Horrible Stories for Terrible People, Vol 2: Obscura

By James Pratt

This short story collection is written in the vein of early 2oth century weird pulp tales. Stories include:

-An Earth where monsters worship Godzilla and humans are a distant memory.
-A man tracks down and has a conversation with the Lord Almighty.
-The incarnation of ultimate evil tries to determine which replacement candidate best personifies the evil of the modern age.
-A beloved musical re-imagined with zombies and spies.
-A computer simulation that proves all too real.
-Armed with a crowbar and Bigfoot's blessing, a good ole boy confronts his strange, toxic zombie-filled destiny.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Pratt
• Release date: May 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301813346

James Pratt

James Pratt likes to create realistically flawed but basically decent characters and have them cross paths with serial killer angels, redneck vampires, slithering horrors from other dimensions, and the end of the world. He also likes to write stories that demonstrate how the ever-present darkness threatening to wash over the world like a wave of endless night can be held back with a little courage and a big shotgun (assuming one hasn't already used both barrels, of course). Some take place in the distant past, others in the far future, and still others somewhere between eight minutes ago and twelve minutes from now. Whether sci-fi, adventure, or straight-out horror, the running theme is that the universe is very, very big and we are very, very small.

Book preview

HORRIBLE STORIES FOR TERRIBLE PEOPLE

VOL II – OBSCURA

A collection of strange and obscure tales by James D. Pratt

All stories © James D. Pratt

Smashwords Edition

Cover image © HeroMachine.com

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If this is not a free book and you would like to share it with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If this is a free book and you would like to share it with another person, please direct the recipient to the book’s page on Smashwords.com so they can download their own copy. 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.

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Table of Contents

Welcome to Weirdsville

Addicts Anonymous

Better Late Than Never

Daughters of the Black Lotus

Did You Ever See a Shadow Move?

Ghosts for a Sensible Age

Incursion from an Alternate Frame of Reference

Interview with the Deity

King Kong Died For Your Sins

Prime Evil

The Displeasure of the Inanimate

The Hills are Alive with the Sound of...Death

The Traveler

The Watchers on Widener Avenue

Three Conversations about God(s)

Buford Hollis and the Crowbar of Destiny

WELCOME TO WEIRDSVILLE

Hi. Hope I’m not intruding. I just wanted to drop by and officially welcome you to the neighborhood. I think you’re going to like it here. Quaint little town, salt of the earth folk, and all that postcard jazz. But seriously, if you like small town life you’ve come to the right place. There really is a timeless quality about Wyrdsville.

Fun fact. Wyrdsville got its name from its founder, Jeremiah Wyrd. How’s that for a name? But weird, or w-y-r-d as it used to be spelled, didn’t always mean what it means today. It used to mean fate or destiny, as in It was Bob’s wyrd to be crushed by a falling piano.

The way the story goes, Jeremiah was a…let’s say unorthodox preacher back in the Old World who had a small but devoted following. He also had plenty of enemies because of some of the things he taught. It seems he mixed a lot of old pagan beliefs with Christianity, sort of like how the slaves combined elements of Catholicism with African magic and spirit worship to create voodoo. Some even accused old Jeremiah of witchcraft, and this was back in the day when they burned witches at the stake. You didn’t like somebody, you just accused ‘em of having truck with the minions of Beelzebub by the dark of night. Problem solved.

Reverend Wyrd and his flock took a cue from the Puritans and came to the New World where they could practice their own crazy brand of religion to their hearts’ content. Through the strength of their faith, they endured the harsh winters and survived the depredations of hostile natives to settle this place, and the rest is history. Well, there’s also something about how most of the natives had already been killed off by a plague and were in no condition to predate much less depredate anybody, and there’s even a rumor that claims Reverend Wyrd and his followers ended up eating the natives to keep from starving during their first winter in the New World. But most locals prefer the survived the depredations of hostile natives version so you might not want to repeat it. And if you do, you didn’t hear it from me.

