Maybe it's Thursday out there too, where things were normal. (From Tales from the Valley: Phantasmagory Shorts)

CW: blood, horror themes, mentions of violence

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Seven died on a Thursday.

I can just see the calendar from where I'm cowering under the desk, rows of little red x’s that lead to a big smiley-face. That's really what does it, a bright red smile like the blood on the curtains, the walls, the crevices between my fingers.

Thursday, Thursday It was always fucking Thursday.

Maybe it's Thursday out there too, where things were normal. That’s a morbid thought. Thursday at my empty desk in the dingy office park behind the gas station. Thursday in that apartment on the hill, the bathroom door busted off its hinges and a forest of grocery store plants dead on the windowsills. Briefly, I wonder if someone else lives in that apartment these days, or if the rest of the world went ahead and ended too. It's not like these are even my memories. It's not like this has anything at all to do with me.

So fine, whatever, it's Thursday, if thats supposed to mean anything, as if that matters, and there's a big red smiley face to mark the occasion. Seven probably knew what was coming then, of course she did. I feel a twinge of rage at that, bubbling up through the stupor. The audacity she had to draw that, knowing what was about to happen. The nerve.

And maybe it’s because it’s one of those cheap calendars the admins at my old job used to have, tacky and badly typeset, filled with pictures of kittens in fields posed in an array of tiny hats, a collection of miserable, blank kitten faces staring into the camera, maybe that’s what finally snaps me out of it.

Hang in there, she'd say with a smile that lit up the basement, watching them open me up on the table again. Yes, I'm sure she would think the whole thing was hilarious, if she could think about anything anymore.

God, how I hated her, truly.

My legs are stiff and angry when I pull myself up. I've been under the desk for god-knows-how long. Time was strewn about the floor in little fragments.

Who needs time anyhow? What has time ever done for anyone? I'm better off without it, I tell myself, pushing the unease back down under my sludgy layers of cognitive disonnance.

Seven is probably still splayed out on the dining room table. And it’s true. I flinch when I turn the corner, eyes dropping to the bloodstain painting the horrid, ugly carpet. The body looks happy, manically so. And you know, at least someone is. That counts for something.

Are you satisfied, Mother Seven? Have all your dreams come true? I'm a proper monster now, and Seven got a vacation in whatever hell things like her go to.

She shouldn't still be here. It makes no sense, given my limited understanding of whatever the hell this stupid nightmare is supposed to be, but it's the kind of thing she'd make special sure of. Just for me. Just so I know what I probably did.

No one has cleaned up, or bothered to close her eyes. Who would have? I'm the only one left now. My head is ringing. The only one left, the only one.

Apart from him.

Wherever he is. The 'real one,' the shit-heeler who stole my face, or signed the lease for it anyway. He's been gone for days now, decades, months, whatever. My head has never been so blissfully empty without him in there screwing around. Maybe my awful owner is dead in a ditch somewhere, clutching his horrible little hands to his horrible little head, pretending it’ll all go back to normal in the morning.

And bless our shared, malignant little heart, it just might.

Hilarious. I could scream. I could cry, if I had anything inside of me to wet the tears with.

At some point, I wander into the kitchen and make a cup of tea. I don't like tea, but it's better than staring at the blood on the curtains, the windows, the ugly blue cabinets. The body in the dining room... My shirt is cemented to my skin, tugging my armpit hair when I reach for a mug. There’s blood in my armpits and I don't even like tea.

The kettle is whistling harmony with my head. A major third, my brain supplies helplessly. Ding dong, Beethoven’s 5th. I consider throwing it through the kitchen window. That's what a proper monster would do, I think, and I'm a proper monster now. A terrible beast that ruins the carpet and lurks around snarling at calendars. I set the kettle gently back on the stove.

When I wander back into the dining room, the body is still on the table. Just for me. Just so I know what I probably did. For godsake, she didn't even really exist, why the hell is she still here for?

Looking at her is making my eyes burn, so I go back to contemplating the horrid, ugly carpet again. Red splatters on lime green swirls. The red is my fault of course, but who the hell even built this house, unleashed their vision of midcentury misery on this unsuspecting pile of coal baron showboating.

I'm losing the the thread, grasping at anything to distract me from the reality of being well and truly alone. The smell of blood and earl grey is making me sick, so I tip the mug out and watch my tea bleed into the mess around it. It doesn't matter what I do at this point, not that it ever did. The carpet is already ruined.

I'm making a noise like a giggle. It's not funny, so I must be crying. I don't even like tea and it doesn't matter even if I did because the tea isn't real. The house, the horrors, the body on the table. The fake wind-up monster clutching his fake mug of fake tea with fake shaking fingers.

God, how I understand the fear in their eyes now. It isn't real, I yelled, watching them claw their arms with that horrible look on their faces. It isn't real, it isn't real. God, how I killed them all with three ugly words and I wasn't even enough of a person to die with them. Black trails of nothing slip down my face.

