Fiction Vortex - October 2013 Horror Issue, Page 3

  "She’s not coming back," the deer told me.

  I panicked and squeezed the trigger. The bullet struck the deer in the shoulder and I watched its flesh ripple as if a pebble had been thrown into a body of water. It collapsed to the grass without a sound. I didn’t stop to gather the carcass. I didn’t even look back at it. Jumping down from my perch, I sprinted back to my cabin and charged inside. With the gun still in my hand, I collapsed on the couch. I tossed it aside and it skated across the hardwood floor, to rest by the hearth of the fireplace. I put my head in my hands and gulped for air as my world spun behind my eyelids.

  I needed a splash of cold water on my face, so I stood up to find the kitchen. The room spun and I caught myself against the dining room table. Right when my vision started to clear, I watched a man materialize at one of the chairs, only a shadow at first, and then slowly gathering dimension and shape, as though developing on a sheet of film. I jumped back with my heart seizing in my chest. It was my grandpa as a younger man, as I remembered him from when I was a boy, and he was as solid as me. His blonde hair was slicked back and he wore a crisp vest over a red turtleneck sweater. He smiled at me brightly and offered me to sit with him. I plopped down hard into an open chair.

  "How’re you doing, son?" he asked me with a voice that didn’t quite match his lips. The voice sounded distant as if it were underwater or imprisoned inside a seashell.

  "Gran?" I croaked, and he nodded his head. "Are you really here?" At this point all feeling had trickled off my body to pool around my heels.

  "I’ve always been here," he said. "You have to cross the water. Nothing keeps you here, or me."

  "What’re you saying?"

  "Sometimes we stray too far from our roots, and can’t go back. We all carry darkness with us, and hers ran deep. It’s what carried me to this dark corner of the world, but I couldn’t escape it. Not really. It’s when we sleep too much, and hold fast to these dreams, that we’re not sure what’s important anymore, what’s truly real."

  Before I could speak, my grandpa was already fading out of existence. I watched him go, and felt my energy return to my body. I bolted outside and looked out across the lake. Usually I could see the houses on the other side, but today they were obscured by a heavy mist over the surface of the water. I’d never seen anything like it in all my years at the cabin. I stood on the edge of the dock, wondering how I was going to get across. As if to answer my question, a lone canoe came drifting into view, empty and somewhat unsettling. It bumped with the dock and I reached over to grab hold. I fell inside and struggled to right myself in the chaos of splashing water. I found a lone paddle and waded forward into open water, putting my grandpa’s cabin at my back. I hadn’t left my little island for twelve long years, but strangely enough, I didn’t look back, not that I could see anything in the thickening fog.

  I felt like I was out there for hours, which didn’t seem right, judging by the size of the lake. I watched as the fog turned to a solid grey, and then into a black screen. The sun had left me with nothing but a chilled wind and a wet pair of pants, too cold for comfort. The lake was so still and quiet. I had never heard it that silent, not without the incessant chirping of the crickets. The dip of my paddle into the water hardly made a sound. I started to breathe through my mouth, just so I could hear something.

  Finally the mist cleared and my canoe grinded with the shore. I fell onto cold grass and inhaled the night air. I looked up, and illuminated in the soft light of the moon, was Linda’s cottage, only a doll’s house from where I was, but I knew it was hers. She had often pointed to it from across the lake, sometimes through a set of binoculars for a better look. The house with the red trim, and the cherry tree in the yard. It was her favorite tree in the garden, she told me. A strange grove of trees separated me from the house, which I hadn’t noticed before. I walked slow, watching as the naked trees scratched their branches together. Then I was right underneath them, their bodies nothing short of brick towers, and their arms like the complicated workings of a spider web, weaving and knitting into one collective canopy over my head.

