Anthology - Dark Whispers Part 9

Not for the first time, Helen wondered if he knew she was full with his child, if he had even noticed she was pregnant. Not likely, she decided. He hadn't been home since the police found his wife lying wide-eyed in their bedroom with a phone in one hand and a torn photo of him in the other. Dialing 911 before leaving the apartment had been a nice touch, Helen thought, and the ease with which the false wife's neck had snapped left little doubt about who was the more deserving.

The baby moved again, dropped a little lower, making sure that Helen was not distracted enough to forget about it. She staggered back into the room, leaving fleshprints of a wide-eyed, open-mouthed look of surprise on the gla.s.s.

A sudden pressure on her bladder; Helen ran to the bathroom. She felt tile beneath her feet a little too late, and, afraid that sitting would give the baby a chance to slip through, stumbled into the shower stall. For safety's sake, she made a mesh of fingers across her crotch before relaxing enough to let the thick flood pour from her. Liquid the colors of earth and clay carried fleshy jetsam toward the drain, leaving a dark stain behind.

When the worst was over, Helen dragged herself back into the living room, marking her path with hand prints on counter, doorjamb, and walls.

She half fell, half lowered herself to the floor and laboriously worked her legs and pelvis up onto the couch. She'd hoped to be able to relax her tired muscles in this position, but she had not counted on the strain it put on her back and shoulders. In time, exhaustion overcame discomfort and Helen fell asleep, absentmindedly pinching her nipples and wondering when they would begin to bring forth milk.

HELEN AWOKE TO the buzz of flies. There were more of them than before, a dozen at least, crawling across her with scavenger's disregard. They took to the air when Helen waved a heavy, aching arm at them, only to drop back on her with barbed feet and sucking mouths a moment later.

Everything hurt. Her neck was stiff, her toes numb, her back burned by the carpet. The sun hanging low outside burned her eyes when she turned toward the window. She was hungry, but the thought of food made her nauseous.

Groaning with each motion, Helen lowered her legs from the couch to the floor. A few minutes pa.s.sed while she lay still on the carpet, waiting to see what the child would do.

Nothing. Nothing at all. Slowly, she began to get to her feet.

Helen was a tripoda"one hand waving for balance, one with fingertips touching the carpeta"when she felt the baby drop in her belly. She felt the s.h.i.+ver of adrenaline pouring into her blood, but surprise and her awkward position stopped her from reacting in time.

With neither pain nor ceremony, a small hand, its fingers in a fist, dropped from between Helen's legs the moment she stood erect.

A dozen kinds of panic mingled together and overwhelmed Helen's ability to think. The baby was not emerging head first as G.o.d intended. It would die. And it was too early. Not yet ripe. The urges of motherhood had not yet risen in Helen; she wasn't yet ready to bond.

The movement of the baby through her body brought Helen to her senses. She squatted, grabbed the shriveled gray-blue thing, and spread herself with one hand to push it back inside. She had barely lifted the hand when a small thigh fell between her feet.

Helen's body heaved, threw her forward onto her knees. Another heave and her body spat forth a shattered dream a few pieces at a time while she stood on all fours like an animal.

It was over. The child was gone. She had failed.

Helen arched with a thousand kinds of pain and gave voice to her agony while that which would have been uniquely hers voided itself on the living room carpet.

But even in her despair, with a broken child and unnameable fluids pooling about her feet, the core of Helen's determination stayed whole. Failure strengthened her resolve. She could find another family, another baby. Maybe she'd leave it in larger pieces and use needle and thread to keep herself closed. Through her sobs, with damp hands to her face, Helen vowed that the next child she took would stay within until she had made it her own.

That's What Little Girls Are Made ofby Bob Schmalfeldt After a debilitating back injury, Bob Schmalfeldt left his job as a newspaper editor to pursue a career writing horror stories ... something he had long dreamed of doing. In just over two years he had over 60 published credits, having appeared in such magazines as, "Widders.h.i.+ns," "Dread: Tales of the Uncanny and Grotesque," "Eternity Online," and "FrightNet," among several others. He recently completed his first novel, "We Shall All Rise Again," which he is currently marketing.

"STOP CRYING, SON!" Mike Harris shouted as his little boy sobbed. "This is supposed to be fun! Just like I told you!" But little Sammy most certainly did not act like he was enjoying pulling the mixture of over-cooked spaghetti and dog s.h.i.+t out of the doll's belly.

