All of Them Nightmares

By J Joe Sherman

"We all have nightmares," J. Joe Sherman warns in the forward of this book of eight dark fiction stories, most previously published in reputable small press magazines. A clone-boy's crush on his teacher makes him sing a strange song. A bored adolescent finds an eerily changing photograph inside a used book that challenges his boundaries between the real and fantastic. All of them...nightmares!

• Language: English
• Publisher: J Joe Sherman
• Release date: Aug 29, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452385464

J Joe Sherman

Justin Joe Sherman is a native son of the South and writer of Christian suspense fiction. He lives in Mississippi with a wonderful family and a dog-muse named Samuel. Although his wife is a descendant of the family haunted by the Bell Witch of Tennessee, he is weary of the multitude of stories where dark forces rule. The good news is that in the Bible it is clear: God wins in the end! Justin loves to write stories about God helping His children shackle the dark forces. He will soon be releasing _Strengthen Your Sketchy Faith_, a composite of short stories and Bible lessons aimed at helping young adults cope with a world that constantly bombards them with tough choices. If you like Christian suspense authors like Frank Peretti, Ted Dekker, James Rubart, and Travis Thrasher, tune in for soon-to-be-released offerings from Justin Joe Sherman. He can be reached at [e-mail].

Book preview

All of Them Nightmares

By J. Joe Sherman

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 by J. Joe Sherman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission of the author. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are entirely the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Forward

Beyond the Red Pavilion

(published in Sinister Tales, July 2008)

Discovering Georgia

(published in Lost in the Dark, Fall 2004)

The Cellar’s Siren Call

(published in Down in the Cellar, 2006)

Searching for Valentine Gifts

(published in Seasons in the Night, 2004)

Vermillion Birdcalls

(published in Sand: A Journal of Strange Tales, 2009)

Milo’s Black Box

(published for the first time in this collection)

Gone to the Pond

(published in Southern Fried Weirdness Anthology, Winter 2007)

White Stars and Gemstones

(published for the first time in this collection)

About the Author

Forward

We all have nightmares.

As I write this, I am staying at a relative’s old farmhouse where my wife had a nightmare last night. Sheila has these night terrors, not very often, but when they occur they are truly terrifying for her. We call them ring panics because usually she wakes up sitting bolt upright, wringing her fingers trying to find the rings that she had taken off prior to falling asleep. That is her nightmare: losing her rings. They are not even that expensive—believe me, I bought the pitiful things for her—but in the dark and quiet of the night every irrational fear seems rational, and every nightmare is really happening.

Last night, Sheila woke us both up by sitting bolt upright and screaming, I can’t get out, I can’t get out! It wasn’t about the rings this time.

I grabbed her and pulled her on top of me, trying to calm her with my soothing, It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay sweetheart, it’s only a dream. There was no other sound in the still night air, only the heartbeat that I could feel from her chest to mine thumping as if it were a train about to derail from its tracks. Her sweat dripped onto me, and finally, thankfully, her heart began to slow back to its normal pace.

She was on that edge between the dream and reality, her eyes wide and lips quivering. It was this room, this room. I couldn’t see anything, and I was alone and trying to get out the window because the room was closing in on me. And nobody could hear me even though I kept screaming.

Shh. It’s okay, now, sweetheart. I love you, and it’s okay. I planted a light kiss on her still-sweaty forehead.

Her eyes finally refocused, and she slipped off of me and wordlessly rolled back over onto her side of the bed. Only seconds later, the sounds of sleep emanated from her. I checked my watch. It was exactly midnight.

I write fiction in all genres: horror, science fiction, fantasy, even Christian-themed stories. You’ll find eight of my horror stories in here, almost all of which have been previously published by reputable small presses. At first the stories will seem to be as eclectic, as different from each other as night and day, but know that they all have some elements in common. They deal with aloneness. Or finding your way through darkness. Or screaming in a void where nobody can hear or help. Or things that close in on you, whether they are monsters, or situations, or only your own irrational fears.

We all have nightmares. I just write mine down. Enjoy.

