Short Story Strands: Halloween 2012 Edition Read online

  THE NEST

  by Linell Jeppsen

  Captain Nora Bradley started and stared at her dual monitors when her XO, Carl Winnifer declared, “This is it, Captain, G-X, 422.”

  Nora and her crew were called out on this search and rescue mission when the fourth emergency beacon lit up the switchboards back at HQ. Every planet, moon and asteroid in every star system had its share of shipwrecks, and every shipwrecked crew sent a beacon if they were still able. This was the fourth beacon from G-X, 422 in as many weeks, however, and Star Command was getting nervous.

  So was Nora. She stared down at the gloomy and forlorn planet in her view screen. It was devoid of life forms, according to her stats charts. Once rich in ore, the planet was abandoned after a passing meteor took a huge bite out of its moon, sending the world below into an elliptical orbit. The seas overflowed the landmasses, and then turned to ice as the population fled to the stars and a safer world.

  So, what’s with all the distress beacons, Nora wondered. Although G-X, 422 had been declared a disaster area, she knew that the planet still held vast deposits of iron, gold, and uranium. She also knew that if that information was recorded in her charts every salvage operation, mining consortium, and pirate knew about it as well. Some fool had probably led his team landside with the promise of easy money.

  She squinted at the monitor for a second and murmured, “Carl, is it my eyes, or do you see shadows in the atmo?”

  Carl nodded and replied, “Yes, ma’am. I’ve tried to isolate them, but the computers are not recognizing them as biological. My best guess is that they are clouds of frozen vapor that have condensed into mass-like icebergs.”

  “Ma’am?” A new voice penetrated Nora’s thoughts. She glanced to her right and saw Amanda Neilsen, her communications specialist, gazing back at her with a startled expression on her face.

  “What is it, Mandy?” Nora asked.

  “There are hundreds of distress signals now that we’ve come into orbit. I don’t know why I didn’t hear them before now… maybe something to do with this thick atmosphere, but there is definitely a problem down there.”

  Turning to her lieutenant, Nora asked, “Carl, do you anticipate any problems with a burn?”

  Carl shrugged and replied, “Our shields will be so hot they’ll melt anything that gets in our way, Cap.” He consulted his astrological charts, and added, “We’re good to go look around, ma’am.”

  “Let’s do it, then. Secure stations!” she commanded, tightened her safety harness, and sat back in her chair. “Commence glide, XO.”

  There was the usual noise, fire, and soul wrenching feeling of falling that accompanied every atmospheric dive, and then a sudden silence.

  “Raise the shields, Carl…let’s get a look at this place.” Nora gulped back her dread. What is the matter with me, she wondered, and then her heart stopped in her chest.

  There were hundreds of spaceships stuck like flies in a web, and there were millions of spiders — huge, metal spiders that skipped, ran and hurtled across millions of miles of strands. They were eating the spacecraft, fighting, mating… the whole planet was one huge spider’s nest. As one of those spiders, then two, looked their way and took a mighty bound toward them, Nora knew that yet another distress beacon would ping the communication arrays back at HQ.

  She had only a moment, and her fingers fumbled nervously, but she managed to type, “ABORT FURTHUR RESCUES, NUKE PROTOCALS ONLY!”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Linell Jeppsen is a science fiction/fantasy writer with three novels to her name—Detour to Dusk, Story Time, and Onio. Story Time was nominated as the best read of 2011 by the PRG. Her short story, The Gag Gift also won 3rd prize as the best science fiction short story of 2011.

  View Linell’s books on Goodreads / Connect with Linell

  THE MEDUSA TOUCH

  by Sam Kates

  Rubber gloves, that’s the ticket. I found them under the sink, rolled into a pink ball. When I gingerly lifted them from the cupboard, they didn’t uncoil and hiss and writhe. When I unrolled them, they didn’t wriggle and spit. When I yanked them on, they didn’t slither. The gloves have given me freedom. Freedom to touch things.

  I can pick up this pencil and it remains wood and charcoal. I can touch this paper with my shocking pink fingers and it remains wood pulp. If my sanity could be made corporeal, I could reach out and grasp it, except that it’s long gone.

