Angels in Black and White (Horror Short Stories) Read online

  Angels in Black and White

  Collected Short Fiction: Vol.II

  by

  Craig Saunders

  Copyright © 2011 Craig Saunders

  All characters in this novel are fictitious and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover or format other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchase.

  2nd Edition

  Cover Art Copyright © 2015 Craig Saunders

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  The Dude in the Hat

  Interlude: The Author

  How to Tickle a Zombie

  The Convocation of Planets

  Broken Diesel

  The Hole in the Fence

  Caterpillar

  The Bogie Man

  Hiding Behind the Sun

  The Eternal Circle²

  Last In, First Out

  My Life as a Crisp Packet

  Refrigerator

  The Unknown Warrior

  Bill

  About the Author

  Also by Craig Saunders

  Dedication

  Me? Can I dedicate a book to me? For Craig. Nope. Felt weird. Hmm...I got nothing.

  Craig

  The Shed

  2012 (ish)

  And so...first up, in the red corner, we have...'The Dude in the Hat'...a short story of the horrific persuasion...

  The Dude in the Hat

  The dude in the hat was a ten-inch high cowboy. He wore a poncho over a cloth body, stuffed and sewn with red stitching. His head and hands were plastic but the colour was worn thin so it looked as though his skin were made of leather. He had on long boots that really were made of leather. On his hip he had a six-shooter. Miraculously, the six-shooter had never been lost in all his years. The revolver rested on his right hip. On his right was a bowie knife.

  Richie Warner loved that cowboy but on some level he knew he should get him gone. It wasn’t anything the toy did, but something about that thousand yard stare, that kind of squinty look in the cowboy’s eyes, like he was facing down another gunman, across a dusty dry road in the old west.

  It was just a kid’s toy and he didn’t need it anymore. That’s what Richie told himself, and the explanation was fine, in as far as Richie could reason out anything at all.

  The fact that the little cowboy moved around in the night didn’t figure into it, because Richie was shy a few cogs in the old noggin, and he never noticed. Least, not since the last time, but then time passed on by differently for Richie. He knew the time was coming around again. Something even Richie could feel. An air of impending violence. He’d felt it once before, when he was three years old. But then Richie didn’t remember the time the Dude blew his father’s brains clean out the back of his head.

  *

  ‘Mommy,’ said Richie, because he thought he was American, even though he lived on a council estate in an anonymous part of London. He watched all the cowboy films, old black and white things. He spoke like all those old cowboys and he saw in black and white, too, because of a rather large tap on the head his father gave him when he’d been two years old, back before his cowboy doll came along and changed his life for good.

  ‘Mommy,’ he said. ‘Don’t want that old cowboy n’more.’

  ‘Honey?’ said Mommy. Mommy was accustomed to her baby’s strange ways. Her name was Jane, but Richie called her mommy.

  Jane called her sugar daddy ‘Daddy,’ ever since her first husband had been found with a bullet hole straight through the skull.

  ‘Mommy,’ said Richie again, holding out the offending toy.

  Mommy shrugged and took the old toy from her baby. Bless him, she thought. Bless him, because it was her fault her baby had a large dent in his head and saw in black and white and would only speak like an American in one of those cowboy films.

  ‘Up there,’ said Richie, pointing at the attic door. ‘Might need the dude back, one day,’ he said.

  ‘The dude?’

  ‘The dude,’ said Richie, nodding.

  ‘OK,’ shrugged his mother. ‘I’ll put him in the attic. ‘K?’

  Richie nodded. The dude in the hat went into the attic, five shells in his six-shooter and a bowie knife on his hip.

  *

  ‘Ah, fuck. Oh, fuck, Daddy, fuck, oh fuckfuckfuck...’

  It went on like that for some time. Richie stared at the ceiling.

  He could hear him walking in those long boots, prowling, trying to find a way out.

  He didn’t wonder why he’d never heard the dude walking before.

  In the dark, things were black and white and he stared at the ceiling listening to his Mommy and the bad man with the dirty secret.

  When mommy finished with the bad man, the bad man came into Richie’s room and stood, watching over him. The bad man laughed. The one Mommy called Daddy but wasn’t. He’d never hit Richie, never even touched him, but it didn’t matter because Richie saw things clearer in black and white than anyone ever did in Technicolor.

  He could hear those old worn boots up there, but it was a small sound, the kind of sound a ten-inch high cowboy would make, walking back, swinging round.

  Drawing down.

  *

  The dude in the hat spat out a wad of chewing tobacco. He stuffed some more in the side of his cheek and chewed slowly, thoughtfully.

  It weren’t right. God damn it. Weren’t right.

  He checked his load and checked his knife.

  He cut a hole right through the eaves and tumbled out two floors down to the grass, all flopping limbs, just like a toy. But when he got up he was walking tall.

  *

  Before Richie decided he’d better put the Dude in the attic before something bad went down, a bad man sugar Daddy stropped a razor until it was cold and sharp.

