horror

Excerpt from “Bluebottle”

/ Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

BluebottlePage

When the next day passed with no sign of The God Who Brings Rain, and then the next day, Monarch knew it was time for him and his subjects to take definitive action. The butterflies were growing weak from lack of water, and some of them could barely keep their heads up as Monarch addressed them from his flower. He knew that even if they chose to move to another garden now, some of them would not make it.

As he finished his speech, in which he outlined the plan for the exodus, Monarch happened to glance down into the soil. The beetles were gathered there in their numbers, carapaces shimmering in the sun. The head beetle, the one who had found the orphaned worm, stepped forward and spoke. “We would like to be included in any plans you have for relocation,” she said, her tiny voice almost lost, coming from so far below. “Surely there is another garden nearby where The God Who Brings Rain will see fit to be more generous.”

“You will only slow us down,” Monarch said, fluttering his wings as if to remind them of his superior attributes. “You can make your own way, if you wish to.”

“But you can scout farther ahead, tell us where to go,” the beetle protested, but already Monarch was tuning her out. He turned to the other butterflies and signaled them for takeoff.

But just at that moment, a curious buzzing was heard coming across the garden, from where The God Who Brings Rain had last been seen. Monarch looked around, confused and hopeful, but then he saw that it was just that creature, the horrid one he had raised, thinking it would be a princess someday. He couldn’t believe he’d ever actually thought anything good could have come from that detestable little grub. “What are you doing back here?” he shouted with all the scorn he could muster.

The little creature hovered, clear wings flapping so quickly that they were nearly invisible. “I don’t know where else to go,” came the plaintive reply. “I am not at home here, but all that I found beyond the garden was a lonely plain with none of my kind to be seen. Out there is only a large pale creature who lies on the grass, as still as death.”

“We have our own problems here, as you can see,” Monarch said testily.

The head beetle was waving frantically with her black legs as Monarch talked, as though trying to get his attention. When he finally deigned to give it, the beetle spoke with breathless rapidity. “The worms we saw crawling on The God Who Brings Rain were not his pets at all,” the beetle cried. “They killed him! Surely they did! Isn’t it true that The God Who Brings Rain has not been seen since we brought this creature here?”

“Yes, that’s true,” Monarch answered, glancing sidelong at the other butterflies.

“She and her kind killed The God Who Brings Rain, with the sole intention of ridding us of our water supply! It all makes sense!” The beetles around her were chattering their agreement, and some of the butterflies seemed to be picking up on the mood of the crowd.

“What have you to say for yourself?” Monarch asked the tiny creature pointedly.

“Please! I don’t know what you all are talking about,” the ugly outcast said. “All I remember is coming out of my cocoon and seeing all of you around me. I bear you no ill will.”

“Then what have you done to The God Who Brings Rain?” the beetle demanded.

“Nothing! I don’t know!” The little creature was frantic, her wings beating the air so hard that the flower petals around her danced crazily.

“We cannot let something like this go unpunished,” Monarch intoned. He signaled to the other butterflies, who immediately took to the air and surrounded the buzzing little murderer. They closed in, gripping her minuscule legs with their much larger ones, barring her escape with their massive and gaily colored wings. Monarch watched her as she struggled, eyes wild with fear. “We will take her to the sill, where we take all enemies of our kind,” he said. “Perhaps this act will purify the garden, and return us to favor with The God Who Brings Rain, so that we may remain in this place that has always been our home.”

The insects were all in agreement, and moving slowly as befitted the solemnity of the occasion, they began the short journey to the residence of The God Who Brings Rain, which was a wooden shed at the north edge of the garden, a shed with a large open window and a smooth white sill.

The Severed Feet Dream

/ Jenny Ashford / 1 Comment

 

good-foot-copy

This is a very vivid dream I had a few months ago that I’d like to somehow turn into a story one day.

The first thing I remember, it was night and I was in bed with Tom and we were half asleep, though we weren’t in our house. We were in some kind of boarding house or off-campus housing, because I knew there were lots of other people living in the house as well. It was dark, but I could see a TV flickering; I don’t remember if it was in the same room as us or if it was in an adjacent room that I could see through the open door. I lifted my head up a little and looked at the TV. There was a woman on the TV talking, though the volume was muted. There was a guy standing in front of the TV, just a couple feet from it, staring at the screen. He was talking to the woman on the TV like she was a real person, and he was just saying all these horrible violent things he was going to do to her. His voice was getting louder and the stuff he was saying was getting more vile, and I was starting to wig out. I scooted closer to Tom and said in his ear, “I’m scared.” Tom told me that it was okay, that there was nothing to be scared of.

