Fetal Bait Apocalypse: 3 Collections in 1 Read online

  Fetal Bait Apocalypse: 3 Collections in 1

  Joel Arnold

  Fetal Bait Apocalypse contain all three of Joel Arnold’s short story collections in one volume:

  • Bait and Other Stories

  • Bedtime Stories for the Apocalypse

  • Fetal Position and Other Stories

  This one volume holds over 120,000 words of fiction that will haunt and terrify you for days on end.

  Contains the award winning stories “Some Things Don’t Wash Off” and “Mississippi Pearl” as well as stories that have seen print in such venues as Weird Tales, Gothic.Net, ChiZine, HorrorFind and Pseudopod. Six of these stories have received honorable mentions in The Years Best Fantasy & Horror.

  In these three collections, you’ll meet:

  A father whose intense longing for his dead son lead to disturbing consequences.

  A group of college students tubing down a river through a burnt forest who encounter terrifying creatures.

  A man seeking redemption for a sinful past through the skill of a tattoo artist.

  A Cambodian-American teen who will fit in with the locals at any cost.

  A woman who finds a bizarre solace in a rare pearl.

  A self-absorbed husband monitoring the end of his existence over the internet.

  A teenager digging his way through a deep crust of waste and bone to win his freedom.

  A man whose work for the Khmer Rouge returns to haunt him.

  A son who has an intensely strange relationship with his mother.

  A student with a bizarre homework assignment.

  A woman who has a macabre way to deal with bill collectors.

  These stories and more will have you up late into the night, glancing over your shoulder and flinching at the slightest of noises.

  “Joel Arnold is the real deal. He elicits a subtle element of terror and justice through his writing, delivered without a heavy hand. His exceptional imagery effects readers in a way that leaves them chilled and disturbed; causing the kind of behavior that will leave friends asking ‘what’s bothering you,’ for days afterwards.”

  D.L. Russell, editor of Strange, Weird & Wonderful Magazine

  “Author Arnold has a deft touch with horror that will leave a chill in your spine, but without the violence and gore of much modern horror. The stories remind me of Ray Bradbury at his darkest with their ability to play on the difference between what we know might happen and what we want to happen. These are complex tales with layers below the surface enjoyment of a story well written.”

  Armchair Interviews

  Joel Arnold

  FETAL BAIT APOCALYPSE

  3 Collections in 1

  BAIT

  and Other Stories

  The Kindness of Strangers

  At dusk the cabin looks like a brooding face, the way the sun throws deep wrinkles across its knotted and gnarled logs. Two front windows stare lifelessly out at the surrounding forest and the door is like a blockade across an ancient mouth, keeping its secrets from spilling out and poisoning the weeds outside the threshold. At its base, dark gray rocks creep up like dead, swollen fingertips. No one has lived here for a long time.

  Gary Nelson kneels with his back against a nearby oak. Tears trail down his cheeks. His eyelids resemble fat, bloated leeches. He places the barrel of a 12-gauge shotgun against the roof of his mouth.

  “Barbara,” he says around the barrel.

  His tongue flicks against the rusted metal. He gags. He is thirty-eight years old. Barbara left him three months earlier for an insurance salesman. Nelson caught them on the living room couch. As if they wanted to be caught. As if they got off on being caught.

  He shakes the memory away. He’s got nothing left to live for. No family. No home. He shuts his eyes and pulls the trigger.

  There is a dry click but nothing else. He opens his eyes wearily and removes the shotgun from his mouth, spits the taste of metal on the forest floor, and wipes the tears and sweat from his eyes. His breath is shallow and noisy as he checks the breech. A cartridge winks at him in the dying sunlight. Nelson calms down and sets the butt of the gun back on the ground, placing his finger upon the trigger. Once again he positions his head over the barrel. Closes his eyes.

  That’s when he first hears the whispers.

  His eyes pop open in surprise. He moves the gun away from his face and quickly stands. This is supposed to be a private act.

  “Who’s there?” He can’t see anybody, but there are plenty of places to hide. “Who’s there, goddamn it?”

