Shock Totem 9.5: Holiday Tales of the Macabre and Twisted - Halloween 2014 Read online

  “Christ,” he said. “Holy fuckersucks!”

  “What happened?” Katie said.

  “Wow.”

  Matt stared down the street, wide-eyed. Katie thought about slapping him a second time. “Matt, focus! What happened? What did you see?”

  “Too much,” he said, turning toward her, his lips trembling. His eyes were wide with fear, but finally focused. “They’ve seen us.”

  “Oh no.” Hands shaking, Katie flicked the lighter. The flame sputtered. She kept at it, and it caught on the third try. She held it to the candle.

  There was no wick.

  No, she thought.

  She placed the flame directly to the candle’s tip. Nothing happened. It wouldn’t catch.

  No, no, no!

  “Here,” Matt said. “Try this.”

  Kneeling, he hoisted the child to a sitting position. The child’s body hung limply, its head bowed. Grabbing its hands, Matt placed them together, palms up, as if accepting sacramental bread.

  Katie stood there, staring into the sky, waiting for the blood-red raindrops to fall, like they had in her vision. But again, nothing happened.

  Her heart plummeted.

  “Give it the candle,” Matt said. “Hurry.”

  She silently cursed herself. This wasn’t your everyday candle. She should have known better. Instantly the child reacted when she placed the candle in its palms. Its body stiffened as if air were being blown into a balloon. With Matt’s help, it stood. Eyes shifted from white to black.

  Matt let go and stepped back.

  Flee...now...

  The voice was weaker, but the urgency still clear.

  Matt grabbed Kate’s arm. “Let’s go!”

  They ran the short distance to the house. Once inside, Matt slammed the door shut, locked it, and turned out the lights. Through the window they watched a single drop of fire descend from the sky like a dying firefly.

  As if in prayer, the ghostly sentinel bowed its head.

  The air around them seemed to gasp, and a fiery glow pulsed within the child. It grew brighter, stronger, hungrier, the air shimmering and blurring like waves of heat over a desert highway, until all was bathed in a dazzling orange hue.

  Matt went to the kitchen sink and splashed water on his face. “Holy crap,” he said. “Katie, come check this out.”

  He had moved the curtain aside and was looking out the window that faced the back yard. There, too, stood one of the strange children, surrounded by the beautiful orange sheen. Two more stood silently on either side of the house, making four in total, all afire from within, a protective dome encapsulating the house.

  They moved to the front window again and watched the street beyond. Though they couldn’t see the wormlike shadows, nor could they truly fathom the danger, they knew where they were by the way the firelight dimmed as the dark things repeatedly tried to break through the near invisible walls that kept them at bay.

  Matt pulled Katie close, and kissed her forehead. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She embraced him, not sure what to say. The kiss, innocent as it might have been, had sent her heart aflutter. “It’s okay,” she said quietly.

  “So now what do we do?”

  “I don’t know.” Katie hadn’t had time to process what had already happened, let alone figure out what they should do next. Halloween had come alive in ways more real than she could ever have imagined, shattering the fictional barrier that usually separated her world from that of the dark. “We wait, I guess.”

  She rested her head on Matt’s shoulder.

  He hugged her a little tighter.

  The minutes ticked by and they watched their little corner of the world through the unbelievable orange sphere.

  Again Katie thought of her father. She’d felt lost since his death, but had tried to remain strong. Her mother had dealt with the loss in a completely different way—isolation, denial, anger—and Katie’s relationship with her had suffered greatly.

  But maybe her father was still here with them. Perhaps, with Katie’s help, her mother would soon emerge from the darkness into which she had descended.

  Perhaps.

  Katie had always wanted to trust in what the religious folk preached, but it had always seemed so hokey. Now, however, it seemed wonderful. The possibilities warmed her heart. And even if it weren’t entirely true, or not true at all, could believing in some higher power, having faith in it, be so terrible?

  One thing she did know—beyond the window, past the strange child and the enchanting sphere, there lurked a darkness more menacing than she could ever have imagined before tonight.

  She closed her eyes, thought of her father, found hope for her mother, and dared to believe.

  K. Allen Wood’s fiction has appeared in 52 Stitches, Vol. 2; The Zombie Feed, Vol. 1; Epitaphs: The Journal of New England Horror Writers; The Gate 2: 13 Tales of Isolation and Despair; Anthology Year One; Appalachian Undead and its companion chapbook, Mountain Dead; and most recently in Anthology Year Two: Inner Demons Out. He lives and plots in Massachusetts.

  For more info, visit his website at www.kallenwood.com.