Another fun fact. It wasn’t cowboys and rugged frontiersman who tamed the New World and sent the redskins a’runnin’. No, it was something a lot smaller than bullets or musket balls. It was germs, specifically the ones brought over centuries earlier by the Spaniard explorers who came looking for cities of gold and the Fountain of Youth. Unfortunately for the natives, their immune systems didn’t have any resistance to all those nasty little foreign bugs, just like those dumb Martians in War of the Worlds. By the time colonization began in earnest, disease had already wiped out most of the native population. Just one of the many things they don’t teach you in history class.

Let me tell you about your neighbors. Next door on your right in the tidy Cape Cod with the flower garden lives Mrs. Mabry, a kindly old widow woman with a lazy eye and a dozen or so cats. She can supposedly trace her family tree all the way back to Jeremiah Wyrd himself. Mrs. Mabry is like everybody’s grandmother, always baking something or dispensing some pearl of wisdom straight out of a 1953 family sitcom. She’s been around since forever, and a widow almost that long. I don’t think there’s anyone left alive who remembers Mr. Mabry, God rest his soul. But Mrs. Mabry, she just keeps chugging right along. And she’s good people, as the saying goes. Just don’t mess with her cats. Or let her catch you in a lie. Or steal her newspaper. Or…Let’s just say it’s not a good idea to cross Mrs. Mabry. Speaking of which…

Next door on your left in the not so tidy Cape Cod with the broken windows and overgrown lawn lives Old Man Brumford. Nobody’s actually seen Brumford in quite a spell. They say that back in the old days he was a distinguished professor at Wyrdsville U. and a tall, handsome devil to boot. It seems him and Mrs. Mabry used to have a thing going. Then Brumford got engaged to one of his own students and broke it off with Mrs. Mabry, or so the story goes. He got sick soon afterward, the kind of sickness you don’t get over. His fiancé ended up leaving him and he became a recluse. Now he’s supposedly all twisted up like a pretzel. Something to do with his spine. There’re those that say his jilted lover put some kind of hex on him. Which is silly of course, but you know how people like to talk. Anyway, just do yourself a favor and try to stay on Mrs. Mabry’s good side. Best keep that last little tidbit about Brumford to yourself and remember, you didn’t hear it from me.

Across the street in the little rancher live the Taylors, Ryan, Jessica, and little Alex. They’re a happy little all-American family, like a Norman Rockwell painting sprung to life. Mr. Taylor runs the town hardware store and teaches Sunday school at the Methodist church on the corner of Maple and Ash Street. Mrs. Taylor is a homemaker who sells cosmetics on the side and loves gothic romance novels, the more lurid the better. And Alex…well, you better keep your eye on that one. Like most six-year olds, Alex spends most of his time trying to figure out just how much he can get away with. He’s a scamp.

Hey, this is going to sound like a weird question but did you have to worry about neighborhood pets pooping on your lawn where you used to live? Yeah? Well, you won’t have to worry about that here. It wasn’t too long after the Taylors moved in that the neighborhood pets started disappearing. Just one of those weird coincidences, I suppose. Anyway, pets are kept indoors now, or aren’t allowed to stray any farther than their own backyards. The timing was a real shame too. Little Alex is quite fond of animals but can’t have a pet of his own because of his dad’s allergies. You should have seen the way Alex’s eyes would light up whenever he got within touching distance of a cat or dog. Funny thing is, most animals didn’t seem all that fond of him, but then again the way little kids run around all full of crazy energy can make animals nervous so maybe that’s not so strange. What is strange is that I can remember seeing Mr. Taylor pet one of Mrs. Mabry’s cats once, something you wouldn’t expect a guy with pet allergies to do. But then again, allergies can set in at any time in life so there’s that.