"It stinks, Daddy! I don't like it!"

Mike stepped behind his son and began rubbing his son's hunching, lurching shoulders. Maybe this was too soon, he thought. Maybe this wasn't the best way to go about it ... to train Sammy. He leaned forward and hugged his son from behind, the nagging throb from the bullet wound in his hip protesting as he embraced his boy.

"I know," Mike said. "It does stink. Just like it does inside of a real girl."

Sammy's head drooped, his chin touching the collar of his T-s.h.i.+rt. Mike saw that Sammy really had given his best effort. He'd really tried to please his dad. Clumps of pasta clung to his fingers ... pasted there by the claylike excrement. Mike ruffled his son's hair. "Let's give it a rest," he said. "You tried hard. You did. And you'll get better at it, too. I promise."

Sammy twisted his head to look up at his father's face. A thin line of snot had dripped from his nose to the upper ridge of his lip. Carefully, he pulled his left hand out of the doll's messy innards and began to bring his wrist up to his nose. Mike had to stifle a chuckle as Sammy suddenly remembered what was on the hand that was about to wipe his nose and, instead, let his arm flop loosely to his side.

"Let's get you washed up, sport," Mike said. "Then we'll talk some more."

The little boy sniffed, nodded and trudged toward the bathroom. And like he always did, as he pa.s.sed the table with his Mommy's framed picture on it, Sammy swatted it onto the floor.

"Good boy," Mike shouted. "Very good! You remembered!"

Mike heard his son turn on the shower. As he stood facing the bathroom door, his heart swelled with pride and hate. Oh, he was proud of his son. He was learning ... learning fast. The lessons were difficult ... and each time those lessons made his little boy cry, Mike's hatred for that b.i.t.c.h bloomed.

Sammy was nearly ten now. Next month, as a matter of fact. Along with the private father-son party Mike had promised, he had also promised Sammy that for that one day there would be no lessons. One day off, Mike thought ... that wouldn't hurt. After all, Sammy was learning so fast.

And he told his son that once the birthday was over and done with, there would be new lessons to learn. And some of those lessons would take them out of their house. Just the idea of going outside ... something he hadn't permitted Sammy to do for three years now ... was enough incentive for Sammy to try his best at learning each lesson, Mike thought.

Too bad it had turned out this way, Mike thought as he wetted down a handful of paper towels and began cleaning the mess on the kitchen table. But Sammy had seen it all. He was only an infant at the time, but Mike's own training proved that things seen at that age are remembereda"if they made a big enough impression.

And what Sammy saw his mommy doing had to have made an impression.

Psychological profiling was a new science when Sammy was born. Working out of the FBI's Denver field office, Mike had been excited at the possibility of peering into the criminal mind ... cracking it open, looking around, reading the history of the personality that found itself not only capable of murder, but incapable of refraining from it. His bosses noticed Mike's interest and put him in for a transfer to FBI Headquarters at Quantico, Virginia, where he would work alongside the men and women who were blazing new trails into the criminal mind.

Patty said she was excited about the possibility of moving. She hated Denver. Hated the stuck-up, artsy way of life there. Mike explained to her that life in Virginia would no more closely resemble the beer-and-pickup-trucks life she mourned from her teenaged days in Anniston, Alabama than Denver did. But Patty hadn't cared about any of that. She wanted out of Denver. Mike had hoped that the birth of their son would force Patty to settle down a bit. Looking back on it all, Mike knew there had to be something about his own personality that attracted the kind of women he always seemed to wind up with. From p.u.b.erty into adulthood, he'd never had a relations.h.i.+p with a woman he thought he could trust. Not one hundred percent, anyway. His law enforcement training taught him that men and women were wired differently. They didn't think the same way. But Mike knew something that wasn't in any of the FBI's textbooks. And it was the biggest difference of all.

Men need the physical act of s.e.xual intercourse. Women use that act as a form of currency ... trading their bodies for their own needs and wants.

Perhaps it was the political correctness of the times, he thought. But the difference was never addressed. Still, all one had to do was watch any of a number of nature shows on television ... because the animal world was just like the human world. The males fight and b.u.t.t heads and kill. They create and defend territories. And they do it just to get laid. And the females, no matter the species, rely on this fact. They instigate. They use. And from the smallest bug to h.o.m.o Sapiens, they were all the same.

