Population Of

Dominic would show them all. That stupid "Welcome to Bessemer" sign was his. It was the pride of the whole damn town. No other target would do.

It was the dead of night, and Dominic rode his bike to the town line. He briefly considered spray painting something vulgar over the bent placard proudly proclaiming "1967 Pennsylvania State Basketball Champions", but decided against it. This was his statement. He wanted to show everybody how teeth-gratingly boring he found this place.

Drawing in his breath, he raised his arm and poised the nozzle. With two exaggerated swipes of his arms, Dominic crossed out the number beneath "Population of:" and beside it painted a dripping number "1". Himself.

"That was easy," he muttered to himself, glancing over his shoulder. He expected guard dogs and an escape scene from an action movie, complete with explosions. When nothing broke the silence, he hopped on his bike and rode home. He slept easy that night, reassured by the satisfaction of a job well done.

The next morning, Dominic rose with his alarm, excited to hear the gossip that was surely already starting to stir. Pulling on some clothes, he took the steps two at a time down to the kitchen. 

"Hey, Mom! I -- "

His voice bounced off the empty chairs and slammed against his chocleas. 

"Mom? …Mom, where are you? Dad? Thea? Where are you guys? Where's breakfast?"

Dominic searched the length of the downstairs, peeked into the basement, and rounded the stairs for an investigation of the upper floor. Nobody was home. He checked his watch to make sure the time was correct. It wasn't normal for his family to not see each other before they started their day, but maybe they each had to get an early start. Shrugging, he gathered up his things and left for school.

As he rode his bike down the sidewalk, something started to gnaw at him. At first, he couldn't place it, but it eventually dawned on him: The silence was overwhelming. But why was it so quiet? There were no cars. Where were they? Speaking of, were his parents cars still at home? He hadn't bothered to check the garage. 

When he made it to school, Dominic was dismayed to discover that nobody was hanging around outside before the bell. He checked his watch again to make sure he wasn't late. 

"Everybody's probably in mourning over that goddamn sign," he scoffed. 

Dominic walked to the doors and pushed, but they were locked. Figuring there was a gas leak, generator failure, or a cow terrorizing the building (it had happened once before, back in 1986), he jumped up in the air, sang a few lines from an oft-quoted Pink Floyd song, and began the ride back home.

But the uneasiness followed him. Unable to shake it off, he decided to drop in at his friend Matt's house. Dominic strode to the door and rang the bell. Matt was not home. He decided to try Butterly next -- good old Butterly. With the goofy grin and the busted treadmill. But like Matt, nobody answered at Butterly's house.

"What the fuck?" Dominic asked. "It's like everybody's dead." It dawned on him that it was like everyone was dead. He tried Butterly's neighbors, but every doorbell had the same effect: Stony, uncomfortable silence.

"This isn't funny," Dominic growled as he punched the fifth door. By the tenth, he was kicking them. Around nine o'clock, he was sobbing uncontrollably.

Dominic didn't know what to do. It was like the whole town had picked up and moved away during the night. 

At dusk, he biked out to the town sign to gaze upon his work.

"I bet they have a new damn sign," he frowned.

Their Soft Bones

I wrote another Creepypasta. All off the top of my head, but that's pretty much the nature of Creepypasta.

The movies never make this clear, and I curse them for it: When you shoot yourself in the head, you don't always die instantly. Half of your had caved in, jaw swinging on its hinges, and sinuses bubbling with blood. I'm on my side, and with my remaining functional ear, I can hear their soft feet sliding across the wooden floor. God help me. If the movies hadn't lied, if I had gone instantly, they wouldn't have been able to get me. 

And, more importantly, they won't come after her.

I was born in this house, and since I can remember, I've wanted nothing more than to see it burn to the ground. The gasoline has been spread. I hope Hollywood hasn't spread any more falsehoods. It's my last chance. If it goes, they go with it. I can only hope.

I knew these woods whispered before I was old enough to speak back to them. It was as if the forest itself was a living entity, fueled by a cancer growing along its spine, black and running parallel with its neurons. Sometimes I would search under the rocks or in rotting logs for the source, but in the end, I would always come up empty.