  Then something moved to the left while all the trees blew to the right. It appeared as only a crooked figure stepping out from behind one of the trees, and once it joined my path, I saw that this creature was all legs, and they were long. It moved toward me with the delicacy of a spider, another set of thin lines extending from its body in the shape of arms. Long spindly fingers curled and uncurled within its hand. In the night it was only a black figure without any real substance, but I could see what appeared to be a roundish head set atop its twig of a body. I could see the reflection of light in its eyes, only dimes from where I was standing.

  I watched panic-stricken, rooted to the spot as the creature slinked toward me without ever making a sound. It stopped a few yards away, standing fifteen feet tall at the least, its legs spread, and its arms hanging low to the ground, fingers curling and uncurling. It was hunched over, head bowed as if in prayer. It stood perfectly still. One might have mistaken it for a tree growing out of the very path, if it hadn’t spoken to me of course.

  "We don’t speak of such stories, not even when the trees are not themselves, when they are shadowed," the gaunt man said. His voice was but a whisper, a breathy exhale of air, which mimicked the sound of the wind through the trees. "Don’t we know such stories act as prayers, drawing the darkness in rather than the light?"

  I had nothing to say. I stood below the creature, waiting for it to do something, anything. Even its fingers had stopped moving. I blinked my eyes a few times, and the more moisture I brought to them, the more the creature resembled a tree in the middle of the path. After awhile I realized that its spread legs were actually two different trees touching, and the arms were only low hanging boughs with branch-like fingers. The head was nothing more than a knot in one of the trunks.

  I slowly navigated around the trees and ran the rest of the way to Linda’s house. It was dark, and all the windows were closed. I ran past the cherry tree, and into the house, skating up the stairs as if I was on a track. I passed through another door and there was Linda, sleeping in her bed with the moonlight spilling in through the un-shaded window, throwing crazy shadows across the ripples of her blankets. And I was lying in the bed with her, at least my body was, my arm around her waist. I looked at the window and the pane of glass was still speckled with fresh rain.

  I hurried to Linda’s bedside, my hands reaching out to touch her face, but passing right through. I saw that she wasn't breathing, and her skin was so pale, her mouth hanging slightly ajar.

  "I went home with her that night," I said out loud. "She didn’t go out in the dark alone." My face filled with tears, and I didn’t know if they were real or not. I wasn't even sure that the fingers that wiped them away were real. They felt solid.

  I kneeled by the side of the bed for some time, staring at Linda’s vacant face. I wondered whether I should reenter my body and try to shake her awake. I wondered whether I should call an ambulance or perform CPR, but I couldn’t sense the slightest flicker of life in her face. I stood up and floated out through the window, hovering above Linda’s tidy little garden and cherry tree. I was sad that I hadn’t visited this garden earlier, that I hadn’t helped her trim those hedges or plant those flowers into the soft soil. I was sad that I hadn’t seen her at her best, happily standing below that tree, picking the cherries like candy, maybe saving a few for her pantry, or popping a few into her mouth right then and there.

  Even though the wind had died down and the night had gone still, the cherry tree waved at me, its branches clicking against Linda’s bedroom window. It seemed to groan at my presence, every bud and leaf on its body trembling with life. Light filled my senses and I placed a hand on the trunk, so warm to the touch. I felt her stir inside her earthly shell, her voice coming to meet me across a long distance. I smiled and pressed my face against the bark, feeling her lips kiss my cheek.

  Something insisted on rooting me to this
world, at least for a little while longer. Everything I needed was there in nature, only not in the nature I had always envisioned on my distant island, forever swimming in the lake and chasing squirrels. I found everything in the warm embrace of a cherry tree in the rain soaked garden of my deceased love. And to think a town was right there at my back, where people still shopped in stores and woke up to the morning news. It had been there all along, and just like my grandpa and his cabin long faded on a crumpled Polaroid, so had I.

  Brendan Verville is an English student in Denver, Colorado. Good horror stories were some of his first introductions to reading, and then to his writing. His love of the macabre has gotten so bad that he can't enjoy a dream unless it's a nightmare, just so he can experience the relief of waking up from it. Recently his works have been published in the Metrosphere and From the Depths literary magazines. "Too Much Sleep" is dedicated to fellow ghost storyteller, Phil Gudgel, who first showed him Slender.