Perhaps there were some women who could rise above their instincts to connive and cheat, Mike thought. But they were rare ... the exception. Not the rule. And even the best of them, he supposed, kept their baser instincts within reacha"should they ever need them.

Nature was nature, Mike had learned. And women were women.

There were times when the job had taken him out of town and he never took a business trip without worrying just what his wife was up to at home. Often, when he returned to their house, Patty's welcome-home kiss would taste ever so slightly of whiskey. Often, when he'd call home to check in, the phone would ring and ring. He always let it ring at least twelve times ... she might be in the shower. Or on the toilet. But after twelve rings...

And once, right after coming home from a week long investigation in Wyoming, he spotted a cigarette b.u.t.t floating in the yellow, unflushed water of the toilet, and the seat was up. Mike considered asking Patty about it, but decided against it. Her lies would be bad enough. But what if she were to tell him the truth?

So when Patty tearfully announced that she was pregnant, Mike silently rejoiced. The possibility the child wasn't even his did occur to him. But he could deal with that. Stepfathers love their stepchildren, he thought. He would love this child no matter who provided the sperm. And having a babya"that, he thought, should force Patty into adulthood. He knew that above all other instincts, women were mothers. Hopefully, Patty's mothering instincts would keep her close to the nest.

When Sammy was born, and for several months after that, Mike had silently celebrated the change in his wife. When his job called him away, his phone calls to his house were always answered by the second or third ring. When he came home, everything appeared to be in order. Sammy would be rolling and cooing in his playpen, the house would be clean and Patty seemed genuinely happy to see him.

Still, he thought (knowing what he knew about the nature of females) he shouldn't have been all that surprised by what happened when Sammy was nine months old.

He had been out of town for three days ... on a trip that was supposed to last for a week. His bosses, in preparation for Mike's transfer to Virginia, had sent him to Quantico to meet with his instructors and to find a house for his family. But on the third day of the trip, one of the instructors dropped dead. Heart attack. The start of cla.s.ses would be postponed for one month.

Mike phoned home to tell his wife the news, but after twelve rings, he gave up.

During the four-hour flight to Denver, Mike tried not to think about why his wife wasn't there to pick up the phone. There could have been any number of reasons ... and not all of them bad.

As he strode through the crowded walkways of Denver International Airport, Mike thought about picking up a pay phone and...

...But no. Perhaps there was an innocent explanation, but if there was something going on, he needed to know about it. Patty wasn't expecting him home for at least another four days. So instead of calling his wife and having her pick him up at the airport, Mike grabbed a taxi and gave the driver his address.

Mike knew there was something wrong the moment he stepped out of the cab in front of his house. He could hear little Sammy's screams from where he stood at the curb.

Tossing a twenty-dollar bill at the driver, Mike raced to his front door and threw it open. Sammy's shrieks stopped the moment he saw his daddy.

And Patty stopped, too.

There was a man sitting on his sofa. His pants were bunched and piled up around his ankles. His naked wife's head, which a moment ago had been bobbing up and down, spun around to look at him ... eyes wide in panic and disbelief. And as she opened her mouth to speak, a white jet of sticky fluid shot from the man's p.e.n.i.s. It struck Patty on the corner of her lip and dripped onto the carpet.

"Mike!" Patty shouted, getting to her feet and not seeming to notice the man she'd been servicing or the wad he had just shot onto her pretty face. She continued talking, but Mike couldn't tell what she was saying. It was all gibberish. Insect noises coming from the s.e.m.e.n-soaked mouth of a woman acting like a woman. Her grunting pig noises mixed with Sammy's screams, which had begun again. Mike looked over at his son and saw the jagged hunk of bone protruding from his forearm. And he saw the red blotch on the side of his son's face. It was shaped like a hand. A small hand. Too small to have come from the hand of the man who was scrambling to pull up his pants and race out of his house.

It was the shape of a woman's hand. Patty's hand.

So much for instincts, Mike thought as he finished cleaning the mess on the kitchen table. As he dropped the pasta-and-s.h.i.+t-filled doll into the trash can under the sink, he heard the shower turn off. Sammy would still be in the bathroom for a couple of minutes, drying himself. Mike grabbed the plastic garbage bag inside the trash can and strolled out through the living room, out onto the sidewalk and over toward the garbage cans by the curb. He was in a hurrya"Mike always tried to spend as little time away from Sammy as he could. And though his old bullet wound pulsed and throbbed as he raced to and from the curb, he was back at the kitchen table in less than thirty seconds.