  No one answers. Yet now he can see something in the short distance. A shape through the dark, twisted trees. The shape of a cabin fading quickly with the sunlight. Funny how he hadn’t notice it before.

  He feels the shotgun heavy in his hands, but before his thoughts turn back to the task at hand, he hears the whispers a second time. He is unable to distinguish any words, barely able to discern it from the howl of wind through the trees.

  “Who’s there?” he calls again. A wisp of smoke creeps up from a black pipe in the roof of the cabin. He steps toward it.

  Inside, a single log smolders in a black wood-burning stove. A worn mattress lies in the corner hidden beneath a tattered Army-issue blanket. There is a weathered pine table. Some empty cabinets above a rusting countertop. A round disc of sawed off oak, five inches thick and two feet across, still ringed with rough bark and cured with blood, sits heavy on the counter; a crude butcher’s block. Next to it is a hatchet, its blade nicked, its handle splintered and dark with grease.

  Nelson sees a five-gallon pail full of thick red water on the floor next to the wood stove. He sets down his gun and peers in. A severed hand floats to the top. He wants to vomit, wants to get back to the simplicity of placing shotgun in mouth and pulling the trigger, but again he hears the whispers. They come at him from all directions.

  “Welcome,” they say, a hundred voices united in a child-like chorus, tickling his brain. “Welcome.”

  The door to the cabin shuts quietly behind him and he hears footsteps, slow and heavy and dragging. Rough callused fingers squeeze his shoulder. The floor comes up to meet him, but he doesn’t feel a thing.

  He dreams of the shotgun. Dreams of the barrel in his mouth. It tastes like black licorice. The shell perspires in the chamber. It looks alive, like flesh. He pulls the trigger. Instead of an explosion, he hears loud, throaty laughter as the bullet rips through the roof of his mouth and into his skull. Instead of the instant gratification of death, the bullet eats slowly away at his brain.

  He wakes. It is night. An old Indian squats at the foot of the mattress on which Nelson lays, silhouetted darkly against the crimson glow of the wood-burning stove.

  “You got piss poor dreams,” the Indian says.

  “Who are you?” Nelson’s head feels light and he has trouble focusing. “Are you some kind of medicine man?”

  The old Indian answers with a soft, wheezing chuckle. “Hell no,” he says. He gets up and saunters over to the wood stove. “Name’s Hump.”

  Hump is bare-chested, his skin dark and wrinkled like beef jerky, full of pale welts and scratch marks. He wears a stark white ponytail that reaches down to the belt loops of his jeans. On his cowboy boots are tooled a pair of intricately detailed eagles hidden behind a thick layer of dried mud and grease. His eyes are sewn shut with thin strips of deer hide.

  Hump holds something in his hand. Nelson’s shotgun shells. He throws them one at a time into the belly of the stove where they explode, sending a spray of ash onto Hump’s cancerous grin.

  He turns to Nelson. Despite the missing eyes, Nelson feels as if the old man is seeing him, seein
g deep inside of him. He feels a chill settle in him from the inside out.

  “You can hear ’em, huh?” Hump says.

  “Hear what?” Nelson asks.

  “The children. Singing in your head.”

  Nelson doesn’t answer. He looks away.

  “I know you hear ’em.” Hump laughs. “Lucky for you, or else I’d have to kill you.”

  Nelson thinks briefly it’s a joke, but then remembers the hand he saw floating in the pail by the stove.

  “But hey, you wanna die anyway, no?” Hump says.

  Nelson isn’t sure how to answer. By his own hands, yes. In his own way. But to have it done at the mercy of some stranger? He glances at the bloodstained butcher’s block. That’s not the way to do it, he thinks. That’s not the way to die.

  “I want to be alone,” he finally says.

  Hump gestures toward the butcher block. “Hey, don’t worry about that shit. That ain’t nothing.” He stands. “I got something that’ll make you forget about your troubles. Make you wanna be alive.”

  Alive? What for?

  Nelson remembers the look on Barbara’s face. No sorrow. No regret. Merely smugness. Then a slow, creeping smile followed by laughter.

