Fear the Abyss: 22 Terrifying Tales of Cosmic Horror (20 page)

You recognize the beginning of "Do it Again," a much lighter song than the BOC tune, but hardly a more comforting one at the moment. But you don't turn the radio off, nor do you lower the volume.

Just get to Lizzie,
you tell yourself.
That's all that matters.

The neighborhoods are supposed to improve as you get closer to the school...at least, that's how you remember it. But today this part of town...which used to contain middle-class suburbs with well-kept lawns and warm, cheerful homes--looks like a bombed-out war zone, the road cracked, buckled, and filled with potholes, sidewalks crumbling, houses lopsided skeletal frames, their yards barren patches of lifeless gray dirt. The cars and trucks driving by are rust-eaten wrecks belching black exhaust as they judder along on decaying tires. You see signs everywhere that proclaim this to be a DECONSTRUCTION ZONE, and despite yourself, you laugh.

By the time you reach Lizzie's school--which is now called Oak
grave
Middle School, according to the tarnished metal letters bolted to the crumbling brick façade of the main building--your head feels like there's something inside trying to claw its way out, and your chest is on fire. But you don't care. Take a nitro pill, don't take a nitro pill...You know the end result will be the same.

You try to check the time on your phone, but the device deforms in your hand like warm taffy, and you drop the useless thing to the floor. You don't need it anyway. You know you're not late because while the buses are lined up in front of the school, there's no sign of kids getting on them yet. The final bell has yet to ring. You made it.

The buses don't
look
like buses, though. They resemble large gray elephants, a dozen in all, lying on their sides in two neat rows, their massive bodies bloated with decomposition gas. There's a small lot in front of the school where parents are supposed to pick up their kids, and there are a number of vehicles parked there, even more lined up in a single row, engines still running, the drivers impatient to collect their progeny and get on with what remains of their day. Their cars are all of a kind: roundish vehicles encased in green shell-like metal, headlights crosshatched like multifaceted eyes, engines emitting a droning buzz. Your pick-up is the only normal vehicle, and you pull into an unoccupied space and park. Before you can turn off your engine, the song on the radio ends, and Mr. Gillespie comes on again.

"When you think about it, boys and girls, the universe's only real function is to devour itself. It's an ouroboros, tail in its own mouth, chewing and swallowing, chewing and swallowing. And no matter how much it eats, it can never finish the job, and it will never, ever be full. So...dig in and join in the feast, kids, and remember to tip your servers on your way out. Bon appetite!"

You turn off the engine and the radio goes silent. Your pulse is beating trip-hammer fast, and sour-smelling sweat rolls off of you in waves. Your headache is so intense that tears stream from your eyes, and the pressure in your chest is so tight you expect your ribs to burst out outward in splintered shards. But as you exit the truck, you leave the keys in the ignition, the pill fob untouched. Let your heart explode like a flabby, rancid, fat-filled balloon. What possible difference could it make?

Now that you're outside, you find the insectine drone of the other cars deafening. Vibrations thrum through your body, and your heart and head try to match the rhythm. It hurts like a motherfucker, but you don't really mind the pain. In fact, it's kind of pleasant in an
Oh my sweet Christ I'm dying
kind of way.

The front doors of the school--glass broken, metal frames rusted and bent--slam open and a tide of children surges forth. Flesh spongy white, eyes flat obsidian, mandibles in place of mouths. The vast majority of children race toward the elephant carcasses, fall upon them, and begin to feast, mandibles cutting away chunks of rotting flesh with machine-like precision. Not all of the kids head for the elephants, though. Those whose parents have come to pick them up run toward the parking lot, and even though her face isn't exactly like you remember it, you recognize Lizzie as she comes toward you. She throws herself against you as if she hasn't seen you in years, and you hug her close, ignoring the way her mandibles catch on the fabric of your shirt. As you hold her, you watch the other children--the ones devouring the elephants--writhing in thick clumps over the carrion, covering it completely in a mass of white. Within moments, dead flesh becomes a foamy, liquid goo, and this, you think, is the real ocean of truth.

