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H.P Lovecraft

Loverman Chapter 9 “Night of the lotus eaters”

Hey there,
Whenever I start one of these I always have no idea what to talk about then I end up waffling for like an hour.
So tomorrow I start Cur 2 I guess, I’m not that psyched for it for some reason which is bad because I really enjoyed writing the plan for it but now it’s time to pay the piper and I’m just dreading it being shit. I dunno, I think I just need to get back on the horse and I’ll feel better, I always feel better when I’m writing. I really just need some feedback, I need someone to believe in me and there aren’t enough of those people around.
What have I been doing in the mean time, surprising yesterday was a pretty busy day, the poem was sort of prepacked honestly but I got this proofread and I managed to clean up a lot of the pitch for Cur and send it to a couple of places that might accept it. But who knows.
In other news my gamepass subscription is almost up but what should pop up within a week or two of it running out but Vampyr, a game I’ve sort of been eyeing for a while but people kept telling me was shitty and full of political nonsense. Which I believed because dontnod is famous for having these really social justicey liberal games like life is strange and life is strange 2 which is hilarious to watch lets plays of because it’s almost as cringe and on the nose as a David Cage game. They’re not subtle.
But honestly this just seems like a good game and I don’t feel like a narrative is being forced down my throat, it just feels like a solid rpg with good mechanics and I’m really enjoying it.
I think I’ll definitely do a review of it and possibly another playthrough, it kinda feels like bloodborne meets the witcher 3, but we’ll see how it pans out.
That’s about it for today I guess, no big rant planned. I think I’ll spend the rest of my day looking for reviews of Cur, maybe find some more publishers
–
Of course I had no idea what was on the piece of paper only that it seemed to spur Ericcson into a fit of furious action. He drove in almost a trance like state, gripping the wheel so hard I could hear the plastic and leather creaking. I was perturbed to try and wake him from it. I caught a glimpse of the paper and it appeared to be some kind of flyer advertising an event of some sort. I hadn’t the faintest idea what possessed him to kill those men at the gas station. And even less of an idea why a piece of paper they were carrying would cause him to act like this. It made no sense at all, well it made as much sense as it would in a dream. I didn’t want to think about that, I didn’t want to put into any conceptual process to discern whom was the dreamer and whom was the dream.
My reeling thoughts were rudely interrupted by the screeching of the well worn brakes of my mother’s long suffering Crysler. The bag I was in lurched forward and fell into the passenger side foot well.
From there I couldn’t see anything, just hear him getting out of the driver’s side and slamming the door shut behind him. Then more muffled fumblings until he opened the passenger side door and retrieved the bag I was in.
From my low angle it was too dark to make out the shape of the building he was taking me towards. There were no streetlights at all, just the sickly moon hanging half cast in the sky. There were no stars to speak of and the building seemingly had no lights or discernable activity going on outside.
But as Ericcson got closer it started to look familiar and I saw the patches of the burnt sickly pink stucco and I knew he’d taken us back. Back to the accursed place where I had died and he had fallen into this madness.
The pink bird mental institute.
Or what was left of it at least.
The building was a burnt out carcass of it’s former self, funny, I couldn’t recall a fire but it’s charred remains defied my recollection. It all happened so fast.
But why, why had he come back to this wicked place?
Then we both heard it, music, a low bass beat looped over and over.
Investigating the noise lead us around the side of the building. There was a door which seemed blackened from fire.
We approached it cautiously and as we did, the music increased in volume.
Ericcson pushed the door and it swung inward and we were assaulted by the loud bassy music blaring at us from below. Through the door was a darkened concrete stairwell leading down we assumed to the basement or some sublevel I hadn’t been privy to during the tour.
We descended the stairs following the loud ungodly music.
The basement level was fairly unremarkable service level. It housed mainly industrial size washers and driers, which seemed old and in disrepair. But they were not the source of the noise, that was deeper.
We followed a trail of shadeless hanging bulbs swaying in the complete darkness of the basement. They moved with what seemed like sentience, like the lights of an angler fish luring its prey into the crushing depths.
The darkness conjuring up such shapes in my head that would make what I had seen up to now seem like a harmless daydream. The shadows pulsed with the throbbing music, the lights swaying faster as we passed under them. At the end of this semi-dark hallway was a single green door.
There was no doubt that it was the source of the heart pounding music.
Ericcson opened the door but a crack, the music spilling out and assaulting my eardrums. With no hands to cover my ears I had no choice but to allow the din to dull and kill any sense I had until the noise became a ceaseless drone.
Although the music and the damage done to their ear drums didn’t seem to bother the shivering throngs of sallow cow eyed people dancing to it.
By my count there were at least a hundred strangely dressed people, young and old dancing in what seemed to be a large generator room. The lights strobing back and forth in time with the hypnotic drumming of the music.
Ericcson evidently saw something as he began to push his way through the crowd in the direction of the back wall. There was something, a fluttering of wings, black feathers floating to the ground. Coal black eyes looking at me from the far end of the room and then they were gone again.
I looked back at Ericcson and he was being lead through the room like a child by a woman, I could only see the back of her head. Her hair plaited down her back, she was wearing a black backless gown, her skin was pale and freckled. Looking her up and down I could see in her other hand she held a crow mask.
Ericcson was saying something to her but I couldn’t make it out over the music.
She turned and I could immediately see it was Jane, impossible, how could she have survived? But it was her, her glasses gone and her green eyes and red lips. She said something to Ericcson but I couldn’t read her lips. She smiled and turned away to lead him into the centre of the room.
He followed dutifully and I couldn’t fathom why until the crowd parted and I saw a little boy in his pyjamas standing alone in the crowd. He wasn’t crying, his face was placid and expressionless like he was sleep walking. He looked exactly like he did in my hallucination, like he’d been plucked right from it.
Ericcson dropped the duffel bag I was in and picked up his child, that’s when I noticed the strange symbol on the floor. It looked almost like a malformed five pointed star in a circle. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before except maybe through the gaps in my fingers. Or in feverish nightmares at the time I spent at that auspicious university in arkham.
I looked back at Jane, she was smiling and she held up her hand and showed him the ring. For a moment it was a parody postcard of a perfect family. She held his hand and then walked out of the circle leaving his hand to fall by his side. I watched her go, her smile turning it into a grotesque mask, a grin that seemed waxen, then she slipped the crow mask on.
–
If you want to read the rest of this weird shit, head on over to inkitt. Night of the lotus eaters
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Loverman Chapter 8 ‘red right hand’

