Tag Archives: monsters

General Fiction

When You Look Away

“The monsters win when you look away,” he said soothingly to her as she lay softly crying on her bed, her eyes tightly closed and her face buried in her pillow. Outside, rain steadily fell as dark grey skies stretched forever, “You cannot look away. You must be strong and stare them down,” he kept repeating as she kept crying.

He was always there but he only appeared when she needed him. He only appeared after her stepfather had left her room. She wished her mother would never go away on those business trips ever again.

Eventually, her crying subsided into mere sobbing. Her tears ran out and she lifted her face from her wet pillow.

He was still there, smiling warmly. She sometimes called him ‘Mr Razzy‘ but mostly it was ‘Razzybones‘. He was tall and thin with a great top hat and fierce, blue eyes that spoke of clear skies and beaches. Sometimes he would sing for her or fly around the room dancing across the ceiling. He was always dressed in the bright colours of a circus and he extended his hand to her.

“Come, little one,” he said, “Let’s get out of this room. Let’s go play outside and we can practice staring the monsters down, OK?”

She reached up and grabbed his delicate hand, nodding gently. She felt better already and the skies were now blue outside. The rain was gone and she would learn how to not look away.

***

The pastor was speaking but she was not listening. She held her mother’s frail hand tightly and felt her squeezing back as they lowered the casket into the ground.

“George was a loving husband and caring stepfather to Anna,” the Pastor was saying but all she could think about was the turmoil inside of her. She ached for her mother’s loss and squeezed her hand instinctually as tears came to both of their eyes, but she also kept staring at the monster’s casket as it slipped slowly into that dark hole forever.

Lower and lower, and further and further away.

“Don’t look away,” Razzybones was whispering in her ear. She could feel his fierce blue eyes sparkling as they both finally stared the old monster down, “Don’t ever look away.”

***

“What is wrong, my dear,” Anna asked, turning the light on and sitting down on her daughter’s bed, “What can mommy help with?”

Her daughter almost leaped from under the covers into her arms, and she hugged her tightly. She could hear the TV from the lounge where her husband was channel hopping the evening news and outside it was raining gently. This used to bother her but now it made her all warm inside. She squeezed her daughter tightly and repeated.

“What is wrong, little one? What can mommy help you with?”

“Mommy, it’s the monsters again. I can hear them outside when you turn the lights off. They aren’t there now,” her daughter pleaded with her, “But they are there when you turn the lights off…”

She smiled. She knew all about monsters.

“Come,” she began, picking her daughter up, “Let’s tuck you in and I will tell you a secret.”

She lay her daughter in the bed and pulled the bright, circus-coloured duvet up over her, tucking in the sides and then gently leaned down and kissed her little forehead.

“The monsters win when you look away,” she began, smiling warmly, “Next time, baby girl, you look straight at them and you do not look away. Do you think you can do that, my dear? Do you think you can stare the monsters down for Mommy?”

Her daughter nodded and flung her arms out for another hug. Anna could not help but smile, and she was sure that she could feel Razzybones smiling somewhere too with his fierce, blue eyes sparkling.

General Fiction, Horror & Dark Fiction

The Nature of Permanence

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church

The Priest noticed that in one of the church’s back rows there was a strange man. He had not noticed the man there before, but he could well have slipped in at any time. People did that sometimes. Some people preferred doing that. Besides, it was a big church with plenty of gloomy patches.

The Priest began walking up the aisle to speak with him. The man looked old and tired; his hair and beard were shaggy and he had bags under his eyes. He was gazing at the Church wall where a crucifixion statue hung with a deathly thin Jesus writhing on the cross with large nails protruding from his hands and feet.

“Can I help you with something, Sir?” the Priest ventured as he got near to the man. If the man knew he was approaching, he had not so much as moved a muscle to acknowledge this. All he did was continue to stare at Jesus’s cold marble form.

The Priest reached the man and sat down next to him. He suddenly shivered as a chill ran down his spine. This side of the Church was particularly shadowy and there was a strange coldness in the air here.

“Can I help you with something, my child? Is something troubling you?”

Slowly, the man broke off his gaze from the crucifixion and looked at the Priest. Despite the rings under them, the man’s eyes were a striking blue and had an incredible depth to them. His eyes reminded the Priest of a Vietnam war veteran he had once counselled. The Priest had a theory that this war veteran had seen such terrible things that God himself had put beauty into his eyes–kind of like a filter–to try to protect him from the world thereafter. It was a nice theory. The man sitting next to the Priest had eyes like that, and the Priest instantly found himself believing that this was a truly damaged soul here.