  “I want to go now,” Nelson says.

  Hump laughs. He walks over to a small oval rug on the floor and pulls it back. There is a knot of rope beneath it, which he lifts, opening a small trap door cut out of the floorboards. Darkness rises out from the hole in a thick, miasmic mist.

  “You can’t go now,” Hump says. “Once you hear ’em calling you, you can’t never go.”

  A foul odor rises, too, like fish rotting in the sun. Nelson’s stomach lurches and threatens to spill its contents on the floor.

  “Aw, hey,” Hump says. “Don’t worry none about that. You get used to that in a hurry. You get to like it, even.” He slowly descends the set of stone steps that the trap door reveals. The darkness devours him.

  Nelson looks at the door of the cabin, the door that leads outside. He sees his shotgun sitting there, but remembers the shells Hump threw into the stove. All he would have to do is stand and run. Run back into the forest. Perhaps take the hatchet with him and hack a couple jagged lines in his wrist, hold it under the flowing waters of the nearby river and wait for the black nothingness to overtake him.

  But again he hears the whispers.

  “Come,” they say, a thousand voices all whispering at once.

  Nelson tingles all over.

  “Come.”

  He can’t resist. He follows Hump into the darkness beneath the cabin.

  Outside, the limbs of the surrounding trees shiver in the wind. The animals in the forest avert their eyes. They run away in fear. The cabin looks alive. It looks hungry. The deer flies, the mosquitoes, the gnats, strafing and buzzing the cabin’s exterior, fall to the ground in a stunned death.

  Beneath, all is black. “Just wait and see,” Hump says, leading Nelson through the darkness. “This is your Heaven now.”

  Nelson can feel shapes all around him, large shapes that are immobile, yet somehow alive. His hand brushes across something hard and mossy. The sound of dripping permeates the cavern. A constant drip, drip, drip, like the beating of a watery heart.

  “We’re almost there.” Hump stops. Gently pushes Nelson forward.

  Nelson still can’t see anything, but he steps forward. The toe of his boot hits something solid. He takes a step up. Then three more steps up.

  “Now sit,” Hump says.

  Nelson’s eyes finally begin to adjust. There is a tiny bit of light coming from above and Nelson realizes it’s the light of the cabin seeping through the cracks in the floorboards. He looks down at Hump. He sees the pale white welts on Hump’s body move. They crawl down Hump’s arm and gather on his hand, a writhing mass of white worms. Hump reaches up to Nelson’s leg and the worms cross over. They squirm up his leg and across his body where they come to a rest.

  His body tingles all over. He realizes the hard, mossy mound he sits on is a conglomerate of bones. A huge pile of bones.

  “You’re the man,” Hump whispers, a look of ecstasy on his haggard features. “You’re the man.”

  A throne of bones.

  The old Indian leaves him. Nelson hears the trap door open and close. He can feel the white worms sticking to his body. He can hear the whispers all around him.

  He sees more mounds. Bones everywhere, ancient and new, animal and human.

  “Yessss…” The whispers caress his brain. “Yessss…”

  He hears an explosion from above, the sound of his shotgun discharging. Hump must’ve saved a shell.

  He looks up at the floorboards above and sees Hump’s blood dripping through them. It drips in a rhythm—

  Drip.

  Drip.

  Drip.

  A rhythm like a beating heart, hypnotic and soothing.

  He feels his own heart slow down. Matching the tempo of the drops.

  Drip.

  Drip.

  Drip.

  And the visions begin. Like a floodlight turned on in his brain. Barbara is there. Naked and flushed, she takes him into her embrace. Her tongue darts in and out of his ear, her warm, moist breath penetrating into his skull. The rancid smell Nelson experienced before has turned into something sweet. He smells the blood of the insurance salesman on Barbara’s breath. Her teeth nibble at his ear. They’ve become pointed and sharp.

  But Nelson doesn’t mind. He has found a reason to live.

  He ejaculates blood. The worms on his body dig in.

  “Welcome,” the chorus screams. “Welcome.”