Bet you didn’t think you’d see this, yeah neither did I.
This is basically me trying to procrastinate so I can finish this shadow book I’m reading that of course is really boring before I start the next Cur. I really hate leaving books unfinished but this book is dragging it’s fucking feet so hard man. I want to just finish it and get back into the Conan stories that are fucking amazing. So I can soak up that lovely Conan badassery and keep it in my head, pass that spirit on to Cur 2.
Because I really feel inspired when I read something like that and it’s just like rocket fuel to my creativity and energy.
So hopefully I’ll finish the boring ass Shadow book and I can get back to Aquilonia like a boss. 
It might be surprising to hear that their are stories so stupid and shitty that I write that even I abandon them. Like sometimes I get halfway through something I think will be fun and interesting to write and then I’m just not feeling it and I drop it for something better.
This coming from a guy that writes weird samurai clown nonsense and that’s the stuff that makes it, even what doesn’t make it, wrap your brain around that. But I figured since I put some of it on inkitt I might as well finish it and I saw how close I was to finishing it, like a chapter and a half, there last chapter is next. So I thought ‘fuck it’ kill some time, get some content and maybe have some fun. I guess I just didn’t really get into the character of Ericcson and I didn’t really care about his struggle and if I can’t care about him how the hell is a reader going to care about him?
So I kinda rushed the ending a little but it’s a an ok ending, it did everything I wanted to do with it. I just wanted to make a fun little lovecraftian super hero revenge story with lots of gore. Maybe some people might enjoy it, who am I kidding no one is going to read this haha.
One can dream.
Ok well that’s pretty much it, gonna make a start on Cur 2 tomorrow unless some unforseen circumstance comes along and a bus hits me or something. Won’t be able get much done over the weekend because I have lots of day job stuff to do but I should have something to show of it the week after hopefully.
See you…
–
It was getting dark, Ericcson was fully awake as far as I could tell. He slowly planed my mother’s Crysler to a stop near a tight grouping of dying oak. The trees loomed over head bare and exposed as the sky burnt out and blackened like a struck match.
The car creaked under him as he got out and slammed the door in the fashion he had become accustomed. He came around the side and picked up the bag I was currently calling home and placed me on the hood of the car for whatever reason. Maybe he thought I needed to stretch my legs, or get a lungful of fresh air, having neither faculty it seemed like a waste of time.
He went around the back of the car out of sight and I heard the trunk opening and closing.
I couldn’t see much for the trees and the looming darkness, he’d angled the car towards an old broken fence. Through the trees I could see a dilapidated red farmhouse and a barn that looked like it needed a new lick of paint.
The ground was a mix of grey and browns, dry and desolate, the leaves blowing in the wind were grey and floated like ash.
I looked closer at the fence, it was more like a small coral for sheep but with no gate. A few of the planks had given way and the fence had slumped slightly to one side, the wood looking sodden and old. On second viewing the coral seemed too small for animals and then I noticed the pieces of wood propped up at even intervals sticking out of the ground. Some of them stooped with age and decay.
Ericcson without a word came around the front of the Crysler after slamming the trunk. Obviously not content with just mistreating the drivers side door of my mother’s car. In his hand was a shovel and all at once it made sense what I was looking at.
Some folks in the more rural parts of new England preferred to have their own private plots. Or if they were just too poor they could opt to intern their dearly departed on any land they owned and create their own tombstones.
So, not a sheep or pig pen but a small family cemetery.
He started digging as the sun went down and then after it was down by the head lights of my mother’s Crysler, never stopping and never seeming to tire. After a while it almost seemed like he wasn’t breathing at all. As I recall it must have been cold but as I had stopped breathing all together I hadn’t thought that his breath should have been visible also.
I decided to give it no further though. I tried to focus on the sound of shovel carving the cold earth like a butcher chopping thick slices of meat. He sunk the blade of the shovel deep into the ground with what seemed like an icy resentment for it being there.
She wasn’t buried very deep, I know nothing of the actual burial but I know most all of her family were lying beside her already, waiting. I believe I read something about it in the paper, in any regard they weren’t currently living in that farm house. She was most likely interned by the state, otherwise she’d have been filed away on a cold shelf in the morgue.
I heard the shovel hit something hard and the sounds of his effort cease. The still night and the sounds of him scratching and scraping away dirt with the cold shovel blade, then his hands. His black nails scratching at the coffin lid. I imagined for a moment that it was her making those noises from the other side of the lid. For what could surprise me now, after the impossible things I’d seen, the impossible thing I was.
It was hard to make out with the stark light of the headlights but I saw him stand. Then I saw him stab down hard and the crack of the wood as it splintered under his boot. He lowered himself down into the hole where I couldn’t see, gently like the honeymoon in the marital bed.
There was then a low sound like a dog whimpering, mad whispered talking. I suddenly felt dizzy, like I couldn’t tell which way was up and there seemed to be pictures projected on the sky. Then it was around me, a room, a padded room. Lying on a bed, my head attached to a body I didn’t recognise. Silence and then a song whispered in the night and a knock at the door, the door to a cell.
L is for love, baby
O is for only you that I do
V is for loving virtually everything that you are
E is for loving almost everything that you do
R is for rape me
M is for murder me
A is for answering all of my prayers
N is for knowing your loverman’s going to be the answer to all your prayers.
It was a woman’s voice singing but there was no music, sung almost like a nursery rhyme, whispered through the door of the padded room. But at the same time it seemed to be all around me. Me? The me experiencing something close to a memory of Ericcson himself in that damned nut house.
L is for love, baby
O is for oh, yes I do
V is for virtue, so I ain’t gonna hurt you
E is for even if you want me to
R is for render unto me, baby
M is for that which is mine
A is for any old how, darling and
N is for any old time
Like Now!
Suddenly she was there, I had no idea how, but she was on top of me. I couldn’t stop her, couldn’t want to. She was strong and forceful and hateful and my limbs felt numb and heavy and willing. A face I knew somehow but changed, a mask of some obscure emotion covered her face and she tried to be someone else and no one. Her features mashing together in some hideous parody of feminine beauty.
Her lips burning and biting into mine, a hollow sinking feeling, cold heat.
And that ring, she was wearing the ring.
The ring.
“It’s gone”
Ericcson’s voice came from the hole.
“Her wedding ring is missing”.
–
After that Ericcson was aimless, seemingly inconsolable. Driving through the night with no destination. No goal in mind but a rising foul hatred for everything outside of my mother’s Crysler. Of course he didn’t tell me this, he’d barely said a word to me after we left the asylum. His anger, hopelessness, radiated off of him, I could feel it like heat from a lamp, smell it like second hand smoke.