“Priest, when you lost your baby and then your wife, what did you feel?”

The Priest was a bit taken aback by the directness of the question, but he had on many occasions publicly explained his path into the Church. He had not always been a man of God. When his child had died and his wife had left, he had been a broken man and the Church had saved him. This man could well have sat through a sermon or spoken to someone who had. None of this was a secret.

“I-I felt pain, my child. I was lost and in pain, like Jesus walking through the wilderness. Do you feel this way, my child? The Church saved me and it can save you too if you let it. Tell me how you feel, my child, and I will try to help?”

The man’s gaze did not move nor even flinch. His brilliant blue gaze continued to bore into the Priest’s eyes. The Priest shifted his weight and glanced away briefly. When he glanced back, the man was staring at the crucifixion scene again.

“No. No, Father, I do not feel like that,” the man began speaking slowly and then started to pick up pace, “I’ve done what I always do: I’ve grown bored. All of you run around warning people of Hell and damnation, but your lives are brief and you all go back into the same box to be played again next round. The greatest gift you can give a consciousness is mortality while the greatest curse you can inflict on it is immortality. The temporality of mortality makes things beautiful because they are fleeting; even the flaws, horrors and suffering has a beauty because they cannot last forever and they are temporary, never to be repeated again. This is very different for the Ageless Ones. The real war of the immortals is one against boredom. Perhaps your God and your Lucifer are both just trying to fight the boredom of eternity? Did you ever consider that? Perhaps Jesus as well? I think he actually just staged the whole thing to give colour to a new cycle. Muhammad probably too, yes. I reckon that God probably doesn’t even like Muhammad, but is just playing along for now because it is more interesting than not playing along. I guess it is all just trying to fill up eternity. I am bored, Father, and I am very tired–very, very tired–of being so goddam bored.”

The Priest was a bit surprised. That was not the answer he was expecting. So he took a moment to gather his thoughts before answering the man the best he could.

“So,” the Priest began, “In Psalms, Isaiah says that we must not fear for I, the Lord God am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”

The Priest paused for a moment before continuing.

“I can see that you are feeling lost, my child. God can help you, but only if you let him in–”

The Priest stopped talking as the man turned slowly to look at him again. Time seemed to stop. The Church and the day outside disappeared. The man’s gaze was so intense that it held him. The gaze bored into the Priests mind, unleashing strange thoughts there. These thoughts appeared at first in the Priest’s mind and then began to balloon into all-encompassing images exploding through his whole being. It started with darkness. Emptiness. Space. And then he saw that the vast expanse of a starless nothing that was filled with monstrous, ancient leviathans. Countless, ageless, infinite beings brooding on the edge of all galaxies. It was dark and so cold in this abyss. These pre-cosmic horrors were just floating there with alien motives driven by immortal, inhuman desires. These gargantuan, apocalyptic beings were just drifting there. They were floating in a darkness older than time and they had only their dark dreams to keep them company across the millennia while they plotted the chaos of world just to colour their existence. And then a vast, tentacled being floated silently by him. Its form was an indescribable abomination with clawed appendages bigger than entire planets and its world-eating mouth stretched out like a deep space black hole crowned with Antediluvian teeth.

Suddenly the ancient leviathan opened an immortal eye and looked directly at him!

He gasped and leapt up from where he was sitting. His heart was racing and his palms felt sweaty. It had been such an intense daydream–or daymare!–that he had lost all sense of awareness. His skin felt cold and the hair on the back of his neck was raised while he tasted something foul and bitter in the back of his throat.

The Priest realised that the man was no longer there. The row in front of him was empty. He looked around the Church, but he could not see him. It did not seem that much time had actually passed during the Priest’s daymare. In fact, it seemed that the daymare had been but mere moments. There was simply no sign whatsoever that a bearded man with a shaggy hair and blue eyes had been sitting right there in front of the Priest.

The Priest shook his head and began slowly walking back down the aisle. He believed in God and all the angels. He believed in miracles and the wonders of the Bible. But that also meant that he believed in the Devil, and all his tricks and wickedness. He also had to believe in all the demons of Hell, and their wicked agendas. But–and he could not shake this thought no matter how hard he tried–could there be others? What if there were dark, ancient beings floating in the starless parts of old space and the twisted, timeless corners of the universe? What if they were immortal, and existed beyond the comprehension of men? What if they walked among and through us? What would we call them? What would they want from us? What would they dream about?