Then, for some bizarre reason, I decided that I had to get up and go down to the kitchen to wash the dishes, even though it was the middle of the night (WTF?). In the dream, I remembered that earlier there had been some excitement at a house nearby, with cops there and stuff, and everyone in our house had been looking out the windows trying to see what was going on. I got to the kitchen and there was a girl there; I couldn’t see her, she was just a tall black shape, but she was leaning against the counter in the dark. In the dream I knew who she was, and I also knew she didn’t like me at all, so I was nervous about her being there, but I just nodded at her and went over to the sink. While I was washing the silverware, she started moving around behind me, and I was glancing over my shoulder, thinking, “What is she doing back there?” But all she did was go to a window and peer out through the blinds, checking on the action at the neighbors’. I tried to make small talk, like, “Wonder what that’s all about,” but she just went, “Hm,” and then left. I never could see her, she was just a shadow.

The kitchen sink was on a bar that faced the living room. There was moonlight and light from the other houses, so I could clearly see the front door and the Oriental rug on the living room floor. I could also see through the front windows that there was a party going on at the house across the street; people were standing outside talking, with drinks in their hands.

The front door opened and a guy and girl came in, laughing and grabbing at each other. They left the front door open, and then sat down on the floor and started goofing off and making out. I didn’t know if they could see me, or if they just didn’t give a shit. The girl took her shirt off, though her jeans were still on; the guy stayed dressed. I could only see him from the back; he was preppily dressed, wearing jeans and a button-up shirt in a pale blue color. I was just standing there washing dishes, wondering if they could see me.

Suddenly the guy grabbed the girl’s ankles and pulled her legs apart and up off the floor. She started to cry like he was hurting her, and I thought that I should help her, but I was frozen to the spot. Then he started pulling and squeezing really, really hard around her ankles, and as stupid as it was, I thought, “Holy fuck, he’s going to pull her feet off.” And then, yeah, he ripped her feet off at the ankles. There wasn’t much blood, but I could hear the feet thump as they hit the rug. And I was still standing there, just shocked and horrified and unable to move.

And then the guy got up and whipped around and grabbed my wrist, hard. I was holding a butter knife that I’d been washing, and I saw the blade press into his palm, though of course it didn’t hurt him. I stared into his face, which was really wide, with wide-set blue eyes. He also had shoulder-length blond hair that was swept up and back off his forehead. He gave me this horrible grin, and then with his other hand he grabbed my elbow and started to twist my arm, like was going to tear my arm off. In panic I just kicked out at him, which in real life wouldn’t have worked because the kitchen bar was between us, but at any rate my leg thrashed violently and I woke up to Tom (who was still awake next to me) saying, “Hey. Did a flea bite you or something? You kinda kicked me.” And I said no, that I had a nightmare. He asked what it was about, and I didn’t feel like explaining it just then, so I said, “Some guy was trying to kill me.” And then Tom asked what he looked like (maybe so he could find the guy in one of his own dreams and kick his ass? I dunno, haha) and again, I didn’t feel like going into it because I was freaked out, so I just said I didn’t know. And then, kinda like at the start of the dream, Tom said (in real life), “It’s okay. No one’s trying to kill you.”

I couldn’t fall asleep for ages after that.

Excerpt from “The Omitted Thirteenth”

/ Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

 

Omitted13thGraphic

The dead man had lain in the wreckage of his host body for hours after his quarry had fled, wondering what in the hell he was supposed to do now. He already knew he could not escape this flesh, not until the woman saw fit to release him, and he could have screamed in frustration if his windpipe had not been crushed along with the rest of him. He stared at the darkened ceiling through his spirit eyes, pleading silently to the woman who had trapped him here, the woman who was controlling his fate from afar. Let me out, he said. I’ll continue to do your bidding, but let me find another body to do it in.

After an eternity of the begging to her (and where had she gone, last night, while he was being mangled by that stupid girl? She hadn’t even come in to help), he gave up and considered his situation. Perhaps his only option was to try and reintegrate his scattered parts, at least enough so that he could move around. He strained to the limits of his will, tried to strain beyond them, and for a second he felt a glimmer of hope as he thought the molecules of the shattered corpse were pulling themselves back together. And he had done it before, when Faustine was looking down at him, hadn’t he? All he had to do was try, imagine himself whole with every fiber of his being.