At some point, I go back to the office to wait for time to pass again, for lack of anything better to do. It doesn't. It sits in pieces on the floor like an angry toddler, staring at me in silent accusation. The creak in the office chair agrees and I make a note to burn it later, along with the papers flung across the desk and the books lining the shelves behind me. Endless notes on the town, the victims, the fake plastic monsters like me. Rules, lessons, faith, belief. Books, trinkets, junk, mess. Paper monsters piled in great heaps against the doors and windows, suffocating ourselves with gleeful malice.

Yes, there will be a lot of things to burn later, I think, idly picking flecks of gore from my nails. The calendar is boring a hole through my head from the wall, but I'm going to burn it later with the rest of the house and maybe then the ringing in my ears will stop.

I wonder how well fiction burns, if the last of it will drift to the sky in a column of smoke or if it's carved itself into the hills, waiting to leak back out when no one's looking.

I press my dirty fingers to my face. I'm too tired to go looking for answers today.

—–+ #Horror #ShortStory #Writing #Fiction

_____________________ Hello! I'm Nilly. I write stuff and draw stuff. You can also find me at mastodon.art.

A monster reveals himself and a lot of awkward questions are answered. (From Tales from the Valley: Phantasmagory Shorts)

CW: horror themes, briefly: gunshot wounds, monster gore —–+

Well, the situation was well and truly teakettled. I'd really gone and done it now.

When I turned and looked at her, Jenna skittered back with a small, terrified squeak.

Fair.

I had a pretty good idea what I looked like right then, soaked head to toe in former wall-demon, too many legs arched angrily around me. All the focus I usually set aside to look like a human being had gone out the window because I was tired and pissed off and shot an unreasonable amount of times.

Joe had gotten four hits on me before he ran off. Black blobs of whatever the hell I'm made of oozed down my back. It would have been nice if he'd shot that horrible thing he'd made come out of the wall while he was at it, but you know. Points for managing to hit anything, I guess.

My heart sank. This was probably the start of the end for them, then. The valley was a feedback loop once people started losing it.

Once people realized there was no way out.

But hey they'd lasted two, three weeks, give or take a month. I don't know, time is kind of messed up here. Good on them, though. That was better than some...

I hated this.

Why did this always happen? I didn't even really know these people. I didn't even like them.

It was my fault they were here, trapped in their messed up little dream worlds. Of course I felt guilty. Of course I felt bad, but what the hell could I do about it?

I rubbed my face and started going over my roster of hide-outs for the impending shitstorm. I waved most of the gore off. There was no point keeping up the “real person” act now that they saw me for what I was. The bullet wounds would have to wait until I was out of viewing range, unless I wanted to arm wrestle with someone's idea of how shot to shit I was supposed to be.

Jenna was injured. Her nerve signals were screaming Leg! Leg! in the back of my mind. I felt a pang of guilt. Someone should probably help her. I turned to look again and she skittered further back.

“Stay away...” she said.

OK, someone non-abomination shaped should probably help her, but we were experiencing a shortage currently.

“Your leg is broken,” I said, unhelpfully. She flinched. I guess I sounded about as bad as I looked. “There's splints and morphine in the laundry room. I don't know where the hell they got the morphine from though, so maybe just, uh.”

“What...” she squeaked, and honestly yeah. What indeed.

What was the point? What did it matter? It didn't, that's what. I felt sick to my stomach. She'd be dead in a week, maybe less if she was lucky. Why was I bothering? Really, there was no use sticking around making this lady's day any worse. I turned to leave.

“Wait,” she said before I could vanish. “You're hurt.”

I hesitated. This was a mistake because, for both emotional and injury-related reasons, I needed to get the hell out of there.

“Not really,” I said. “You just saw me get shot.”

She stared at me blankly.

“You think I'm shot, so am,” I tried again. It was a little more complicated than that, but now didn't really seem like the time to get into nuance. “Like the thing in the wall. It's why I was trying to distract you.”

She was quiet for a while. Assuming that satisfied her terror-fueled curiosity, I turned to leave again. No such luck.

“So then...”

The pain in my back began to fade and I could feel my shoulder muscles knitting back together. I'll be honest, I was perplexed. There was clearly some kind of misunderstanding going on here. I was already leaving. There was no need to go fishing for mercy points.

“What are you doing?” I asked and the confusion must have been enough to offset my horror-movie vibe for a minute.

“You can't just walk around bleeding everywhere,” she said with a sniff. “It's unhygienic.”

I made a weird little involuntary giggle noise at that. Suave. I can't imagine what that must have looked like coming out of whatever the hell I am.

“Right, wouldn't want to mess up the furniture,” I gestured at the ruined living room.

“What was that thing?” Jenna shivered and surveyed the wreckage. “For that matter, what are you?”