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  The Most Qualified Applicant

  by Kathy Charles; published October 8, 2013

  Allison White exited the Columbus Circle subway at a brisk pace, heels clacking noisily on the pavement. She was confident in the direction she was going, her stride full of purpose. She had to be. Her very livelihood depended on it.

  Allison was a woman who knew things. She knew how to screen a phone call in a professional and courteous manner. She knew how to groom a Bernese Mountain dog and feed it a veterinarian-prescribed diet. She even knew how to change a light bulb in a chandelier. That task had been particularly challenging, not so much for its complexity, but for the sheer height of the damn thing, hanging at least twenty feet above a living area bigger than her whole apartment.

  Now she needed to know new things. Like how to hail a cab in peak hour traffic, a skill rarely called upon in L.A. where drivers ferried studio executives — men who had little reason to travel their own course — from one meeting to the next. She would need to know which deli could deliver at a moment’s notice, how to get the best seats at Broadway’s hottest shows, and whether the Midtown Tunnel or the Brooklyn Bridge would offer the fastest way to JFK Airport. Allison was confident she would find her feet in no time, if only someone would give her the opportunity. What she needed more than anything was a break.

  "Can you spare some change?"

  The beggar leaned forward and shook his paper cup hopefully. Allison didn’t make eye contact, didn’t even slow her pace. I handled that well, she thought proudly as she continued down the street without breaking her stride. I know how to handle things.

  Allison had been on the East Coast for three months, so far with little luck. The recruitment agencies didn’t want to take her on, even with her A-list experience and impeccable references.

  "This is New York, darling," one uptight manager with an even tighter ponytail had helpfully informed her. "We do things differently here. The needs of our clients are, well, a tad more sophisticated than your West Coast counterparts. The needs of our clients are significant."

  "Of course," Allison had found herself eagerly agreeing, buying into the bi-coastal snobbery. "I’m originally from New England. I liked living in California, but I agree — the lifestyle is very superficial."

  "New England is not Manhattan," the woman sneered before abruptly closing her file. "Come back and see us in five years, once you have some real experience."

  Experience was hard to come by if no one would give you a job. At her darkest moments Alison regretted leaving California, thought she had made a terrible mistake that her career would never recover from. Employers don’t like gaps in a resume, she thought painfully. The longer she stayed unemployed the harder it would be for her to find a job. Then there was her age to contend with. At thirty-five she felt positively ancient, no match for the fresh-faced kids straight out of college who were hungry for experience and willing to work for nothing.

  Allison needed a way to pay the rent, and she needed it fast, or she’d be back in Maine living with her parents, working at her Dad’s hardware store and dating the local fishermen on Saturday nights. Grist for the writing mill, sure, but far from the creative, literary life Allison had in mind for herself.

  California had been bearable until he broke up with her. She should have known better than to date a screenwriter; they were as self-absorbed as actors, with a much greater chip on their shoulders. She had attempted to make herself indispensable to him: reading his scripts and offering much-needed encouragement, refilling the stationery cabinet with online orders from Staples, and making sure the fridge was full of microwave meals so he wouldn’t need to leave the house. She thought she was ingratiating herself to the point where he couldn’t live without her, but the truth was she had over-shot the mark. She was crowding him, he had said. He needed space to breath. But if she wanted something casual, a no-strings-attached partner that could be called upon at a moment’s notice, he would be open to that, provided his schedule was clear.

  It was probably for the best, she thought as she made her way toward Central Park. If she were honest with herself she would have admitted that not only his talent but also his prolific nature caused her enormous unease. He found writing so easy, practically pounded the keys with abandon while she sulked in the bedroom, unable to put even one word to page. She didn’t have the hubris for success in Hollywood, but she could arrange a dinner party for twelve guests with only twenty-four hours notice, a skill that could be utilized in any city brimming with affluent dwellers. Within twenty-four hours of being unceremoniously dumped she had booked a ticket to New York City, figuring a move to the home of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker might reignite her literary ambitions, or at the very least give her a new pool of men to cull from. They say you should never move to a new city with a broken heart, and definitely not without a job. Allison had done both these things.