Despite much struggle, he was unable to pull off any more than a few twitches of bone, a slight knitting of flayed skin. Sighing, he settled back into his misery. What would become of him now? Would he just lie here forever in this battered carcass, unable to escape? The proposition seemed more horrible than anything he could imagine. And the girl would never be back now, he was almost certain of that. Nick had taken her away and they had failed in their vague mission. Even in the unlikely event that the girl did return, what could he do to her in this pitiful state?

Lost in his thoughts, he at first failed to notice a peculiar lightness of feeling overtaking him, a sensation of a weight being lifted. By the time he realized what was happening, his incorporeal self was hovering somewhere near the ceiling, gazing down on the ruin his borrowed body had become. Had he been solid instead of spirit, he would have whooped with joy. He was out, he was free! He zoomed around the room a few times, testing his new liberty, reveling in the feel of his individual atoms stretching and contracting, invisibly, in the stinking room. How he loved the feeling of being out of a body; although his kind could not remain as pure spirit for long — they were as vulnerable as hermit crabs outside of their shells — he had always adored the sensation of being unencumbered by the clumsy limitations of human flesh. He felt at one with the universe.

Then he stopped to think. How could he be out? Surely he hadn’t done it himself; even after all his efforts, he wasn’t stupid enough to think he could have escaped against the will of the more powerful woman, his lord and master. He swished around the room again. Maybe his prayers had been heard, and the woman was allowing him the freedom to find another body, one that would be more suitable. He smiled with his non-existent lips. And if he chose a body of his own, perhaps the rotting and deterioration that had plagued his old skin would not be a factor. That was a definite plus. Besides that, Faustine would be unable to recognize him when she saw him again. Or her, he thought, overcome by the deliciousness of the idea. I could always inhabit a woman.

Excited by the prospect of a new flesh, he took a last glimpse at the body he’d vacated. When he’d gone and fetched a new skin, he thought, he should come and clean all that up. Let Nick and Faustine wonder what had happened to him, where he had gone. Let them think he’d still be shambling around in that broken-down housing. Let it be the rotting zombie that they were looking for. At the moment, he’d find the woman, then he’d find a new body, a nice one this time.

This decided, the dead man, now spirit and nothing more, dissipated his atoms sufficiently to pass through the door and out into the night.

Excerpt from “The Five Poisons”

/ Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

 

Pageflex Persona [document: PRS0000037_00017]

Another picture began to form, the inky puddles of black spreading and deepening like cancerous growths, like thick flocks of ravens emerging from a calm sea of milk. The paper made a distinct tap-squish sound as Sabrina pushed it around in the developer with metal tongs that glinted red in the glow from the overhead bulb—red pan, red paper, red world.

She stared at the birthing image, intrigued as always by the way the shadows met and filled in the holes in the picture’s universe, popping the highlights forward into three dimensions, darkness defining the light. After a few more moments, she pulled the dripping photo from the developer with the tongs, holding it over the pan and watching the droplets shatter the surface of the liquid into fragmented ripples, distorting her reflection into a cut-and-paste Picasso of misplaced eyes and lips.

She plunged the picture into the stop bath, letting the chemicals work their spell, and then the fixer, burning the image, binding it to the formerly virgin white paper forever and ever, amen. Then up to the heavy length of twine that served for drying, clip clip onto the two top corners, and the photo hung there with the others, another captured rectangle of reality.

Sabrina strolled to the end of the room, where the first of the pictures hung like a piece of unspeakable laundry, and she stepped back to look at it proper, her hands on her hips. Her head tilted to one side as it often did when she was deep in thought, and her tomato-red braids whispered in the silence. The harbinger of a pleased smile curled at the edges of her mouth. She could already see that the photos were among the best she had ever taken.

The first depicted a monstrous tree, its black bark like the scabrous skin of some hideous reptile, its knots glowing from within, throwing into stark contrast the cat-slit pupils of its many gnarled knot-eyes. But it was the mouth of the thing—cavernous, rotten, and filled with splintery teeth—that made the image come alive. For there in the maw of the beast, a child’s pale face was clearly visible, captured by Sabrina’s camera in mid-scream, eyes and mouth stretched to impossible proportions. The terror in the child’s face was heart-stopping, disturbing, fascinating.

Sabrina’s smile widened as she went down the line, examining each of her new pictures in turn. Here was the glittering surface of a placid lake broken by the scaly humped back of a serpent as large as an aircraft carrier. Next was a forlorn blonde woman slumped in a mud puddle, her arms and legs slapped on her body the wrong way around, her face turned inside out so that the throbbing veins lay criss-crossed amid the gore like roads on a map, the optic nerves hanging down her cheeks like fleshy tears. The photo after that portrayed a mist-shrouded cemetery straight out of Hammer horror, white headstones sticking up at odd angles like clutches of skewered dinosaur bones in an archeologist’s pit; and from the black fogged earth at the base of each grave rose a transparent gossamer hand with long groping fingers.