‘Anger’ was a poor choice of words, there was a seething boiling disdain fomenting inside of him for nothing in particular. It felt like he wanted to tear the sky down like it was some pathetic backdrop in a school play. Pull the stars down from the sky and shatter the moon and let thick cool blackness blanket everything forever.
His restlessness was getting to me so I suggested he get something to eat or drink, anything to calm his nerves and take his mind off whatever it was on. He didn’t answer me but he soon pulled up at a little roadside diner connected on one side with a gas station outside of town.
I’m not sure why I insisted that he try calm himself or why I thought food and drink would suffice to do that. Maybe I hoped some kind of routine would spark something in him. Or if I saw him eat a cheeseburger he’d seem more human and I could feel sorry for him instead of revulsion. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen him eat or drink anything since we’d met, nor had he really slept. I was starting to wonder if he needed to or if he was even still alive. Was this really Zane Ericcson or something else wearing his face?
Regardless, some part of the man remained, the part that was driving him on, that was fueling his hatred. Why else would he visit his wife’s grave, why would he feel this sucking melancholy pulling him under a writhing tide of black bile hatred? If not love, then what?
An hour of staring at a cold bacon double cheese burger and soaking under halogen lights past by. Ericcson decided to skip the slice of keylime pie and top up of coffee and fill up my mother’s Crysler instead.
The gas station was dimly lit and in disrepair with a dingy mini mart squatting behind the pumps. A dagger eyed Asian man glared at us from behind the counter. The diner across from it, I had assumed was an all night affair but after we left it closed and they turned all the lights off.
The silence didn’t last long, punctured by a loud tire squeal and the vein rattling bass beats of urban music.
I saw them pull up in what looked like a Lincoln town car, square, with box like edges, black with a dent in the rearside fender. All this I could see as through protest I had been elevated from my position in the duffelbag on the seat. To my new lofty position of hanging from the head rest by the handle so I could at least see out of the window. A strange thing lacking a stomach but still suffering from phantom car sickness, it helps to see the horizon as most sufferers know.
They parked the car at a haphazard angle and one of the youths got out in a cloud of smoke. The music louder than ever, an oddly shaped hand rolled cigarette hanging from his mouth. He started pumping the gas as one of his friends got out to go into the mini mart. His movements loose and heavy like he was bouncing, his arms swinging by his side.
The one smoking the cigarette noticed Ericcson and shouted over the music. “Hey what’chu lookin’ at man?”
Ericcson said nothing and made no attempt not to stare at the youth.
A moment of awkwardness past then there was a loud series of pops from the mini mart and the one that had entered jogged out, a pistol hanging from his side.
“Ayyo! I said what’chu lookin at man?”
“Who dis?” The youth with the gun said, gesticulating with the pistol as he spoke not looking at Ericcson but pointing the pistol in his general direction. “This nigga wanna die too?”
“Ayyo, we gonna be late to that party man!” Another voice from inside the car shouted over the music.
“I don’t give a shit, this mufucka can I.d us man”
“Then waste his dumb ass, what you think we can wait around here all night?” A moment past as the one with the gun just stood and sweated as he readjusted the gun in his hand. “Bitch ass” The smoker said as he sucked his gums and pulled out his own gun. I can’t say much for guns, my family had never been big on them so the make and model eludes me. It was silver and rather large and I knew the dangerous end was pointed at Ericcson.
“I said; what you lookin a-“
The youth with the cigarette stopped talking as he noticed the change. He focused on Ericcson who remained constant like a waxwork, but the night was silent. No birds chirped or dogs barked, no cars passed, no wind. The pumps, the cars, the gas station, the road, the diner, the sky, were all gone. All moved away like props on a stage.
The youth gaped and his cigarette fell and hit the ground with no sound as he stared at the endless nothingness. The blank black canvass that surrounded them and then there were sounds. Only the sounds of Ericcson’s shoes as he walked closer to the youth. The tap tap tapping that echoed over the dense writhing darkness sending shocks through his veins. Each footstep like a dentist drill skipping over his teeth. The silence itself becoming thick with a terrifying low hum.
His body deflated, all the muscles in his face sagged and his arms shook at his sides as if they weren’t connected to anything. His posture was that of someone floating shoulder deep in a black pool. He felt light and weak but constantly in a comatose rhythmic somnambulist motion.
Ericcson stopped too close to him and took both his hands smiling like the devil himself. He helped the youth clasp the gun tightly in both hands. Then he forced him to put the gun in his mouth.
Ericcons smiled as he bit down on the barrel of the gun and said “Pull it niggerman!”
The youth flared with a rage that was as sudden as it was flaccid, his trembling fingers pulled the trigger and blew out the back of Ericcson’s head. A thick black brain matter exploded out of the back of his head like the ink of a squid and he fell backwards slowly as if he was sinking and then he stopped.
Ericcson rose to his feet from mid fall with a queer slithering motion and he laughed soundlessly.
There was a loud thunderous bang and suddenly reality bobbed into jarring focus like falling in a dream. Everything was the same but now the gun was in the mouth of the youth.
He pulled the trigger and his eyes rolled back into his head as he covered the car in brain matter.
His friend who had come out of the mini mart froze and then started up again like clockwork firing wildly at Ericcson who hadn’t moved from the pumps. Ericcson grinned and raised his hand, out of his sleeve. A vicious stygian tendril shot out and in a blink of an eye had hold of the youth with guns arm and was wrenching him about like a dog with a chew toy.
The tendril, with an inhuman level of strength whipped the youth through the windscreen of the car. His head imploding against the toughened glass and landing in the drivers seat.
The youth in the back of the car got out the otherside and started firing over the roof. In an instant one of those foul tendrils clutched at his throat, wrapping it’s veiny muscular limbs around his neck. The tentacle yanked him across the roof of the car.
Another tentacle slashed at his wrist, severing the hand completely before the one around his neck twisted his head off slowly. His cries trailing off in a distended vile screech like a dying animal.
His body fell from the roof of the car with a terrible wet thud.
Ericcson’s feet scraped the concrete as he walked over to the dead man’s car and casually turned the radio off. He searched the dead man’s jacket pocket, the deadman closest to the pumps. he pulled what seemed to be a piece of paper out of it and walked back over to my mother’s crysler, staring at it intently.
–
If for some insane reason you want to read the rest of this chapter or this weird ass story, head on over to inkitt. Red right hand
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Loverman Chapter 6 ‘Ask for Lucas’

