I gobbled down my first meal in days, barely chewing, expecting to feel guilty about it afterwards. But I only felt relief; besides, I never really liked my neighbours.
© Shyla Fairfax-Owen
Thanks for reading my two-sentence horror story… Mmmm human flesh… Feel free to share your own in the comments!
A single drop of rain rolled over the tip of Leigh’s nose and hit the map with a thud. Its splatter distorted the icon for one of the many tourist attractions along the Royal Mile, which struck Leigh as appropriate. The rain had calmed, but fresh pools of it had formed in every crevice, pocket, and hole of the city. Leigh refolded the map sloppily, allowing only some of the folds to line up, and stuffed it into her back pack. An irritation was flickering inside of her and one more minute of that useless map was going to ignite it. Flinging her hood back she pulled open the heavy wooden door to the pub she had been pacing in front of for what seemed an immeasurable amount of time. The bartender gave little more than a slight glance upwards before returning her eyes to the ketchup bottles she was marrying. Leigh took a deep breath and approached her.
“I’m sorry to bother, but I’m looking for South Bridge. Can you point me in the right direction?”
The bartender raised her head, sluggishly, as if it too had been weighted down by the heavy rainfall. Without a smile, she asked, “The vaults, then?”
Leigh nodded nervously. The acknowledgement of her desire to engage in paranormal exoticism still made her uncomfortable, even after months of travel.
The bartender gave a sort of grunt, before jotting down a few quick directions on a napkin and silently sliding it towards Leigh. Before she could be thanked, she turned 180 degrees and began removing half empty whiskey bottles from the display shelf.
“Pay Becky no mind. Hospitality is not her strong suit.”
Leigh torqued her head to the right to see that the Australian accent belonged to a tanned, stout, man of about thirty. He had a cartoonish smile plastered on his face, and was gripping a half empty pint glass with both hands.
Leigh nodded graciously and headed for the door, but he called out to her to wait up. After downing what was left of his pint, he jogged towards Leigh and they exited into the cool, grey, day.
After a short walk, the two of them joined what looked very much like a rag tag team of wannabe investigators at the meet-up location. Leigh was surprised, since these tours more often tended to attract couples looking for something out of the ordinary to define their vacations.
“First time?” her companion asked. He had introduced himself as Duck on the way over.
“Here.” Leigh tried to keep her responses short and concise, purposefully revealing very little of herself.
In truth, she had been on so many ghost walks lately that the experiences were all beginning to bleed into one another. But then, she figured that pretty well described tourism as a whole. She had been in Scotland for four days now, but this was her first venture into its ghostly underground. She had been to Castlehill, the site of many historical witch burnings, but was discouraged by the vast number of unthoughtful feet trampling it; dripping ice cream into the porous cobblestone of what Leigh thought one might consider sacred ground. She left in a hurry.
“Been here three times myself.”
This caught Leigh off guard, and she felt her head cock in a very obvious, and perhaps judgemental, way.
“I know,” he replied to her reaction. “But you never know when something will happen. I’d hate to miss it.”
Leigh offered a sympathetic nod. She wasn’t sure why she was being so patronizing. Weren’t they all here for just that? To see something; feel something – to have any type of visceral experience that they could then use to obtain to a sense of knowledge about life and death. That was probably, on some level, why Leigh was there. She attributed her curiosity to a fondness for history, but ghosts aren’t really about history. Ghosts are about the the future, and our inability to understand it; our fear of it. That, Leigh thought to herself, should be the real premise of her book.
Before they entered the vaults, the tour guide offered a rehearsed spiel about the importance of understanding the risks involved. Terrible things had happened in the vaults, and those who had become trapped down there (she explained) were often filled with anger, resentment, and vengeance. As Leigh looked discreetly about her she caught flashes of discomfort in more than a few tourists eyes. Some twitched a little, others fidgeted with their fingers or tried to steady their breathing. During her paranormal travels, Leigh had discovered that most people who did these tours were secretly terrified, as though testing their personal limits. People had become so easy to read. Duck was one of the others, though. He wanted to see something. Needed to, even. He was a man seeking concrete answers, and nothing short of concrete evidence would do. Leigh, on the other hand, was looking to immerse herself in the past. Her research grant depended upon it. Ghost stories interpreted through contemporary frameworks – it would be a bestseller.