The Priest did not know these answers, but he felt cold, small and insignificant in a dark, inhuman universe.

A couple decades later, the Priest died. A couple centuries later, the country fell into civil war and the Church ended up bombed into little more than rubble. Nearly a millennia later, humans wiped themselves off the face of the earth. Of humans and all their achievements, there was little more than a cosmic echo left that bounced through the universes and galaxies left there.

At one of the dark edges of pre-cosmic space, something still floated. This gargantuan being floated in a starless vacuum, dreaming its dark, inhuman dreams. And, then when the last echo of humans died out to complete silence, this ancient leviathan rolled over in its timeless slumber. Its dreams drifted from the world of men to a new world. The beast was and will always be seeking out the next thing–anything!–to try to stave off the fate of all immortals: boredom.

Fantasy, Horror & Dark Fiction

Hands in the Woods

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hands-in-the-forest

“Don’t go down to the woods tonight, little girl,” said the grizzled, old man while sucking on his half-lit pipe, “The Sleepers there will be waking from their dark, ageless slumber to dance in the bloodless moonlight like wild dogs. They will drain you of your virgin blood, little girl, because no one has ever come back alive.”

The younger, less-grizzled man next to him chuckled loudly, “No, no, old man! Are you saying that we are a village with only virgins wandering around in our woods? We won’t last this generation if that is true. It has nothing to do with virgins or blood. No, the Sleepers don’t dance and they couldn’t care less about the moon or your sexual proclivities,” the man leaned forward, looking intensely at the young girl, “Sweety, the Sleepers rise from where they once fell on their ancient battlefield to haunt the old willow trees that grew over their graves. They climb the boughs to scout the battlefield. Our woods are a battlefield just as real to them now as it was to them back all those ages ago in whatever ancient kingdom they were once part of. Today is the anniversary of their great, forgotten battle, and so, Sweety, we all huddle up in this warm, cozy bar with everyone and drink until dawn before going back out. The Sleepers will be sleeping once again and all will be fine in this world of ours then.”

“W-what do the Sleepers look like?” the wide-eyed little girl managed to ask the two men before her mother found her and dragged her away to sit with her family. But, this question sparked a heated debate amongst the two men. Soon enough a number of men from other tables joined the debate.

“Dark, twisted, hairy forms with bloated hands that float in front of them,” one medium-grizzled man piped up, “My Cuz told me he once saw them across the river late one night. They float all ghastly-like out there–”

Another man laughed, slamming his tankard on the worn, wooden table, “And how would your drunken Cuz know such things? He was probably pissed and saw your mother fetching water!”

This was met with an uproar of loud laughter and manly back-slapping. Another round of ale was ordered for everyone. The inside of the inn was warm and packed. Most of the villagers were in there that evening. They were all laughing and joking amongst themselves. There was flirting amongst the young and tale-telling amongst the old, but no one was in the mood for anything more.

Outside the night was cold and the woods were dark.

Outside the Sleepers were waking up. They were crawling from their nests inside the unique willow trees that grew in that wood. Their hairy, eight-legged forms had a pattern on their backs in a soft whitish-pink that made them look almost like a human hand from a distance.

A whole forest of hairy, eight-legged human hands was crawling out from their nests in the boughs of the willows. Like some dark and twisted ritual, they all climbed to the tops of their trees. At the top of the trees, poking out above the woods, there was the cold wind that constantly blew from the mountains. It blew down those rugged peaks through this valley and out to the next forest a kingdom away. Each Sleeper would spin an off-white sail, stand up on its back four legs–four other hairy insectoid legs spread upwards–and flick out its sail to catch the cold wind.

One by one, each spider took off, floating upwards and onwards like a silent, hideous, hairy hand over the dark woods. One by one, they would disappear into the night.

Only, nothing really disappears. The Sleepers would reappear, falling from the sky in the nearby kingdom. They would silently fall from the night sky in another wood outside another village that were also huddled indoors telling stories about the annual flight of the Fallers that dropped from the dark sky once a year to steal away mortals caught in their webs…

And, back in the wood in the boughs of those old willow trees, the spiders’ eggs lay awaiting the day in a year’s time when they too could fly to the mating grounds.