Nightmare Fuel: The Ultimate Collection of Short Horror Tales (5 page)

The next morning, I awoke brave and proud of myself for having overcome my abhorrence. I brewed some intense coffee, took a sip, then retreated back upstairs to shower. As I washed away sweat and grime I felt as if today was going to be a good day. I couldn't have been more wrong.

I went about my Tuesday advising on sale tactics, attending meetings, producing power-point presentations and gulping down caffeine-crammed beverages by the gallon. By the end of the day I was shaking as if my whole body had been overcome by Parkinson's decease. I drove home and decided to stop off at a local book store, which I hadn't had the pleasure of visiting yet. I was desperate for a new crime novel, and today I had closed a deal worth millions, so I had most certainly merited some reward. I entered the traditional and quaint little book store, where hundreds upon hundreds of crafted bindings were encompassing me. Thick oak wood held this impressive collection of novels and autobiographies, but my focus was to locate the crime section and delve deep to discover my latest thrilling conundrum. There was a mix of people in various clumps of the store, stood in the genre they felt most comfortable in. Some brave individuals craving horror, others hungered for distraction in the fantasy corner, a few students in the education area, then I sighted it. CRIME. Crying out to my obsession like a bag of cocaine to a drug addict. In bold letters, calling to me like a seductress beckoning with a mystical voice. After an hour of exploring a variety of covers and intriguing blurbs I decided on 'Pin Drop'. A crime/thriller about a rash of teenage girls that keep going missing under very unusual circumstances.

I rushed home eager to eat, jump in the shower, and hunker down with 'Pin Drop'. There is nothing like the excitement of beginning a new book, falling in love with some characters, and detesting others, becoming completely captivated in a fantastic journey.

Leviticus 3:2

'You are to lay your hand on the head of your offering and slaughter it' 

As I was quite warm and my bedroom was too stuffy, I sat in the conservatory. I grabbed a mug of coffee to ward off fatigue. I didn't want to sleep for a while yet, not until I had enjoyed at least the first quarter of the novel. There I was, happy, content, enthralled in a fictional world where my brain was painting the words that my eyes were decoding, and my speedy fingers were flipping the pages, keeping the story going, continuing the pursuit of suspects, with protagonists throwing themselves in life or death crises. When a tapping broke my focus. My heart thundered, which was quite dramatic for just a subtle sound. But given my recent troubles and the large volume of caffeine spiking its way into my system, I began to predict the worst. Foreseeing an abundance of hellish apparitions.

The tapping was continuous, and not only unnerving, but distracting. There was no hope of rejoining the fictitious world with the annoying and simultaneously chilling noise breaking air molecules. I got up and began a search of the grounds. I checked downstairs, and zilch.

I explored upstairs, and nada. But I hadn't explored the kitchen. Maybe it was just a leaky faucet after all this. That is what I prayed, but underneath my vain wishes I knew better. I wandered into the black marble tiles and granite worktops, where all surfaces appeared to be coated in a chunky layer of gloss, as I began listening intently. The drips must be coming from somewhere in or near the kitchen. I followed the dribble to the basement door. I knew the house had one but had avoided it like the plaque as I loathed cellars, and had even refused to enter with the agent at the initial viewing. But regardless, I was out of options. I creaked open the door to be faced with nothing but black. The light from the kitchen only very delicately exposed a wooden bannister leading downstairs with specks of dust swimming aimlessly in the air. I exhaled slowly, and readied myself. I eyed a piece of white string hanging in front of me, which I assumed was for a bulb. In a hurry to shed light on things, literally, to ease the fright darkness created, I yanked it then let the string wiggle for a few seconds. Only two bulbs came on, one in front of me, and one at the bottom of the stairs. They were both very dim, and flickered on and off.

Each footfall seemed loud enough to wake the dead, an ear-piercing yawn that, well, was comparable to what you would imagine the resonance of the dead waking up would be. The stirring of ghouls, goblins and other manifestations of malevolence. That thought scared me so I shook it from my mind as if it were an aggravating wasp and concentrated on identifying the perpetrator of the tapping. I reached the bottom of the rotten steps and was faced with a concrete floor and poorly plastered walls. There was also a huge metal pipe overhead, travelling the breadth of the basement ceiling. I turned left then right to fully observe the huge space I was now in. The tapping was definitely coming from my right, so I turned and tentatively tiptoed onwards. After a minute of steady well balanced strides, I glimpsed liquid dripping from the ceiling. It was made from enormous planks of wood. After all this, it was a leakage. But after looking down on the solid wintry ground, I concurred the water was red.

Matthew 10:28

Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

Blood was my instant speculation, but for whatever reason I chose to determine this. My skin once again awash with bumpy hairs, and hot blood rapidly circulating every inch of my fleshy form. I ordered my feet forward. But when I knelt to the red liquid it smelt of paint, not blood. Now I was befuddled. So I found some ladders and a torch. I climbed the metal steps up to the wooden ceiling and separated a couple of beams where the wetness was dropping from. My torches' ray shone over the dead body of a clown.

I remember thinking I would rather be dead than in this poorly lit basement with a man's dead body attired as a clown crammed into a cellar ceiling. It appeared to be staring at me, it was the exact same clown that I had seen a few days ago, just with slightly different face paint. Had that been the ghost of the clown? I wasn't sure of any one thing anymore, but I knew one thing, I wanted out of this house immediately. I jumped from the ladder and dashed to the stairs to see an old man stood at the top of them.

“NO,” he yelled, suffused with outrage.