Heyo,
Gonna be another quick one sadly because I spent most of today christmas shopping and I’m probably not going to be doing poetry or more blogging this week because this month is really busy for me, at work and obviously in my real life.
I was kidding myself when I thought I could get Diana done this week or the next, it’s gonna carry through to next month. I just don’t have the time to get in depth on it. I’m not just dotting i’s and crossing t’s I’m totally restructuring it and that takes time and a lot of concentrated effort. But it’ll all be worth it in the end I’m hoping. Otherwise I’m pretty much as fucked as I suspect. The spectre of doubt is looming hard and let’s just say I’m not feeling the christmas spirit one little bit. 
Just more confused and deranged as time goes on. I really don’t know what I’m going to do if this isn’t it, well I know but I don’t like it.
Fuck me, this is a grim christmas, was last year this grim? Probably not. Last christmas I had plans to go see the only person that matters to me and this year I don’t have the money and it’s my own stupid fault. I really fucked up. I just need one win. I miss her so much.
–
 
What we learnt from Letho was feeble, as it appeared Ericcson’s true quarrel was no amateur braggart. Letho guarded his identity with much more zeal as we could ascertain not even a physical description. The way he described it, it appeared they’d met on some role playing forum devoted to some obtuse writer of cult fame.
 
With some peculiarity they’d struck an ospicious bargain to meet masked at Ericcson’s house. Then to carry out the crime never having met in person without their masks. Coming in separate cars and leaving alone after committing the crime.
 
It seemed very strange to me but upon remembering my circumstances it didn’t seem too far out of the realm of possibilities. It had occurred to me Ericcson could not be the killer of his wife and most if not all of what he said was confirmed by this complete stranger. If his testimony could be verified as correct through the inhuman torture Ericcson inflicted on him.
 
There was something that gave me pause, a moment of strange clarity as Ericcson asked him softly and grimly why he did it. There was almost a moment of confusion, as if the question was obvious or didn’t even occur to him. His eyes rolled in his head and glazed over for a moment before he looked at Ericcson with a stark dumb cow-like expression before saying “Huh”.
 
Although he didn’t prove totally useless, a quick turnover of his pockets turned out a card from an erotic bookstore on the other end of town. There was a small note written on the back in pencil that said “Ask for Lucas”.
 
A thorough search of his phone elicited a series of messages from someone only listed as ‘L’ in his contacts. It seemed like no minor coincidence. Was it possible that one or two of the accomplices had broken the bonds of their anonymity packed and made contact in the real world unmasked? Or at the very least planned to do so.
 
It seemed altogether likely and since Ericsson and I had little else to go on it was pertinent for us to at least call the number. And do as the note had instructed; ‘ask for Lucas’.
 
Stealing himself away in some small coffee shop closer to the edge of town, the town of which was littered with them. Full to the brim with all manner of social outcasts all tapping away with their heads down under woollen hats. Sadly I lacked a notion for directions even when my head was attached to its body. After the separation it was much harder for me to orientate myself despite the fact it seemed to be more important than ever. I couldn’t say where exactly we were with what little I could see from the hole in the bag. I could smell the coffee and the lonely desperation of its patrons. The nasally cries of adolescents asking for increasingly innane concoctions of coffee all containing soy.
 
He began to punch in the number on the card of Letho’s phone, of which we had commandeered as at present he had no use for it. The image of his deflated corpse passed in front of my eyes suddenly but I felt no tinge of guilt or human sorrow. Just a pale flash of rememberance, a filing away of a person. In my memory he sat hunched, looking flat and pale and dull. His eyes and mouth inhumanely stretched in indescribable horror as a black ichor dripped out of every orifice. A wrinkling of my nose was the only reaction and an odd sinking feeling as I knew I would have to see more. Much more before the day was through riding as I was on the right hand of the devil.
 
He held the phone to his ear listening as it rang. It rang two or three times before a nasal voice of what could have been a teenage boy or a young woman answered and uttered the vile name of the place she worked. A vapid disgusting pun relating to sexual acts I feel no need to glorify in my notes. Needless to say she said them with some shrill glee that peaked at a dull metronome having said it many times before. Each time losing it’s charm and comic timing for her.
 
“Hi this is Debbie, what fantasy can I fulfil for you today?” She said. Her voice was hoarse and unfeminine.
 
“I was told to ask for Lukas”
 
“Lukas isn’t here today”
 
“Do you know when he’ll be in?”
 
“Jeez, I dunno, why don’t you ask him?”
 
“Do you have his house number?”
 
“He’s the boss, of course I have his house number but I’m not gonna give it out to every random guy that calls.”
 
“He’s an old friend of mine.”
 
“Oh yeah? How many piercings does he have in his face?
 
“Seven”
 
“Wrong answer asshole, he doesn’t have any piercings- in his face”. And with that she slammed the phone down and the line went dead.
 
“Well that was unproductive” I said.
 
It didn’t take him long to find the seedy little hole in the wall, sandwiched as it was between a dry cleaners and another damnable coffee shop. A small flat single storey boxy building with blacked out windows and a stainless steel door.
 
Ericcson pushed it open with me swinging by his side. A chinchy chime rang over the door. Looking over the racks overflowing with the worst smut and degenerate filth there was a girl flipping through the pages of a magazine.
 
Ericcson had taken now to wearing something of a disguise but sunglasses indoors in my opinion did little to detract attention. But it seemed he’d also gained some sensitivity to light with his new found, I’m reluctant to say ‘powers’.
 
He marched briskly to the counter stopping not one second to cast a curious gaze at the layers of smut and filth covering all four walls. I almost felt a little thankful that I had lost all urges relating to these acts with losing the relevant appendages. Viewing them in this form made my non-existant stomach churn, acts both degrading and unsanitary to say the least. It boggled the mind that there was such a species with as little taste and decorum as this. That almost took it’s reproductive act as some sort of sport or sad melancholy cynical joke.
 
