Mind Terrors 1 by D. I. Russell

Author:D. I. Russell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: free fiction, free, free horror, thriller books, psychological thrillers, books about mental health fiction, depression autism fiction, family drama fiction, nineties horror, scary horror ghost stories
Publisher: D. I. Russell

The Varden Gleave Art Prize 1998 entrant

Outside

by Samara Mathers

The hall had started to fill with latecomers filing through the door, seeking out their sons and daughters and a glass of sparkly before wandering over to the waiting works of art. Months of labour, mounted for the most cursory of glances as parents passed. They were keen to see the masterpiece created by their own offspring.

Samara watched with pride as one woman glanced at her painting and stepped away from it, as if the picture and the area around it were tainted. With no parents of her own to gush over her artwork, Samara noticed that “Outside” stood strikingly alone in a room full of sycophants.

However, one figure stopped before it, meeting the now tortured eyes of the model as her real face fought to emerge from the canvas. The girl with the dark hair stared up at the painting, unblinking and motionless. Parents and staff passed by, ignorant to her presence, perhaps only scowling as they spied the painting from the corner of their eye. The girl ignored them, consumed by the agony presented in oils.

Samara drained her thin glass, placed it on a nearby table, and meandered through the various guests to stand beside her sole audience. The girl wore the same clothes Samara had selected that morning: black jeans and a hoodie to hide within. She wondered if her counterpart also gripped an art knife in her pocket, hand sweaty from her tight grip. In silence, they both considered the art before them.

“I’m supposed to talk about my work,” Samara muttered, “to tell someone the reason behind its creation. This…torment. It’s my obsession.” She sighed and turned away, unable to look at her own work a second longer.

Next to the doorway, Dale leaned against the wall, watching her. She figured he’d come. Considering himself one of the creative elite at the college, and with the predominantly female art students here in abundance, Dale had to make an appearance. Samara stared back, challenging him to come over, daring him to try. He stayed put, his glasses precariously perched on his smashed nose. The blood had decayed to black, like tar had oozed from the carnage at the centre of his face. His head sat atop his neck at an odd angle, the vertebrae of his spine destroyed and unable to support the weight.

“It’s my confession,” Samara continued to the only one that mattered. A passing woman in a cream-coloured dress cast her a confused glance.

Dale revealed swollen purple gums and bloodied teeth as he smiled in greeting. A second corpse had shambled into the exhibition hall, stepping through the open double doors from the foyer and taking in the scene.

Samara had no idea how her former friend could take in the scene. Pulpy cavities stared out across the hall, somehow finding her. Lily’s head tottered, secreting congealed blood from torn arteries hanging beneath her sliced jaw.

One could cut but not intricately carve.

Rather than blindly grope after her quarry, Lily slowly turned, finding Dale.

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