Gothic, page 26
How much of the true him even remains.
“I agree,” he says finally. “But it could be more complicated than that.”
Violet tilts her head, waiting.
Ben sighs, continues. “I’m not sure your father is the problem, or whether it’s something, someone, else.”
Violet shakes her head. “I’m not following.”
Ben leans forward, folds his hands on the table. “I think the evil we’re talking about is something we haven’t seen yet. And, I’m sorry to say this, and I don’t mean to frighten you, but I think your father is in over his head. I have a feeling that his usefulness is finite.”
“I agree. I think I’ve seen it. That evil. Or, I don’t know… part of it. Okay, so… what? I mean, I don’t know what we can do. What we’re supposed to do. Do you?”
“Honestly? No, I have no idea,” Ben replies. “But I think we should try. Together, if you’d like.”
“Maybe after we can go back to the museum. Look at some art.”
Ben smiles, nodding. “That’d be nice.” He pauses a moment, gathering his thoughts. “Violet, can I ask you something? What did it look like? What you saw?”
Violet’s eyes fall to her wringing hands, her numb legs. She recalls the events of that awful night. Remembers being shot, bleeding out on the stairs. And how, just four hours ago, she was hanging by her neck, twisting for the phone, seeing the strange figure hunched on the bed, watching her die.
When she answers Ben, she can’t meet his eyes. “It looks like my father.”
Ben doesn’t know what to say, where to begin. He decides he’ll just wait a bit. Stay with her. For now, they’ll stay still, and let the future come to them.
Beneath the dim circle of light inside the dark apartment, they sit together in a companionable, if troubled, silence. Outside, the great chamber of night eclipses their world, oblivious to the menace which runs swiftly through its black halls, rides the wind to points far and wide, aiming for distant horizons.
Fifty-three
Tyson sits at the desk and wiggles the mouse. The large screen of his brand-new PC springs to life, the pages on the monitor every bit as white and large and imposing as a physical page would be. Tyson figured the upgrade would be good for his eyes long-term (no more squinting at a laptop screen), and the mechanical keyboard he purchased along with the new computer allows him to type faster than ever, the clackety rhythm a meditative balm that soothes away his anxieties while creating a new piece. The reflexive keys also mean less wear and tear on his fingers and wrists, which is nice.
Less blood as well. Fewer broken fingernails? Always a plus.
The only other light inside the office is the faint flicker of firelight coming from the living room, barely bright enough to illuminate the back wall of bookshelves and a patch of hardwood floor. In the dark, Tyson’s skin shines ghostly pale in the glow of the bright screen. His hands are curled into fists on the desktop, defiant.
“I have some ideas…” he says. “For the new book, I mean. Perhaps…”
Sarah stands off to the side, just outside the light of the monitor, a rippling shadow nestled within the heavy dark, a hazy patch of white against the muted reflections of firelight.
“Oh,” she says. “I don’t think so.”
Tyson feels a sharp pinch in his leg. He looks down but can’t see below his waist. The monitor is too bright, the dark too dense.
“What… again?”
Another needle-prick slices his forearm, slides beneath the skin.
A third stabs his neck.
He winces and sucks air, raises his fingers to his neck, presses them against the thin tendril of wood that has stabbed through his flesh. He feels the pulse coursing through the wood as it drinks. “Shit. That one hurt,” he says, laughing uneasily.
“I’m afraid,” Sarah says, “this will be our last project together. This form was difficult for me, but I thought it was the least I could do.”
She steps close to the desk, the monitor’s light luminescent against her plain dress, her chalk-white skin. Tyson’s eyes move up from her waist, past her belly, to the bumps of her breasts, then higher, to her slender neck… resting below the deep shadow of her face.
She bends over, her features blunt in the harsh light. He recoils, sickened.
Her eyes are the swollen, cloudy blind eyes of the old man.
“As you well know, sweetheart,” she says, her red mouth grinning. “All good things must come to an end.”
He sees them now, curling up from the edges of the desk.
Twenty, thirty… more.
They dance and wave, their needle-sharp points and long leafy limbs glinting with the distant light of the living room’s fireplace.
“Wait,” he whispers.
As one, they fly at him.
The tendrils punch into his flesh, then push inward, deep into muscle and organs, scraping bone. The pain of a hundred wasp stings burns his nerves like acid.