"You want a can of soda, Sam?"

"Yeah," an enthusiastic voice hollered from the bathroom. "Thanks, Dad!"

"No problem," Mike yelled. "Dry off, put your dirty clothes in the hamper and get in your jammies. Then you can have a soda. Okay?"

"Okay, Dad!"

Mike smiled and opened the fridge, where he spotted a couple of cans of cola. He nabbed the cans and brought them to the kitchen table, still limping noticeably.

The bullet to his hip came nearly a year after his divorce from Patty. And the doctors had a much more difficult time digging the little wad of metal from his pelvic bone than his lawyer had extricating Mike from his marriage to Patty.

Patty wasn't about to fight him. Not after Mike raced his son to the emergency room while his wife was still trying to find her clothes. Bundling his son in the blankets from his playpen, he grabbed the car keys and drove to the hospital. When Patty arrived an hour later, there were police officers waiting for her ... one of whom asked her what that crusty dried stuff at the corner of her mouth was.

The doctor said Sammy's arm would heal. Patty confessed to grabbing and twisting her son's arm, then slapping him to shut him up. She'd been drunk and swore she hadn't realized she had broken his arm. The divorce became final during Patty's third month in jail. And there was no question as to who would receive custody.

For a year, Mike tried like h.e.l.l to juggle work and parental duties, a problem that was solved for him when he walked in on a robbery in progress at a gas station. When Mike realized what was going on, he identified himself as an FBI agent and pulled his gun out of his shoulder holster, aiming it at the teenaged gunman. As the kid's girlfriend shrieked and screamed for the kid to "Shoot that f.u.c.king pig," Mike heard a loud pop and felt fire in his hip. As he fell, Mike got off a shot, which caught the boy in his left eye, killing him instantly.

For three weeks, Mike was hospitalized. And as his wife was in jail and Sammy had no aunts, uncles or living grandparents, Mike's son sat in a foster home for the duration of his hospitalization. ("A lovely older woman is taking care of your son," somebody told him. "She's a darling woman. Your son is in fine hands.") As he laid there in his hospital bed, his thoughts accentuated by the morphine dripping into his veins, Mike remembered the screaming girl telling her idiot boyfriend to kill him. Poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d, he thought. There was no question in his mind what that boy was doing at that gas station, and why. It was the oldest drama in the world. Boy wants to get laid. Girl gives it up. Boy wants to keep getting laid. Girl knows this. Girl sets forth the rules of engagement. Boy follows those rules. Forever and ever. Amen.

And something else occurred to him as he sweated through the postoperative fever that roasted his body for three days following his surgery. In a moment of mental clarity as he slid from sleep to fevered dreaming and back to wakefulness, the little television in his room was airing a program called, "The Mind of the Serial Killer." One of the people interviewed for the show was the poor son of a b.i.t.c.h whose heart attack had precipitated Mike's early arrival at his house.

It was pretty basic fare. Complex theories boiled down for the consumption of the ma.s.ses. What turns a child into a killer? Are they born that way? Or do they, somehow, become monsters as they grow up?

Mike knew the answers. Women are what they are, he thought. They're born that way. Men are what they are, too. But Ted Bundy? John Gacy? They weren't born to kill. Something happened to them early in life. Some event occurred that started the process in motion, changing a normal boy into a living, breathing slaughterhouse.

Just what did and didn't happen to make a killer was still a matter of debate. But Mike had a pretty good idea of what it might take to create a monster out of an otherwise normal little boy.

As a matter of fact, he thought as the morphine pulled him back into sleep, he had a very good idea as to what it might take.

The FBI gave Mike a special commendation and full disability retirement pay. His pension would be enough to get by on ... enough to feed, clothe and educate his son.

When Sammy turned five, Mike tapped into the Internet for the first time in his life. It was a new medium, but he knew it had potential. Delving into various Usenet newsgroups, he found a great deal of information on home schooling. And before his son's sixth birthday, he notified his local school district of his intentions to home school his son. But Sammy's education had already begun much, much earlier.

