Category: Submitted Stories (Guest Posts)

Bloodlust

On By Shyla Fairfax-OwenIn Horror, Shyla's Stories, Submitted Stories (Guest Posts)5 Comments
By Shyla Fairfax-Owen and Aurora Van Roon

For most of her life, Anna had been a lovely, quiet girl; proficient at hiding her desires, fears, and obsessions. Normalcy was what she strived for, but her desires… they caused an ache in her stomach that would not easily go away. And so inevitably there came a time to give in, wholly and completely, to the lust that set Anna apart from all the people she had ever known. The blood, and how it felt slipping through her fingers and on her skin, was what she needed more than anything else. Tonight was the night.

With a startling eagerness, Anna tied up her long hair and stuffed it under a cap and hood, only meagrely aware of her own attempts at disguise. Nothing about the process would be quite as rational as it would appear. Rationality and desire – Anna worked hard to tie these concepts together but knew that her need was strong enough to drag her out the door in the silent, deadly, heat of the night. Resistance only weakened her. The harder she fought against her nature, the further she slipped from the strength and power it endowed. No more. No more weakness. Tonight, she would feast.

The heat lay like a blanket on the city, dousing it in a sticky silence. She thrived in the silence. It afforded her the opportunity to hear her own blood pumping in her veins. Moreover, in the thickness of the quiet she could finally sort through the voices in her head, and listen to the whispers of the sleeping city. Their nightmares called to her while so vulnerable they lie, unknowing. Blissful ignorance was the sweetest blood of all. 

Anna knew in her heart she shouldn’t prowl so close to home, but the second she smelt the honey-sweet smell of the child’s blood, it beckoned her closer. Outside, the wind was just cold enough to assure her that she wasn’t dreaming. The sound of the crunching leaves underfoot made it all the more real as she stalked through the dark streets – a predator. She had never felt so alive. 

Her heart was racing now. She moved with the tempo and approached the window quicker than she expected. Her rational side cried at her to not look, to go further, to find another. But the smell. 

Besides, she had been so controlled and stubbornly good most of the time – hadn’t she earned this? yes, she believed she had. And if she hadn’t… Well, Anna could do nothing now but follow that scent of that innocently throbbing artery that would spill luxuriously across her face soon enough.

She peeked into the window. There he was. His dark hair caught the moonlight, framing his beautiful, youthful face. She watched his slow deep breaths. The blood. Anna desperately wanted to savour these last moments before the chaos, but she couldn’t. She leapt forward, half conscious. When it was over, it was all a blur; an event that had burrowed deep inside of her bones and become a part of her forever. She knew that, even in the after-haze of a satisfaction so powerful it tingled her very being.

She looked down at the cold, lifeless body. He was so young. The silence came again and with it the sweet sound of his blood, now in her veins. She felt rejuvenated and oddly without shame. She smeared the blood from her face to her neck; tried to stretch its sweetness as far as it would go. Eventually, Anna knew, she’d need more.

The blood stained the tips of her fallen hair. As she stared at the drops that fell to the floor, pooling, she felt that ache return. She loved the feel of the blood, inside and around and on every part of her.

But the happiness faded quickly, until she almost couldn’t bear the loss.

© Shyla Fairfax-Owen and Aurora Van Roon

Bug

On By Shyla Fairfax-OwenIn Fantasy, Horror, Submitted Stories (Guest Posts)1 Comment
GUEST POST BY JENN HUDDLESTON

There are certain things about human skin that you can only really appreciate after you’ve had to forcibly break free of it. Its strength, for one thing, is incredible. Particularly against tears. Without something sharp to slice through it, skin will stretch with surprising resilience against a literal ton of force. I learned this the first time I shifted. Watching as the bones in my greater extremities began to elongate, I wondered why they didn’t just split through my feet and fingertips. Until they did, of course, and then I blacked out from the pain of it. For mostly obvious reasons that first time was a complete mess. Like a lot of us, I had no clue what was happening to me. I’d contracted it a month or so before, and hadn’t been in contact with the person who gave it to me since (that situation was also a mess, but that probably qualifies as obvious too).

That night I was mercifully alone in my house (my three roommates, all in their early twenties, were away at their respective night gigs). It began as a series of cramps – the kind that double you over and make you wish it was somehow socially acceptable to conduct your life from the comfort of a warm bath. I’d been watching some trash TV show and I remember that despite the blinding pain I’d had the presence of mind to close my laptop (being found as a contorted corpse in the living room is traumatic enough – no need to have your nearest and dearest associate your death forever with a screenshot of RuPaul’s Drag Race). For some reason I truly believed that everything would be ok if I could just make it to the bathroom: In the bathroom I could be as disgusting as was necessary to ride out this sudden sickness (Food poisoning? Appendicitis? Delayed-onset alcohol poisoning?). Moving seemed to make the cramps worse though, and the pain spread like boiling whiskey from my abdomen throughout the rest of my body. I can remember tasting copper as wave after wave of nausea hit me, though I don’t think that I actually vomited. By the time I found the staircase, the skin on my arms and legs had started to burn. I didn’t realize it then, but at this point the epidermis was spontaneously separating from my muscle tissue. By the time I made it to the upstairs bathroom, my upper lips must have split because the face (a generous term) I saw in the mirror looked something like an aborted cat fetus forcing its way out of a sausage. Slick, shiny scales had begun to emerge beneath my scalp.

