Horror – This Jolly Beggar

Dead Rights

The sun had taken flight with midnight near
The killer stops uncertainly, afraid,
Behind a sound he hears, sinister, clear,
A hollow breathing, ice-cold hand now laid
Upon his shoulder, grips; he springs away,
As if the fiends of hell were at his heels,
But still pursued, his face with terror, gray.
At last he turns, with courage bold, then squeals
As dead Lucille peals, “Now see how it feels!”

Well, Halloween’s just around the corner isn’t it? 🎃👻 Update: And right on cue, I’m number 13 on Mr. Linky! Haha.

Laura at dVerse's MTB: "Since today is the 9th of the 9th month it is fitting for that numeral to inform today’s poetry form –  so let’s meet The Novelinee!. . . Yes, it’s a nine line stanza poem overlaid with this rhyme sequence:
a,b,a,b,c,d,c,d,d" also written in iambic pentameter.

Hollow Hauntings

*Black Hole*, 2016 by Ian Cumberland (b. 1983)

I am the hollow woman. I swallow holes. I can see the gaps in your cabinet of selves better than you can, selecting your latest reinvention or falling back on an old. As you reach, I look at you and your emptiness becomes mine. For a split second you pause, as if aware of me.

I hold my breath in case you hear me.

I hear you.

You say, “There is nothing behind the wall except a space where the wind whistles.”

Then you glance in the mirror and see me, and are shocked. Why? We swallow being into nothingness. (Or are we swallowed?) We make perfect the meaninglessness of it all, call it life, and make it compost, a place for new beginnings and endings. A cycle. Endless. Bare. Signifying nothing.

I am the hollow woman. And I am not alone. Am I?

Written for dVerse’s “Prosery” which asks that we confine our prose to 144 words or less and use the following line from a Lisel Mueller poem: “there is nothing behind the wall/except a space where the wind whistles.” Click on Mr. Linky to join in!

Discovery

Written for Rochelle's Friday Fictioneers
PHOTO PROMPT © J Hardy Carroll
Click on the frog and join in the fun!

Genre: horror; word count: 100

Discovery

“Did you bring the mirror?” Eli asked.

Lena rummaged through her backpack behind him. “Do we have to do this?”

Eli snorted impatiently at his best friend. “Don’t you want to know why kids from this school have gone missing? Mr. Drobkoni’s gotta be a vampire. I’ll stay here. You keep a lookout. Whistle when you see him coming.”

“Right-oh,” Lena said. “Here.”

Eli held the mirror so he could see over his shoulder.

Lena had already left.

She’s fast, he thought.

“What’s that?” asked Lena behind him.

He turned around quickly. “The dead travel fast,” he said, suddenly pale.

The Trap

See the sepulchral ash, the sulphuric fume

See the primed portals set for me and you

See the smoke, the tea, the burnt residue

Just six more guests to speedily consume

Don’t fret, not yet

Never fear, my dear,

There’s not a shortage of fools in Bara-Du.

Written for Sadje’s What Do You See picture prompt, product of an eerily terrifying image combined with insomnia .

In a Dark Hour

ezekiels-vision-of-the-valley-of-dry-bones-what-does-it-mean_0

3 A.M.

Awakened to an eerie self-examination of the soul
on the steel-cold surface under surgically precise lights
unentombing cancers, contagion-carrying arteries, dismembered
corruption to the dispassionate gaze of an Enemy brooding,
brooding.

3:20 A.M.

Still sweating under the administered fumes seeping
through pores, guilt-driven language of parents driven
from home to carnage of children preying on children, warfare
of wretched depravity in the eyes of a man, a woman seething,
seething.

3:40 A.M.

Cannot speak, cannot hear, cannot see, cannot feel anything
but the weight of irreversible fate, the darts of the Enemy
injections of delirious oblivion only to awaken to endless night
where no refuge lies from grief and fear and the hate pursuing,
pursuing.

4:00 A.M.

Helpless, my tongue dry, the light dims, darkness closes in,
but a voice is heard, a minister to prophesy over the bitter
collocation of bones, unholy, “O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD!”-
prophesy!- in the body and the blood a Life that is not mine breathes,
breathes.

DailyPostPrompt: eerie

It Can’t Be Smoke: A Haunting

It can’t be smoke that drives you here like a leaf
Caught in a funeral pyre or a sinner fleeing in shame!
What fell blast of Hell’s eternal fire brings you, cruel shade
Upon my porch, and feeds the tendrils of your fiery flame?
Begone, you ghost of the foul-mouthed past that stalks
The children of men, to warn of never-ending death
And griefs that ne’er can mend! Begone upon your walks
Of doom and leave me to life’s revelry and vice
Until its trinkets be a dream and I a shadow like you.

DailyPostPrompt: Smoke

The Marsh Fiend

The four friends sat in the pale moonlight beside a flickering fire. The youngest of them was just short of thirty, the others led by four or five. They had long met in this clearing by the marshes, surrounded on all sides by woods. As the darkness grew heavier, their thoughts turned inward to the Marsh Fiend of Vetiver and Thyme. She travelled alone like a ghost far from home luring travelers to her side. And once they had seen her and gazed quietly at her while she smiled her forlorn smile.

Continue reading “The Marsh Fiend”

The Locked Book

It sat on the shelf like a glowering menace, dusty with age and disuse and fine cobwebs like a gauzy shroud. Even buried as it was behind apothecary jars and pestles, it was still the first thing the visitors to the six hundred-year-old museum wanted to touch.