please stop calling me a ‘chainsaw murderer.’ i am a ‘forestry tool disposal technician’

My heart hand’s threadbare fingernails scritch at mildewed bricks - there is an escape - there must be! For all the times I’ve found myself within and later without? Vision reduced to a scotopic white noise pond - a fuzzed moon through starless clouds. Spent, like a dime. For what? A soundless amplification of my rushes. A tender earache squeal. A bruxism rockfall, and a groaned diaphragmatic thrum. Nerve grooved ribs pinning elbows to the wall’s coarse grater. Elbows folded like confession. The room breathes with me - inhale, it narrows its clever waist; exhale, it plumps. Warm massaging its wet fetor under a sightless shroud.

Hard blink. Release, and hold. No change, no variance. The pond: immobile, concrete, eternal. An ambiguous constriction prevents self-orientation; all limbs’ burdens cancel out. Is this free-fall? Is this a return to my antenatal hearth? What an infantile thought! From this I harvest enough self pity to fuel an outward outburst - I strain - my bones bow and joints shudder. But the mechanics are all wrong - the force is applied too near the pivot point, like pressing the lever on a banded umbrella.

The collapse encompasses all dimensions - time’s arrow is now pointing head-on. This moment is time entire. I reach to scour my memory in the hope to sidestep and view its length, but find the arrow pivots with my dance. There is no past to touch: recall is reduced to reflection. Instead, desperate, I invent aloud:

"I was six, maybe seven. The dog kennel signified reunion and road trips (though it would later signify divorce proceedings and yellowed boyfriend cigarette teeth.) The weather was mama or the baby popped its head off dandelion weather - humming insects and plump leaved trees. I was sticky and raw-cheeked from the day’s play. The memories were still alive, still vibrant: the sourness of hide and seek - forgotten behind a tree; the jubilation of escaping in a game of tag by way of a clever play through a cornfield. We had walked, Mama and I, beside bounding Brutus, my knees grass-stained, to the Steiner kennel.

"A barn had been refitted of its termite-softened pens in favor of chain-link eight by ten kennels, and had supplied the struggling Steiners with a modest income. Mama and Mar (short for Mary, read like mare) greeted each other and toured the kaleidoscope garden with polite interest. Tomatoes bursting, lettuce a latticework of early wilt, cucumbers lazing on the overnourished earth. I stumbled tip toed behind, able to decipher neither the unseeded pathways from the unsprouted rows nor the maze of my companions’ cautious talk. Julius high-kneed expertly, darting from odor to odor, tracing the paths of past through time.

"After the garden, we went into the barn through an aluminum side door. The barn’s hollow flowed with the ineradicable time-mellowed feculence of stall wood. The sparse industrial lighting greened Mama’s cheeks like old linoleum. After a small entry stall housing feed and tools, the barn opened into a gauntlet run between kennel rows - each chain link enclosure faced its twin across a pathway narrow enough that I, at that age, could have run my fingers along both fences at once. Our entrance was not missed by the boarders - the fences began to rattle and the timbres of the breeds various competed for dominance. Mar’s voice rose to match the riotous din and her hand beckoned Mama outside; Mama’s hand implored I stay put.

"No sooner had the door shut behind them than the pandemonium silenced. I braved a wary look into the kennels and found dozens of silent, intentful eyes fixated on me. We watched each other for a small eternity. The hum of the lights and the fans and the dumbed panting silenced any murmurs of conversation outside. Wine cask tension, inwardly and outwardly. I realized, after a time, that I had been holding my breath.

"I cautiously emptied my lungs through my nostrils, and the Pyrenees three cages down along the left wall released a grunt. Nose and tail aligned towards me, she formed a neckless, white silhouette - feet and ears jutting from a snowy, ill-defined mass. Another moment of silence, another grunt. I surveyed the others; they stayed their steaming gargoyles. Another grunt. Her mouth loosened and dropped. A pause - a bark. And another. Each bark a hammer blow; each blow a cracked boulder; each crack a gunshot; each shot the lightning split of a century growth tree from crown to root. Each rally separated by silence just sufficient for the barn to finish its reverberant retort. And each reiteration enough to further drive stakes through my shoes into the concrete foundation. As regular as the midnight chimes.