August 21st, 2010

Beyond the Red Pavilion

With each bite of the shovel’s blade, the sand turned and the hole deepened. Jimmy Dunbar, barely into his teens and unaccustomed to rigorous physical labor, found the job difficult, but he had to finish in a hurry. He had dug almost four feet deep within the past hour.

Jimmy rested, shoving the blade deep into the sand. It stood on its own. It was how he had found the shovel, after all. He swathed his face with a sweat-soaked tee, the tattered blue one with the words Miskatonic University, and threw it aside.

Biceps strained as he removed the shovel and scanned the beach. No breeze, no motion, except for waves lapping monotonously only yards away. The red pavilion stood like a lurking menace, shadows merging into complete darkness from the setting sun. A setting Mississippi Delta sun that pounded the beach and its lone occupant even through its waning moments. He resumed digging.

But was he really alone?

Ears perked to detect the slightest movement from beyond the red pavilion were flooded instead with the increasing lapping, lapping sounds from waves now pounding the beach. Could he even hear anyone creeping up on him with all that lapping? He pushed the thought aside.

If he did not find the woman – that beautiful woman who had captivated his every waking moment for the past few days – before sunset, before the last shadows of the day succumbed to the advancing darkness, they would come. He had no idea how he knew this, but he was as sure of this as he was that his own shoulders were raw with sunburn.

His neck prickled and his pulse pounded everywhere – in his neck, wrists, and temples. This new surge of adrenalin helped him to ignore his pains, his muscle aches, his sunburn, his life, as he turned the sand.

#

Only a day earlier, life for Jimmy had been completely normal as he explored his new town. Naperville, the proverbial small Southern town, population five thousand, with its courthouse square and surrounding dilapidated shops. Although this particular shop was filled with stale, dank air, it offered Jimmy temporary refuge from the suffocating summer heat. Jimmy thought at first that he had mistaken an empty warehouse for a bookshop, except for the bindings of paperbacks pinned against the window outside. The store was scrunched between a deli and a pawnshop like a condom in the folds of a wallet, with no identifying name posted outside.

He and his mom had moved from the Gibbons community twelve miles away to the larger Naperville after school let out for the summer. Jimmy’s mom had finally landed a decent job when Guy Phillips, a high school friend-turned-lawyer, had phoned her out of the blue a few months after her divorce. Although she called herself an administrative assistant, Jimmy suspected that the job description still involved large doses of making coffee and fetching lunch.

Meanwhile, Jimmy tried to busy himself, attempting to forget about his lifelong close friend, Owen Stewart, still living twelve miles away. He rapidly lost interest fumbling through the boxes that his mother had not gotten around to unpacking – Mr. Phillips kept her pretty busy, all right. Funny how a friend would put her to work without even giving her time to unpack. Perhaps more out of boredom than anything else, Jimmy decided to explore his new town.

Now surveying the store with properly dilated pupils, the sheer number of used books scattered throughout makeshift shelves astounded him. The feeble oscillating fan on the back checkout counter offered only the slightest respite from the humidity, mostly pushing hot air around instead.

The store’s proprietor, a thin man with a black Fu Manchu mustache, sat behind the counter. He ignored Jimmy at first, preferring to busy himself by cleaning imaginary cobwebs off the counter. Then, he turned and planted both hands on the counter, glaring at the store’s only shopper.

A little unnerved at drawing his attention, Jimmy ducked behind a set of bookshelves. The air in the small enclosure was musty from books weathered, worn, and stained by coffee and food. His uncle was buried in a mausoleum that had smelled this way – sort of moist and decaying with an undercurrent of malice.

As luck would have it, he had ducked behind the horror section.

He loved the genre more than any other. Science Fiction piqued his interest, but the technical background often lost him. The classics were satisfying, but actually reading the formal prose from yesteryear was like waiting for coffee to warm in a faulty percolator. He did not have the patience to read mysteries either, usually jumping to the last chapter before the author had introduced all the main characters. Above all others, he sucked up the marrow of horror novels with an insatiable appetite. Sometimes he actually perspired while he read them, squirming in his bed late at night under the flickering lamp because he could not even force himself to take