  In a dark cellar on the west side of town a girl screamed.

  Then he got to cutting.

  Sugar Daddy took a shower and drove like all hell was on his tail to his baby girl and her fuckwit son, over on the east side of town, where the poor folk lived. The bitch with the tits he’d paid for put out and let him do all kinds of things to her.

  He thought about cutting her up, too, but she was a sweet piece of meat and he kind of got a kick out of making her squeal while her idiot son stared up at the ceiling in the room right next door.

  *

  Weren’t right. Weren’t damned right and someone’d pay dear.

  The cowboy sat in the corner of a cellar on the west side and stropped his bowie until it gleamed. It wasn’t a little plastic play knife anymore. The revolver wasn’t plastic. It was cold blue steel and before the sun was high it’d smell of gun smoke again.

  Pull, up to the hip. Fan back the hammer. Shoot.

  Weren’t right.

  The little girls scalp was nailed to the rafter, right through her head. Little girl.

  The dude had seen some bad shit in his time, but this was right up there and when something’s wrong, it was his job to make that puppy just as right as it could be.

  Time was, he’d have been angry, but he had that thousand yard stare and a six-shooter on his hip, five shells chambered.

  This weren’t a shot to the head.

  The cowboy looked rig
ht at the scalp.

  Nope. Weren’t a six-shooter kind of job.

  *

  ‘Gotta go, Momma,’ said the bad man. Richie heard him. Didn’t hear the cowboy, but he knew where he was. He could see right through the dude in the hat. See through his eyes, and it weren’t in Technicolor, neither, no sir.

  ‘No, Sir,’ said Richie. ‘Ain’t a six-shooter kind of deal, not for this bad dude.’

  *

  The bad dude put his foot on the first riser heading down into the cellar when the cowboy pulled the trigger and blew his ankle clean from under him.

  The man fell like a sack of wheat right the way down to the bottom, and while he was falling the dude in the hat fanned, shot, fanned, shot, until the revolved clicked on that last dry chamber.

  When the bad dude hit the dirty bloodstained ground he was shy two elbows and two ankles and hip, where a bad load had gone six inches stray of its target.

  ‘Ain’t right, what you done,’ said the cowboy beside the screaming bad man’s ear. Didn’t matter none if the bad dude couldn’t hear. Sometimes you gotta be judge, jury and executioner, out where it’s wild.

  The dude in the hat set to making things right as they could be.

  He walked out of there soon after, that hard stare in his eyes, but his spurs jingle-jangled and he had a skip in his walk.

  *

  ‘You got that old thing down again?’ said Mommy.

  Richie saw her in black and white, but sometimes he saw grey, too, and she was fine by him.

  ‘Wanna watch a cowboy flick,’ he said, ignoring the question, and took the dude in the hat along with him. Dude had a few specks of grey on him, but mommy would put him in the wash and that’d be just fine.

  Richie sat the dude down next to him, took a sip of milk and they watched themselves a movie.

  It was an old black and white cowboy, but some things are just better in black and white.

  The End

  Interlude:

  The Author

  I was born. I spent some time at school. It wasn’t very interesting. Then, foolishly, I elected to continue my ineffectual efforts at education. I ended up at university, where I entered an experimental phase (pharmaceutically speaking) and watched the Simpsons on a regular basis. Hence, by the miracle of self medication and cartoons, wisdom was instilled.

  Shortly afterwards, I left England on a steam powered paddle boat for sunnier climes. I arrived, aged of one hundred and two, in the land of the rising sun. I spent a fruitful five years in Japan, coincidentally learning more about the English language than I ever did in school. I discovered the joys of writing, beginning with a monthly snippet of irrelevance for a local magazine and building up to a terrible first novel, which I have since conveniently ‘lost’.

  It seemed to me that writing was the most fun a man could have with a computer that wasn’t connected to the internet and that was too slow to run the latest AD&D game. Nowadays, I am a safely married man with a wife and children to stop me drifting off into a world of make-believe. In my spare time I mow the lawn around my house in Norfolk, England, where I live. I wouldn’t mow it if it wasn’t my lawn. I live there because that’s where my wife lives, and she won’t let me out.

  When I’m not writing, I pretend to listen to my family and make up stories on a scrap of paper.

  ‘Not another shopping list?’

  ‘Yeah. Those kids, eh? Eating us out of house and home.’

  Sometimes I even get a story published.

  Oh yeah, I’m only thirty-nine really. It was a time-travelling steam powered paddled boat.

  Here's a tickly kind of zombie story...

  How to Tickle a Zombie

  Y’pscrsis Stanton Dublovkvech the Third (Deceased) tried desperately to expel an inquisitive worm from his left nostril, where it was burrowing toward his brain. He could feel it snuggling into his nasal cavity, and squirming against the membranous membrane...thingy...that stopped people’s grey matter falling out of their noses.

  He wasn’t sure if the worm would make any actual difference to his intellectual functions, should it reach his brain, but being a recently emergent zombie he was reluctant to try anything new.