–

If you want to read more of this chapter head on over to inkitt Ask for Lukas

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Loverman Chapter 5 ‘The thirsty dog’

Good day to you monstrous lovecraftian abominations young and old.
Been another weird week for me as far as personal life stuff goes, very distracting to say the least, weird but in a good way. Happiness for me in a lot of ways is sort of disconcerting, a high with an inevitable drop at the end. It’s little wonder that there so much of me that longs for the predictability, the safety of misery.
No one including myself can let me down if my expectations are always that of inevitable misery, a fool hopes for any above that but at the same time, I would let it come over me if it wished.
I mean it goes without saying I’m a weird guy and a lot of the time I wonder really what I have to offer a woman above my looks and other… talents. Aside from those things I’m not much of a catch honestly, I’m pretty fucking horrible if I do say so myself and I’m broke as shit haha.
So usually if a woman likes me I feel like I need to sit her down on a couch and have someone with a goatee and a german sounding name take a good long look at her haha.
Anyway that aside, I am ashamed to say I still haven’t completed the editing of Diana, it pains me, but all my effort will be put into it and despite personal life engagements and work and hell and high water, it will be done hopefully this week, definitely the next and then I can do a final run through it, do the all important spellcheck haha. Then off it goes to be prodded by shrewd unfeeling bean counters to be measured and hopefully found in good stead.
Oh I finally finished that Shadow pulp, the first one and honestly it was kind of underwhelming. It didn’t really have a punchy ending it just sort of fizzled out. Very disappointing considering how the rest of it shook out. I expected the shadow to straight up murder everyone and instead he just fannied around a bit and then the police arrested everyone like some lame scooby doo shit.
It just fell sort of flat considering how well they’d built up the shadow to that point, sort of a scary ghostlike figure, everywhere and nowhere, merciless and precise. I just feel like the story was sort of shackled by it’s time and if it were written now it would’ve been either totally shit and filled with political bullshit or awesome haha.
Kinda considering doing my own Shadow pulp, might spitball some ideas while I read the next one which I hope will be a little darker if you forgive the really lazy pun sort of, I guess it’s a pun. Shadow/darker, sort of, fuck it who cares?
It didn’t bore me to tears like the witcher did, the story was ok, the characters were ok, the action was pretty good and the shadow was great, it was a good mystery it just felt a little watered down hamfisted. It felt a little toothless. But I still liked it and I really want to read more for sure.
Back to it I guess.
See you… 
–
My monstrous companion and I had found ourselves a quiet spot in an exceptionally seedy and hole in the wall. The thirsty dog was styled in a way that suggested it was an old English pub. By the looks of it, it was just as old and had not seen a broom or a mop since the witches burned. Their ashes probably still swept under the ancient rugs.
 
The place had obviously had something of a makeover. A television playing nothing but sports, football, the American variety, a broken jukebox in the corner. It was fairly cosy place fashioned in all dark woods, drafty, teaming with dark corners and seemingly dark history.
 
We’d positioned ourselves in a corner booth that was fashioned into a little room. Inside old pictures hung on the walls and there was a false fireplace in the corner. The pictures were of an eclectic variety. Spanning from old pictures of antiquated farm equipment and dishevelled old barns. To noblemen with an odious pretraecian aspect to them. Their mouths much larger than normal and their eyes rounded and glassy and bulging. The bar ran by our right side, the corner poking out like a crooked elbow towards the entrance. We had us a full view of people coming and going and the bar itself while allowing us to be neatly tucked out of sight.
 
My cohort dozed in the corner with his long black coat over his head so no curious old geezer might recognise him. It seemed that his new body needed lots of rest but as far as food I’d seen him neither eat nor drink a morsel since we met. As for myself having no stomach or any organs to speak of made the act utterly superlative.
 
He’d left me on watch as I had little more purpose. It may have been startling for the patrons to see a disembodied head even if it was alive and more or less so. I was securely hidden in something a kin to a bowling ball bag but was more or less a thick duffel bag he’d acquired during my sleeping hours. I was inside it and could see through a series small holes he’d made along the sides of the bag.
 
We were waiting for something but for what I was not certain but I was made certain that I would know it when I saw it.
 
The bar was quiet as it was early and only regulars sat like squat frogs, old men plastered to their seats watching and not watching the tv. Drifting in and out of consciousness, waiting for some great wind to waft them away.
 
I had no idea how long it had been since the incident at the asylum, or even what day it was, having no wrist to keep a watch or way of consulting a calendar. I was growing very bored of being like one of those little dogs women like to carry in their purses, small but altogether useless. Few people came and went and none of very much interest, two old women shaking a tin for some such charitable work, a homeless drunk wandering in and out. It had been maybe an hour or more before someone interesting arrived.
 
He was a small stout man of maybe late twenties early thirties with a dark stubbly beard wearing running bottoms. Although I can’t attest to how much running he did and a sweatshirt with a banal slogan on it. His hair was loose and unwashed and his manner was light of foot for a man his size, with boyish soft features and skin. A doughy featureless blob of a human being but nevertheless carrying some dark aura of imminent threat. He addressed the barman curtly, his dark heavy lidded eyes and unwashed face scanning him with some esoteric suspicion. A curl of anger or fear at his lips as I watched him talk without hearing his words. I had some slight talent of reading lips but he was turned away slightly and I could only make out ‘Looking for me’.
 
The barman looked nervous and all together reluctant to do anything more than polish bar glass and wanted to keep very much to himself. But after some prodding from the shadey figure he subtly nodded his head in the direction of the room I and my strange cohort inhabited.
 
The stout youth cast a wary but cautious glance in our direction and started to inch his way across the bar in our direction. He kept his head down as he worked his way down the bar. Trying to look as casual as possible while being anything but. His hand tightly gripping something in his sweatshirt pocket as he laboured his way towards us, his pale flabby face turning a bright pink.
 
He stopped at the jukebox and pretended to browse songs as he took a long sideways glance through the ajar door. Through it I can imagine he could only see Ericcson’s shoes as he was laid out on the booth sleeping like a corpse completely motionless. He put on some loud rock music with excessive symbol bashing and continued to edge closer to the room we occupied.
 
He got to the door of the room and without taking the pistol out of his sweatshirt pocket he prodded the door open as slow as possible the rest of the way.
 
His face was cold and damp looking as he starred glassy eyed with his thick lipped mouth hanging open. His tongue working up spittle as he probed the room with his eyes licking the dry corners of his mouth.
 
A small satisfied smile curled the corners of his mouth as he saw Ericcson fast asleep in the corner of the booth. The man slowly forced the rest of his bulk around the thin glass door before quietly shutting it behind his wide frame.
 
He took the gun all the way out of his sweatshirt pocket hunching forward and silently moved closer to the sleeping figure under the coat.
 
I watched him as like some sort of fat cat he stalked closer to my daemoniac partner. The small calibre automatic pistol gripped tightly in his cherub like chubby mitt. His face swirling with self loathing and vile hatred and fear, sweating and pinkish, his breath laboured and guttural sounding.
 
–
Read the rest over on inkitt. The thirsty dog
 
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Loverman Chapter 4 ‘Let love in’

Bonjour,

Sort of rushing because I’m totally consumed working on Diana, reaching completion. I almost completely forgot about blogging and proofreading other stuff. All my attention is on that right now and it really has to be.

All other stuff is taking a backseat right now until that is done and dusted and as near as perfect as possible until it can fly off to some cold hearted person to shit on.

Ok so that’s all you’re getting and haha, sorry about that but this really is important, this could be it and it needs all my energy and time and love and effort.

