Year's End: 14 Tales of Holiday Horror Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Year’s End

  Introduction

  Appointment in Time

  Doll

  Jack’s Month

  A Night in the Pampas

  Deadly Secrets

  Trigger

  The Story of Myrtle Roady

  Midnight Whisper

  Contract Fulfillment

  Mixology

  Whatever It Takes

  The Rat

  Missing Pieces

  Token Lesbians

  Author Bios

  Year’s End

  Edited by J. Alan Hartman

  Copyright 2012 by

  Appointment in Time, James S. Dorr

  Doll, Richard Godwin

  Jack’s Month, Nicky Peacock

  A Night in the Pampas, John Stewart Wynne

  Deadly Secrets, Steve Shrott

  Trigger, Leah Givens

  The Story of Myrtle Roady, George Seaton

  Midnight Whispers, Kathryn Ohnaka

  Contract Fulfilled, Jeremy K. Tyler

  Mixology, Betsy Miller

  Whatever It Takes, Byron Barton

  The Rat, Steve Bartholomew

  Missing Pieces, Ali Maloney

  Token Lesbians, Foxglove Lee

  Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Other Anthologies by Multiple Authors and Untreed Reads Publishing

  The Killer Wore Cranberry

  The Killer Wore Cranberry: A Second Helping

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  Year’s End

  Edited by J. Alan Hartman

  Introduction

  I must admit, I’ve always approached New Year’s Eve with a bit of trepidation. Where other people gathered together for raucous parties and proceeded to get blitzed into a drunken stupor, I couldn’t help but sit home and wonder where in the hell the previous year went and what I could have done differently.

  Watching the ball drop in Times Square seems so exciting for all of the people who are gathered there, but for me there was something ominous about it at the same time. Watching the glittering orb sink to the bottom of its tower made me a little bit edgy. What if something went wrong when it hit bottom? What if it wasn’t timed properly? What if there was no point in making New Year’s resolutions because there was a chance that there wouldn’t be a New Year?

  OK, I’ll admit it. I’m a pretty maudlin kind of guy at times. Still, I figured I couldn’t possibly be the only person in the world that found New Year’s Eve a little creepy and maybe not as joyous as everyone else did. Maybe there were others out there who felt a bit like I did.

  Fortunately, I was right. They’re called “horror authors.” I proposed the idea of Year’s End, a short story anthology dedicated to New Year’s Eve gone horribly wrong, and wonderful horror authors showed up with champagne, streamers and a bit of terror to usher in the end of 2012.

  The tales to follow are a bit more psychological in horror than gory, something for which I’ve always had a preference in the stories I read. What’s particularly exciting for me with this anthology is that not only do I have the opportunity to work with many current Untreed Reads authors, I also became exposed to the works of writers brand new to me. It’s a chance to ring out the old and ring in the new with familiar faces and new faces alike.

  So do your best to keep your clock from reaching midnight. Stay sober in case there’s something evil approaching in those final hours of the year. Don’t make any resolutions, as there may not be a New Year in which to keep them. Who knows? Maybe I was right all along trying to hide from the ball drop.

  J. Alan Hartman

  Editor-in-Chief

  Untreed Reads Publishing

  November 2012

  Appointment in Time

  James S. Dorr

  The Englishman was shown to the chair, the first of four he would sit in that day. This one, more a wide bench really, he shared with his escort, two members of the 17th Fusiliers in full dress uniform despite the beastly heat—even on the last day of December! He, a civilian, wore a black morning coat buttoned over a pale yellow waistcoat, grey wool pinstriped trousers, a starched white shirt and a Windsor tie, with polished boots, lavender gloves and a tall-crowned bowler completing his attire. This was, after all, not England he found himself in, where full formal evening wear might have been called for.

  He had, however, been chosen in England for the important role he was to play before he had even boarded the steamship out, a special arrangement commemorating the love that remained, the continuation of British ways, even though the land he was in now no longer retained its colonial status. It was out of this love, as that between a now grown child and its parent, that the ceremony continued virtually unchanged, just as it had from the earliest times, to guarantee prosperity for the year to come for what remained of a once far-flung empire. And it was only in this land that it could be conducted, with its unique mix of ancient gods and shamanistic culture alongside the modern customs of the West—the latter exemplified by the high clock tower they had even now started to ascend.

  One of the soldiers, their uniforms modeled on those of the British they’d recently replaced, steadied the Englishman as the chair left the ground. “You be okay, Sir?” he asked.

  The Englishman looked up first, craning his neck, to see the first puffs of steam high in the air from the vents in the roof above the great clock face. He nodded, yes. He could not show nervousness even though they were fifty feet above the plaza already, even now beginning, before the sun had fully set, to attract the vanguard of what would soon be throngs of celebrants, shoulder to shoulder, packing the square.