Your headache vanishes, as does the pain in your chest. Your pulse falls silent. Your heart is no longer beating, or perhaps it's on the verge of its final beat, unable to complete it. You wonder if Mr. Gillespie was right, if endings are no longer possible here at the penultimate instant before the final entropic collapse of the universe. Maybe, you think. But that doesn't mean you should stop trying to find an ending. To
make
one.

You push Lizzie gently away from you and gaze down upon her with a smile.

"Go ahead," you say. "I'll wait."

She gives a little jump of excitement, lets out an inhuman squeal of delight, and then runs off to join in the feast.

*****

The next day--or perhaps the same one (as if it matters)--you enter Ghostlight Coffee. The old man, the one wearing your father's army jacket, is sitting at the same table, staring at his laptop screen, still muttering, "What are you doing here? What are you
doing
here?"

T
his time, instead of going to the serving counter, you walk over to his table.

You see that he--and by he, you really mean you, because now that you're standing next to him, you can see that this old man is you with a few more decades under his belt--is looking at a picture of you and Lizzie on his screen. It was taken after one of her soccer games when she was younger. You're standing in front of a goal, she's wearing her uniform, her hair tousled, face sweaty, and you're both smiling.

You want to tell your older self not to worry, that you know why you're here--why we're
all
here--but your mandibles aren't capable of speech. Instead, you decide to show him. You grab hold of his jacket, pull him to his feet, and begin to eat your own tail.

Michael
A.
Arnzen

Michael Arnzen is an award-winning author of horror fiction and an English professor at Seton Hill University, where he has taught writing since 1999. His trophy case includes four Bram Stoker Awards
™
and an International Horror Guild Award for his often funny, always disturbing stories. Join his social network at michaelarnzen.com.

"That's it, Mark. He's crossed the line. I'm done with it."

Mark Savage nodded at his wife, Maria, as he chewed on a particularly grizzly portion of the rump roast their new SmartOven had prepared. It purportedly downloaded recipes from the Internet and automatically cooked them once you put the ingredients in the door. The results weren't perfect but he was always surprised by how much better they were than he expected.

She poked the air above their dining room table with her coffee spoon. "Done."

Mark gave up on chewing the fat and swallowed it whole. Once it settled he addressed her concern. "Maria, I find his behavior unacceptable, too. But short of pulling Tommy out of school, locking him up in his room and shutting out all social interaction until he turns eighteen, I really don't know what else we can do."

She looked up at the ceiling. In the direction of Tommy's bedroom upstairs. "We have to do something. Grounding him, taking away his...toys. It's just not enough. He keeps doing these terrible things! We just can't keep ignoring the problem and hope it floats away to never-never land. Ever since Chauncey died, something's been wrong with Tommy and we have to fix it." She scooped at air again with her spoon: "No, fix him." She scooped into her mashed potatoes and took a bite to give it finality.

"What do you have in mind?"

She picked up Tommy's tablet computer from a nearby tabletop and turned the device on. She fingered around on the screen a bit, and then turned her head to one side, sticking out her tongue. Then she held it up so Mark could see the child's disgusting e-drawing again.

Mark sawed into his meat, summoning the courage to look again at what she'd confronted him with when he got home from work an hour earlier. Then he glanced at it again.

Tommy had drawn a dismembered head, held aloft by some unseen hand. Morbid, but common enough for a kid's painting. But it was too realistic to be some mere playtime distraction: the eyes were mottled white as broken marbles, the nostrils spewed blood, the tongue was agog as if still muttering its final words...and the flesh was torn horridly around the neckline, dangling an exceptionally realistic yellow-white trachea, bloody spinal vertebrae, and an assortment of purple red veins.

She peered around the screen, tongue still peeking out from her lips, her head also seeming somewhat detached from her body in the process.

He returned to his plate. "It's gory. I get it."

"No," she flatly replied. "He's gory. And I don't get that at all. What is he thinking? This isn't art...it's some sick fantasy."

"He's a twelve year old boy. Slugs and snails and puppy dog tails..."

She glared at him. Any reference to canines was verboten since the death of their family pet, Chauncey. "And decapitated human beings? Please!"

Mark dropped his fork. "You took away his iPad. Grounded the kid. What more can we do about it?"

He awaited an answer while her face flushed. "You can beat the living shit out of him!"

Mark kept his cool. "You know I'm not going to do that. You don't answer violence with violence. It only reinforces the idea that violent acts are the only thing that can generate a desired reaction..."