There’s not a lot I can remember after that. Things went red and the night itself is a blank. I must have run into something pretty foul though, because whatever it was gave me wicked bad indigestion the next morning.

If I’m honest, something had felt off with me for a couple of weeks before the full shift. Flu-like symptoms, lethargy, bumps, itching and unusual discharge – all of the things a Google search will tell you amount to cancer, AIDS, or herpes. In short, the imminent demise of you or your social life. There’s a special kind of dread that comes with the possibility of real illness. All of a sudden you can’t just ignore the timestamp on your body and the puniness of your life. This is the mortal meat that you occupy, and there’s a chance that you fucked it irreparably for a lay, or a hit, or a high. I was worried enough to book a physical (at least I could be retroactively responsible), though I’ve cancelled the appointment since. The dating pool in my town is shallow enough, and for a while there were rumours about something going around, something else – but this isn’t exactly the sort of thing you can campaign about with pamphlets. Or list in your Tinder profile.

Not that I got out that much anyway. There’s really only one person who could have given me this. They’ve probably given it to many others. That thought, for some reason, is one that’s stuck with me. In those moments when I believe that my life might not be over – I fixate on this idea of the bug existing in others. Passing between us, linking us through this strange, unmentionable horror.

It feels as though I’ve been in hiding for months now, beneath my human skin. On most days I could pass for normal, and sometimes I almost forget what’s really there. How many others live this way? Do they worry that the horror might consume them too? Do they care? I spent most of my twenties dodging serious relationships out of a pretty basic fear of emotional fallout. I get that I was lonely then, but that’s nothing to what I feel now. Every day I wake up knowing that, with one touch, I could destroy the people I love. My body is poison, and worse than that; it’s insatiable. Even on my best days, the days I believe that I can control it, or somehow embrace it as part of myself – there’s only so long I can ignore the hunger. It’s been three months now, and my appetites have not waned. Even without the shift I crave meat. Weeks before the change, I can feel the scales beneath the skin, straining it. It will hold, but I never know for how long.

Jenn Huddleston ©

jennhuddleston (at) gmail (dot) com

 

Her Unburdening

On By Shyla Fairfax-OwenIn Dark Realism, Horror, Submitted Stories (Guest Posts)1 Comment
GUEST POST BY PENNY LONG

It arose from her. It uncoiled itself from her bowels, shrugged itself off from her heart. She sighed a long, world-weary sigh and breathed it out with the vapour of the wine she had drunk, exhaled all the disappointment that she had tucked away in her being, not to be seen by others. Her sins, her opinions, the unredeemed monologue of her suffering, all these loosened themselves from her, like the button of her jeans that she had undone before sitting down. Some sought company with her other secrets – the cravings crawling into empty bowls in the sink, frustrated longings creeping under the bed. Unkind thoughts formed themselves into a film on the window behind her, making the room just a little bit darker. And the howling, lamenting unforgiveness oozed across the floor and sat erect in the chair opposite her. All these unacceptable things once settled, the sad loneliness finally found itself a place next to her on the couch, the last and most deeply hidden, stowed away in the lining of her nervous system, hiding in the hooded lids of her eyes, peering out always from its hiding place, observing the lives of others. Relieved of the need to carry her secrets inside her, lighter now, she breathed in the air of her home, the lingering aromas of stew and sadness.

Sitting alone, yet not alone, she stared at the screen in front of her and pretended not to see all the things that slithered and scuttled around her. All the bits of lies, the sarcastic remarks she had uttered that evening, the unintended wounds she had received gradually found their way into the dust on the cushions, each showing itself in her peripheral vision on its way. Occasionally one distracted her from the story she was watching, forcing her to relive an uncomfortable moment before it wheeled its way to the ceiling to join the heavy canopy of regrets. She populated her solitude. She allowed her consciousness to fill the apartment. Her thoughts and ideas, repentance and lamentations found their usual homes in the empty chairs, on the unused side of the bed. When at last they had all been released, she looked around her. Ignoring the darting and glaring of that troupe of transgressions, she perused the familiar furnishings, her eyes sliding past the carpet stain and the regret, affirming her condition: Home. Alone.

Penny Long ©

pennylong62 (at) yahoo (dot) com