  It seemed like a dream, but I’m no longer sure. My existence has become so nightmarish that I can’t tell if that was real and now I’m dreaming. Or they’re both dreams: then and now. I want to wake up.

  I bunch my hand into a rubberized fist and drive it hard into my nose. Pain flares hot and brief. My eyes water. Bright red splotches appear on the paper. Can dreams hurt?

  Medusa was a Gorgon, though I’m no expert on mythology. Those who beheld her turned to stone. Look on me all you like. Feast your eyes on me. You won’t become granite. But beware my touch, my lover’s caress, my father’s embrace. It would be your last.

  The paper is sodden. I need to stop the bleeding. And my bladder is full.

  That was a trial, emptying my bladder for the first time after it had happened. See, I wasn’t sure if it was safe to touch myself. After the horrors I’d just been through, you’d think that the last thing to worry me would be creating a literal trousers snake. You’d think.

  My fingers shook as I stood over the seatless toilet and allowed the first hot spurt to come forth undirected. I could have stayed like that, peeing with surprising precision into the bowl without using my hands at all. Of course, I had no clothes to hamper my aim. But I needed to know. I grasped my penis.

  The urine cut off mid-stream as my sphincter recoiled in apprehension. Nothing moved within my hand. I was still holding a penis, a flaccid tube of flesh that had played a starring role in siring two children. I let out my breath in a sigh. The remaining urine soon followed.

  Now that I was glove-clad I could do anything I wanted with impunity. I could tear off strips of toilet paper to staunch my leaking nose without the tissue becoming flaking, sloughed skin in my hands. I could pee in my favoured position, leaning slightly forward with one arm stretched above my head, weight supported by one hand resting on the wall, without the same fate befalling the wallpaper. A scaly handprint above my head showed where I had rested earlier, pre-gloves. I could take a dump now if I had the urge and not worry about inadvertently animating the porcelain, though a bath is out. Heck, I could even dress should I get the notion that there would be some purpose in doing so.

  Nose throbbing, but no longer dripping, and bladder empty, I wander into our bedroom. It is dark and smells hot and heavy. Jungle smells.

  I walk over to the window and grasp the curtains with my rubber hands. When I open them, the room is flooded with bright light. I turn and look at the bed.

  Kate is bathed in a yellow shaft of sunlight. She lies on her back, her arms by her side. But she is not still. Her skin undulates constantly, taking new forms as they squirm over her, jockeying for position. They like the warmth of the sunlight. As they move, patches of Kate are revealed. Her skin has turned black and is smoothing out as her body swells.

  They hiss and flicker their tongues. I close the curtains and the hisses grow more sibilant. In the darkness, their movement sounds like someone shuffling pages of dried parchment.

  “Fuck you,” I say as I walk out, shutting the door behind me.

  ***

  He came to me in the last of the night, in the hour before dawn. His eyes glinted in the red glow of the bedside alarm radio. A paradox: ember-bearing ice chips.

  “Give them to me,” he said. His voice was low and clear. Melodic almost, but the melody of discord, of chaos. Beside me, Kate stirred in her sleep and muttered something unintelligible.

  “No,” I said.

  “Give them to me and I leave. I offer only once.”

  “No.”

  “Then I will take them.”


  He had gone. Kate cried out again, louder, but I was already out of bed and running to the bathroom. I sank to my knees, grasping the pine toilet seat with my hands and puked a burning stream of bile into the bowl. Groaning, I let my head rest on the seat.

  It moved.

  I jerked my head up. I was no longer gripping pine. My left hand was closed around a deep grey, tapering body. The right was holding a head. As I let go and recoiled, the head arched towards me. Flinty eyes regarded me and a flickering tongue darted out to taste me. A collar of skin around the head inflated, giving the head the shape of a pharaoh’s death mask. It hissed as I scrambled to my feet and shot forward with such speed that I cried out. I felt something warm hit my cheek and trickle down to my neck. The creature was so close to me that had it wanted to spit into my eyes or gaping mouth, it couldn’t miss. It was warning me to back off.