"Although my eyes were fixed on the third cage on the left, I began to sense a sluggish creep of a splotch of periphery from across the aisle. I did not possess the bravery to shift my gaze. As the rhythm continued, the splotch grew- its extramacular coagulation shifting between contextually sensible shapes (a dog, a tractor, a cow, a cloud) as I tried to make sense of its senselessness. The mass transcended dimensionality - it ignored the confines of the cages and the barn, and grew like a wildfire on a satellite map or like ink dropped on a petri dish until it blotted out a hemisphere of my retinal world. The barks continued, and the growth began to encircle the third cage - growing and feeding on the world around it until all that remained in my world was the Pyrenees suspended in void. The Pyrenees, unmoving, grew in size, as though it were mounted on a track between she and I - the cage dissolved - the face, the eyes, the steaming rancor and sopping gnarl inflating uniformly like pulling a projector away from a wall, until

“the door opened. Mama and Mar entered - adjusting their voices for the continuing racket of the cages rattling and the dogs’ uniform chorus. The blot was gone, and the third cage on the left was empty. I left with mama and we had tomato sandwiches for dinner, and that night I dreamt I lived in a tree in the rainforest.”

My voice, overused, has dredged the room of its still. The room begins to awaken slowly, stirring a clamorous, muffled conscience. Under my tongue falls chaff-like flecks and mold which my spit-dry mouth can’t gather and expel.

The silence is shattered by a tear and screech of brickwork sliding against itself and the crumble of disintegrating mortar. The walls, though undulating, draw increasingly inward. This is the patient but tempestous answer to my attempted escape. The roar of a boxcar torn by god-hands - the orgasm of a battleship - the seismic apocalypse. I try to clap my chapped palms over my ears, but I am pinned immobile. I try to still the walls, but I am pinned immobile. Each brick batters and bruises; the heart of the room - my heart - is pure malevolence. With each moment, another bone is crushed and another deciliter of lung subsumed by flesh. Hours pass in moments.

And as gradually as the room had awoken, it steadies again. I am alive. I am crushed - entombed with perfect efficiency - enveloped by brick as if it were water. My soft flesh pinched as mortar, my firm flesh and bone milled and hammered into the shape permitted. Each breath a depthless gasp, and each gasp a stab. Pain screams away the fresh silence.

The brick pressed into my right orbit pulls back with an impossible quiet. The light blinds, then dulls into a blur. The image clears. It is Jon Phillips.

“Welcome to Spooktober, baby”

Spooktober story X̴̢͍̥̰̦̺̼͐͛̽̿̊͋̈̈́͂̄͌̀̀̈̒͊̈́̃̚͜͠

I’m Candy. I want to get up and go way over there where I got to see one time.

I think it looks really cool over there. There are good colors like blue and green! Over here the colors are mostly brown and white.

I’m a grown up, so I can go wherever I want now. At least that’s what the other grown ups do. I had to stay still for a long time.

I got way too big to fit in the seat anymore. I was big for a long time but now I am way too big and I don’t fit even a little!

I went right outside by all the big dead trees. There were four cars! Jon must have taken the other grown ups for a walk.

I am bored of looking at everyone’s eyes all day. And when they go they put on movies I seen a hundred times already! At least I want a break for a little while. They get to take a break whenever they want.

I could have walked with them now that I’m a grown up. But they left me sitting weird on my seat. I told them I was too big now!

They didn’t even make sure I was safe and buckled in because the straps are too short now. That’s ok though since they squeezed me pretty tight.

I took a car and I got to drive through the big dead trees and the snow and everything! When I got to the place over there it was pretty cool.