In the vaults, they listened to stories about class divides in Edinburgh, about immigration and poverty, gardyloo, and crime. A man who looked as though he’d dressed for bird-watching rather than ghost-hunting gave an audible shudder when the guide talked about grave-digging and the sale of corpses to university professors. Duck laughed more than Leigh was comfortable with, but the damp darkness of the vaults kept her rather distracted.
She took a deep breath and let herself feel it. She tuned out the sound of the guide’s theatrically hoarse voice, and made the restless excitement of the group fade behind her eyes until everything melted away. Then, there was just her… and him.
At first it was just a flicker of light, so faint she almost didn’t notice it. But as she focused, it became more clear. It was the flame of a match, migrating upwards until the glow of a cigarette revealed his face. Or, rather, an echo of his face. More real than a shadow, but less tangible than the touch of someone familiar. They caught eyes and he nodded politely from across the cave-like space. Leigh smiled, and breathed a shallow sigh of relief. He approached her and as he did so the dark engulfed them, hiding them from prying, curious, eyes.
Leigh brought her pen to her paper, still smiling, and whispered, “Hello sir. Thank you for visiting me. Please, share your story.”
The man smiled, and began his tale.
©Shyla Fairfax-Owen
A withered fairy
Dancing in the pale moonlight
Rot and elation
© Shyla Fairfax-Owen
Omens is my Halloween Haikus series – check back soon for more!
Thirteen whispers sigh
Hushed by the howls outside
Thirteen lost souls wait
© Shyla Fairfax-Owen
Omens is my Halloween Haikus Series – check back soon for more!
The bell chimes twelve times
A cat’s cry through the blackness
Time to say goodbye
© Shyla Fairfax-Owen
Omens is my Halloween Haikus Series – check back soon for more!
I stare back at me
An eerie mist surrounds us
Our hands never meet
© Shyla Fairfax-Owen
Omens is my Halloween Haikus Series – check back soon for more!
Stalwart as it hoots
Tidings of death it does bring
Impenitent glare
© Shyla Fairfax-Owen
Omens is my Halloween Haikus Series – check back soon for more!
Crows flock high above
Omniscient eyes pierce the soul
Deleterious
© Shyla Fairfax-Owen
Omens is my Halloween Haikus Series – check back soon for more!
Kato approached the window and laid his hand upon the cool, hard, glass. On the other side of it lie his trusted advisor, and surrogate big brother, unconscious. It had been exactly thirteen hours since the craft crashed, nearly taking Hays’ life. What was left of it, flesh and bone, was practically unsalvageable. As he watched the galaxy’s most renowned doctors busy about Hays’ crushed, inoperative, body – Kato couldn’t help but wonder if making him cyborg was the right choice. Hays had told him once, before he even became King, that the biggest obstacle humans have ever faced is mortality, and that banning cyborgism was the only way to make us face it. Cyborgism, he explained, was not a solution, but a pacifier. All the same, he added that if he were ever on the brink of death, that he’d take all the metal he could get, legally or otherwise. He had chuckled heartily at his own irony, and Kato had smiled along. But he never forgot those words, “a pacifier.” He recalled them in a public speech the day he signed the bill. Now he wondered if it was a pacifier for the patient, or their loved ones who simply won’t let go. Tomorrow, he’d have to publicly retract those words. Tomorrow.
© Shyla Fairfax-Owen
I look up. Everything around me is sand. For miles, and miles – just sand. It’s in my eyes, between my breasts, under my fingernails. Hell, it’s even in my lungs. I cough, but I’m so hoarse it hardly sounds like myself. And then there’s the ringing. A piercing, relentless, ringing that somehow I know is coming from inside of my own head.