As I grew older, my search became more obsessive; mainly, any reason to get out of the house was a good one. It was just me and my mom, and as the years went by, she grew more and more erratic. At one time, she would take me into her arms and tell me stories of my grandfather, but eventually she became inconsolable at the mention of his name. She got into drugs, and I didn't recognize her as my mother anymore.

We lived in a small cabin in the woods, at the end of a long road. I was told that the house had existed as long as my family had. It even had an old outhouse, but that had been converted into a shed years ago. Generations of my family had been born there, and I was convinced that they were all still stuck in the walls, nestled into the knots and swirls of the wood.

I wondered if the oppressive sickness that hung in the air was making my mother crazy. I could feel it in my bones, too, like the moss clinging to the rocks. 

Like the moss clinging to the rocks.

There was something curious about the moss that grew on the cabin. The way it snaked inside and covered the walls and floor, how no corner was safe from its reach; the way it would lightly pulsate after a thunderstorm with a hum like a wasps' nest; the opaline colour of it, all green and white and gray at once. The drugs made my mother hallucinate the moss into talking, and some nights, I could swear I heard it, too.

One night, she overdosed. It was inevitable. As she lay on the floor, I telephoned for help. She was gasping for breath and unconscious, and I knew that she didn't have much time left. 

That's when it happened: With a groan, the walls came alive. Out of the moss, their figures formed: Eyeless, gaping, abhorrent, and wholly silent. On those vile legs they slid across the floor to her and began to peel off her flesh with surprising speed. They gouged out her eyes. Blood painted the floor. When they pulled out her bones, I was finally shaken out of my deep shock, and I began to scream.

Her bones were covered with moss and animate. They left through the door.

Emergency services arrived at some point later, but I was hysterical. I don't know what they thought. I was placed into foster care until I was eighteen. I did some drugs and got a girl knocked up. That's how I ended up with my daughter, and that made me turn my life around. She deserved better than what my mother had given me. She needed a proper home. That's why I tried to forget about what had happened all those years ago and moved back into my old home. Besides, that couldn't have really happened, could it? I was just a kid in shock at seeing his mother die.

The cabin was still there, as fresh and clean as if somebody had been there all along. It really did feel like home.

I did some poking around in my mother's old room, and that's where I found my grandfather's old journals. There was quite a bit of old family history in there. A lot of it -- Well, I don't know. The way it reads -- It sounds like he was losing it. But it struck a chord in me; an axe against an ocean of ice. 

I'm unclear how it began, exactly, but it started sometime after the Revolutionary War, whenever my family got this land. My great-great-(whatever) grandparents built this house. They were desperate for children, but they couldn't have any. My great-great-(etc.)-grandmother went out into the forest and made a deal with whichever spirits would listen, and something malignant took pity on her. There was a fragile creature close to dying off, and they struck up a deal: If she went with them, she would return to her husband with a child. But the child was an abomination, with moss clinging to its bones. And that was how it was for the following generations -- We were allowed to reproduce once to strengthen the genetics, then we were called back to be with our own kind.

Horrified, that night I sent my daughter back to be with her mother. I was going to end this unholy alliance like my mother had tried to. 

But they whisper. I'm unsure if the sound of gunshot or the smell of gasoline awakened them, but they have come for me. 

And again I curse -- Moss does not burn.

From Beyond

I originally wrote this piece years ago after the image flashed in my mind one night, and it was something I always came back to. This piece has been revised and updated as my life did the same, but the intent never faltered.


It came back to haunt me when I was diagnosed with epilepsy a year ago. I don't know why I find the whole thing so funny, but I do.

Automatic Typewriter

I actually started writing this three years ago, when I was sitting in the tattooist's chair getting my own typewriter tattoo. I then forgot about it and lost the notebook.


For whatever reason, I woke up this morning, remembered the story, and spent all day on it. I'll probably come back and edit the crap out of this thing, but here it is, anyway.

Sees you.

 

 

Sociopathic Medicine

I was once faced with a prompt to write a romance scene involving zombies, and this was the result. In retrospect, I pretty much failed the challenge, as there is no romance to be had in this piece. But there's plenty of mad science, and that should count for something.

Also, this is creepy -- even for me.

True love may last forever, but the most I've ever gotten out of a lab assistant is two years, five months, three weeks, twelve days, and fifteen hours. And he was the exception.