  HOWLING THROUGH THE KEYHOLE

  The stories behind the stories

  “Halloween On”

  Halloween is my favorite holiday for a lot of reasons, but chief among them is that it is a night for people to empower themselves by assuming an identity they choose. Sure, it’s an occasion for children to go door to door begging for treats and for college students to dress up as sexy Freddy Kruegers and bad puns like “cereal killers” before getting wasted. But for a lot of us, it is a day to be something we always wanted to be, if only for a few hours. Unlike all other holidays, it’s a day about individual self-determination and wish fulfillment.

  The inspiration for both of my pieces in “Halloween On...” comes from the idea that Halloween is a chance to try on a new skin and reinvent yourself. Both of my characters, Nick and Bonnie, are defined and confined by the contrast between who they are and who they want to be. On the corner of Cave and Ellis, and at the other end of the neighborhood on Ballard Ave., I tried to offer twin stories of the struggle to assert one’s own identity. Nick is a bullied, scared child, who lives in self-imposed isolation. At first it might appear that he’s preparing for something awful by playing his game, but in reality he’s confronting his fears—forging himself into the man he wants to be. Bonnie, by contrast, lives in isolation as a result of her husband’s obsession with their showpiece home. She wants to engage with the outside world and invite it in, but he won’t let her. When she confines him instead, she throws the door to her own cage wide open.

  Whether or not you sympathize with either of these characters, my intent was to offer a glimpse at people who wear masks every day, except on Halloween, when they are able to be who they really are.

  –Bracken MacLeod

  I like Halloween. I like candy. With “The Corner of Ash and Thomas Streets,” I wanted to do a nod to the most cliché of Halloween creepies, the candy tamperer. And I named the streets for one of my favorite current writers, Lee Thomas. On “The Corner of Kenwood Lane,” named for my brother from another mother, Ken Wood, I went for the sad. I sometimes do that. And...I like candy.

  –John Boden

  “Night in the Forest of Loneliness”

  “She told him her name was Willow, and he laughed and claimed his name was Oak.”

  I wrote that line on a printed copy of another short story and some months later it led to “Night in the Forest of Loneliness,” my first flash piece.

  –David G. Blake

  “Out of Field Theory”

  The idea for “Out of Field Theory” came when a graduate class I was taking—Film & Philosophy—was studying the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. I probably understood it just as well as my protagonist did—not very well at all—but one of his ideas about framing struck a chord in me. Framing suggests that, when we take or film an image or movie, we’re creating an alternate rea
lity that’s not necessarily bound by the frames we artificially impose on it. The idea that we were creating a reality, and that it continued past the frame of a picture or movie, proved very unsettling, and after a year or two of germination, produced “Out of Field Theory.”

  –Kevin Lucia

  “Tricks and Treats”

  Thinking about Halloween, I always remember being a kid and going trick-or-treating. Dressing up in a costume, pretending that you’re someone or something else, and getting to go door to door where people you don’t even know give you handfuls of sweets. What could be better?

  I also remember when I was informed I was too old to go trick-or-treating anymore. No more free goodies, no more running around in the dark trying to scare my friends or the neighbors. Yet not quite old enough to be into parties or doing what the older kids did on that magical night.

  That was the background of the story, just that reminiscence of more innocent times. But there are always those who aren’t ready to give up the free stuff, and who are willing to ruin another child’s fond memories of that favorite holiday. And then I got to thinking... what if there are other things out there, whose ideas of trick-or-treating are altogether darker and less innocuous? It’s always good to remember, we’re not the only ones out there wandering in the shadows.

  –Rose Blackthorn

  “Howdy Doody Time”

  We moved into a new house recently, and, as an adult, I’ve never lived in a place that had proper trick-or-treating, so I was having some anxiety as to how to prepare—are there a lot of kids? How much candy should I get? What kind? Are they going to egg us if we don’t have Snickers? Those kinds of things. That’s about it.

  –Kriscinda Lee Everitt

  “Before This Night Is Done”

  My parents got me Danny Elfman’s film score for Batman Returns (1992) at some point in the mid-to-late 90s, but it wasn’t until after I got my first portable CD player in the later 90s, that I really listened to it. I began to discover multiple musical surprises on it; besides the obvious sweeping, heroic themes and a number of more bombastic sections for the more action-oriented scenes in the movie. I was mystified by the dark passages in tracks like “The Lair, Pt. 1” and “Selena Transforms.” In fact, I became downright fascinated by these tracks; they crawled with nocturnal soundscapes, and with repeated listens (independent of the movie), I swear, the tracks got even darker. I became determined to somehow interpret and share the dark imagery inspired by Mr. Elfman’s score, and with “Before This Night Is Done,” that darkness has crawled out of my ears and onto the page.