I stumbled backwards, my butt hitting the ground agonisingly. It felt like I was swimming in ice cold water, Antarctic temperatures biting my rump. The old man looked infuriated, stomping his feet as he descended towards me, as if each stamp of his foot caused me pain. He was clearly trying to intimidate me. I closed my eyes and begged the lord for some charity, and when I peeled them up, to my amazement, the man was gone.

I exploited this opportunity, jolted up and sprinted the staircase, careening through the threshold to the kitchen. I raced through the hall and to the house's entrance, but it was locked, so this provided no escape.

I was stuck. I then thought of the conservatory in a frenzied panic, and was about to dart back down the hall but at the kitchen's entrance was the clown. “BOO,” he laughed hysterically.

I wasted no time, turned around the stairway bannister and scrambled upstairs. I reached the top   and racked my brain for some way out of this house. “Come here my dear,” a high pitched voice muttered, it was like the voice of the witch from 'The Wizard Of Oz'. I turned to my left to see an old woman cutting her face with a large knife, with a large golden cross dangling from her neck and laughing at her own self-mutilation. For a few seconds I felt as if I had left my body and was simply watching the madness ensue, experiencing an outer body phenomenon. I was surrounded by a hysterical clown, an angry old man, and an old woman slashing and shredding her flesh. Nightmares envied my turmoil.

Out of the chaos dominating my cognitions I saw a young girl standing a few feet in front of me, scared. She wore a pair of light blue pyjamas and had golden hair that hung at her shoulders.

“Come quick, he will kill you if you don't follow me, hurry,” she told me with a hushed voice.

John 7:20

"You are demon-possessed," the crowd answered. "Who is trying to kill you?"

She twisted around and jogged forwards, and I began to follow her. She scuttled left down a corridor which lead towards the front of the building. I wondered where she was taking me, where could possibly be safe? Until she stopped at a window and turned around to face me.

“Up there,” she pointed to an attic.

I calculated numbers in my mathematical mind and after an enormously brief analysis I decided I didn't really have much of a choice. I reluctantly pulled down the steps and climbed them, with her leading the way. The second she was in the attic the blackness seemed to consume her entirely, a black void swallowing her youth.
Thank god for this little girl
, I remember thinking. The drop down stairs came up gradually with a boisterous creak that made me erupt in shivers. I then noticed a small glow of light from the corner of the attic, I couldn't distinguish its origin, but I noticed a cardboard box below this brightness. I crawled over caught up in a web of curiosity, and on temporary leave from my trepidation. I reached into the box to uncover a stack of newspapers, a bible, crayons, and a few toys. I began reading the headline of the first paper, 'man kills himself, and family, dressed as clown'. Below this was a picture of an elderly couple and their daughter, the girl was the very same girl that had brought me up into the attic.

The horrifying reports continued with creepy gallant headlines. 'Killer Clown Murderer', 'Haunted Clown House'. All this had taken place in my current residence, that realisation petrified me and I experienced a new lease of terror, knowing I was in an attic of a house that had bared witness to such butchery. But yet again my meddlesome nature challenged my abhorrence for attention of my thoughts. I continued to read one article detailing the chilling entropy that had played out in this dwelling. It no longer felt like my home, but a place stained with death and anarchy. Questions dropped into my mind like fish falling into a shark's mouth. Were the man and the clown that I had seen, the same person? Did this man just snap? Or did something happen? Out of my several enigmas an icy hand grabbed me. I again felt a breath on my neck. I spotted the clown in the gloom holding a balloon animal immersed in blood, sniggering. Someone then knocked at the attic hatch and with a husky voice uttered, “I'm coming for you.”

The clown had vanished. Just before a crimson covered knife poked through a gap in the attic door.

As this happened I was enveloped in a whiteness and then a flash of scenes played before me.

The elderly couple at the hospital thankful to have finally been blessed with a baby, the parents a few years later playing with their child on an evening, the mother smiling and she wore plain but colourful clothes with a large golden cross necklace, and a cross stud in her ear, I guess that explains why I am writing in this. The father was dressed as a clown making the girl laugh, when they hear a bang at the door. They open it to a man gripping a long sharp knife, who plunges it into the clown's stomach, screaming ensues until the man has sliced and diced everyone. Splashes of blood oozing from every surface. Then the intruder took the clown costume from the dead man and changed into it. He used some paints that were in the living room for his face. Then he crept down to the basement, wedged into the ceiling, and hid above wooden boards. That clown in the cellar wasn't a dead body or a ghost, it was the man who annihilated the previous residents. It was the man who was trying to break into the attic right this second.

Psalm 55:5

'Fear and trembling have beset me; horror has overwhelmed me'

I began to cry and shake ferociously. Then I heard the girls voice, “My daddy wants you to leave this house.” I either stayed in the attic with an old man disguised as a clown, knife-happy senior citizen and odd little girl, all of which I assume are ghosts. Or I open the attic hatch and unleash a living, breathing, murderous man, dressed in the clown costume of a man he'd slaughtered.

“My daddy is angry with you now,” the little girl

announced, appearing scared herself.

Then the rapping of the attic door continued

and the man's voice calmly but eerily spoke through the gap. “I know you're in there, come out and play.”

I am writing this in the tattered and ripped bible I found in the box, with a colouring crayon, on any blank page or big enough space to mark my words that I could find. I figure that most people, even the most non-religious and unbelieving, would reach for any semblance of faith in times of abhorrence. So this is why I chose to write my message in a bible, to future householders. The murderer is still trying to get into the attic, shouldering the door and jutting the knife through. The girl is still warning me of her father's inhospitableness. Hopefully you will read this before it is too late. I still have to get out of here yet. So who knows, if I don't make it and someone moves into this house, and is now reading this, I may see you very soon. My massacred corpse could be in this house, not far from my ghost. Who could be stood behind you right now. Or even the clown.