Nightmare Fuel: Volume 1

By Andrea Trask

This began several years ago, when Andrea started having nightmares. Not that she'd never had nightmares before, mind you - but she'd never had them one on top of another, ceaselessly, all night and every night for days and sometimes weeks on end. It recurred the next year, and the year after that.

It happened regularly enough that she began to refer to the fall as Nightmare Season.

Then at the beginning of Summer 2011 Google opened the invite-only beta of Google+. Andrea was invited, joined (as Bliss Morgan), and managed to meet some really great people, and witness them doing some interesting things. In September, with Nightmare Season looming, she decided to (and posted that she would) write a piece of short horror fiction every day in October, in the hopes that getting the demons out of my head and onto a page or screen where she could see them would help alleviate Nightmare Season somewhat.

People thought this was a fantastic idea.

People wanted to join in.

She welcomed anybody who wanted to participate in any capacity, and set it up that she would post an inspirational image each morning, and anybody so inclined had all day to write something and post it. She was the only one that she felt had to post something every day. She ran it from October 1 to October 31. She had folks who wanted to write, some who just wanted to read and comment, and several who wanted to provide photography or other images.

From that project, she ended up with many short fictions, which she pared down to these fine twenty. She hopes that you enjoy the Nightmares.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrea Trask
• Release date: Apr 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476406602

Andrea Trask

Relentlessly cheerful and dedicated to the proposition that all people deserve happiness, Andrea picked up the name Bliss early in her college career, and it has stuck with her in the many years since to the point that she's far more likely to answer to it in a crowd.

Book preview

Nightmare Fuel

Volume 1

by Andrea Trask

Published by Andrea Trask at Smashwords

Text Copyright © 2012 Andrea Trask

All Rights Reserved

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Permission for cover art granted by Moan Lisa

under an Attribution-Sharealike Creative Commons license.

See image and info here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/moanlisa/6950828002/

Cover font is Appendix by Erwin Vader

http://www.dafont.com/profile.php?user=19134

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events, and locations are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

To the writers of Google Plus

For helping me fend off Nightmare Season

Table of Contents

Prime Directive

Brickboy

She Rides Through The Wood

Leviathan

It's Full Of Stars

Watercooler

Lucia's Dance

Special Hell

Death of Bees

Lost

Patience

Bloody Mary

Ride

Shadowpeople

Bear

An Offer You Can't Refuse

I <3 You

Mooned

At Home With The Muddletons

Strange Fruit

Acknowledgements

Author's Note

About the Author

Prime Directive

A long time ago, histocasts claimed, we were one race, living on one planet, and the sky above it was barely penetrable except to unmanned, clunky satcom units and the occasional shortjump to the totally non-T-formed moon. It sounded so lonely, so barbaric for most of my life, and I couldn't imagine what it must have been like not to be able to hop on a transport to go to another world, let alone not knowing about all the other creatures the universe housed.

We'd long since made contact, so much contact, and some of the non-sapiens were pretty funky, but hey, that's the beauty of the 'verse, right? Little bit of room for everybody, and all kinds to fill it up.

Even so, we'd sort of hit the point that when I signed up for some of the edgeworld and outbound exploratories, I figured it was mostly going to be sightseeing with note-taking. I never imagined that for the first time in several generations we were going to run across somebody – somebodies – new. Quietly hoped, maybe, but honestly, what were the odds at this stage? There was so much explored and so many contacts, what was really left? Sure, I felt like I'd missed the boat, but I like to travel, so that was cool, right?

Then we landed on what we thought was an unformed planet.

An earthday later we were completely swarmed and separated. I hadn't seen hide nor hair of anybody what felt in half an earthweek and I was miserable, my stomach feeling ready to eat itself inside out. The room I'd been dumped into, if you could call it a room, was under the surface and surprisingly raw. Or maybe it shouldn't have been so surprising – after all, the surface had looked so organic and unoccupied, so why should the underground structures of the inhabitants be any different?

The door, best as I could surmise it was, was somewhat inset from the surrounding rock walls, but made of much the same. The room looked like it had been hewn and carved from the stone, with a ledge along one end that I slept on, and a deep pool set in the floor at the other. After a day and a half my thirst had overcome my reluctance to drink unknown water.

Oddly, my uncertainty had been a little assuaged when, kneeling by the edge that slanted down into the water, I saw more than a few tiny cephalopods in the depths. They shifted and writhed a little when I dipped my hand in, several of them turning themselves to aim their dark eyes in my direction. Half-smiling, I waved at the creatures through the rippling water and drank a little more, until the cramping of my otherwise empty stomach around the fluid pushed me to go curl up on the ledge at the other end of the room.

I'd slept, and walked a bit unsteadily back over to the pool when I wakened. I couldn't quite remember how many days they said we could go without eating, but I knew that if I was dehydrated, I was done for. This time when I knelt, one of the creatures was just under the surface of the water, featureless dark eyes turned upward – and it detached a tentacle from the rock to waggle slowly through the water.

The laugh I barked out was raspy, echoing hollowly off the walls of the room, and I raised my hand to wave again. Apparently satisfied, it lowered its tentacle and I watched it crawl arm over arm back down the slope into the deeper shadow where other similar forms waited, and there they all moved sluggishly about, apparently ignoring me.

I drank, and stripped down to rinse myself off; even without much activity I was starting to feel pretty rank. I drank a little more. I slept.

There finally came the point where it was hard to walk, and I satisfied myself with napping by the side of the pool. Sometimes I woke to find one of them watching me, sometimes a whole bunch of them, just under the surface. Not a one of them looked any larger than my hand, but there were a lot of them, and whenever I actually looked at them, they would all raise a single tentacle to wave at me. I waved back.

Not long after that the door opened; the space beyond was incredibly brightly lit compared to the dim, diffuse light of my room, and I couldn't really get a good fix on the shape of the creature in the doorway. It moved, and the Captain's transcom unit clattered across the floor to land near me.

Reaching out