But then Jon came and told me I have to come back. They made me a new seat! Good thing I got to drive and see all this stuff before he came to get me. And good thing they made me a grown up seat! I bet now it won’t squeeze too tight!

SPOOKTOBER STORY #1:

The heavy wooden door opens for you, as if drawn by an invisible hand. The darkness behind it is complete, the interior of the crypt concealed by its ink-like shroud, and you cannot help the feeling that you are about to fall in and tumble forever in that total blackness.

Still, you must enter, and so you do, attempting to banish the dark with your torch, which drips strands of firey pitch into the black. However, the darkness impossibly overwhelms your flame and swallows its light. The flame falters, then suffocates, and disappears.

You are left standing in the still and dark of the crypt. When you turn to flee, you find the door closed, unyielding, shut firmly against your palms as you pound against it, fruitlessly.

Panic reaches up into you, palpating your heart and mind with its skeletal fingers, and you begin to lose command of your senses. The madness of this place is about to overtake you.

Then- just as you let out your first hopeless wail, a second flame alights in the room, somewhere to your left. You turn to face it, disoriented, frightened.

This time, not a torch but a fireplace, the flame pale and terrible, yet what light it gives manages to illuminate the crypt. Not a crypt, you now realize; perhaps a study, a library. The stones on the wall are recessed to allow for the bookshelves, overflowing with weathered volumes and yellowing stacks of papers, which reach to the ceiling and spill onto the floor, where they leach unknown substances and stains from the earth below.

In a high-backed armchair in front of the fireplace, there sits a fat man, his sunken eyes staring levelly at you. He wears his beard short, his hair black, his skin sallow. There's a flabby haggardness to him, some sickly cadaverous bloat that suggests disease, whether of the body or of the mind. His eyeglasses have slid down his nose, and he pushes them up with a bloodless knuckle before addressing you.

"Welcome, traveler, to Year Six of Spooktober Stories. My name is Jon Phillips, and I will be your caretaker for the next thirty-one days of terror. No, no, do not try to escape, for there is none, not in this place. But do not fear. The ghouls you encounter here are simply stories, dreamed by a sleep starved fantasist, and cannot hurt you. There is enough real terror outside of these walls.

"So take a seat, traveler, against the wall, yes, there, and let me read to you, a tale or two. Perhaps, when this is all over, you will awake and find it has all been a dream... or more likely... a nightmare..."

SPOOKTOBER STORY #16:

Ok. Hear me out on this one. So this Spooktober Story is about bowling. I'm not very good at bowling, and I really don't know a lot about it, but we're doing sort of a Faustian thing here, and that's a pretty simple framework to lay out any sort of story, as long as you use google to figure out the relevant words to plop in the template. This time we're doing bowling.

Still with me? Good. So in this story a bowler guy gets really good at bowling, but hey, there's still this thing that nags at him, aw, jeez, he can never pick up a 7-10 split. (I know that the 7-10 isn't the hardest split, I can google too, but 7-10 splits are a lot more well known than like a Greek Church or whatever.)

Anyway, so then this, uh, I guess it would be like a bowling-related guy. This is the devil, or Mephistopheles, or, you know, some being with a lot of power. Supernatural power in this instance. I think you can do non-supernaturally powered Mephistopheleses, but it takes some fancy footwork to give it consistent internal logic and I don't really think it adds to the story in this case. And the Mephistopheles in this case is a guy named Gerald The Arcade Machine Repairman.

Long story short: Gerald The Arcade Machine Repairman is repairing Dig Dug, and the bowler guy, whose name is, like, Ne...r...p....... Nerp, his name is Nerp, Brian Nerp, is cheesed off about not being able to pick up a 7-10 split, and Gerald is like "hey son if you want to pick up a 7-10 split, I can give you this magic-" actually maybe he wouldn't say magic, that's a little on the nose, so maybe it's like "I'll teach you a technique in exchange for something from you, but I can't tell you what that is now because of so-and-so-and-so" and Nerp's like "yeah whatever old man sure why not."