Since they've given me my own lab, I don't get bothered very much. Security is tight. A team of interns and secretaries do my paperwork. The official stuff, anyway. I only have to see them twice a week at the most, and that's how I like it.

My office is to the back, a spacious enough room off my auxiliary lab. I only spend time there out of necessity, which is mainly to eat, sleep, or change my clothes. However, I get much more use out of it than my apartment across town, which I inhabit an odd weekend here or there. My work often spans most of the night. A mattress and wardrobe in my office makes more sense.

I work for a major pharmaceutical company, birthing new drugs for mass consumption. These operations are all the same, total rackets operating far below anything resembling legality. They give the reach-around to the FDA; enough politicians are on the payroll to get just about every drug pushed through to the market. The FDA doesn't ask questions. Nobody does. If they did, they'd probably realize that the majority of our case studies done on actual breathing human beings are fabrications at best. Then again, I'm not sure that they even care. Anything to get those stocks up. I'm not complaining, though. The system allows me to do whatever I want.

I'm a genius. Arrogant, too, yes, but I have every reason to be. I "graduated" high school when I was fourteen, which is to say I was shipped off to an Ivy League university on a full scholarship. I have a doctor title before my name and everything. I'm not even thirty, and I've been promoted more times than I can count. That's how I got my own lab. Gotta keep the scientists happy, Corporate reasons. They're money in the bank.

Sure, it's been hard sometimes. I don't mean the work -- that part has always been so unbelievably easy for me. It's people that have always been the problem. Due to my exceptional situation, I was placed into single-occupancy dorm rooms. It made for a lonely existence; when most kids my age were out learning social graces and riding in fast cars, I was plugging away over test tubes and lab reports. I never learned the hows or whys of human connection, which seems exhaustingly boring when I really ponder its nature. I can't say that there wasn't a time in my life when I didn't try to make friends, but it seemed that I was strictly off-limits due to my age. I was denied access to all the good parties on campus. I couldn't get a male to come near me, even after I transmogrified from plain girlhood into a hyperly curvy woman. And girls? -- forget it. I may be one, but I don't have time for their games, nor the knowledge of how to play them.

Ultimately, it didn't matter. I had my work, and that's all I care about. Science goes beyond obsession. It infects me to my core; it is the electricity that stimulates my neurons. There is no rush like molecular structure. Nothing gets me off like cold, unforgiving facts. Emotion, conversation, complications -- they all dim the brilliance of molecular bonds snapping and reforming, biochemical reactions, and pulsating instincts buried deep within the empty spaces of every synapse of the human brain. Sex is, as a process, truly amazing. Human interaction is what makes the mechanism malfunction so soundly.

It had been a while since I had had any form of concrete contact with others of my own species the night I found myself in the cadaver lab. I had misplaced my dictaphone, and process of elimination had led me there. It was well past two in the morning, and despite the fact that the facility had long been deserted for the night, the corpses selected specifically for research purposes lay peacefully, row by row, in their stainless steel beds. They were waiting for tomorrow, when they would get one or more of their organs sawed out for the greater good -- the greater good being some half-assedly engineered wonderpill that would make a lot of a greedy bastards a large profit. The room hummed to the tune of air conditioning, florescent lights, and my quiet breathing.

It was a Saturday night, I remember. It occurred to me that things didn't need to be this way. The bars were closing, and if I wanted my pick of a suitable subject for a one-night stand, the odds were solidly in my favour. My typical aversion to other people had temporarily thawed, but not enough for me to take my chances with the general populace. Besides, it's never as simple as it sounds. He always wants your phone number, a real date, a cup of coffee, to cuddle. So undignified. And you can bet there's no talk of the Periodic Table.

I found my dictaphone on the table, and on my way out, one of the corpses caught my eye. He was still looking very fresh. There was no way to tell how he died, save that it wasn't from a major disease process. He was young, his skin was still spongy and pink. Rigor mortis had set in, but otherwise, he was inviting.

>The thought crossed my mind and stayed there. It would be such an easy thing to do, and nobody would ever know. Loneliness was burrowing through every one of my pores. This particular February was fraying my nerves like no other ever had.