See you…

–

I felt the room grow darker and the air heavier as if the room were sinking into an inky black abyss.

 

Jorge leapt from his corner and gripped the writhing tattered figure with his huge brawny arms as Ericcson howled and cried “They were always there waiting! They’ll come for you as they came for me!”

 

Jorge seemed to struggle to keep the much smaller man in place and as I watched in horror I saw odd depressions on his dark skin as if he fought against some invisible colossus and then came an ungodly cracking noise and his arms twisted and snapped back as if he were an insect in the hands of some veracious child.

 

Then I saw Avery, his face drawn in silent horror, his eyes locked on the scene of the large Indian fighting with this invisible force, fumbling blindly in the drawer of his desk.

 

Another hideous cracking noise, sending spurts of blood and vile smelling marrow across the room, hot and viscous as it was, Jorge’s deep booming cries growing louder and then muffled and high pitch and shrill like an animals. I tore my hands from my face glued as they were by sheer fright and I saw his head squeezed as if through shrink wrap, compressed and then pop like a watermelon dropped from ten stories. The rest of his limbs spasmsing with some electric impulse, torn asunder by the invisible tendrils.

 

Avery, his aphable bearded face was white as a sheet and his hand was ever whiter as it gripped the handle of a pistol he aimed in the general direction of Ericcson firing wildly and hitting only the walls of his tiny office and me in my gut, the burning pain seering my flesh like a hot iron.

 

Then his hand was gripped by some unseen impulse and it was snapped as if it was a twig, the bone protruding out of the skin, his heart beating fast pumping out tiny spurts of dark red blood over his desk as he coughed and hiccuped the gun dropping into my lap glazed in a warm sheen of his vital fluids.

 

I fumbled the thing frantically with one arm, the other to stem the bleeding from my wound. The gun was hot and wet and I’d never even seen one outside of a film before let alone handled or fired such a thing. I gripped it in both hands and tried to make it hold still but for it’s incessant shaking in my boney fingers. I squeezed it aiming at the mass of opalescent tendrils stretching out from Ericcson and he vomited the vile things into this world.

 

Avery eyes bulged out of his skull as the invisible arms squeezed him, the veins in his face growing long and distended and then bursting, the blood of which seeping into his clothes.

 

I squeezed the trigger as hard as I could but it felt hot and slippery in my hands and it wouldn’t stay still, I had to fight the thing to stay straight and will the trigger to fire and the hammer to fall and when it did there was only a distinct pinching sensation around my neck and then blackness.

 

Only a feeling of falling, an emptiness, a deep black nothingness, tumbling forever and then a light, a horrible light and a screaming which could only have been my own but seemed to be that of a babies first, a new birth, a new horrible world born before me as I opened my eyes.

–

Read the rest on inkitt.

Let love in

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Loverman Chapter 3 ‘Man of constant sorrow’

The name of this chapter is only a coincidence haha.

Hell of a week, had the worst shift of life at work to date, I almost got down on my knees and prayed to Trump to get me through it haha. And then more unpleasantness followed that was to a point where I wondered if my life was actually a practical joke. The events being so farcical I doubted I was awake. None of which I can really go into, needless to say if I could afford a therapist he would hear about the whole humiliating affair at length.

And I would be way more bummed out about the whole disaster if something great hadn’t happened directly after, well I should say something terrifying and then wonderful. Well I’m not counting all my chickens yet but I’m also not thinking about sticking my head in an oven to make God laugh. So that’s something.

I got a message that the one of the most important people to me was sick and my heart hit the basement until I was told she was ok and I saw her sunshiny face again. So relieved and happy and then something weirder happened, I got swept back up into something I was sure was dead and gone with something as easy as a smile. It only took a smile to shine a light on feelings I was sure were gone. We’re taking it slow for now, for the first time in our history together but I know it’ll be worth it.

That’s all because I’ve been reading bugger all this week but what I did read of the shadow on my way to work I really loved mainly because of the way the story is told. It’s all third person from the perspective of someone who is witnessing the shadow and it makes it delightfully creepy. The shadow is almost some kind of monster and it’s really good, like the main character is the right hand of the devil almost. I really like it, it’s old but still manages to be engaging and creepy and interesting.

Anyway gotta get down to doing some editing or proofreading, it’s not gonna do itself after all haha.

See you…

 

 

–

I turned in horror and revulsion, could it speak, was it listening to us?

It seemed to shudder for a moment and then a noise like air escaping a tire, a dull low hissing as air came to it’s dry cracked lips and then a voice from far away, like someone talking at the end of a far flung hallway.

“Had to” The voice was strained and it seemed to amount to a strange buzzing as if there were bees caught in his throat, his voice giving off a strange vibration. “Coates”

“What about Coates?”

“He wouldn’t stop”

“Wouldn’t stop?”

“Asking about my dreams”

“So what did you do to him?”

“Stopped him”

“Would you mind telling Henry about the night you lost your wife, would that be alright?”

I swallowed waiting for his response, all at once his eyes focused and he looked at me with a pained searching glance that I couldn’t describe.

“Yes”

“Well go ahead.”

“I was- trying- trying to find something.” He swallowed, his voice brimming with that strange buzzing noise scratching at his throat. “My work, it became stale, the spark- died and I was having to dig deeper to find inspiration. Using a form of meditation and salt solution I could induce trance like states to better commune with the great darkness.”

“The great darkness” I asked dreamily.

“A place inside, a dreamstate, source for my inspiration.”

All at once I remembered the paintings in the day room, the strange vistas and odd creatures and remembering in the past his work seemed quite benign. Not post-modern but classical almost, capturing a singular beauty from nature but the market has no great demand for paintings such as those these days and I could recall his style had become quite abstract and strange almost terrifying, beastly in their suggestion. Some far flung horribleness that could only be glimpsed in dreams.

“I knew what I was doing might be- dangerous, but I had little choice, I feared that everything I had built would come crumbling down if I turned back. That if I did not press forward I might have to resort to painting children’s faces on the boardwalk to put food on the table. I feared my wife might leave me if I couldn’t keep her in the life she’d grown accustomed to, so I had no choice – for what we do for love is risk damnation itself.” He let out a pained airless cough. “and I did love her, a fearful terrible quaking love that every fibre of my being feared to lose.-

It started like nothing at all at first, my dreams only having the vaguest hints of the nightmares I later saw. I had thought my dreams were just a result of an elaborate imagination, growing up I had fanciful notions as most children do, of knights and castles and great dragons. But this was so alien it hardly fit into any mainstream folklore at all.

