The Hell Show

Posted on by 4 comments

This is a nightmare I had, so it probably doesn’t make a lot of sense.  I often dream in third person.

This a horror story! Turn away, ye faint of heart!

Before she went to war, she saw her doppelganger in the crowd. It was hiding something bulky under its cloak. Its eyes had a peculiar shine to them. It felt her gaze and looked at her, and she sensed great hate, warning her of things to come. It disappeared in the crowd.

Later, when she tried to tell others about it, they wrote her off as afraid of battle.

Years passed…

She was hanging up laundry to dry late at night. Her stepson was watching TV and she made small talk as she worked, the way mothers do. Gradually she noticed that something was wrong with the channel he was watching. It was a picture of hell. Twisted flesh illuminated in violent orange. Heavy screams.

It leeched all light from the room around her. 

She tried to maintain normalcy, changed the station. “Let’s not watch this scary channel,” she said. He waited until she set the remote down and changed it back.

The atmosphere of the room was sapping her. This was the end of her peace. The same darkness she had seen that day in her doppelganger had returned to claim her. She could barely move.

Rolling her head to tear her eyes away from the TV, she focused instead on a coat rack leaning against the wall which she’d planned to mount in the entryway, for visitors. All the wet laundry she had yet to hang. Simple household things which she’d held on to and tried not to take for granted.

A self-protective instinct kicked in. Weak with horror, she staggered to her feet and stumbled into the bedroom next door, throwing herself onto the bed on top of the covers. Absentmindedly she wondered if she wasn’t going to get cold, falling asleep this way. It didn’t matter. As long as she wasn’t forced to watch that channel. As long as reality held fast.

Her stepson followed her. His eyes shone in the very same way her doppelganger’s had. And something else had entered the room with him: the stifling, odious presence of another being, more felt than seen.

“No, no no please,” she managed. It was hopeless. Fear sapped her limbs; paralysis suppressed her fluttering will into taut submission.

The room darkened.

Thick, strangely humid air settled into the room. A small buzzing gnat of mad rationale whispered in her ear, at least it’s warm. 

The room was opaque with darkness. There was no TV in here, but he didn’t need one. He was going to bring that hell to her anyway.

The boy went to the window. An ominous brimstone glow limned the solid blackout roller shade. 

He raised the shade, and hell was there. An enormous corpselike thing looked through the window at her with dead eyes, a boa constrictor jammed down its throat and wrapping its fetid body in torturing coils. It screamed, impossibly through the snake. The sound was deep, low, primal. The sound of pure evil. 

She screamed back.

She screamed until she ran out of air, kept on spasmodically screaming. Paroxysms of wordless pain and terror tore through her, leaving actual tatters. She screamed until every blood vessel in her eyes burst. She threw her head back and screamed until her neck broke.

Her body jittered unnaturally. Her face was changing. She would be one of them soon.

For the Unwanted Children

Posted on by 9 comments

 

For the unwanted children:
All the sparklike souls who have been wished, prayed, gut punched out of existence
The ones we feared we couldn’t feed
The ones our bodies couldn’t survive
The ones our shame would make the bearing of unbearable
The ones who sensed something wrong through the umbilicus
Swallowing too much adult stress
Growing into a faulty womb
Or missing some vital element
Feeling that they are too sick already, or misshapen
Who, being incapable of tenacity
Threw themselves into the sharp cold air or the filthy toilet water
Their parents ignorant, never knowing nor suspecting
That their future has just been protected
By their potential progeny.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Secrets

Posted on by 9 comments

 

Going through my poems
Looking what to post
There are some powerful things I’ve written
And hidden.
There are a lot more
Terrible things, atrocious writings,
Embarrassing nonsense
I’ve hidden that too.
The best of me and the worst of me
Still under the rug
Am I even doing
What I set out to do here?
Am I a writer
If I can’t write what bleeds
If I can’t share what hurts?
If it’s all a secret
What’s the goddamnfucking point.

I want to be a monster.
If I ate people
I wouldn’t have to worry about a job
About relationships
About anything except the next meal
I could spend hours hiding in dark places
Or if I were one of the big ones,
I could go city-wrecking,
Send it all to hell.
But I wouldn’t be either of those things.
If I were a monster
I would end up
A Jekyll and Hyde type
Or a werewolf who transforms on the full moon
Someone who has to keep up a human pretense
And deal with human problems just the same
While also dealing with monster problems secretly.

When I was young
I loved secrets.
They made me feel special, unique.
I liked knowing I could do something the others couldn’t
That I’d seen something the others hadn’t
That I knew something the others didn’t.

