The Spectral Book of Horror Stories by

Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: horror, suspense, Fiction / Horror, anthology
Publisher: Spectral Press
Published: 2014-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

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Later that evening I went out to the barn to see Derrick Yardley for myself. He was a disheveled figure huddled against a rough wall under the tepid light of a dangling sixty-watt bulb. Something else dangled from another crossbeam, low enough to hang tools on, but this one I had to stare at until I comprehended that it was the ragged, meat-stripped skeleton of a snake longer than my arm. The barn interior stank of bile and decay.

Across the dirt floor, in a pen, yesterday’s goat munched happily on sweetgrass. No place smells bad to a goat.

Mr Sunshine was as degraded a human being as I’d ever seen. A thick leather cuff was snug around one ankle and a ten-foot chain anchored him to a huge, honest-to-god anvil that looked like it had been around since the formation of the earth. In a radius around him, and on nearly every square inch of him, was the evidence of violent and explosive sickness.

“Fuck you too,” he croaked as I approached.

I offered him a plastic bottle with the clinical look of something that had come from behind a pharmacy counter.

He eyed it with suspicion. “What’s that? Something else for me to puke up?”

“It’s an antibiotic. Liquid ampicillin. He thought it would be a good idea.” I looked at the chunks and splatters in the dirt. “Considering.”

He grabbed it, uncapped and sniffed it, and took a sip.

“Not all at once. Just a swig or two every few hours.”

“I know how antibiotics work. Jesus. Now, if I just had a clock to tell me when a few hours have gone by.” He rolled his eyes. “Are we done here?”

I respected that he wasn’t feigning gratitude, trying to win me over, beg. No Stockholm Syndrome for him. It was business as usual: all spite, all the time.

“You’ve got a style to what you do. No denying that. I’m just curious why. Why take that approach?”

He stared at me like I’d spoken gibberish. “Why…? I don’t get the question.”

He really didn’t, did he? “What do you get out of it?”

Again, more incredulity. That little open-mouthed, side-to-side headshake when someone can’t believe he’s hearing such idiocy. “I get more hits than anyone else there. More page views, more sticky-time, more link follow-throughs. I win.”

Okay, I thought. Just as calm and clearheaded as could be.

Fuck this guy.

Maybe 90% of everything really was crap. I don’t know. But he’d made it his life’s mission to punish people for even trying, regardless of the outcome.

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re done here.”

Then, finally, I looked up into the hayloft, because I was starting to feel gutless for avoiding it, telling myself that whatever I’d heard shifting around up there was just a rat. Or a barn owl. Or a snake the size of a fire hose. Or any of the other manifest forms allowed by chaos. In that moment it looked like all of them, all at once, at least what I could make out from filling in the gaps between

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