw off his glasses. He lifted his hands to his eyes, and screaming again, he drew his fingernails across them.

  ***

  “He's had a massive heart attack Mrs. Soames.” The doctor told her. “He's fortunate to be alive actually.”

  “I'm not Mrs. Soames anymore.” Erica replied. “We're divorced, but I'm all the family he has.”

  She watched him solemnly as he lay sedated in the hospital bed. Irritating machines emitted smug bleeps from one corner of the room.

  “What happened to his eyes?” She asked.

  “No idea,” the doctor replied. “But the damage is fairly substantial. He'll need corneal transplants if he's going to see again. Luckily we've had quite a few donations recently... from Eastern Europe.”

  If You Ever Meet a Girl Named Maisie Mae

  By Nathan Robinson

  MISSbuttereyes99;) writes - hav u eva seen that film?

  MRKNOWITALL writes - nt yt.

  MISSbuttereyes99:) writes - wnt 2 c it? My mates say it’s 2 scary n ive no1 2 go wiv now!

  MRKNOWITALL writes - my dad got it on pirate but wud mucho rather c it in 3D.

  MISSbuttereyes99:) writes - me 2! 3D rocks. checkd times show at 7.30 if ya fancy it?

  MRKNOWITALL writes - Yeah defo, shud b gud. Cnt wate!!

  MISSbuttereyes99:) writes - ok. C u there! Cnt wate 2 meet u finally.

  MRKNOWITALL writes - likewise. Be there about 7ish so that we can get a good seat.

  MISSbuttereyes99:) writes - got to go 4 t now c ya later shane!!!

  MRKNOWITALL writes - bye bye buttereyes.

  PRIVATE CHAT ENDED

  LOG OFF?

  YES/NO

  ***

  Lupo drummed his hairy digits on the dash. She was late. He hated been made to wait. The incessant rain beat down on the roof of the car, the waterfall of pattered white noise increasing his frustration further.

  He said seven.

  It was now twenty past.

  How did she ever in her tiny mind expect to make the show arriving so late?

  Typical female. Probably still at home doing her makeup like a dammed whore.

  He cracked his knuckles, cracked his necked then stretched his legs, pushing his heavy form back into the straining leather of the driver’s seat.

  The colle
cting droplets of rain blurred the windscreen, marring his view of the neon rich, cinema entrance. He tapped the wiper switch and the blades dispensed the moisture in a single swoop.

  There she was. Just walking towards him now.

  He hurriedly started the engine and pulled the car forward so he was now up next to her, winding the electric window down as they drew level with each other. Lupo forged a friendly smile, baring his teeth.

  “Miss Butter Eyes I presume?”

  She stopped in her tracks, turning to his call and bringing her head closer to the window. She didn’t even think to carry an umbrella, the silly little girl, just a backpack. Even in the orange glow of the streetlight he could see how beautiful she was.

  And how young.

  “Yeah, maybe, why?” She answered coolly, pulling the electric pink hooded top closed tighter around the Fall Out Boy t-shirt she had on beneath. He knew she was a big fan of Fall Out Boy, this was her. He guessed her eyes to be baby blue.

  “I’m Shane’s Dad, Mr. Terry. I came to tell you that he can’t make it tonight, he’s a bit ill.”

  “Oh, that’s a bit of a bummer, is he okay?”

  “Yeah, just a stomach bug, he tried ringing but couldn’t get through, kept going to voicemail he said.”

  “Yeah my battery is dead, I’m always forgetting to charge it, I’m such a dumbass sometimes!” She admitted. with a goofy smile.

  “I’m sure you’re not. Anyway listen, Shane’s got the film on DVD, I have a friend who works here, gets me all the latest films, so the wife and me don’t ever have to leave the house. If you want you’re more than welcome to come back get dry and watch the film in the back room with Shane. He’s ever so sorry he couldn’t make it. I blame the wife’s cooking, she could burn water!”