Tyson cries out as they spear him again, and again, puncturing the fabric of his pants and shirt, slithering past the skin, burrowing into veins. He feels white-hot pricks in his calves and thighs. His cock is pierced, and he gasps, mouth wide in shock, as the prickly wooden stem slithers up the shaft like a catheter. Before he can cry out again, a dozen more stab mercilessly into his stomach, hip, chest.
He wonders if they are winding around his heart.
Slowly, as if his body were submerged deep beneath a black ocean, his arms float upward as long strands of wood weave themselves into the tendons of his forearms. Fingernails split and fall away as the branching tips push through the ends of his fingers.
He watches, horrified, as the blood-smeared stems curl and flex his fingers and hands, getting used to the controls.
More tendrils plunge into his neck, then his cheeks and tongue. They worm into his ears, perforate the drums and slither along the bones of his jaw, holding his head in a vice-tight grip that forces his gaze straight ahead, at the screen, the blank page, the blinking, taunting, cursor.
He screams then. Screams so loudly that it tears his vocal cords to shreds. Screams his throat raw, and then keeps right on screaming. Sarah laughs like a demented schoolgirl as he does, pausing only when she drops to her knees to lick the pooling blood at the edges of the desk—sensually, hungrily.
When she thrusts her face back into his vision, her lips and teeth are smeared with blood, her chin dripping red.
She opens her mouth wide and laughs.
His eyes roll up into his head, and he has visions—bright flares that soar like falling stars across the darkening night of his mind.
Of his sanity.
In his mind’s eye, he sees an image of himself sitting at the desk. The windows are filled with the crimson color of a dying day. In this vision, as the sun is bursting like an overripe cherry, he’s nothing more than a sunken-eyed husk, the flesh of his face so dry that his bloodless lips have withered to dead skin, pulled away from the teeth to expose a wide, joyless grin. His eyes are panicked, desperate. As if he’s imprisoned inside his own body.
Then that vision slides away, and another replaces it.
He stands on a great plain. The horizon is fire, the sky bleached the color of old bones. He walks forward, seemingly forever, but hears nothing, sees nothing but that distant horizon of flame. He hopes to find the ones he loved, to one day be forgiven. If not by God, then by whatever is left in the world to forgive, by whatever runs things in this place of pale skies and blazing horizons, of endless steps.
He doesn’t like this story, and desperately wishes he could think of a different ending.
When that vision passes away, he returns to himself. The windows are no longer the color of blood, but have turned black, soaked in midnight. He looks down at himself, or at least the parts he can see by roving his eyeballs.
His head is held fast.
“I’m sorry to say goodbye,” the old man says. Tyson can just barely make out the spirit’s bodily form in his peripheral vision. “He’s coming, you see, and I’d rather not be here when he arrives.”
The old man shuffles across the room one final time, leaving the office without a look back, and closes the door behind him. Tyson tries to swallow, but it proves impossible.
His mouth is full of wood.
With the dim light of the room, it might have appeared to an outside observer that, from a certain distance, Tyson is sitting in a great chair, one boldly arched on all sides with fine woodwork, bowed outward into complex, concentric wings around his body. A seat of honor. A throne.
And when the desk begins to glow, the false image of his regality increases ten-fold.
A low hum fills the room, and the stone of the desk brightens to a dizzying, translucent blue, a window to a world no human can ever look upon and still retain their sanity, their humanity.
From deep below, as if rising from the bottom of a great sea, something is rising toward the surface. A leviathan emerging from the depths of a different world, an alternate plane of existence.
Tyson watches it come, and shrieks in tear-drenched horror, from deep in his throat he murmurs guttural protests, begging, then he cries out once more, for the last time.
The ends of the desk split apart with the CRUNCHING of splitting trees, of shattering bones. Two majestic horns slide out from within and rise high into the air, their surfaces slick as oil, covered in the fluid of birth, like the skin of a newborn child.
They continue to push out, curve upward, thick as a man’s thigh, drenched in blood. Like the barbs of a great bull, they taper at the ends into glistening tips that gouge the ceiling.
Tyson moans through a torn face pierced with thorny wood, his wild eyes flicking incessantly from side-to-side in his immobilized head, searching desperately for escape, for help, for a savior.