It seemed like every day I spent meditating I could feel myself getting closer to something awesome. And in my dreams I felt even less inhibition and control. As if something were drawing me further down a long a stairway, odd shapes twisting in the distance.

Something I remembered most distinctly were fish. Not unlike our worlds fish but these glowed with a cosmic opulence and danced around my head as if in water, drawing me closer down into the dark waterless ocean.

I felt myself growing lighter and more lurid with each step I took the path behind me a sturdy rushing wall of water.

Each morning I woke feeling unrested, like I’d been walking all night just like my dream, my mind had no retreat and I could feel a strange pull even in my waking hours. I meditated and felt myself slipping away and pulling myself back from the brink with whatever morsel of inspiration I could pluck from the torrent of black madness down there in it’s depths.

I felt as if I was an invisible watcher a voyeur, dis-embodied floating above the strange eon old city under the waves. Nothing could see me or touch me, I had the invulnerability of the watcher and I could glance at the strange structures before me with their haunting shapes and maw-like open doorways, windowless and dark.

I would wake and sketch them as best as I could remember but as time went on I felt myself feeling more and tired and withdrawn like I’d never slept those nights at all and I was just lying there awake.

It got worse as I’d paint, I could swear it, those fish, they’d followed me. I saw them while I was awake, only fleeting glances of them in the corners of my eyes, just enough to tell myself I didn’t see them at all but to give a gnawing feeling of coming darkness. That crushing blackness closing in on me.

I had no idea what I was doing, I was just an aimless wanderer in a world I didn’t understand, glimpsing behind the curtain of night not knowing whether something was looking back at me from the darkness.”

“And was there? Something watching?” I asked almost shaking, without even thinking of my words as I stared into the strange man’s milky eyes.

–

Man of constant sorrow

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Loverman Chapter 1 ‘Paint a vulgar picture’

Ok truthfully just desperate for content at this point and not really feeling up to starting Diana two, I dunno, I just feel kind of drained creatively, might be something to do with my sleep patterns but I don’t feel super pumped about it. And I don’t wanna start anything unless I’m ready to start it. So I’m just back in the trenches finishing this off, which is one of the stories I started and sort of abandoned when I lost focus of where it was going.

I think I literally abandoned this story to write the first Diana so I’m kind of hoping for that to happen again, just to be writing this not really knowing where I’m going then boom get hit the lightning bolt again.

I didn’t abandon this because it was shit, I just kind of lost my place because this is a story I didn’t write out a really detailed plan for, now I write out these really detailed chapter breakdowns I almost never look at but they’re there in my brain. But for this it was sort of up in the air and I can’t really place, I’m not sure what I was doing with it so it’s harder to keep pace on it.

Just trying to keep my mind busy so I don’t go insane, kind of ironic considering the subject matter. I do love Lovecraft but I dunno it feels sort of hollow copying him or trying to make it into a marvel haha. I dunno, it just doesn’t get my blood pumping as much as Cur did, well I don’t anything could get my blood pumping as much as Cur did. Too soon for a sequel to that but I should start work on a plan for it at least, the plan for Diana two was finished ages ago, I just might want to go over it again.

In other news really enjoying the latest Parker book it sort of starts off as a normal Parker book and slowly escalated into an all out war bringing back some of the best characters from the series, even one from the fucking dead haha. I tried finding info on this but I could swear this one character died in a previous book this books references and I went back and sure enough, he’s dead as a doornail, I guess Westlake just forgot haha. Which is so weird because of how he seems so good and keeping all these characters alive in his universe. To miss bringing a guy back from the dead haha. Maybe it was a different Ed Mackey with the same wife haha. I dunno, I’ll give it a pass, he is a cool character.
Also so stupidly excited about this but I managed to track down and pirate all the conan, shadow and solomon kane pulps and I can’t wait to read them. So I’m gonna be knee deep in like 1920’s era pulp fiction for a while, should be really fun and inspiring. I can’t wait to get into it.

Anyhoo, hours a waining and I need to do some proof reading, wasted too much time already setting up the Loverman Inkitt page for you to mosey on over to.

See you…

–

On recollection of that singularly disgusting building my mind is hesitant to reconstruct the image of the hideous fuchea paint. Which cast over it like a layer of bubbled pink flesh hanging over a rancid rotting skeleton of a building. The colour of which I might imagine of those many chosen people who were exposed to a noteably vile a substance as cyanide gas intended as such for vermin. Their bodies bloated and pink, skin bubbling like that of a suckling pig slowly roasted over an open flame. The bones of the building that of an old English town house, transported brick by brick from such old haunts as Glastonbury. Home to such tails of wicked faeries that would disappear unlucky travellers who might have the poor fortune to rest upon a certain rock deemed sacred to the cruel ironic justice of the fae folk.

 

To this day I have seldom the choice to replay this ‘event’ over and over in my head. As it was this soggy new England morning in maine that I was to lose my grip on the mortal coil for better or worse.

 

It was a notably wet early morning that I was to set foot on the grounds of the Pink Bird mental asylum as it stood in the October of 1994 in the new England town of Presque isle maine.

 

Having graduated from a university of note some years before I was applying for a newly opened position at the facility. I’d hasten to add I had grown irritated at relaying which university I’d graduated from. As it seemed to invoke strange and morbid fascination from anyone that heard the name which is why I refuse to mention the accursedly wicked place even in these notes I scrawl now. Strange rumours dogged it of doctors coming from there possible forty years hence conducting strange research into the reanimation of dead flesh. I had no interest in such study for it was the mind that interested me. It became increasingly more irritating as people seemed to imbue me with vicarious curiosity at the history and rumours that abound said university of which I deem to remain nameless. It’s past neither in my time there nor in my present state interested me at all.

 

That being said I can’t help remarking on my present predicament and wandering if the accursed place had some hand in my misfortune.

 

I approached the building which I had remarked looked like a corpse prepared hastily for an open casket viewing. A make over having possibly taken place in the early seventies had not aged well and as it sat off the beaten track in the back country of new England.

 

The garden was slightly overgrown, the hedges seemed to crawl out and attempt to swallow the narrow path that led from the road. A large bare tree stood in the court before the building reaching up into the slate coloured sky of that misty morning. The colours of the hedges a mix of deep damp greens and autumnal oranges and browns forming a mash of living and dying rott. The smell of which was slightly sweet.

 

I approached the building in an old crysler my mother had left me passing a few years prior. The car was in fairly good condition but wide and maneuvered like that of an old tugg boat on choppy waters. As I wasn’t the most robust figure of a man I was prone to car sickness which made me slightly light headed as the car lurched around the tight oval curve of the main court around that old bare tree with it’s dark grey bark.

