Darker Than Black excerpt Darker Than Black, Tales of Horror

Darker Than Black excerpt

Darker Than Black, Tales of Horror

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“She’s a very thin woman,” Bobby said after his first clear look at the strange lady in black. “Her skin doesn’t look natural; it has a green pall. And her eyes are black. Helluva makeup job.”

“Let me see,” Andy reached for the binoculars.

“No way,” Bobby pulled back, almost losing his balance and falling off the tree house. After gathering himself, he put the binoculars back to his eyes again. “The stroller looks a hundred years old. The lace is ripped and the wheels are rusty. I bet it makes a helluva racket.”

“Can you see what’s inside of it?”

“No, wrong angle, and she has the lid up. We’ll have to wait till she passes us.”

“Not going to happen, she’s turning into the cemetery.”

“We have to follow her!”

“Let’s go!”

The boys swiftly climbed out of the tree and ran across the street, binoculars and wooden swords in hand. They crept along as quietly as they could once they entered the cemetery, going from tree to tree, like ninjas. The girl in black didn’t seem to notice.

The shadowy girl walked the winding path until she was about halfway through the cemetery. Then she cut across a swath of graves that led to an area of mausoleums. The boys closed in, not to attack, but to get a better view and understanding of what she was up to.

She pushed the stroller over rocks, roots and whatever was in the way as she made a beeline to the creepiest mausoleum in the cemetery. It was half covered in vines, mostly covered in moss, had cracks all through it and its door was half open. The girl squeezed the stroller in and from there the darkness of the crypt took her out of view.

“Whaah!” a cry came from the crypt.

“It’s a baby!” the boys screamed in unison.

Their outburst must have startled the girl and an otherworldly fog began pouring out of the crypt. She hissed at them in the most hellish voice the boys had ever heard, setting the hairs on their arms and neck straight up. Then they heard the sounds of heavy stones being rubbed against each other. She was either opening or closing a tomb.

Ready for battle, the boys ran towards the crypt but stopped dead in their tracks when the growls of an angry wolf startled them. It was humungous, and had a bloodthirsty look its glowing red eyes. It slowly came out of the shadows and placed itself between the crypt and the boys, its white fur blending ominously with the fog.

With nothing left to do but flee, the scared boys started slowly walking backwards. The wolf stayed where it was at but continued its eerie growling. When they’d gotten out of sight of the beast, they turned and ran as fast as they could out of the cemetery and into their backyard.

Hell is Empty excerpt, Darker Than Black, Tales of Horror

Hell is Empty excerpt

Darker Than Black, Tales of Horror

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It didn’t long for her to understand that the IV was just to keep her alive. As the days dragged into weeks, she started to resemble a skeleton. She wondered if she could be kept alive indefinitely like this, like a coma patient. Despite the constant high from the sedatives the figure occasionally spiked into her IV, she would panic and struggle against her bonds. Her wrists and ankles had been rubbed raw from her constant wrestling against them, but still she couldn’t slip through. Still, she refused to accept her fate.

The next time the doctor figure entered, he was pushing a laptop computer on an old fashioned rollable television stand. Taken aback, Mary Beth didn’t yell at the man this time. Instead, she quietly watched as he placed it in front of her, locked the wheels, plugged it in and queued up a video. He pushed play, tapped the mouse a couple times and walked out.

Her eyes fixed on the computer screen; she sat through several moments of static before a video began to play. She was appalled by what she saw and turned her head, but couldn’t keep it turned away. This wasn’t just any type of disturbing video. It was something much more dubious; foretelling her fate in no uncertain terms, and leaving little doubt what unmerciful action was about to befall her.

The video showed a young woman, about her age, starved half to death, strapped to the same table she was now. The doctor figure slowly inched towards the woman, with his hands skillfully gripping a scalpel. He put the blade next to her vagina and without hesitation split the girl all the way to her throat, Jack the Ripper style. She did not die instantly, but rather terribly, with her bowels exposed and her dying screams only drowned out by the harried screaming of Mary.

All alone in this dreadfully white room, Mary tried her best to puke, but there was nothing in her stomach to purge. So, she dry heaved until her starving stomach cramped relentlessly, sending blinding pain through her senses. Gasping for air, tears streamed down her face, as the video looped over and over again. There was no escaping the torturous death of the girl in the video and no escaping the evil which was surely going to happen to her, whenever the mysterious doctor figure chose the time of her end.
  

The Boy That Created Monsters excerpt, Darker Than Black, Tales of Horror

The Boy That Created Monsters excerpt

Darker Than Black, Tales of Horror

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The slew of doctors and therapists who saw Theo were shocked and disturbed by his withdrawn persona and the violent nature of his drawings. This caused Theo to be held in the asylum indefinitely. He saw many doctors in his time there because the suicide rate amongst workers at the asylum increased dramatically after Theo’s admission.

This went on for quite some time, until one doctor noticed the correlation between the suicides and Theo. All the suicides had one thing in common: they’d all come into contact with Theo. The doctor that pieced it together noticed that amongst the thousands of sketches that Theo had produced, several were of those doctors, and the manner in which they met their violent, self-induced deaths, were an exact match to those drawings.

 Going against everything he’d been taught, the doctor became convinced that Theo was possessed by demons and that if he wanted to go on living, he’d better befriend the boy, so as not to appear as a threat, like the other doctors apparently had.

So, instead of trying to repress Theo’s artistic abilities, he decided to help him expand them. He started bringing all manner of drawing tools and sketch pads for the boy and brought him snacks and drinks. This did little to help Theo fit in with the rest of the patients, who never received such special treatment, but Theo didn’t care, nor did the doctor. All Theo cared about was drawing monsters and all the doctor cared about was finding a useful way to manipulate the boy’s supernatural gifts. Since this doctor never questioned Theo’s art, his death scene was never drawn. Their friendship flourished.