"Oh, enough with your psychological gobbledy-gook."

He hated it when she turned his career on him. "Maria."

"You're useless." She stormed away from the table, iPad in hand. He knew where she was going. To her recliner in the living room. The one with the scotch bottle within arm's reach.

Mark ate the rest of his dinner, giving her plenty of space. He tried to recollect where they had stored his college textbooks, especially the ones from his courses in adolescent psychology. He'd been out of graduate school for about as long as Tommy had been alive, and he had no clue where his books were anymore. Maybe they wouldn't help, anyway. Maria was right: something was seriously wrong with Tommy lately. It wasn't just the morbid drawings. He'd stopped eating breakfast and dinner. He stopped playing ball with his lifelong buddy, Rudy, just down the street. He gave up on riding bikes and playing chess with his father. He'd withdrawn completely, and even though Mark knew this was a phase that all preteens go through, he hadn't expected his son to become something akin to Pugsley from The Addams Family. It just seemed...out of character.

"Oh," he heard Maria utter from somewhere in the other room. "Oh no."

Mark sighed, stood up and slowly pushed his chair back under the table. "What is it now?" he asked as he entered the living room.

Maria was sobbing in her hands. On her lap, the iPad glowed with a familiar old photograph of their pet dog, Chauncey.

Only it had been doctored. Manipulated. Chauncey was on his back, legs cutely pointed up in the air, head curling to one side, begging for a good belly rub.

But Tommy had changed it. Big black Xs had been drawn across the dog's eyes. And Chauncey's canine coat now looked peeled back to reveal spiky white ribs and a wet red cavity writhing with worms.

*****

Mark took a seat on the bed beside his son. His weight sunk the bed a little, which made Tommy lean closer towards him.

He waited silently for his son to speak first. An old psychological tactic. He glanced around the room, sizing up the Yankees poster tacked beside his closet, and nearby, his neglected baseball bat and glove. The baseball equipment peeked out from under a pile of clothes in the corner, like Tommy was covering them up so he wouldn't have to look at them anymore. His TV and Xbox took up a lot of privileged space on the dresser. Behind them, a familiar shoebox--filled with a vintage sports card collection that Mark had passed down to him--looked dusty on the nightstand. On his desk, a few notepads spilled sloppily across the wooden top. He suspected they might have terrible artwork on them, but only spotted some innocuous flowcharts and similar scribbles from his computer programming classes. A cutely crooked vase he made in a third grade pottery class sat nearby. Tommy always had an artistic streak. He wondered what had turned it so dark.

"Those pictures…It's just artwork, dad," he explained, readjusting to keep his distance.

Mark tried very hard not to sound like he was on the job. He was a therapist, but he only worked with geriatrics now, as resident staff at the local nursing home. He was an expert at helping the elderly cope with Alzheimer's or the dementia of their roommates--or, at worst, the depression associated with the inevitability of death...but not fetishism of this sort. "Tommy," he said, turning the electronic tablet over in his hands, "that is not art. That's Chauncey."

"No it's not." Tommy sat on his hands. "It's just an old picture I was messing with. No big deal. I was playing with a new graphics app. It could have been a picture of anything."

He looked sideways at his son, hoping for eye contact. The boy didn't get it. "Chauncey was a member of our family. You disturbed your mother with that picture. And you disturbed me."

Tommy shrugged and tossed his unevenly-grown brown hair. "That was just some random picture on my iPad, Dad...and I don't see how my drawings are so terrible, anyway. I think they look kinda cool. I've seen a lot worse on TV and the net."

Mark took the time to swallow. He wasn't going to let his boy pull him down into some kind of philosophical discussion about aesthetics. "There's a line, Tommy. A line that you can choose not cross."

Tommy blinked and crooked his head to one side. He seemed to respond to that.

Mark continued. "The line is there. I don't care if you do your art, and I actually don't care if it ruffle's people's feathers. I just want to be sure that you know where the line is. And you goddamned better not..." Mark stopped. Swallowed. "Do you understand what I am saying?"

"I guess." Tommy yawned. "I didn't mean to ruffle your feathers or whatever, Dad. It's just a stupid piece of art. You can delete it for all I care."