“Some asshole's personal problems,” I muttered, politely ignoring the second question, less politely ignoring the little voice that said I'd just answered it anyway. “It was something he made up. A reoccurring nightmare, maybe, or some kind of phobia.”

“It looked like his uncle.”

Yikes.

“Well, he should probably go do therapy about it instead of trying to kill us, but what do I know. Guess that's kind of off the table here, though.”

Jenna grimaced. People never liked my sense of humor. Oh well.

She gave me one last wary up-and-down before hoisting herself on an overturned couch. Her leg gave out from under her and I dove to stop her impaling herself on a pedestal table without really thinking about how that might come off. She grabbed onto me anyway, and let me help her back down. I tried my best not to loom.

“What are you?” she asked again. I still wasn't having it.

“Great question. I have no idea,” I said to the ceiling. It was spattered in wall-demon. I looked at the floor instead, which was also spattered in wall-demon. After a minute or so of awkward non-looming, I did feel bad about leaving it there. “Well. That's not true. I have some idea, but I don't like the answer.”

“I see,” she said.

We spent a while where I stood there not elaborating and she sat there on the floor with a broken leg until we both decided it was best to move on.

“Fine. Can you help me up, please?” she sighed.

I carried her to a less hazardous part of the living room and set her down on one of the few intact-adjacent couches. I guess we were overlooking the whole abomination thing now, then. That was good. When I went to stand back up, she kept a hold of my arm, eyes wet and pleading.

“What's happening to us? What is this?” she whispered. I felt that awful sinking feeling again. “Please tell me. Please.”

I can't handle this kind of thing. I'm not cut out for it. I'm too weak, too soft, too easy to drag into other people's problems. I hate it, hate it. Why couldn't I just shrug it off? Why did this always happen?

Anyway, whatever. I'm a wet, sappy mess, so I confessed.

I explained the valley, explained why she was there. I let her cling to my arm as I explained what was probably happening to her brain and felt a little bit like dying.

She cried, she begged, and the whole time she gripped my arm like I might disappear. Which was a fair enough read, honestly.

When she asked if I wanted this, if I did it on purpose, I didn't have the heart to lie. The righteous anger on my behalf was mortifying. The pity was horrific. I have enough of my own pity, thanks. The fact is, it was my fault she was here, no matter how much say I had in the matter. I did this to her and I hated that I couldn't make her understand that.

We sat like that for a while, arm in arm, her asking trembling questions, me looming over her like the terrible thing I was.

“Well this sucks,” she said, eventually. Boy, didn't it. “It must be tough. Watching this happen again and again.”

I had nothing to say to that, because if I opened my mouth I was probably going to cry and today had been awkward enough.

“You don't have to answer. I understand,” she said. Bless her, she did not, but the sentiment wasn't lost on me. I was not in the right head-space for another round of sentiment though, so I tried to excuse myself for the third time that night.

I gently pulled my arm away and tucked it behind my back with the rest of my awful appendages. The legs were starting to fade, but I still kept them folded away as out of sight as I could. They weren't really meant to bend like that, but they weren't really meant to exist either, so my aching joints could kindly shut up.

“You're in a lot of pain. I can tell from your nerve signals,” I said. Very cool, a very normal-human thing to tell someone. That train had sailed though, so the least I could do was try to be useful. “Let me go get the medical kit.”

“Can't you just fix it? Like I did for you?” she asked.

“No. That's... different. Best I could do is convince you it's fine. You'll hurt yourself even worse that way.”

And see, that was the thing. Real people didn't just bounce back once no one was looking. Real people also didn't have Cronenburg moments when they got too distracted and forgot to be person-shaped. Usually. The point was, real people died when things like me fucked with their sense of possibility, messed around in their heads and generally went around scaring the shit out of them. The valley was a feedback loop, after all, and I was the engine driving it.

I really, really needed to leave.

“Do you think Joe is alright?” Jenna asked as I turned away, a little quiver in her voice.

I felt around for him with my mind. Joe was curled up in the basement hugging his Colt .45 like a teddy bear.

“He's fine.” He was probably not fine. “After I get something for your leg, I'll go try and reason with him.”

“You shouldn't,” she said. “He'll shoot you again.”

“Probably. I'll be paying attention this time, though. I'm harder to hit when I'm paying attention.”

It's true. I'd only been shot twice before, and once was my own fault.

By then, I'd regained enough control to have the normal amount of legs again, but the fact that the real-life person in the room was still convinced I was a real-life Halloween costume was overriding most of my other adjustments. I could feel the bolts of static rippling across my face when I looked back at her. I didn't really want to think about what she saw when she looked back at me.

—–+ #Horror #ShortStory #Writing #Fiction

_____________________ Hello! I'm Nilly. I write stuff and draw stuff. You can also find me at mastodon.art.