  Not that I needed to be warned. I stepped back so quickly and heavily that the backs of my legs struck the bath with such force that I began to fall backwards. Pinwheeling my arms for balance, I only succeeded in grabbing hold of the shower curtain. It parted as I fell, collapsing on top of me as I landed. I lay for a moment, partially stunned. It was the slithering movement on my chest that brought me back to full awareness. The shower curtain had become a sliding, wriggling mass of snakes.

  Daylight must have been creeping into the sky as the bathroom blinds were lightening enough for me to make out colours in the creatures that squirmed over me. Some were a drab olive or khaki; others mottled brown or obsidian black or pale vomit yellow; a few were hooped in bright green, red and yellow like a child’s traffic light shoelaces.

  I don’t know whether I screamed, but I braced my arms on the rim of the bath and hauled myself out as though from a coffin about to roll into the crematorium oven. At my touch, the bath disintegrated into a fresh broiling mass, but I was already out of the door and onto the landing.

  Kate had appeared in our bedroom doorway, bleary and disheveled.

  “Get back!” I yelled. I gave her a shove in the chest that sent her backwards into the room, her mouth forming a ring of shock. “Shut the door!”

  There wasn’t time for me to slam the bedroom door myself. I had seen something that made my blood run cold. The cobra had left the toilet rim while I had been floundering in the bath. As I ran onto the landing, I saw its black body coiling through the doorway of my daughters’ bedroom.

  ***

  I am back downstairs, clutching this pencil in my gloved hands as though it is a wand I can wave to put things back the way they were. Me and Kate and Joely and Gemma. Oh, and my sanity. Now it’s just me and the snakes.

  There is a bowl of fruit on the coffee table in the lounge. The bananas are not yet ripe; Kate only bought them yesterday. Soon I am going to eat one. But not yet. Joely and Gemma first. I have to commit them to this page; I owe them that at least.

  Joely is… was the eldest at nine years. Gemma was six. Joely slept in the bottom bunk and was crouched into the top corner above her pillow, staring at the approaching serpent with wide eyes. Her bottom lip quivered, but all she could emit was a high, thin keening. I hear it now.

  The cobra had reached the bed and had raised the top half of its body off the floor. It swayed as it stared at Joely.

  “Joely, close your eyes,” I said, wanting to scream at her but afraid to panic her and her sister. They were way beyond that. Gemma was crouched at the edge of the top bunk, quaking with fear as she gazed down at the hooded head. “And shut your mouth.”

  I doubt that she even heard me. I might still have saved her had not my presence penetrated Gemma’s terror. As I bounded forward to grab the cobra, Gemma shrieked and launched herself off the bunk at me. My hand made a grab for the back of the cobra’s head but jerked upwards as Gemma thudded into me and my fist closed on nothing. The cobra spat.

  Joely flinched as the venom spattered into her eyes. She screamed and scrunched them tightly shut, but too late. The snake spat again and a stream of poison entered her gaping mouth, cutting the scream off as she gagged. The snake slithered onto the bed to make sure of its kill.

  When Gemma threw herself at me, my arms instinctively came up to protect her. I clutched her tightly to my chest as great sobs convulsed her. I was still trying to get to the cobra but was now hampered by ensuring I kept Gemma from its reach. There was no need to bother.

  Gemma’s sobs were cut off as though she had been garroted and she fell limp in my arms. I clutched her tighter, but she was diminishing, sliding from my grasp. I tried desperately to cling onto her but it was like trying to hold onto a greased ferret. What had been Gemma slithered to the floor and coiled itself into a dappled green spiral. It hissed at the smaller serpents that had been Gemma’s nightie as they fell to the floor around it.

  I tore my gaze away from the floor and back to the lower bunk. Joely had slumped down on the bed, her eyes rolled up in their sockets, her small body already convulsing. If there is any iota of comfort to be had, it is that I am certain that neither of my girls suffered any pain. Gemma’s transformation was almost instantaneous when my traitorous hands clutched her to me; the cobra’s venom would have acted so quickly on Joely that she would have been unconscious before it started to sink its fangs into her.