Now I hate secrets.
I can keep the secret of another for a lifetime
But my own secrets eat at me
Like a wet infection
So I air them
Systematically.
And every time I do
I find
Everyone has a wolf inside.
Everyone’s like me.
There are no such things as monsters
When we all pretend humanity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Captured image

Posted on by 7 comments

 

See a frame on the wall
Inside the frame
A photo of a small animal
Tiny ribcage
Whiskered cheeks
It looks back at you
With piercing rat eyes
Reflecting red
And hisses.
The photograph
Hates you
So much.

Life is harder
Inside a picture frame.
It’s easy for you
Able to reach out at will
For a conversation or some tea.
But those who are trapped
Remain a spectacle,
Nothing to eat
But still life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Journal – Ghost Hunting

Posted on by 4 comments

 

Some of my siblings and I went ghost hunting! It’s tremendous fun, especially if you don’t find anything.

We stayed a night at the Lemp Mansion. It was beautiful and eerie. We had a great time exploring the place at night after the lights went out and everyone was gone. They really set you up for ghost hunting there. The staff lock you in and leave at nine. You get to be alone, and if you’re lucky enough to schedule a night without any other guests, you really will be alone. Unfortunately we had a couple of rooms with other guests that night, and they were loud and constant talkers! But they didn’t leave their rooms much.

We went exploring, it felt pretty dumb, because the stairs and doors were creaky… not just eerie creaky, but cringy LOUD creaky. We got to be the ghosts for the other guests once because the door was so loud, they heard it and called, “hello?” And we crept away. I actually didn’t get why my siblings did that to them…  maybe because it was nice to let them believe in Santa. Or maybe it was because we didn’t want them to find us four grown-ass idiots tiptoeing around the mansion in our socks and jammies. We did a lot of sneaking around those people, that was probably the silliest and most fun of everything. They never caught us! As far as we know. They were pretty drunk. At one point a guy walked by, and my sister and I stood still in a dark corner as our only defense, and he never saw us. It was crazy.

Our room was the Lavender Room, haunted by the Lavender Lady, and also by Billy Lemp who was a playboy in life and a nasty shower-peeper in death. My sisters and I tried to lure him out in the bathroom by flashing him but he didn’t manifest.

The bathroom was magnificent. It had a giant bay window, a marble bath, a shower with a built-in spot-free lateral rinse, and extra space enough to perform several backflips. It was excessive, but hey, excessive bathrooms are what money’s for, amirite?

My ghostiest moment: when I was alone in this bathroom pooping, the overhead light came on, then after about ten seconds it turned off again. Maybe Billy was a coprophiliac? They didn’t mention that in the brochure. I, er, finished up, then tried the light. It was one of those lights on a dimmer switch which shouldn’t be on a dimmer switch. If you turned the knob slowly through the low, medium, high settings, the light went: low, higher, lowest, bright, off. With much flickering in between. 

The whole building’s electricity was on the fritz. Lights flickered weakly all the time. It started to remind me of Stranger Things. Their wiring must have been SUPER old. Why pay for expensive rewiring when it’s spookier for the guests this way?

Also, there were some brutal cold spots from the overhead AC ducts in consistent places.

When we went down to the basement, we got our worst scare of the night: the ice machine. We could hear it from around the corner. It said, “whirrrr whumpity whumpity BANG!!” *dead silence* “whirrrrr, whirrrrrr, whir-whir-bumpity thumpity kkkk clack rattle whirrrrr” and so on. The poor machine was choking to death on the flickering electricity. Once we realized it didn’t want to eat us, I pitied it.

There were an inordinate number of mirrors hanging on the walls. I had to wonder if the owners decorated it that way on purpose, to increase the suspicious photos and reflections we might see, or even just to give us a good jumpscare around corners.

It was beautiful though, it has a scary atmosphere, and we had tons of fun. I highly recommend it. I hoped I would see something, but in my heart I knew I wouldn’t. Still, we ate a lot of brownies and stuck close to each other nervously and felt like kids again on a great big sleepover. Go check it out, unless you’re a sensitive, then maybe don’t, because it’ll probably end like The Shining for you. I’m still not discounting the possibility of ghosts, and I definitely don’t want anyone getting scarred for life because I told them this place was delightful and unhaunted!

I like ghost hunting, especially if I get to do it with good people. Next time I’ll apply what I’ve learned and catch me that big ten-point ghost I’ve heard about, and get him mounted on my wall.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

« Older Entries Recent Entries »