  Stiff upper lip, he thought. England expects. He hadn’t exactly volunteered for what was to happen, but as a member of the foreign service he had known that, any year, he could be the one chosen to represent the erstwhile mother country.

  It was what he had been trained for, in a way. With everything else. That he had been unmarried was a factor also, allowing him more freedom when he arrived, for evenings in the capital city’s less sedate sectors. For drinking. For love. For civilized pleasures as well as those less so.

  But what was civilization, he thought, except accommodation for that which was needed, even if not fully understood. To acquiesce to the local culture, even while representing his own.

  The best of both worlds, yes?

  Still lost in his thoughts, he felt the sudden rise as the troopers on either side stood. They were on the first ledge. “Help you, Sir?” one said as he stood up too, then let himself be led—glancing once back and down, toward the increasing crowd—through the narrow door into the tower’s clockwork filled interior.

  Here the Englishman was led between the great twin boilers that powered the mechanisms above them. The tower was still lighted, the last rays of the
sun shining in through open louvres that pierced its walls. He climbed the metal stairs up to the catwalk that wound around and, in some cases, through the slowly turning gear train, from flywheel to axle to crankshaft to belt to the central arbor that turned the clock’s hands, so high above and lost in shadow that he had to strain his eyes to make it out.

  “This way, Sir,” a new voice said, breaking into the Englishman’s thoughts. He had to admit what he was seeing was impressive! He allowed this new person, wearing the goggles and white pressed duster of a clock mechanic, to strap him into a second chair, one he would ride alone up past the pendulum chamber, with its verge and crown wheel, its own gear train regulating the power train he had just viewed. And above it, the gong that sounded the hours, especially the twelve chimes that would sound at midnight, signifying the turning of the year. And, above that, the glint of more metal, of more machinery again hooked to pendulum and power train, to arbor and gong, for the culmination of this, the final day of December.

  The technician handed the Englishman a bottle before he released the chair for its trip up. “To show our appreciation, Sir,” he said. “It’s imported Scotch whisky, from your own country. A man above will help you to a table and chair, where you can enjoy it, along with ice. Or seltzer, if you prefer. There’ll be a light supper too.”

  The Englishman thanked him. He rode the chair up, then, noting how surprisingly fast it went, wondering if it, too, was connected to the main works of the clock, through yet one more gear train, or if it just had its own belt and flywheel independently taking it up and down as needed.

  The chair finally stopped, hundreds of feet above where it had started, letting him off on a rough plank floor, with a crimson carpet muting its starkness. A man in a butler’s livery appeared, ironically dressed in more formal style than the Englishman himself, in a swallow-tailed coat and linen shirt with a standing collar. A second servant, head bowed, stood behind him.

  The butler led the Englishman to the third chair he would sit in, this one with a comfortably padded seat and back. “Please relax as much as you can, Sir,” he said. “I and my colleague are here to serve you, in any way that we can, until it’s time to go outside.”

  It was at this point the Englishman balked, if just for a moment. No, he thought. He made to turn back, to find a staircase, a ladder, anything leading down. It was all a horrible farce! But then he looked at the butler again, the calm determination on that man’s face as he nodded to his assistant.

  The Englishman nodded too. What was, was, he thought as the second servant brought up a small table with a single place setting, bringing as well a bottle of water and several dishes. They left the Englishman then to his own meditations until, several hours later, they returned to lead him outside to the ledge beneath the huge clock itself.

  The Englishman was tipsy by then, feeling little pain as the butler handed him a snifter. “A special drink, Sir,” he said. “Once more to show our appreciation—all England’s appreciation, as well as those of us once in its family. You know what you must expect, I trust?”

  The Englishman nodded. He drank down the brandy—if he had almost had second thoughts before, it was certainly too late now. The under servant strapped him into a chair—the fourth chair that evening—that was bolted to the stone ledge it stood on.

  “It wouldn’t do if you were to fall,” he said.

  “No,” the Englishman said, “it would certainly not.” He gazed out into the night, drinking in the square below, now packed with cheering men and women, their eyes looking up to him. Behind him he heard the click of turning gears.

  Looking up briefly, he saw the clock’s longer hand climbing to meet the hour hand at twelve. He heard the blood rushing thorough his veins and arteries—it was as if he had lived for this moment, when all eyes were on him. When time itself seemingly depended on him.

  And so, let it be, he thought. He heard another click, one more minute passed, then that drowned out by the beating of his heart. Everything concentrated on one thing, the necessary. The pre-appointed. That which must be.