  Sometimes I’m my own worst enemy, she thought ruefully as she made her way to her appointment, the incessant honking of the New York City cabs putting her even more on edge. After her disastrous experience with the recruitment agencies Allison had been forced to trawl Craigslist for positions. Most of the ads for personal assistants were thinly veiled requests for sexual partners. Allison had found this out the hard way. An "upwardly-mobile businessman seeking executive support" had turned out to be grocery store owner in the Meatpacking District with a foot fetish. Another asking for a "driven, ambitious, career-minded woman" was actually a recruiter for a high-class call-girl ring. She had actually seriously considered that proposition for a brief moment. College students did it, so why not her? She might even get a red-hot memoir out of the experience. The idea had played fitfully on her mind as she continued to send out her resume into the black hole of job-hunting, until finally one day she received an email that buoyed her out of her prostitution-considering reverie.

  Miss White,

  Thank you for your interest in this position. Impressed with your resume. Can you come for an interview? Address below.

  All the best,

  BENNETT M. AMBERSON

  She had applied for so many jobs she couldn’t even remember which one this was. She backtracked her steps and found the advertisement.

  "Philanthropist seeks indispensable assistant. Support required for completion of important project. Absolute professionalism and discretion required." The address was the Upper West Side.

  Allison strolled past the park, enjoying the warm air, the sun and the way the light played on the leaves. The light in New York was different from Los Angeles; it was softer, easier on the eyes. The L.A. sun would burn you up in a New York minute.

  She consulted the map on her phone then looked up, seeing her destination for the first time: an old, opulent four-story brownstone with large glazed windows that overlooked the park.

  Stockbroker, she thought as she approached. Or maybe a hedge fund manager. A nice change at least from the spoiled, bratty A-list of Beverly Hills. The doorman smiled amiabl
y as she approached.

  "Miss White?" he enquired cheerfully.

  "Yes, hello," Allison replied, smiling broadly. First impressions were always important, especially with the rest of the help, with whom Allison made it her duty to strike up an alliance. Although such a gesture in this case would probably be short lived, Allison thought grimly. The doorman looked a hundred years old, though a spritely one hundred, she had to admit. She’d heard her father pronounce many times that working kept a man young. The day he retired was the day he’d drop dead, he was often fond of saying.

  The doorman ushered her in with a slight quiver in his step. "Mr. Amberson is expecting you."

  Allison stepped through the doorway into the foyer, spied the gleaming steel elevators at the end of the hall.

  "Top floor," the doorman croaked, as if he could read her mind.

  "Thank you, Mr...?"

  "Just call me Harold," he said with a smile, graciously putting her at ease.

  "Harold. I hope to be seeing much more of you," she said with a laugh.

  "I’m sure you will," he said kindly. "You look like a good one."

  "Why thank you," she said, her spirits suddenly lifted by this show of support. "Let’s hope so."

  Allison made her way to the elevators and pressed the button.

  A brownstone with an elevator. Nice.

  The doors opened and she stepped inside, pushing the button marked clearly with a ‘P.’ Suddenly she felt even more tense for a reason she couldn’t clearly discern. Maybe it was the way the elevator doors closed, snapping shut with a speed she didn’t think she had seen before. Maybe it was the color of the elevator, a dark smudgy brown resembling dirt that made her think of being buried alive. She put her growing unease down to pre-interview jitters. She couldn’t afford to be this anxious; it would completely jeopardize her changes of being hired. She needed to be the very epitome of grace and ease. She resolved when she got home to up her dosage of St. John’s Wort to nine a day. Six obviously wasn’t cutting it anymore.