  I stepped around the writhing forms on the floor and caught hold of the cobra just above its tail as it struck again at Joely’s juddering body. It drew back its head and hissed like a scalded cat, whirling round towards me. This time it would do more than warn me off. But I was already swinging it round like a rope, accelerating the force through my wrist as the snake’s head neared the wall. It struck the wall firmly, but with only enough power to stun it. Before it could recover, I swung it back underhand, as though I was about to crack a whip. This time I generated far more momentum in my swing, so much so that the snake’s head exploded like an overripe grape on impact. I dropped its limp body to the carpet.

  It had taken bare seconds to dispatch the cobra, but Joely was already dead. Numb way beyond anguish, I saw, as though through a heavy fog, my fingers move towards her eyes to close them. I made my hand stop just before it reached her skin. Instead, I bent and placed my lips to her cooling brow.

  Another thought penetrated the fog: Kate. I had to get her away from the house while keeping her out of the girls’ room.

  As I stepped from the bedroom, the thing that had been Gemma was slithering towards the bed.

  “Let them be together,” I murmured.

  I took the two or three strides to our bedroom and might have gasped if I had any emotion left as I saw that Kate hadn’t closed the door. I stepped inside.

  My shove had forced Kate at speed into the room where she had fallen backwards onto the bed. There she lay now, but she was no longer wearing a cotton nightdress. It could still be described as a nightdress, of sorts. A shifting, living nightdress that slunk and slithered and hissed softly at the draft of my entry.

  I don’t know how long I stood in the doorway and looked down at the bed. Long enough for the foam flecking Kate’s cheeks to dry. Long enough for the room to grow hot and musky. Long enough for whatever shred of reason I still possessed to depart.

  ***

  Now I have a fancy for a banana. A firm, unripe banana. I shall leave its greeny, yellowing skin in place.

  He won. He took them as he said he would. I wonder what would have happened if I’d agreed he could take them. Would their end have been easier, or were they — we — damned already by whatever it was I’d done to draw him to us in the first place? Maybe that is their and my salvation, that I refused him. It is a hope, the only one I have left.

  It is time to eat. I push the banana, stalk first, into my mouth. I press it back until I can feel its rough tip against the back of my throat and I am almost gagging. My breathing harsh, I peel the rubber glove from my left hand and let it fall to the coffee table.

  A sound by the lounge door makes me glance up. The serpents have gat
hered and are watching me. I flip them the finger.

  As soon as I put down this pencil, I will remove the right hand glove. My throat is slick with copious saliva generated by the irritation of the stalk against my throat lining. I can barely breathe through it.

  I am going to shove the banana, or whatever it becomes, down as far as I can.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sam Kates lives in the UK and has recently published his first book for the Kindle, a collection of short stories called Pond Life. His first novel, The Village of Lost Souls, will be published shortly.

  SKINSHADE

  by T. Jackson King

  Howard Wolfson stared longingly at his prize possession. It had come from a highly corruptible assistant curator of artifacts from The Great War at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. It had cost him four million dollars, a small part of the fortune he’d made doing oil arbitrage trades on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The “finder’s fee” that he paid to a former KGB agent had been another million.

  He sighed. Then he reached out to run a stubby pink finger down the surface of the lampshade. A lampshade colored pinkish-brown with two pink ovals located halfway down the foot tall shade. It felt smooth, like velvety leather. A little warm, now that it was evening and the incandescent light bulb had warmed its inner surface. He marveled to himself.

  “I have a lampshade made from human skin,” he murmured into the shadows of his private study. It lay in Garden Grove, not far from the original Disneyland.

  “Would you have liked to ride the tea cups at Disneyland?” he said to the lampshade.

  No response came from the shade made of human skin, carefully tanned and stretched between rings of metal at top and bottom with the upper and lower rims secured by eyelets cut into the skin’s edge. According to DNA analysis and radiocarbon dating, the skin had been stripped from the chest of a young Polish girl, around 1943.