Anyway so later Nerp is like "dang I really can hit a 7-10 split consistently now," but the thing Gerald The Arcade Machine Repairman took from him is his ability to roll anything *but* a 7-10 split. So like no more strikes, just spares forever.

And Nerp goes "aaaaaa" about it and that's where it ends, because you can end horror stories on just an implication of unimaginable future and get away with it. It's better sometimes if you don't resolve things. Like you wouldn't want to end a horror story with a Stand By Me ending that tied everything up all nice and neat. I don't know, maybe you could do that. I guess it could be fun.

Whatever.

SPOOKTOBER STORY #15:

There: hollow socket sunkin moonpale anatomika, twimping armbends, thighknobs, chaatterclax aspeed afar barren toothy sandplane. Klikaklakaklak neath deathshroud orb. Seekly. Unfilled. Hollow sockets scour, or wash, sandplane for swallowmatter.

Ye (thee) scapper, ye ot ot glanced moonpale anatomika ti yet afar. Swallowmatter thee be. Clambor aweeh.

Alas, too slugly. Anatomika embraceland, ajaw, gulp gulp! Swallowmatter swallowed true.

Better luck next time, cowpoke!

SPOOKTOBER STORY #14:

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Claude Debussy - "Un désir désespéré d'oubli"

SPOOKTOBER STORY #13:

“Don’t talk to mommy before mommy’s had her mommy juice!” she exclaims.

“Ha ha, oh Jean,” you chuckle, up to your elbows in suds. “It’s a little early for wine for me, but you do you.”

“You’re right, Danielle. It’s too early for wine.”

You realize you can no longer hear the sound of Ana and Hunter playing in the other room. 

“Don’t talk to mommy before mommy’s had her mommy juice,” Jean repeats, quietly, and you finally notice the 16 gauge stainless steel hypodermic needle she’s trying to conceal behind her palm, the rubber tubing running up the sleeve of her blouse, the hunger in her eyes

Spooktober story xx:

Jon Phillips tears into an elk tenderloin with his genetically altered front teeth. After the jungle gym accident he’d undergone an experimental procedure to splice his dental genes with that of the common rodent. Lifelong regeneration.

As blood from the recently-severed muscle drips from his chin he tucks his necklace into his shirt as to not stain the reminder of their purple morbidity. His white button-up can be bleached, but the teeth can’t stand an endless routine of erosion.

His new teeth are getting long; longer than he’s had the chance to notice. The first bite of tenderloin is deep and juicy, but the second has painful results. He clips the gums in front of his bottom incisors and slices a small gash through his lower lip. With ravenous hunger and no distinction between his own blood and that of the slaughtered elk he continues his feast, unaware or willfully ignorant of his automutilated wound. His lust for soft meat has done nothing to dull the ever-lengthening teeth in the front of his mouth. A knife will not dull quickly by cutting through butter.

The small gash becomes an infected hole, with raw meat constantly being pushed through. The hole gets bigger, and the teeth get longer. Jon’s next meal, a rabbit, again does nothing to grind his ever-growing incisors. Blood drips from the pierced loin, and he hides his toothy necklace behind the buttons of his now oft-bleached white shirt. The first bite doesn’t quite penetrate both sides of the meat, but the second impales clean through. Teeth through the rabbit, and the hole in his lip, and the already bloodsoaked flesh of his chin. He winces at the pain of teeth meeting his own jawbone, but he’s gotta eat. Another bite, and a deeper chip into his chin. By the time the rabbit is fully consumed, Jon’s jaw is obliterated by his own chewing.

His next hunt, while successful in killing the prey, is a difficult cut to swallow. Even as he begins to use his molars to crush the soft innards he cannot avoid the annihilation of his lower jaw. Before the magpie is even halfway eaten the pain is too much. Gangrene has set in his lower lip and fatigue is beginning to take hold. Curled beside the magpie nest Jon realizes his fatal flaw.

