Landscapes for the Dead

Playtime Never Ends

Miss sat in an armchair in the living room, reading a hardcover collection of short horror stories. It was warm inside, but dark and cold outside. Her parents were out for the night and had left her home by herself. She neared the end of a generic spook tale, and read the last sentence with a sigh: 'Thinking this, it shut the door quietly and slipped off into the howling wind'.

She put the book down on the coffee table and shut her eyes. She needed a break from the constant barrage of idiocy found within those pages. The stories were all carbon copies of each other, over and over again. She stood up and walked into the kitchen with thoughts of pear juice. It was horrid sickly stuff, but she always seemed to forget. There was only half an inch remaining in the bottom, so she skipped a glass and carried the whole bottle back into the living room.

She sat the bottle down on the coffee table and reached for the book, ready to dive back in to those illogical worlds. They were like chocolate biscuits how you started with one and ended up eating the whole packet regardless of how similar the taste was. Or maybe wafer-crackers would be a closer comparison since they were so bland. She picked it up by the spine, but then saw something was resting on the cover.

She shrieked and recoiled. It was a small black thing, garnished with wiry hair. A finger, a boneless finger. Miss flipped the book and the finger flopped onto the rug. She dropped the book also. It landed with the pages open, bending them.

The finger was snuggled down into the long threads of the carpet, a dark blue juice oozing out from the severed end. Miss screwed up her nose. She could smell it, and it was rancid. She unhooked the fire poker from the wall and inserted the end into the centre of the finger, where the bone should have been, then tossed it into the fire.

When she turned back around, another finger had appeared on the cover of the book. As she watched, it rolled off the sloped cover onto the floor. Miss shrieked and stomped on it with the heel of her foot. Cold wetness soaked into her sock. She whimpered. The clock on the wall informed her that her parents would not be back for another half hour. She had to get rid of the book. Throw it out into the rubbish, she thought walking out into the chilled hall towards her room, but first she would change her socks and wash her feet. They felt unclean.

Standing on one leg with her foot in a sinkfull of warm soapy water, she realized that she could just throw the book in the fire. That seem like the best choice; the fire would cleanse it thoroughly. She towelled her now rosy pink feet, hoisted on a fresh pair of socks up to her ankles and walked back into the living room.

There were more body parts heaped up on the book. Miss bellowed with rage and lunged into their centre, tossing aside a blackened fleshy tube the size of a sewer pipe that looked like a thigh, a concave cheek of meat with sweaty, matted hair infesting the pit, and assorted other foul things to get at the book. She hurled it into the fire. It landed on its spine and opened. The pages flicked over one another and were instantly enveloped in flame.

Miss watched it burn with a fury until it was only a charred cover and ashes. A drip of spittle slid from her lip onto the carpet. She turned back around to the scattered body parts. They were staining all the furniture with their blue-black blood. Resting against the leg of the armchair was a caved in football skin of a head that looked as though it had dripped and congealed into existence, such was it ugliness. Miss was about to pick it up and push it out into its proper shape, when something hard and heavy rolled out of the fireplace onto the hardwood floor.

She whirled around to face a skull, shaded charcoal grey from the smoke. It had all the normal features of a person, eye sockets, mouth, nose, but they were off in such a way that turned the skull into an abomination. The eye sockets were not in line with the jaw, for one thing. It was as though someone had wrenched the top and bottom halves around independently of each other. The forehead was too short, the cheekbones too large, and the teeth far too thin and long. It was massive, and seemed to leer up at her.

Run, she thought, run away. But she couldn't. She was simultaneously repulsed and fascinated by what was happening, and afraid to miss some new development. There was no fear. Not yet.

For the first time she saw something materialize from the book with her own eyes. A bone, long and thin, possibly an arm bone, grew from the cracked cover of the book in the heart of the fire. It surfaced like a stick floating up from the depths of a dark pool. When it was full it tumbled off the cover to rest amongst the logs, a white stick. Another bone followed closely behind and clicked into place on the end of the first. Then the book heaved and retched up a handful of knuckles and lumpish bones. It heaved again and more bones the size of pebbles vomited forth to join the slowly forming skeleton.

Suddenly the book began purging itself of wave after wave of pearly white bones, which were quickly blackened by the fire and arranged themselves to form the skeleton of some huge creature. A column of vertebrae fell forwards and struck the back of the leering skull. The beast's skeleton was complete. It crawled out of the fire, knocking a log out onto the floor. It started to burn the floorboards, but Miss didn't notice. She was backing away in fright from the mutated skeleton, wanting to escape but not wanting to take her eyes away from the horrific scene before her. In her shock she noticed that the first bone which she took to be an arm bone was in fact part of the foot. The monster was massive. Its chest was as wide as the grille of a semi trailer. The skull, which had seemed large before, now seemed relatively tiny compared to the rest of the body.

Miss screamed and wrenched her eyes away from the beast and ran for the door. Her shin struck the side of the chair and she spun away, falling. She was gone, she thought behind her scream, this was her end. Before she even hit the ground her shirt was grabbed and she was lifted up to the ceiling by skeletal fingers. She was thrown headfirst to the floor. Before she made contact a cold tingle shot through her body like iced lightning.

She felt numb in the seconds after her back broke. The first to regain feeling was her face. Her cheekbone had shattered. Her eye felt swollen and inflated, too large for its socket. Her head was lying in blood, and she could feel it seeping into the collar of her top as well. Her arms throbbed, her chest hurt, her stomach burned, her neck felt like it had received a severe dose of whiplash, but the worst pain was halfway down her back. There was a lump in her spine which radiated pulsating bolts of glassy pain all the way to the centre of her brain. Below that lump she felt nothing. She sobbed, and tears mixed in with her blood. Something was lying on top of her and she shrugged it off. Her legs flopped to the floor beside her head.

Her one good eye widened and she released a bloodcurdling scream. She clawed her way forwards across the rug, dragging her useless legs behind her. Suddenly, black fleshy fingers seized around her throat and lifted her again into the air.

The beast had completed itself. It was wearing all the flesh now, black tubes like grotesque leg warmers. It truly was an abomination, not symmetrical in the slightest. Every bone in its body looked like it had been broken at least once. Where the separate pieces of flesh had seared together there were lumpy ridges of scar, rotten green in colour. Some joins leaked the dark blue blood.

The worst feature it posessed, however, was not the deformed limbs or the clumsy flesh joins, but the head. No matter how bad the skinless skull may have been, clothed in this face it was worse. All of the ugly deformities of the skull were magnified and elaborated on in the flesh. It had gained eyes from the book, eyes that revealed the promises of hell to whoever gazed into them, as Miss was doing now. She found that all her screaming had been used up. She could scream no more. And this face was beyond screaming, it was pure paralyzing terror itself. Miss was nothing anymore, and as it leaned in to bite her in half she lost consciousness. The beast dropped her legs to the floor. Some of her insides flopped down next to them. It lumbered over to the door, letting the half chewed pieces of her torso fall from the narrow teeth in its mouth. It opened the door, letting in leaves and dry grasses on the wind. Headlights approached the house from the top of the driveway, flooding the room with pale light through the windows and open door. The beast did not want to be seen, not yet. It would only show itself to very few. The woods maybe, that sounded nice. Thinking this, it shut the door quietly and slipped off into the howling wind.