But, no. It really wouldn't be a step above masturbation, something which never did much for me. If there was a way to preserve warmth, to coax kinetic motion, and to do away with all the rest, I would be so happy. If only --

>I don't know why, but I had a flashback of a show I had seen sometime when I was in college. It was the true-life account of a Mr. Claudius Narcisse, a documented zombie. He had been slipped some Voodoo potion that had been concocted of the venom of a local pufferfish, among other things. The venom slowed his heart and respiration, shrouded his brainwaves, made him appear, for all intents and purposes, dead. In Haiti, bodies are neither embalmed nor buried, just placed into above-ground concrete sarcophaguses. On the night he was laid to rest, the Voodoo priest collected him. Claudius laboured as a virtually mindless drone for the next fifteen years. After his term of servitude had been fulfilled, he was left off in his village, largely clueless to the past decade and a half.

Claudius would never insist that I call him the next day. Claudius would never fall asleep next to me. Claudius wouldn't do a lot of things.

I started my research at once. I practically had to sell my soul to the proverbial devil to get my hands on that delightfully neurotoxic recipe. On the other hand, the ingredients weren't a challenge. I can order anything I want for experimentation, no questions asked.

I tried it out on a Saturday night in a bar downtown. I singled out a particularly noxious subject, one who was attractive enough yet annoyingly overconfident. It wasn't difficult to convince him to accompany me to the lab for a good time. When we arrived, I offered him a drink. Little did he know it was laced with Pufferfish Cocktail, which has the advantage of being colourless, scentless, and tastes only faintly metallic.

He was in a full death-coma within a half-hour of ingestion. I ran a full STD panel. By the time he came to three days later, the cultures were back. He was safe to proceed. I spent the next week feeding and injecting him with a steady diet of chemicals, and, of course, fucking him without discernible mercy. When I tired of him, I dropped him off in an alley behind an electronics store. The best part was that I never heard from him again.

I've come so far since then, improved on my methods so much. I figured out an easier delivery method of drugs post-zombification. I insert mediports intended for chemotherapy in the subclavian region, carefully snaking the catheter into the superior vena cava so the drugs are pumped throughout the entire body by the heart. Surgery takes forty-five minutes, tops. I run tubing around the shoulder and down to a drip-bag fastened to the back. When I want to actually use my zombie, I inject a type of paralytic into the bag, one that decreases sensation and mimics rigor mortis. But their bodies are always warm. Sometimes they even make sounds. When I'm done, I load them up with succinylcholine, another paralytic, and stash them in an empty storeroom.

Finding victims isn't difficult. This city is full of loner subculture-types; young men out to prove some idiotic point and nothing else are seldom missed. All I've had to do is study up on bands I really don't have a taste for so I can fake my way through icebreaking conversation.

The only problem is that they never last as long as poor Claudius. They're usually dead within eighteen months, their systems doubtless spent from constantly bathing in chemicals. Still, getting rid of the bodies doesn't take much of an effort; I cut them up and feed them to my lab animals. The few that I grew to tolerate were thrown into the incinerator.

The best part is that this doubles as research. Imagine what I can do with this stuff. In time, my company will come to see the possibilites, too. The notion of love, caramelized and dyed on the stovetops of greeting card kitchens, have effectively lobotomized the masses. This way, the burden of sugar-coating is removed from the process. Of course, PR won't present it in such a fashion to the public. They'll twist it around some seemingly home-spun advertisement; instead, they should be celebrating the triumph of science over emotion. I know I am.

Fragment

I found this lurking on my hard drive, and I wish I could remember where the hell it was ultimately going.


The most important sound in the universe was the strings vibrating against the wood, and not the notes they produced: the snap and twitch as they cut the air, the faint creak of the neck, the scraping of all the fingertips that had been cut and scarred and calloused through the generations. She spilled her neurons across the dissecting board of the violin, breathed deep and forced herself outward with every exhalation. Her molecules mixed with wax and horsehair, and her heart valves arched in unison.

The songs would slumber safely within cocoons of bone and skin, incubated by dried flowers and ladybugs; anxiety and yellowing Polaroid photographs; quibbling and the smell of asphalt at August High Noon. Set to their own timelines dictated by unique internal landscapes, they were unexpectedly born by their own automatic c-sections, tearing open their silken resurrection machines with teeth of steel, motivated by the solely by the need to be heard: shrill, or muted, or bleached, or candied — but always louder than a nuclear blast.