That yawn. It said it all. Mark patted his son three times on the knee, slowly, then stood up. "And I don't want to stop you from doing your art, son. In fact, I couldn't if I tried. You can draw anywhere, anytime, with anything." He marched over to the dresser. "But I'm still taking your Xbox and your iPad away, anyway."

Tommy shot up and stamped his foot. "Dad! I need my iPad for Programming II homework!"

"Bologna. You're abusing the privilege. And besides, I pay a lot of money for you to go to a private computer school -so I know for a fact they've got all the technology you might possibly need right in the buildings." Mark walked over to the Xbox console beside his son's television set and yanked out the cords. The mass of them in his grip reminded him of the decapitated head his son had drawn. He tucked the black box under his arm and slammed the door behind him.

Mark heard something crash against the door in his wake.

Probably his old handmade vase. Mark didn't care. He knew he had effectively made his point.

In the living room, Maria's eyes jittered as she looked at the equipment in his arms. She threw back the scotch that remained in her tumbler. "Well. That's something better than just your usual pitty-pat malarkey, anyway."

"Yes," Mark said, dropping the technology on the sofa. "But not really enough, I'm afraid."

Maria squinted at him, adjusting her robe. "Games. You think they're too violent? Is that where he's getting this craziness from?"

Mark looked at the electronic toys. "I'm sure they're contributing factors." Mark ran a hand through his hair. He realized it was shaking. "But the cause must run deeper than just media influence."

She sat up and moved her eyes from the console cables to Mark's stare. "What about his cable TV?"

He eyed her warily.

Even in her chair, she managed to put her hands on her hips in defiance. "That's got to go, too. You can't just take away his games and computers...you gotta get rid of it all."

Mark took a breath. Exhaled. "We can't take the television away from him."

"Why the hell not? I know he's watching gory movies in his bedroom late at night. I've heard the screaming through the walls."

"If we pulled the plug on his cable, it would take the baseball channels away from him with it," Mark said. "I know he hasn't been playing a lot lately. But he's still a fan. I know he follows the games on the weekends. We still talk about the stats." He crossed his arms. "And without sports, he'd probably become a total recluse."

"TV baseball and real world baseball are two very different things. He doesn't need the TV."

"He might only get worse. Hold it against us forever." Mark shook his head, despite knowing that standing his ground might only put up another wall between them. "I have to say no."

She poured another drink. "Listen, Mark. I know you're a trained psychologist and all, and I really do appreciate all you do for this household." She swigged from her glass. "But if our boy Tommy is any indication, you're doing a piss-poor job of bringing up your own child."

Mark had been here before. But he wasn't going to buy into her ploys this time. "Maria, this is not about me. It's about Tommy. And there's a line we have to be very careful not to cross here. If we go any further with this punishment, we might be pushing him over to the other side of that line--and out of our reach--for the rest of his time in this house."

She blinked at him and he couldn't read it clearly. So he just kept going. "And that's only a few years till he's gone for good. I don't want him doing this disgusting art stuff, but at least it's an outlet for his emotions. We need to leave him some way to get whatever's inside of him out...and right now, baseball is one of the few remaining things in his life that's healthy. I want us to please, please, encourage him to do something healthy here."

She frowned, but she wasn't saying anything.

He grabbed her scotch bottle and held what little amber color was left in it up to the light. It looked warm and inviting.

"I'm going to bed," he said, and took the bottle with him.

*****

As he pulled out of the parking lot to head home from work, Mark glanced at the sign for Holmstead Nursing Home in his rearview mirror and found himself puzzling over why they called such places "nursing" homes in the first place. Sure, nurses worked there, but nursing was what you did with babies. These geriatrics were clutching on to what little time they had left on the planet, if they hadn't otherwise succumbed to senility and insanity. They were more like "dying" homes.

He got on the turnpike, eager to get away from it all, and found his Beamer blocked by a swerving car and heavy traffic. He almost even shot the finger to the elderly man in Mr. Magoo glasses and a derby, drifting stupidly in and out of his lane at 20 mph. When he got to something approaching a normal speed, he said "Cruise" and the internal GPS took over the engine, setting a controlled cruise speed and navigating the road in a way that he always associated with an airplane's auto pilot.