Shock Totem Part 1

Shock Totem.

NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S DESK Welcome to the first Shock Totem holiday issue!

It's getting colder in New England. The geese and Stephen King are heading south for warmer climes, the trees are shedding their summer wardrobe, and I'm still determined to wear shorts and t-s.h.i.+rts until January. It never happens, but I try.

I read more in the colder months, the holiday season. I also write more. I think this is one of reasons it's my favorite time of year. Life slows down, there are fewer distractions. To put it plainly: I get more done.

Like this special issue of Shock Totem.

Last year we attempted something similar, though on our website instead. To celebrate the season, we wrote and posted online a batch of holiday-inspired horror tales. When the snow cleared, we deemed it a success. So this year we went bigger...and hopefully better.

In this issue you will find eight short stories written by the Shock Totem Five-me, John, Nick, Mercedes and Sarah-as well as a few of our extended staff and the obscenely prolific-and not to mention talented-Kevin J. Anderson. We also reached out to a wide range of authors and asked them a single question: What is your best, funniest, or darkest holiday-season memory? The resulting anecdotal holiday recollections can be found interspersed throughout the issue.

Though different from our normal print magazine, I think this one stands proudly alongside them. I hope you agree.

Happy holidays!

And as always, thank you!

K. Allen Wood.

November 16, 2011.

HEARTLESS.

by Mercedes M. Yardley.

"It's snowing outside and I would like to sleep in your bed, please."

The voice was unfamiliar and she turned over to see who was speaking.

"I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't look at me."

He sounded so reasonably polite and yet so cold that she quickly resumed her hunched position.

"Who are you?" she asked. She was strangely calm. She felt pleased to feel any emotion at all.

"I only want to sleep. Nothing else." He slid under the covers on the empty side of the bed. There was no pillow there. She felt the heat radiate from his skin, and was vaguely grateful for it. She had caught a chill two Christmases ago and it had never gone away.

She should leap from the bed and run screaming for the door. She should fight for her life if he chose to steal it. But was it worth fighting for? Her eyelids were already starting to droop. Unusual, considering that she generally stared at the shadowy walls until the early hours of morning.

"You're not going to tell me who you are?"

"Does it matter?" he asked.

No. She supposed that it didn't.

"Would you like a pillow?" She was starting to slur her words, and she heard the smile in his voice. It was not rea.s.suring.

"I'm fine, thank you. You should really go to sleep."

She drifted away before he had finished talking.

- The next morning she woke up refreshed for the first time since her husband's death. She sat up quickly and looked at the other side of the bed, but it was empty. The blankets had been disturbed, although whether by her nightmares or a visitor, she couldn't tell.

"Odd," she said, and rummaged around in her dresser for her exercise gear. She hadn't gone running in months.

When she returned, she showered and went about her day until night relentlessly fell again. She read cookbooks and scrubbed bathtubs and did everything that she could think of to fill her time, but eventually she slid a soft nights.h.i.+rt over her head, brushed her teeth, and climbed into bed. She turned on her side and stared at the wall. An hour pa.s.sed.

She pulled her knees up to her chest, but still s.h.i.+vered.

"You always seem to be cold."

She started, but before she could turn toward the voice it said, "Remember that you are not to look at me, please."

"But why not?" she asked, carefully keeping her back to him. She felt him slide into the bed.

"It's personal."

"And this isn't?"

There was a pause before the voice said, "Would you rather that I leave?"

She thought about it for a while. It would be much wiser to ask him to go. But Christmas was coming, and she couldn't bear to be alone for it. And quite frankly, she didn't have much to lose.

"No, you can stay. But," she said evenly, "are you going to kill me?"

"Not at the moment, no. Although it wouldn't really upset either one of us if I did, now, would it?"

She didn't answer. He didn't expect her to. He counted her breaths-one, two, three-and then she was asleep.

- The next night he brought her some holly. The night after that, he left her a dead bird. She became used to him and realized with mild surprise that the faint alarm bells going off were so quiet and listless that they were easy to ignore. It seemed almost normal, their brief minute of conversation and then sleep. She didn't even keep her back to him anymore, but merely closed her eyes when he entered so as to give him the privacy that he demanded. Sometimes she caught a faint, coppery smell, but it was almost familiar and not too unpleasant, so she put it out of her mind. She put everything out of her mind. It wasn't at all difficult to do.

One night he said to her, "You miss your husband." It was simply stated, but not necessarily heartless.

She slid her hand into his, and didn't care when he didn't close his fingers around hers.

"We're all going to die," she said. Her voice was quiet and steady.

He took her hand, pulled it up to rest on his heart. She felt the heat from his skin, but no movement beneath his ribs.

"Yes," he said. He pulled her fingers to his mouth and kissed them, one by one. "Yes, you are."

"You sound sad," she said. She buried her face into his shoulder and sighed. She thought of her father, how he must smell in his grave now. She wondered if he felt the cold or saw the poinsettias that she left for him.

"I might be sad," he said. His voice sounded like the wind. She didn't notice the tears running down her face.

"What do you want from me?" she asked him softly. She remembered holding her best friend's wrists together in high school, the blood running over her hands. The warmth of it had been startling.

