The Candle by Charles Howard

Author:Charles Howard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Monster, Supernatural, Horror, occult fiction, lovecraft, Occult, amy cross, j. thorn, short fiction, short read
Publisher: Charles Howard
Published: 2017-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

A week later, Stephen let himself into Trish’s house. She was at work and didn't know he'd planned to stop by. Actually, he didn't know he was planning to stop by, either. He just got it in his head when he woke up that he wanted to surprise her with supper. Not that his brand of bachelor cooking would be a very positive surprise to a professional chef.

They had been avoiding spending time at her place for the past couple weeks. They didn't state out loud that this should be so. It just was. They either went out on dates or stayed in at his place. It was like they had agreed on a subconscious level that it would be best not to risk him having another "episode" at her place.

The first thing Stephen noticed when he stepped through the door was the sound. The room should have been silent with Trish off to work hours ago, but instead, his ears were assaulted with a buzzing noise.

Flies. A cloud of flies was buzzing around the living room, obscuring his field of vision. The last time he had seen this many flies in one place was when he had been walking through the forest as a kid. He had stumbled across the carcass of a deer that some hunter had killed and decided not to taking home. Flies had been busy that day. Stephen remembered seeing larvae crawling out of every visible orifice of the dead animal.

Given what he knew about Trish, he didn’t know how this was possible, as she was a neat freak to end all neat freaks. She tidied after herself almost to a degree of compulsiveness. She cleaned out the crumb tray on her toaster after every use for crying out loud.

Still feeling too exhausted to care, Stephen easily dismissed the mystery of the flies. In the past two weeks, he had probably gotten about three hours of sleep each night. And even those hours felt restless and broken.

"Hey Frank," he said as he passed the TV cabinet without looking at the candle.

He entered the kitchen and unloaded a couple bags of groceries he had picked up on his way over. The items had been picked pretty much at random. He sorted through them.

A bag of spaghetti.

A can of mushrooms.

Several long carrots.

Two boxes of instant mashed potatoes.

Seven badly bruised kiwi.

A clear plastic bag filled with severed chicken feet. The claws of one foot had speared the bag, and the shriveled talon was pointing at the ceiling.

A Snickers bar.

Stephen picked up one of the carrots and placed it on a cutting board that Trish kept on her portable island in the middle of the kitchen. He reached over and selected from a series of handles protruding from a block of wood on the island. The blade that followed the handle was long and looked sharpened to a manic degree. Stephen had the urge to lick the cold steel, to run his tongue along its edge and feel the welling of blood flow into his throat.

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