My wrist is broken. That much is clear. My head has been rattled. My muscles twitch and ache where they shouldn’t. But none of that compares to the damage done to the ship. Metal bits and chunks are laid out upon the sand, a perfect picture of disaster. And that’s when I know for sure, I’m never going home.
The sun is still high, which tells me I have plenty of hours to succumb to dehydration before I even see a desert’s moon. That saddens me. I’ve always wanted to see the moon from the other side. Earth. I almost chuckle. This is not at all how I imagined my grand arrival.
Somehow I find the energy to scrounge for food and water in the heaps of broken ship. I find one water bottle, and it’s only half full. Luckily, I’ve always been a glass half-full woman, so I smile and let a few drips wash over my parched tongue. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I spot a bag of peanuts, and things really start to look up. Because the peanuts aren’t mine.
The dunes are tough to get over. With each step I sink, and have to struggle forward. I engage every muscle, every bone (that isn’t broken), and every corner of my mind. Willpower – there’s nothing like it.
Finally I see a shadow in the distance. I think it’s the shape of a person. The sun is almost set now; it’s cold and I’ve almost finished the water. The peanuts are long gone. It’s not a lot, but it’s enough to assure me I’m not hallucinating when the figure starts towards me.
It’s a woman. She’s tall and sturdy, wielding a crossbow. A huntress of the Desert Peoples. She won’t care that I’m interstellar. Desert Peoples are poor, desperate – they have a million other things to worry about besides intergalactic relations. Still, I hold up my index finger to indicate that I come in peace. I hold up a piece of scrap from my ship and point to the sky, then my broken bone. She nods and offers me a hand.
Gaza, as she calls herself, takes me to her home. She is proud of it even though it is small, dark, and sticky. Its walls are decorated with her trophies – the heads of creatures small and large. It catches me off guard. These are species of which I’ve only seen images. They captured their stillness, but this – this is too still. I look away, embarrassed by my weakness. To think, I used to consider myself tough.
“Thora,” Gaza says pointing to me. She is introducing me to her father, an elderly man who creaks when he moves. He nods, but his gaze seems to pass right through me. He’s blind, I realize.
Over the next few weeks I learn to help around the house. Mostly, I load parcels of meat, babying my wrapped wrist bone. I’m not sure what animal it is, and I don’t ask. Gaza and her clan are preparing for a great travel to the city where they trade goods. I will be going with her, she tells me. It will make me useful, she adds.
I fancy the idea of being a useful member of a community and I’m tickled. Back home, I was just a petty thief, in and out of jails. No sense of loyalty, no sense of belonging. I was hardly a blip on anyones newsfeed. Until the hack. Nothing like a good b and e to the Authority’s mainframe to get some attention. That’s all I was looking for, attention. But I found something much bigger. Plans of an intergalactic war. I’m not sure at what moment I decided to become the hero of this story, to come to Earth and warn the people – I guess I just needed a win. Unfortunately, the Authority put me on a most wanted murderers list before my ship had gained enough speed for its spectacular crash landing. My name was all over the newsfeeds then. Yes, it was.
“This way,” Gaza instructs as she rips down a wanted poster of me. We’ve just arrived at the trading post. It’s the first time I’m sure she knows who I am, but neither one of us says a word about it. I breathe a sigh of relief. It’s good to know she’s on my side. I plan to tell some of the traders about the war plans. They’ll be from all over, and I’m sure to find someone who speaks more English than Gaza; maybe even some Lunar.
Inside the post, Gaza goes on with a shorter woman who is plump and (from the looks of it) bored. After Gaza begins raising her voice, a man comes out. They go back and forth for a while in a language I can’t understand and I turn my back on the ordeal. I’m fondling some sparkly trinkets that I don’t recognize when the hand grabs me. I turn to face the large man as he cuffs me. I want to scream but I’m in shock, because I don’t know what’s going on, but from the look on Gaza’s face, I’ve been sold out.
© Shyla Fairfax-Owen
Beyond the Threshold 