  –Barry Lee Dejasu

  “Allhallowtide (To the Faithless Departed)”

  I keep a folder by my desk with old poetry, artwork, and other ramblings from my youth—a keyhole of my own, if you will, one that looks into my past. Now and then I’ll go through and find a piece I feel might have some substance to it, and that’s what happened here. I played with the stream of consciousness narrative and reworked it into a more experimental form to try to give the speaker a more distinct voice while still conveying the chaotic nature of the piece. It was originally called “Fear”, and struck me as fitting for a Halloween issue once I explored the theme of religion a bit further and fleshed out the connections. (Well, in my own mind, anyway...) And to be perfectly honest, it’s pretty surreal seeing a poem go to print twenty-five years after writing it—perhaps more so than the poem itself.

  –Sydney Leigh

  “The Candle Eaters”

  Stephen King once said, “If it’s a bad idea, you’ll forget about it; if it’s a good idea, it will stick around.” I tend to agree.

  Before writing “The Candle Eaters,” the basic premise had been germinating in my head for years. Every Halloween I’d think, I really need to write this story someday, and then inevitably the day would pass and I’d vow to do it next year. Rinse. Repeat.

  Finally, back in 2010, a small-press magazine (of which I am a big fan) announced that they were putting out a Halloween issue, and I wanted to be a part of it.

  The first version of “The Candle Eaters” missed the mark. With thinly-drawn characters, a darker feel overall, and an ending full of death and destruction, it was not the “good idea” that had been in my head for all those years. With no time for a rewrite, however, I made the amateurish mistake and submitted it anyway—and was promptly rejected (by one of this issue’s contributors, in fact).

  What I did accomplish with that first version, I think, was introduce some original elements to the oft-explored Halloween setting. Specifically the “candle eaters,” which of course are a riff on the old-time tradition of using hollowed-out turnips or pumpkins to ward off evil spirits.

  On the surface, the story included here isn’t drastically different from that first version, but I think it accomplishes what I had initially envisioned so long ago, which was a story fundamentally about faith and hope without being overly sentimental.

  Ultimately, I just hope “The Candle Eaters” is a good, entertaining story.

  –K. Allen Wood

  ADDITIONAL BIOS

  John Langan is the author of two collections, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (Hippocampus 2013) and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime 2008). He has written a novel, House of Windows (Night Shade 2009), and, with Paul Tremblay, has co-edited an anthology, Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (Prime 2011). He lives in upstate New York with his wife, younger son, and a menagerie.

  •

  Babs Boden is the youngest and accidental daughter of Fritz and Syl. Born and raised in the wilds of the Pennsylvania chocolate regions, she spent her formative years being surly, smirking, making wildly sarcastic comments at breathtakingly inappropriate moments, and fending off crazed Pentecostals armed only with a Joan Jett 45 and a bottle of Aussie Sprunch.

  She earns her living sitting in a little gray cube at a soulless corporation running SAS, configuring databases, and making snide remarks. She is currently on husband #1, has two male children whom she has so far managed not to sell to the circus, and no pets. One day she hopes to retire, obtain her CDL, and become a long-haul trucker.

  •

  Jeremy Wagner writes lyrics and music and tours worldwide with the death metal band Broken Hope. He also writes horror fiction. He has been published in RIP Magazine, Terrorizer, Metal Edge, Microhorror, and has had work published through Perseus Books, St. Martin’s Press, and Ravenous Romance Publishers.

  Wagner’s most recent published works include his debut novel, The Armageddon Chord; the short story “Romance Ain’t Dead,” which appears in the zombie-romance anthology Hungry for Your Love; and the short story “The Creatures from Craigslist” in the anthology Fangbangers: An Erotic Anthology of Fangs, Claws, Sex and Love.

  He currently has two new novels under revision.

  •

  Lee Thomas is the Lambda Literary Award- and Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Dust of Wonderland, In the Closet Under the Bed, The German, Torn, Ash Street, Like Light for Flies, and Butcher’s Road. Lee lives in Austin, Texas. You can find him online at www.leethomasauthor.com.

  •

  Mike Lombardo is an indie filmmaker/FX artist who runs Reel Splatter Productions. His short films have been played at film festivals across the US and overseas. His newest film, The Stall, a Lovecraftian tale of a man trapped in a public restroom during the apocalypse, just finished its festival tour and is available on DVD at www.reelsplatter.com. You should buy a copy. Seriously, that would be totally boss.

  ARTIST BIO

  Silent Q Design was founded in Montreal in 2006 by Mikio Murakami. Melding together the use of both realistic templates and surreal imagery, Mikio’s artistry proves, at first glance, that a passion for art still is alive, and that no musician, magazine, or venue should suffer from the same bland designs that have been re-hashed over and over.

  Mikio’s work has been commissioned both locally and internationally, by bands such as
Redemption, Synastry, Starkweather, and Epocholypse. Shock Totem #3 was his first book-design project.

  For more info, visit www.silentqdesign.net.

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