  He felt a stirring in his stomach as, with a reverberating clang! the first stroke of the hour of midnight chimed. Driving out all other sound as spider-hands, made of articulated brass, reached out from a door in the clock face behind him and gripped him fast in the confines of his chair. With the second chime other hands reached out, divesting him of his coat and outer clothes, tattering, ripping the fabric from him. Letting it drift to the crowd beneath as, on the third chime, knife blades appeared to glint in the searchlights that trained on him from below.

  He felt no pain—he was caught in the moment. Destiny could not be stopped in any event as the fourth gong sounded, starting the carving. Fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, with each of these strokes of approaching midnight an arm or a leg was torn from his body and let fall below. With the ninth chime more blades appeared as the crowd roared louder, those that had already done their work retreating back into the great clock’s interior, and with the tenth his gut was slit open, letting his entrails unfold themselves in his lap.

  Two chimes to go.

  And with the eleventh the flaying commenced, and with it the cutting off of his head, while, with what was left of his body slumped, still strapped in its chair, more stirrings began. The crowd fell to silence. Sprawled on its narrow seat, the Englishman’s limbless corpse trembled as the final, twelfth stroke rang—and, scratching, clawing its way through blood and flesh, shakily standing, the New Year came forth.

  Doll

  Richard Godwin

  I remember that day clearly. It still bears the crystal clarity of a high definition film.

  I don’t know why I bought it. It wasn’t the sort of thing I would normally buy as a present.

  Perhaps it was the morning I’d had. Perhaps it was the aftermath of Christmas and the endless stuffing of mouths with food, the tired bloated feeling after turkey and relatives you do not want to see. Perhaps it was the festivities I saw breaking out around me as people I despised readied themselves for parties. All I can do is recount the events as they unfolded.

  I’m a criminal lawyer and highly paid. When you mix with criminals there has to be some sort of compensation for your efforts, why else would you be drawn to the underworld and its demonic characters?

  I deal with animals. The things I’ve seen are barbaric. Most of us think things, horrific things, but thinking and doing are quite separate. I’d been interviewing a particularly hard case.

  Wandsworth prison is a grim place—Victorian gloom hangs over it like a caul suffocating light and hope. There is an overpowering sense of sick dreams when you enter its walls, as if some universal nightmare has been spilled from a wound. The air feels stained. Its conditions are less than human. Prisoners walk the line between man and animal, neither one nor the other.

  My client was in for assaulting a police officer. He had broken the officer’s face in so many paces he needed metal plates to hold him together. He sat with arms folded across his giant chest and a broad grin opening his face like a scar.

  “I’ve been reviewing your statement and there are a few things I would like to go over with you,” I said.

  “Don’t waste my time with all that, Mark.”

  His habit of referring to me by my first name irritated me.

  “I need to go over your statement.”

  “I didn’t do the pig, although he deserved it—all pigs do.”

  “I would strongly advise you not to say any of that before the jury.”

  “There isn’t going to be a jury.”

  I considered for a moment that the man was mad and this thought opened up an entirely new line of defence.

  “I need to go over your movements on that night.”

  “Look,” he said, putting one hand palm down over my papers and the other down on the table in the form of a clenched fist. I looked down at it, at the tattoo of some animal I could not identify, emblazoned with the words, “Man the unnatur
al Animal.”

  “Would you allow me to do my job?” I said.

  “Why do you think I hired you?”

  “I assume because I have a reputation as one of the best criminal lawyers in the land.”

  “No.”

  He fixed me with his stare.

  I did not want him to see I was disconcerted.

  There was something of the basilisk about his eyes, some shifting surface of lies and violence beneath his look. His lips moved slightly, as if he was in communion with something else in the room.

  “I am looking into the future,” he said. “And do you know what I see? My release.”

  “That’s good.”

  “The reason I hired you is because you’re just like me.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You’re guilty.”

  “Of what?”

  “Something. Maybe a relative you didn’t see at Christmas. You need to keep up your appearance in that suit of yours—you wouldn’t want it messed up.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “Oh no. Not you, you’re my escape route.”

  “Then do as I instruct you to.”

  “I am. But you’re instructing me on different levels. The problem with you educated types is that you attach too much importance to thought. You think terrible things, you have fantasies of doing far worse than I’m accused of, and you think there’s a difference between thought and action.”

  “There is.”

  “All this,” he said, waving a hand at the filthy walls that flanked us, “is hypocrisy, the hypocrisy of those who run this country. You’re just like me—you hunger for blood. I’ll show you,” he said. “You’ll see what I’m talking about and what it is you’re hiding from yourself, and I’ll be released.”

  I waved an arm at the guard, who let me out to the fresh air.

  I had a busy day ahead of me, and as I made my way straight back to my office my iPhone beeped. The message made my heart sink.

  “You haven’t forgotten have you? So looking forward to seeing you.”