A Cold, Dark Tale

By Rick McQuiston

           

            The feeling in my gut told me my Aunt Julie shouldn’t have been standing on our front porch.

            However, I was glad to see her again. She was always nice to me, calling me her little tunkins for as long as I could remember. She played games with me, usually letting me win, and took me to the zoo and the library.

            God, I loved going to the library. I always found myself wandering out of the children’s section and sneaking into the horror fiction area. My favorite writers were H.P Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson. I just loved House on the Borderland. I think I must have read that book a hundred times. Those creepy pig things scared the heck out of me.

            I pushed the front bay window curtains aside and leaned forward as far as I could. Looking out into the cold, dark night I saw Aunt Julie standing on our front porch. She held a bouquet of wilted flowers in her hand.

            I looked over my shoulder at my mother, who was standing by the front door with a small gun in one of her hands and a Bible in the other. She was crying and mumbling prayers to herself.

“Mom? What’s the matter?” I asked, even though I already knew what the problem was.

She turned to me, tears streaking down her round face. “Sh…she shouldn’t be here,” she muttered between sobs. “She just shouldn’t.”

“Why not? Don’t you love Aunt Julie anymore?”

Her face twisted in disbelief. “Your Aunt Julie is dead,” she cried. “She died three days ago. You know that. We were at her funeral.”

It was true. I knew Aunt Julie was dead. I remember seeing the coffin, all shiny and polished, propped up on a thick, wooden stand with flowers on both sides of it.

The heavy pounding on the front door made me and my mom jump.

“Aunt Julie wants in.”

“G…go away,” she screamed at the door while waving her gun back and forth. She was trying to hold it steady, but was having trouble doing so. “If…if you don’t go away I swear I’ll…I’ll…”

I looked back out the front window as Aunt Julie slammed her head into the door. When she pulled it back off there were jagged chunks of wood stuck in her face. Trickles of black blood streamed down the front of her dress, the same one she had been wearing at her funeral. She didn’t speak, I suspected it was due to her mouth being sewn shut, and her overall expression was blank. There wasn’t even a trace of fear, love or anything remotely human; only an empty shell unsure just why it was still moving.

            When I first found the book, I had no idea just what it was capable of or even what it was. It was right before Aunt Julie’s funeral service behind the parlor building. I was taking a break from the funeral, and walked behind the building, immediately noticing a slim, black figure scurrying away under some nearby bushes. It was small, no bigger than a dog, but was shaped like a person. It saw me and quickly dropped what it was holding into a small hole it had been digging. My curiosity got the better of me and I dug up the item it had dropped.

To my surprise it was a book!

Jet- black with no lettering on its front, the book was really strange looking. I plopped down right then and there and began reading it, and within a few minutes, I was hooked. It was strangely addictive and before I knew it I had read the entire thing. My favorite part was a section titled:

“HEREIN LAYS THE ETERNAL GOODBYE”

It contained some sort of weird spell for funerals. You were supposed to recite some words at the side of an open grave or anywhere near a corpse. They could only be said by someone who knew and loved the departed. It was supposed to give the dead person a clear path to the afterlife.                                               

I took the book with me back into the funeral parlor, hiding it from my mother. I found myself constantly thinking about the words to the “HEREIN” part of the book and before I knew it I was whispering them under my breath, even when Aunt Julie was being lowered into her grave.

The gunshot made me jump back from the window. It was immediately followed by screams, my mother’s, and thick, unearthly groans from Aunt Julie. I fell to the floor and looked toward the front door just as Aunt Julie’s chalk-white hands crashed through the door and gripped my mom by the neck.  With one swift motion she tore out her throat, spilling gore in every direction. I watched the gun and Bible, slick with blood, fall to the floor.

I ran over to the door, picking the gun up and raised it straight up into the leering face of my dead aunt. She didn’t even flinch as I pulled the trigger and blew her head clean off. I watched her body, sprayed with rotten blood, collapse on the front porch in a steaming pile of decayed flesh.

My mother was sprawled out next to me, lifeless and cold. Part of me was sickened by the horrible mess; the smell of death, the loss of loved ones, but another part was fascinated by it as well.

A crooked smile slid across my face when the possibilities of my newfound abilities came to mind. I looked over at my mother’s blood-soaked face, and standing up on weak legs, began to recite the words from the book.