  Bait

  It was a cold January when Paul Robinson parked his flatbed pick-up on the edge of Shady Lake. The ice was ten inches thick. Plenty thick, yet it still didn’t compare to the rind of ice that had settled around his heart.

  He let the tail-gate drop, hauled out his wooden fishing shanty and slid it over the ice to a spot a good fifty yards from the other fishermen. It was dusk, and many were already leaving, their perch, walleye, and trout packed in coolers to take home to their families.

  He began to arrange the inside of the shanty, a homemade thing of clapboard and two by fours. He lit a pile of pre-soaked coals in an old coffee can for extra warmth, the flame swirling for a moment like a dervish, then settling to a comfortable glow. As he slid his Styrofoam bait bucket across the shanty’s floor, steam seeping from beneath the lid, he heard the crunch of cleated boots behind him. He turned.

  “You’re getting a late start today.” It was Sven Gustafson with his gas-powered auger. His chocolate lab Blackie followed close behind, clumsy on the ice. “Can I cut you a hole?”

  Paul nodded. “A wide one.”

  “What for?” Sven smiled. “You expecting a couple big northerns to come your way?”

  “Just like a bigger hole is all. And keep your dog out of my bait.”

  “You got smelt in there today? Blackie loves smelt.”

  “Just keep him away from me tonight. I’m in no mood.”

  Sven laughed and started the auger up, its whine accompanying the wind, the whir of the blade through ice setting Paul’s teeth on edge. The smell of gasoline and exhaust filled the air. When Sven was done, he whistled at Blackie. “C’mon, git, before Paul here sets a hook in you.” The dog pounced away a few feet then stopped, waiting. Sven started to leave but hesitated. He turned to Paul, kneeled down on one leg and pulled back the hood of his thick black parka. He cocked his head to the side, studying Paul.

  Paul looked up, annoyed. “What?”

  Sven turned his eyes to the fresh hole in the ice. When he spoke again, it was with a soft, quiet voice. “I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am about your son. I know you and Peg have been having a hard time of it.”

  Paul looked out the shanty across the lake to the far shore. The last light of the day bled through a skeletal wall of birch. He squinted at the pile of stones he placed there. “It’s a hard thing,” he said.
/>   “If you need anyone to talk to—” Sven started, but Paul waved the words away.

  “I’m getting by.”

  “How’s your wife? How’s Peg been?”

  Paul hoped the tears he felt welling up stayed put. He cleared his throat and spat. “You know how it is.”

  Sven waited, and when Paul said nothing more, he nodded and stood, hefting the auger up with him. “Well, if you need anything — anything at all — you know where I’m at.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  He watched Sven leave, and then finished setting up the small six by five shelter. It was almost tall enough for him to stand up in but not quite, although he’d cut a twelve inch diameter hole through the top the year before so he could watch the stars through it with his boy.

  His boy. Jack. How many times had he been able to look at the stars with his son, point out the few constellations he knew, point out the ghostly strip of the Milky Way? Not enough. Goddamn, that was for sure. Not nearly enough.

  He heard the bark of Blackie echo across the lake, clear and sharp in the crisp January air. He leaned over the freshly drilled hole in the ice, took his old rusty skimmer and scooped out the slush and ice chips from the surface. He shined his flashlight at the hole, a dark pupil within an iris of frozen water. How could anything live in such a place?

  Time for some coffee. He opened the thermos, poured some into the lid and sipped. Too goddamn strong. Peggy never made it this strong. She made the best damn coffee in the world, just the way he liked it, but he had to make it today. He’d try to remember to put less in the filter next time.

  Peggy. Damn.

  Get used to it, he told himself. Get used to being lonely, because you’re going to be lonely a long, long time.

  He swallowed the rest of the coffee in the lid with a shudder and grimace.

  Get used to it.

  His son Jack had died the year before. Drowned in this very lake. Only thirteen years old. After it happened, Paul didn’t think he’d have the stomach for fishing anymore, didn’t fish all summer, in fact. But when the lake froze up once again, he couldn’t help but think about his son, and coming out here on the lake brought him that much closer.