 Soon, Theo became the most feared patient at the facility. It became painfully obvious that any of the patients who messed with Theo was soon found dead, either by freak accident or suicide. The other doctors and nurses never saw the connection between the doctors and patients deaths, but the patients did, and those that survived his killing spree avoided him at all costs. When he was allowed in the common area, he sat alone, as everyone else stayed far away from him.

Theo’s isolation from the outside world and the asylum inmates continued throughout his teenage years. He was a silent loner, and it was obvious to all the medical professionals at the facility that he couldn’t survive in the real world with his lack of communication skills and morbid attitude toward human life.

Though all the doctors still involved with his case thought the violence Theo portrayed in his drawings would never come to physical fruition, because of his docile personality, they were all in agreement that he would never be able to fit into society. All, that is, except one: his personal doctor friend.

 As Theo’s eighteenth birthday neared, Theo’s doctor friend pressed hard for his release, even against the wishes of the rest of the staff. He finally convinced the board to release Theo into his custody. He was a well-respected doctor and his personal assurance that he would take care of the young man, swayed the final decision in his favor.

Graveyard Serial Killer excerpt Dark Than Black, Tales of Horror

Graveyard Serial Killer excerpt

Darker Than Black, Tales of Horror

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Once Jimmy dragged the frightened girl into his house, he wasted little time throwing her down the steps. He locked the door and left her there for a number of days. When he finally went down to her, he chained the famished girl up to one of his torture devices and then binge raped her. When he'd gotten his fill, he simply left her alone to die. In her weakened state, it didn’t take long.

Now the monster had created a crisis for himself. What was he going to do with the girl’s body? He threw her into a deep freezer until he could think of something. Breaking from his normal routine of exclusively watching porn, he started obsessively watching the television news and fictional cop shows. He started seeing murderers of all types and realized he wasn’t alone in the world; he had kindred spirits out there!

Jimmy paid particular attention to how these killers disposed of their victims. Most simply left them were they’d fallen, which wasn’t an option for him because he wanted to kill again and his freezer only held one body. Some killers burnt their victims in an effort to conceal their crimes. Others cut their victims into pieces and spread those pieces far and wide. Others, still, put their victims in shallow graves, in dumpsters or dumped them in waterways, weighted down, of course. None of these schemes worked for Jimmy, because he noticed a disturbing pattern. All those killers ended up getting caught.

Then one day at work, while digging a grave, he had a brainstorm. The opportunity was there, all he had to do was act upon it. Later that night, he pulled the dead girl from the freezer, wrapped her in a rug, dragged her to his car and threw her in the trunk. He nervously drove to the cemetery, paranoid that a cop would suspect him and pull him over, but despite his fears, he made it to the cemetery and drove through a secluded back entrance, unnoticed.

He went straight to a grave he’d dug earlier in the day, removed the dead girl from the car and threw her into the hole. He took a shovel and covered her body with just enough dirt were she couldn’t be seen, and then left. When he got home he drank himself into a stupor.

The next day he went to work as usual, despite the hangover. He was waiting near the grave when the hearse and the funeral procession arrived. They took the coffin from the hearse, and the pall bearers carried it to the grave site. Not saying a word or making contact with anyone, he waited patiently while the priest said the last rites and the family said their final, tearful goodbyes. When they all left, he lowered the casket into the grave and covered it with earth. The body of his victim would never be found.

Perfect Reflection excerpt from Darker Than Black, Tales of Horror.

Perfect Reflection

Darker Than Black, Tales of Horror

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Despondent, she sat in front of her mirror one night and cried her eyes out while begging the mirror to talk to her once more. Again, the mirror stayed silent. She fell asleep in front of it and soon found herself in a strange new world where she felt beautiful, wanted, and above all, loved. It was possibly the best dream she’d ever had. But it was short lived.

She woke from the dream when her mother banged on her bedroom door, yelling at her to get ready for school. She lifted her dizzy head from the floor, told her mom she would get right on it and then looked in the mirror.

Her hair was messed up and her makeup smeared from weeping. She was horrified at what she had become. She thought she was the ugliest girl alive, triggering tears to run down her face once again.

She cursed at the mirror for abandoning her, but received no satisfaction from her outburst. She needed an outlet for her frustrations, but had none, so she balled up her fist as tight as she could and punched the mirror, shattering it.

Still sullen, she slammed her fist into the pieces of broken mirror over and over again until the flesh of her knuckles was shredded. By that time, most of the mirror lay on the floor in shards.

As the pain from her wounds finally broke through her intense anger and registered in her brain, she grabbed her throbbing hand and started sobbing. Blood poured from the multitude of cuts and dripped onto the shattered pieces of mirror, empowering them with the unsought magic of her rage.

Slowly the shards of mirror came to life. As she moaned in pain, they screamed at her in a thousand contradicting voices before gathering to speak in one voice. “Broken mirror, shards and all. Anna, now, must kill them all!”

“I cannot kill,” she bawled, not believing what she was hearing.

“Broken mirror, shards and all. Anna, now, must kill them all!” the mirror wailed at her.

Anna put her hands over her ears to block the unholy voice that was encoding her with violent commands more powerful than any force she’d ever felt. A pacifist at heart, violence was against the very grain of her soul, but the vulgar voice and its diabolical demands tore through her soul, as if replenishing the blood that poured from her hands with a new, hateful indulgence.