By the time Sabrina reached her final masterpiece—a ventriloquist’s dummy with deceptively bland eyes crowning a massive rictus of fanged teeth, the doll sitting in the lap of its unfortunate master, whose throat was ripped out, sinew sparkling wetly—her smile was radiant. She nodded to herself, the warmth of accomplishment, of work well done, enfolding her. “Fucking brilliant,” she said, not at all fazed by the echo of her voice in the empty room, in the empty world.

Excerpt from “The Tenebrist”

/ Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

 

TenebristCover_Facebook

The remainder of the afternoon was spent trying to convince Michel of his folly, but deep down I’m sure we all knew it was futile. Only Onorio seemed unconcerned. “Did you see the look on the boy’s face?” he said with a snide grin. “He isn’t even going to come. Don’t worry.”

But I was worrying, and I knew the Cesari brothers were too. They had just nursed Michel back from the brink of death, and I don’t imagine they were keen to see their recovered patient cut to ribbons over a ten scudi bet. Thinking I might be able to talk some sense into him, I took Michel aside and pleaded with him, using every appeal I could think of, but Michel was locked, single-minded; he looked at me as though I was nothing but a particularly annoying insect.

The light in the sky began to wane, and my anxiety grew to a towering edifice. Michel began making his way back to the courts, and though he did not make any indication that he wished us to accompany him, we all followed closely; if anything should go wrong, it would be better for all of us to be there to prevent or correct it. The thought of Michel slowly bleeding to death, alone in the middle of the ball courts, was too much for me to bear.

When we first arrived, I was relieved to see the courts empty of people; perhaps Onorio had been right, and Ranuccio was a coward after all. My relief, however, was short-lived, for after a few minutes Ranuccio and his friends—more of them than earlier—strode onto the court, full of false bluster, though I could see that Ranuccio was pale and had already begun to sweat.

It started with little fanfare as both men raised their swords. I backed away, wanting more than anything to cover my eyes, but unwilling to do so. If my love were to die before me, I would be dishonoring him by looking away.

The first clash of the metal blades was deafening, and there was a general murmur among the assembled bystanders. I suppose they were all wondering, as I was, how an innocent game had come to this, to the point where death hovered in the air.

Ranuccio was obviously frightened, but he fought well. Michel was strangely calm, wielding his sword in the cavalier way he handled his brush, confident to the point of callousness. He fought now as if he had no fear of dying at all.

Ranuccio made a lunge and Michel grunted; I gasped as I saw blood bloom on the sleeve of his white shirt. But it appeared a superficial wound, and only served to make Michel fight back more aggressively, pressing forward into Ranuccio’s range with his chin thrust out.

The sun had nearly sunk behind the horizon and the two men’s faces were nothing but shadowed blurs. Other than the clanging of their swords and the ragged huffs of their breathing, the courts were engulfed in a pocket of silence.

Ranuccio had almost got another blow in, at the chest this time, which likely would have been fatal, but Michel blocked it, only just. Both of them were getting tired, but only Michel seemed to retain that cold but somehow hellish glint in his eye.

A moment later, in the space of an eyeblink, Michel had fairly leaped forward and struck at Ranuccio.

The blow was low, a clean, deep slash on Ranuccio’s thigh, and the boy crumpled to the ground with a wail. The blood was immediate and copious, and I was horrified, but also exultant, for Michel had won, and with only minor wounds. I took a step forward, whether to congratulate Michel or help tend to Ranuccio I didn’t know. But then Michel’s head snapped up and his eyes met mine. I stopped in my tracks, terrified by what I saw there.

It seemed a very long time that he and I stared at each other over the fallen form of Ranuccio, though in reality it must have been only a few seconds. In Michel’s steady gaze I saw reflected all of the demons that haunted him, all of the troubled history between us. I saw melancholy and madness, and most frightening of all, I saw a sort of resignation, a recognition that the demons were too powerful, and that he wasn’t going to fight them anymore. There was a sense that this moment was one that could never be turned back from.

And then, very deliberately, Michel turned his gaze upon Ranuccio, bleeding and cowering at his feet. A long moment passed in which time seemed to have stopped altogether, and then he drew back his sword, and completely ran the boy through.