Instead, the branches which breach his flesh push deeper, and his body is slowly bent forward, forced into the maw of the beast. The monitor, wrapped in vines, tilts precariously before him, a dull glow shining through the branches. Before it, like a holy offering, lays the keyboard, now slightly recessed, as if it has become part of the stone itself.
As Tyson stares in horror, the sharp wooden splinters of his new fingers begin tapping, faster and faster. Madly. His reinforced hands fly with an impossible speed across the keys, the words on the screen zipping left-to-right in a blur, blackening the partially obscured white pages with words and ideas. With shocking twists, and heart-stopping scares.
With a story.
Epilogue
Harry nods at his new assistant—some nerdy kid who can’t be more than a week out of Columbia’s MFA program—as he passes by. Sinatra is softly crooning Summer Wind through the office’s ceiling speakers.
…those lonely days, they go on and ooonnn…
He goes into his office, shuts the door… and stops short when he sees a thick package, wrapped neatly in brown paper, resting on his desk.
Part of him knows immediately who it’s from, and what it likely contains. His stomach clenches, and he swallows a knot of fear.
Not sure how much more of this I can take.
But he also knows the pills will help.
They help everything.
He sits down, gently places his mug of coffee to the side, and lifts the heavy parcel. Across the front, in precise handwriting he knows all too well, is his name.
He’s perplexed, however, at not seeing an address. No messenger’s receipt. No postage.
Hand-delivered?
He debates asking his new assistant about the package’s arrival, but decides he doesn’t really give a shit. It’s here now, and he’ll just need to deal with it.
Thing must be 800 pages, he thinks, turning over the thick bundle. He hasn’t seen or heard from Tyson in weeks, and although this new arrival isn’t at all expected, Harry isn’t really all that surprised, either.
“All right, damn it. Let’s get this over with.”
He tears open the brown paper to reveal a dense stack of white, type-filled pages. On the top is a blank page made from a heavy cream stock, the kind you might use as a cover.
Harry debates retrieving the flask and the bottle of Xanax from his desk drawer before digging in, but curiosity gets the better of him (he is a literary man, after all), and he scans the thick cover page at the top of the stack.
Scrawled across the page, in bold, black ink, is a handwritten message from the author:
Do this in remembrance of me.
- T
“Uh-huh,” Harry says, stroking his lower lip with a cigarette-stained fingertip. He taps his fingers against the top of the stack of paper, debating.
“Screw it.” He sits up, flips over the cover to reveal the name of the book:
GOTHIC
By Tyson Parks
He stares at the page for a moment, ignores the chill that runs up his spine, the sick feeling of darkness that floods his mind. He licks his lips, lets out a held breath.
Shitty title, he thinks.
Then he turns the page over, and begins to read.
More Books by Tyson Parks
Ne’er Do Well
Blood Moon
Kill You Down
Dangerous Dreams
The Storm
Midnight Whispers: Collected Stories
The Quiet Neighbor
Deep in the Night
The Man in the Bowler Hat
The Attic
The Night Plow
Missy Darling
Crimson Skies
The Last Witch
Black Altar
The Horror
About the Author
Philip Fracassi is the author of the award-winning story collection, Behold the Void, which won “Best Collection of the Year” from This Is Horror and Strange Aeons Magazine.
His newest collection, Beneath a Pale Sky, was published in 2021 by Lethe Press. It received a starred review from Library Journal and was named “Best Collection of the Year” by Rue Morgue Magazine. His debut novel, Boys in the Valley, was published on Halloween 2021 by Earthling Publications. His novel A Child Alone with Strangers was released in August 2022 by Talos Press.
Philip’s books have been translated into multiple languages, and his stories have been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best Horror of the Year, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, Dark Discoveries, and Cemetery Dance.
The New York Times calls his work “terrifically scary.”
As a screenwriter, his feature films have been distributed by Disney Entertainment and Lifetime Television. He currently has several stories under option for film/tv adaption.
For more information, visit his website at www.pfracassi.com. He also has active profiles on Facebook, Instagram (pfracassi) and Twitter (@philipfracassi).
Philip lives in Los Angeles, California, and is represented by Elizabeth Copps at Copps Literary Services (info@coppsliterary.com).
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Philip Fracassi, Gothic