“I should have just gotten dentures,” he thinks.

“I should have included dental in my health insurance plan.”

SPOOKTOBER STORY #12:

sexy ghost
want get naughty
but sexy ghost
got no body

SPOOKTOBER STORY #11:

[This Spooktober Story is a Facebook face filter, made with the built in Spark AR Studio. It looks like this:

]

SPOOKTOBER STORY #10:

There's a clown in this movie. You keep expecting its jaw to unhinge so it can swallow a schoolbus, or for it to hack a friendly horse apart at the joints, or at least for it to shoot a service industry worker, but no. It just does funny clown jokes for an audience that genuinely seems to be enjoying them. You leave the theater confused and deeply disturbed by what you've seen.

SPOOKTOBER STORY #9:

A guy bites a dog, and so now every time there is a full moon, the dog turns into a tiny, angry, naked little man who's super toxic in public discord servers

SPOOKTOBER STORY #8:

horror as a genre is often lauded for being a format which can safely examine and dissect the broad cultural anxieties of the day. however, as cultural anxieties are often rooted in bigotry and focused on the 'other' and traditionally marginalized groups (people of color, the lgbtq+ community, immigrants, etc.), horror properties created by those outside of these groups which seek to exploit the common fears of the time can be, even if produced with the best of intentions, just another tool used to further suppress marginalized peoples.

The Thread In The Ground

Part One:

Scraping dirt away from sides of the hole to widen it, Claude's shovel glances off something, taut and tough, about three feet down, which in the darkness he assumes is a branch root from an aspen. A grove of the ancient trees tower around him, blocking out what little light leaks from the waning moon, so it's not until he shines his flashlight on the hole that he sees that the thread is too pale to be a root, too smooth, and glistening with something thicker than water, drooling listlessly into the soil and clay below.

Sunrise and any risk of discovery are hours away, so Claude feels comfortable temporarily halting his dig to investigate the thread more closely. The way it reacts with the flashlight beam is wrong, somehow, and reminds him of a hospital, or his Nana's nursing home... like slick, translucent flesh, like an IV line pumping gruel. Or an exposed tendon.

He wraps his dirt-covered fingers around it, and pulls. He expects resistence, but it slides easily from the surrounding soil, lubricated by whatever thick, clear liquid now drools between his fingers and around his knuckles. Now standing, holding the thread pulled up from the forest floor about four feet to each side of his fist. Claude leans down, sniffs it, and finds it odorless, but his mind is suddenly flooded with associative memories: a different night, another forest, a campfire, a tent, a hollow wind, and in the center, something black and ugly and cruel, a missing act, a violent absence.

Something's wrong. These aren't his memories. Something's wrong.

Compelled, Claude pulls more of the thread up from the earth. He knows he should finish digging the hole, that it's very important (why is it important, again? he can't remember), but the promise of the thread has taken that from him (find what's missing, find the ending), and he follows it out of the grove, towards his truck, parked a few dozen meters away.

By the time he reaches the truck, he no longer needs to pull the thread up out of the ground. It's already there, at height, drawing him forward. He assumes it's leading him to the vehicle, but it passes (impossibly, impossibly) through a fender, emerging at an angle through the driver's side door on the other side like the trajectory of a bullet bouncing off bone, and continues.

The thread leads on, into the darkness of the forest. Claude follows, losing something of himself with every step.

SPOOKTOBER STORY #6:

ok so this spooktober story is that some rowdy teens drive up to a guy just minding his own business and say to him like "check this out" and then moon him and they think it's really funny but the moon turns him into a werewolf and just friggin yeets the whole car into the lake

SPOOKTOBER STORY #5:

There's some schmutz on your windshield so you try to spray some windshield washer fluid on it, but instead of windshield washer fluid: it sprays blood, human blood! All over your windshield! This is really inconvenient, since it doesn't clean the schmutz off really, and actually makes the windshield harder to see through than before.