The first lessons began when Sammy was 18 months old. Mike purchased several children's books for his son, which he would read to Sammy at bedtime. As each book was purchased, Mike would grab a felt-tipped pen and would augment and transform whatever female images might be portrayed in each particular book. Some loving, mommy-type ladies would, by the time Mike finished doodling and drawing over them, appear to be rabid, howling she-beasts. Little girls skipping ropes would become vampire h.e.l.lions stomping on the heads of screaming, crying boys.

And Mike would read stories to Sammy, pointing out how bad this girl was and how hateful that girl was and how many boys this girl had killed and eaten and the blood of how many boys that girl had drained. He didn't read the words that were on the pages. Instead, he made up stories about the women and the things in their heads. Stories about the things in their bodies. Stories about the traps they have under their clothes.

As Sammy got a little older, his education intensified. There were still the nightly stories ... but now, whenever father and son watched television, Mike would point to the occasional female image and tell his son of the atrocities she'd committed. And Sammy would sit and look at his father with adoration s.h.i.+ning in his eyes.

If Sammy ever missed going to school or playing with other children, he never said anything about it. But Mike had made him a promise. Once he was ten years old, they would leave the house.

And Sammy's birthday was coming up soon.

"Which one's mine?" Sammy said as he galloped into the kitchen, pointing at the two cans of soda on the table.

"Whichever one you want, pardner."

Sammy's chubby hands grabbed a can and popped it open. But as he raised the can to his lips, he stopped. Mike wondered about the sad expression that had suddenly washed over his son's face.

"Dad?"

"What's wrong, Sam?"

"I'm sorry. About today, I mean. The doll. I just ... I..."

"Aww, don't sweat it, son," Mike said, smiling brightly. "We'll try it again tomorrow." Of course, Mike thought, that would mean he'd have to go to the store, buy another rag doll, sneak through the park searching for dog droppings and boil up another pot of pasta. But he could do that first thing in the morning when Sammy was watching cartoons. He'd mix the s.h.i.+t and noodles together and pack the doll's belly full, symbolizing for Sammy what he'd told his son all women were. Nothing but guts and s.h.i.+t. Sammy might get a tiny cut when he opened the dolls head and found the broken gla.s.s he would stuff into it, because that's all women have in their heads ... things that hurt boys and men. And there was still a rotten pear in the bas.e.m.e.nt to use as a makes.h.i.+ft uterus for his son's lesson tomorrow.

"Dad?"

Mike looked over at his son, who was now smiling brightly.

"Are we going out on my birthday? Or after?"

Mike smiled back at his son. "After," he said. "I picked a nice town with lots of kids. You'll have your pick, son. Whoever you want. You get to choose."

"Will the bas.e.m.e.nt be ready by then?"

Mike ran through a mental inventory of what he'd stored in the bas.e.m.e.nt.

"Yep," he said.

The two of thema"father and sona"sat silently for a few moments, drinking their sodas and thinking.

"We're really gonna, ain't we Dad?"

"Really gonna? Really gonna what, Son?"

Sammy downed the last of his soda, then loosed an ear-splitting belch. "I mean," he said, "we're really gonna show, *em, Dad. Girls, I mean. We're really gonna show those girls, ain't we?"

"Yes we are son," Mike said, suddenly remembering that he still needed to buy some of that long-burning charcoal for the bas.e.m.e.nt before they took their trip. "We sure are."

Which Image Am I?by Richard Wright Richard Wright is a newcomer to the field. He is a writer/actor living in Glasgow, Scotland. Previously published was his short story "Office Blues" which appeared in "FrightNet Online Magazine" issue #8 earlier this year. "Which Image Am I?" is an interesting story surrounding the infamous "what if" we find ourselves often pondering.

TUNNELING STRAIGHT TO the man's thoughts, the wet red hole drilled through the bone of his forehead and into the meat of his mind. A third eye, black and bloodied, it sat central to and above the two which still stared into dead nothing. The gun held in the corpse's stiff left hand drove Inspector Gemmel to an immediate and inaccurate conclusion. He was not happy to be wrong.

"What the h.e.l.l do you mean it isn't suicide? A man in a locked room has a gun in his hand and a hole in his head. There's one bullet missing from the chamber and the door is bolted on the inside. Yet you seriously suspect he might have been murdered? Tell me, which Chief Inspector did you sleep with to get this job?" The forensic technician shrank back from his ire as each word beat hard into his body. Attempting an insipid smile, he tried to salvage his argument.