It made no sense that they drew her here so often — crumbling masonwork and decapitated statues against a backdrop she could not place. That part did not matter — it was where they chose to be delivered, breaking their own water and inducing their own labor, and she could not argue. It felt better to get them out, and she knew better than to fight with the laws of her own nature. In the end, as she had repeatedly learned, she would be in perpetual last place.

But nothing mattered when she held her violin — or, more accurately, nothing existed; when she played, time would lapse into a coma and gravity found itself needing a living organ donor. Einstein would be furious, but even he could appreciate her talent and skill, boiled and smelted and spit upon since she was old enough to stand.

When she found herself in this familiar haunt, the sun was fading through the absent roof, and the violin — the scratches traced by her fingers, her great-great uncle's fingers, possibly by God's fingers with the fury it could withstand — balanced on a pile of rubble to her immediate left. The panic that had welled up in her chest would part and subside upon locating the object that she had carried with her since memory had formed in her toddler mind, and before that from the Old Country, wherever exactly that was. She had not lost it after all; the daunting responsibility that had been bestowed upon her had not come to an end. And, picking it up and cradling it carefully, she turned on her heel with the best of intentions: To find her way home from this place, and though she did not know which direction to choose, at least the violin was safe.

Against her better judgment, the songs would jerk and stir, and she would respond "It wouldn't hurt to just get one out of my system." And her Better Judgment would reply "I don't like this, but you don't have a choice, now do you?"

The strings would stir, and she would smile — and the world would come to an end, as it always did when she played. Her fingers danced and the bow threatened to saw the instrument in two neat halves. This was how that particular violin had been engineered to be used.

A part of her remembered the rest of the story before it occurred, and familiarity washed over her. She had seen this place before, and she would return her for all the inexplicable reasons in the universe. But it could be different this time. The song was new; it was unlike its older siblings, and it had the power to change every outcome, every supersting of destiny.

The literature could not be reformatted. The corners of reality crumpled, and she heard a mindless howl. Nearly silent at its genesis, it soon overwhelmed her music, bouncing around the stones and landing solidly in her cochlea.

A tangible chill pooled in the back of her head and fled to her sacrum. Her eyes shifted their focus, but her hands continued to produce music. Legs anxiously spasming, the breath stuck in her throat in anticipation of her reaction.

Automated and fueled by adrenaline, her left arm swung the violin underneath her right, and she ran. She did not have time to weigh her decision as her limbic brain awoke and took charge of the parts of her body like a general. She was not an athlete, but fear provided the speed she typically lacked.

Stumbling and unable to find stable footing, she propelled herself in every forward direction. At times her path was blocked, and she would scale ruined walls, jump over deconstructed staircases. Repeatedly looking over her shoulder just long enough as a reminder that her life was in real danger.

It wore the cheap disguise of a man, one that was so transparent it almost seemed like a waste of time. Within the wrappings of pseudo skin and hair was a cloud of black energy, a wailing collection of buzzing electrons that gleamed as they orbited a core that shone with shadow. It spoke its own language, one of a continuous and sinister hum, balktalking like a malfunctioning lawnmower played though the hissing static of a broken amplifier from 1964. It was that sound that awoke the unfettered and inescapable terror within her, the sounds of brains boiling with fever and the dead being reanimated.

Blind Spot

A flash fiction piece I had done for a weekly prompt community. I was watching a lot of Marble Hornets at the time.

If the photographs made sounds, they would rumble like static from an impending thunderstorm, pressed between the pages of a yellowing dictionary. Compressed sound, searching for the proper words.

She had been so careful, searching the landscape for any sign of the figure, singling out trees that could have been him and moving them out of the frame. Her skin had not erupted into prickling goosebumps; the sick feeling that branched out from the base of her spine and congealed into synapses had not been present. Assuming she was safe, she clicked the shutter, feeling momentary satisfaction in the sound. Click-click, all is well.

Staring at the picture, she choked back tears. It was the realization that she had been marked, and no matter where she traveled, no matter how many saint medals she roped around her neck, he would appear, never vocalizing what he wanted. Just waiting, devouring her sanity, forcing her to look over her shoulder at every turn. Forever.

Seeping around the edges, squarely into her blind spot.

Vonnegut was never wrong.

 

 

I guess that's all he wanted.

 

 

Advice Lovecraft: Do what the man says.