He was silent for a long time. He rubbed his chin against the side of her face. She stared at the ceiling, thinking of the moment that she had heard Eric had shot himself in junior high. His brother always fed Eric's kittens to their dogs.

"Do you think that you could love me?" he asked.

She knew worms crawled through her husband's eyes. They had been light green.

"The things that I think when I'm with you..." Birds pecking holes in her skin.

"I know," he said. "I think that I am sorry. It is the nature of things."

She held her breath. He smelled of death and all things abandoned. She couldn't hear him breathe.

"Would you want me to love you?" she asked him.

He didn't speak again. Not for several more nights.

She began showering every day. Brus.h.i.+ng her hair. She pulled the worn box of holiday decorations out and slowly put them up. They glittered and it was almost beautiful.

"Blood," she said one evening. His hand wrapped around hers. "It's blood that I smell on you."

"Yes."

"I want to ask. But you wouldn't tell me, would you?"

"No."

"Then don't ask me to love you."

The next time that he came, her hair had grown two inches. She had stopped eating and had lost more pounds than her frame could afford. The holiday decorations adorned the walls and mantel, just in time for Christmas. She hadn't taken them down since he'd left her last year.

"I can't seem to sleep without you," she said. "Why would that be?"

He ran his fingers along her cheekbone, into the gaunt hollows underneath.

"I do not know," he said. "But you are unwell. That is why I am here."

She turned onto her back, stared at the ceiling.

"I hear carols in my head. That's supposed to be a good thing, yes?"

He didn't say anything. The warmth of his body slowly melted her chill.

She turned into his side, rested her head on his still chest. She grabbed his s.h.i.+rt with both hands.

"For a while, I thought that you were Kristopher coming back. That somehow..."

"I am not your husband."

"I know that now."

He ran his hand down her hair.

"I could...find him for you. If you wanted. He wouldn't be the same, but I could-"

"No," she said, and he fell silent.

"I could love you," she said.

He grabbed her chin and forced her to look at his face. His eyes were hot blackness, but she reached out her hand and laid it on his cheek. Her skin felt like it was singeing. She nearly winced.

"I am of the darkness," he warned. "I can only bring horror." His teeth were sharp, but she couldn't blame him for that. It wasn't his doing.

"Horror is relative," she said, and smiled at him for the first time. When he smiled back, her heart only dropped a little.

Mercedes M. Yardley wears red stilettos and writes whimsical horror. She has been published in The Pedestal, Hint Fiction, Werewolves and Shape s.h.i.+fters: Encounters With the Beasts Within, Demons: Encounters with the Devil and His Minions, Fallen Angels, and the Possessed, and A Cup of Comfort for Parents of Children with Special Needs. Mercedes lives in Sin City.

Visit her at www.abrokenlaptop.com.

What is your best, funniest, or darkest holiday-season memory?

I'm going to tell you the story of a bed. Stubby's bed.

First off, let me explain that Christmastime in Australia means the height of summer, and it gets hot. b.l.o.o.d.y hot. Where I grew up, the rural inland, it'd regularly reach the mid-40s, Celsius-roughly 110 degrees or more Fahrenheit. It's the kind of heat that you can't escape in the shade, that electric fans won't s.h.i.+ft, and we never did have air conditioning when I was a kid.

What the old timers would do, during those awful summer nights, was to drag their bed out to the veranda where they might at least get a breeze if they were lucky. That's what old Stubby would do.

Stubby was a grizzled old hand living in the Riverina, prime lamb- and wheat-belt country. He'd built a place for himself during the depression on a 38.5 acre plot a few miles out of town. "Caen Brae," it was called. The Rocky Side of the Hill. It was more a multi-roomed tin shack than a house, with nothing in the way of running water or insulation, but that wasn't unusual in the area.

In his later years Stubby made his living as a farm-to-farm salesman, selling American-made gadgets for chicken rearing, lollies for the kids with names that might be confused with more popular confectionery brands, and generally all sorts of cheap knock-offs. He lived at Caen Brae from the 30s through to the 70s, alone but for his cattle dog.

His loyal dog was still guarding the body when they found him.

"Body?" I asked at that point.

See, it was my dad telling me the story. I was probably around 14 years old at the time. It was near Christmas, it was hot, and I guess Dad was feeling nostalgic. At that time we were living in a house in town-me, Mum, Dad, my brothers and sister-but for the first couple years of my life we'd lived up at Caen Brae. I knew that much. All this, though, was new to me.

"Body," my dad continued. "One stinking summer in the 70s he dragged his bed out to the veranda, as people do. And sometime around Christmas, on one of those hot nights, he just died. It was a few weeks before anyone came around and found him like that."

"My bed," I repeated, just to be clear. My bed was a big solid thing of cast iron beams, rusty springs, tall ornate headboard and footboard with curls and fleur-de-lis like someone's garden fence. It would have to have dated back to the Depression itself, at least. I sometimes feared that it might collapse under me, but I'd never given much thought to the people who might have died in it.

"Right. Rotted away on it. Kind of just melted into it."