 

I parked as near the entrance as I felt was polite as there was no markings of any kind and only one other car parked in a similar fashion. But notably of more refined taste, a dark blue bently with tasteful chrome wheels.

 

I ascended a steep set of slightly damp stone steps to reach a large but ramshackle white wooden door as cracked and creased as the rest of the paint work on the old building. The whole thing looming over my head looked like a sore open wound crawling with unwanted plant life like dry boney fingers peeling at the cracks in the saturated fuschia paint.

 

Taken with some odd ceremony I knocked on the old door and was met with silence and then a dull echoing noise I attributed to the age of the building. But sounded oddly almost like a person sighing deeply or the sound of sawing wood.

 

After getting no response from my peculiar inclination to knock as if it was episode of downtown abbey and I was about to be greeted by some overly verbose woman in a bustiare. I shuddered at the thought and twisted the old rusty doorknob which released a coppery scent and then popped open with a shudder that ripped through the entire frame and an awful creaking scraping noise that went through me like the sound of grinding teeth.

 

“Oh I’m sorry” A young woman said as I almost fell on her through the door as it gave way faster than I thought it might. “I should have warned you about the door, I heard you knocking I was just…”

 

I was taken by her instantly, a beauty of note, her blonde hair tied into a tight but full bun secured in place with what looked like a chopstick. A set of small reading glasses perched on the tip of a short sharp nose below of which rested a set of full pursed lips painted with a muted dark pink lipstick which seemed to match the sparse spackling of light freckles on her cheeks.

 

Her lidded eyes were green and distinctive under neatly plucked eyebrows, perfect eyelashes beating like that of a butterflies wing. Her face a delicate pale canvas of faintly german irish features.

–

Read the rest of this chapter on inkitt. Paint a vulgar picture

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Chapter 4 Every day is like Sunday

Ok finally got the latest chapter properly edited at great expense to me I may add haha. As always do yo extreme paranoia and neatfreakedness this is but a snippet of the whole chapter which is enormously long. I’m almost finished the book at large, and I may go back and break up some of the chapters so that people feel smarter when they read it “Look ma I read a whole chapter, aint I just Albert Hemmingway junior?”. But no seriously, it’s almost done in it’s delicious raw form ready for editing. It’s shaping up to be around 80k give or take a few thousand words.
Anyway I hope these changes tickle your fancy and if you want to read everything out so far you can find them on inkitt in a lovely mobile format for all your doodads by following this link;

‘Every day is like Sunday’
~

On the edge of town, a sign read ‘Sage Valley – Population 979’. Halogen lights burned cold with a tinny buzzing sound that was both soothing and nauseating.  Early morning was shaking its head and wondering what had happened. It was dark, the air was thick and electrifying. A gas station sign flickered on and off; it was empty, a dead time. The cold concrete forecourt stood bare and desolate and dirty and drab. Cricket sounds etcetera etcetera.

The stale, sterile light inside the gas station lit everything with an off-colour, sickly blue tint. It was just a small town gas station, like the kind you’d see in any crappy slasher movie: a one storey affair with a minimart inside, stocked with essential corn and meat-based snacks and energy drinks, the kind that turned your piss green and soupy.

“Daryl! You better not be sleeping again. Anyone else steals any gas I’m gonna take it out of your ass!” A booming, cigar-scarred voice came from somewhere in the back, through the thin corkboard walls of the gas station. A young man, with his feet up on the counter, slid the magazine covering his pock-marked face off one eye and opened it. He fixed his chair to the upright position, surreptitiously letting the magazine fall into his half-cupped hands. He gave an ever so effortless yawn.

“Shut up, you old fuck! I’m still living! Nobody out here!” he said, in a semi-raised voice, which he then lowered to address himself. “Gotta be four in the morning. No one needs gas in this goddamn town no more. Everyone driving those piece of shit roller-skate cars they got.”

Daryl rearranged himself in his seat and got as comfortable as he could get with his eyes open, reclining only slightly before pausing to look around and take a whiff of the cool night air cut with the smell of disinfectant. On top of the latent smells of puke and piss, there was a definitive lingering scent of cheap booze: burn your gut worse than drinking straight from the gas pump, but it was cheaper to drink from the bottle.

He resigned himself to the fact that nothing was going on. The roads were dead and dark and he rationalised a resting of the eyes, letting his heavy lids close and his vision become hazy as he blinked at the transparent glass doors of the minimart. Just as he hit the point of no return with his dozing, the doors parted soundlessly and then closed again, giving him pause as to whether he saw anything at all.

His eyes opened and rolled to attention as if he were waking from a coma. He could have sworn he saw someone come in. He strained to hear: padding, damp noises. A stray wandering off the street drawn by the smell of stale complex carbohydrates?

He straightened in his seat and stepped back into his body. He looked around. “Err, can I help you?”

A rustling sound, cans rattling; instant foreboding crossed the brow beneath his trucker cap. A cold damp grease formed where he had rested the magazine while he was sleeping. Sweat rolled off his forehead now as he felt the urgency of being alone. “Hello?”

Sounds of gumming and biting, ripping, crinkling: a dog for sure. He curled around the counter, picking up a tire-thumping bat from under his seat. He walked briskly to the front of the counter. Reaching the door, all his nervous energy left him with a cough. And he became lifeless and limp, trying to hold the bat firmly in a clammy palm. It dangled by his side like a twig.

“Who’s there?” Daryl called out, like all those clichés in the movies. And he cursed himself for falling into that trap. But a new, sudden fear of the unknown twisted in his guts now and he felt compelled to ask.

The scuttling sound of bare feet on linoleum sent a cold shiver up his spine and a dry gob of spittle down his throat. The noise moved deeper towards the back of the store. He felt his feet dragging him listlessly in the direction of the sound, the bat swinging at his shins.

“Hello?” he called out again, groping at the wet walls of his sanity, trying to come up with any number of reasonable conclusions to this event. A dog? A cat? A racoon? A crazy homeless guy? A drunk chick? Some hungry pothead or all of the above?

He turned down the snack isle, which was oddly paired with feminine hygiene products. He rested his shaking hand on the side of the metal shelves. He forced himself to look around them to where the noise emanated. His body felt numb. Pulses of adrenaline coursed through his brain and sent shocks all the way down to his fingertips.

Hunched over a small mound of assorted snacks and raw or semi-raw meat products, was what appeared to be a child. He saw its naked back. The skin looked cold and drawn and wet, like a fish or a lizard. It was so pale it looked blue. The child hunched over the food, making soft sopping gnashing sounds.

~

For the rest of the chapter mosey on down to inkitt sil vous plait;

‘Every day is like Sunday’

 

 

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