  Being dead was kind of new enough, he figured. He wasn’t quite ready to try figuring out flat-pack furniture, say, or debating the worth of 3D gaming in his local, ex, boozer.

  There was probably a knack to being a zombie, but he hadn’t quite got it down yet. He’d only been self-aware for five minutes or so. He didn’t exactly remember being killed, or a funeral.

  Plus, he was in the dirt.

  Being in the dirt made trying things out a little difficult, but small steps came first. The dirt, in a way, was his womb.

  Not his womb. He wasn’t a woman. Y’pscrsis was a man. He didn’t have a womb.

  But you know. Figuratively speaking.

  He remembered being alive, that subtle sense of growth and regeneration that you couldn’t fully appreciate until you’d actually passed on. Of course, most people nowadays were burned and recycled into various household products. You could follow your loved one’s progress from cremation through to kettle, toaster, or for the unfortunate and distinctly unloved ones, toilet brush.

  Small steps came first. Same as being a baby. Figuratively speaking.

  There was the old breathing and beating heart malarkey. He was buggered if he could figure it out now he was trying to think about it. It would help if he could just get a little light. Being buried under god knows how many feet of dirt wasn’t helping his synapses any.

  Now, what was it? He tried to think back to his basic biology tutorial he’d taken in kindergarten. Left ventricle? Was there an aorta in there somewhere? And what the bloody hell was haemoglobin supposed to do?

  He tried to breath and only succeeded in taking in a mouthful of foul tasting…no, wait…taste buds didn’t work either. There was just a kind of grainy sensation. Never having tasted dirt before he wasn’t sure if this was just ordinary dirt, or recycled, or if it was his stupid taste buds.

  At least that was something to be thankful for. He might be struggling to get a heartbeat going, but he could remember food well enough. He remembered eating beefburgers, sausages, bacon, fried chicken...all the food groups. He didn’t remembered the taste of dirt, and that was probably because it tasted like shit and no one ever served it up, not even in the greasiest of dodgy eateries.

  The worm snuggled right next to his brain. It tickled, mildly, but it didn’t seem to want to go any further, like a dog, circling, then plopping itself down with its tail curled around it.

  Y’pscrsis tried to think. He’d already given up on circulation. It seemed a bit of a waste of time. He was obviously still alive (in a sense) and if he was able to think he must be cogitating…no, wait, didn’t that mean thinking, also?

  Bugger.

  He tried to snort out the worm but he didn’t have any breath to blow with.

  It was surprising how much of your bodily habits were tied up with having breath. It was no wonder dead people were always so still. They couldn’t laugh, or blow their noses, or whistle. Y’pscrsis wasn’t doing much better either. At least he hadn’t been cremated. He’d been interred. A rather upper class death, he felt.

  Shame he’d had to be murdered to be buried in the earth though. And when you got right down to it, who’d want to spend the rest of their undead life being eaten by worms and beetles and rotting under someone’s hardy perennials?

  I wonder if I can just wriggle my hand, he wondered. He wiggled instead. Wriggling proved a little tricky as his hands were apparently shackled behind his back.

  He pondered this for a while. It threw up several pertinent questions.

  Was his murderer suffering from some kind of obsessive compulsion? Was the murder followed by burial somehow deemed insufficient to keep him down?

  Shackles seemed a little...overkill.

  Or, he mused on a slightly different track, was the murderer just plain laz
y? Had he been bound before his interment, and had the despicable miscreant simply forgotten to untie him?

  But there would be trace evidence left behind. The shackles would be coded, as all recycled products were, with a microscopic bar code indicating where it was purchased and who purchased it. A stupid killer, perhaps?

  How embarrassing. Being killed by someone stupid.

  But then maybe…maybe the killer was an occult grandmaster who knew Y’pscrsis’ game, be it man or woman or other denomination*.

  *(Hermaphrodites, Angels (Sometimes one and the same) and emancipated pleasure bots all claimed sentient rights)

  They would have to be powerful indeed to have overcome his wards. He was no slouch in that department. He’d been conjuring demons since he was a mere nipper. He’d banished his first angel by the age of twenty-three.

  Speaking of which, what if it was an angel? He’d made enough enemies in his time. And you just couldn’t keep the little bastards in Heaven. They just popped back onto the prime plane easy as you like, popping like peas for a pod, or popcorn. Pop, pop, pop.

  Fuckers.

  At least you knew where you stood with demons. They were grateful. After all, even a minute on earth after an eternity in Hell must seem like a gift from the Anti-Christ himself.

  The boss?

  Nah. Too simple. The boss had bigger fish to fry. Like letting loose the Old School Pantheon.* Besides, Y’pscrsis had been on his side since the last war. Doing his dirty work. Summoning up his minions. Strike that. It wasn’t the boss.

  Probably wasn’t a demon, either.

  Angel then.

  Or just some freak who took things to excess.