And then there’s Miss Fassbender who lives all alone in the big white house beside the Taylors. Or should I say ‘Mizz’ Fassbender. That’s how we’re supposed to refer to unmarried ladies nowadays, right? Ms. Fassbender teaches at the middle school on the other side of town. She’s a pretty little thing, doesn’t look a day over twenty-five, but I swear she’s been teaching at that school for well over two decades. Some people just age better than others, I guess. Just look at me. By the time I turned fifteen I could have passed for twenty. I guess genes have something to do with it, or maybe life was just harder back in those days what with all the asbestos and such.

Where was I? Oh yeah, the lovely Ms. Fassbender. All the other teachers are jealous of her, and not just because of her looks. She always has the best disciplined class, in no small part due to a story that’s been floating around the school for years. About fifteen years ago, one of Ms. Fassbender’s students disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Now according to the story, he was a little trouble-maker who ignored Ms. Fassbender’s promise to feed him to the devil’s own imps if he didn’t straighten up. Nobody gave any serious thought to that promise when the boy he failed to show up on the last day of school and was never seen again. But as the years passed and Ms. Fassbender stayed the same, rumors started going around that she’d kept her promise and traded the boy to the devil in exchange for eternal youth. Silly, I know, but gossip and rumors are just a part of small town life.

But small town life also has its advantages. You the outdoor type? There’s a state park just a few miles down the road where you can go camping and fishing. And there’re some great hiking trails running through Crowley Woods just outside of town. Just don’t go out there after dark or you might run into the Black Goat of Crowley Woods. See, there’s a story about the woods. It’s said that Jeremiah once outfoxed the devil himself. To get revenge, the Father of Lies seduced Jeremiah’s daughter, Abigail, who bore him a son. Unfortunately he took after his father’s side of the family and was born with a pair of curvy horns, hooves, and a thick coat of fur as black as night. He came to be known as the Black Goat for obvious reasons and is said to haunt Crowley Woods to this very day. Just more silliness, I know, but every small town has its own mythology. It’s part of the charm.

This is going to sound like a strange question but are you a fan of Halloween? The way some towns go all out for Christmas, that’s how Wyrdsville treats Halloween. In fact, back in the old days they didn’t even celebrate Christmas at all. Halloween was their Christmas. But then they built the Exit 6 off and on-ramp a couple of miles down the road right off I-66 and new blood started to trickle in, bringing the outside world with it. But Halloween is still a pretty big deal around here.

Fun fact about Halloween. Like most modern holidays, it started out as a pagan festival. Specifically, the druid celebration Samhain which was a combination harvest and death festival. Those druids were an interesting bunch. They used to put people and animals in big wicker baskets then set the baskets on fire because they thought they could auger the future in the flames. Anyway, the druids believed that on the night of Halloween the dead would walk the earth. Once you’ve experienced one of Wyrdsville’s Halloweens you’ll think they were right!

Speaking of ghosts and such, every town has a haunted house and Wyrdsville is no exception. You see that the big, decrepit mansion at the end of the street, the one that looks like the house from The Munsters? That was the home of the late Tobias Wyrd, the last of Reverend Jeremiah’s descendents to carry the Wyrd name. Tobias had a reputation around town for being a bit of an eccentric. He spent his youth roaming the world then came home, settled in the family manse, and spent the last of the Wyrd family fortune buying old books and strange gadgets and Lord knows what else. He claimed Jeremiah was actually a genius way ahead of his time and he was just carrying on the family tradition. One man’s crazy ideas are another man’s nuggets of wisdom, I suppose.

Yep, Old Tobias was out there. And as befitting an eccentric mad-scientist type, he just disappeared one dark night never to be seen again. It was the Night of the Storm, capital ‘n’, capital ‘s’. The wind can whip through these valleys like one of God’s own farts but that storm was a whopper even by our standards. It’s like it was…angry. That’s the word. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but the way that storm beat the snot out of this town, it almost felt personal. Anyway, that’s why to this day you can say Night of the Storm and any local will know exactly what you’re talking about.

I was a youngster back then. Me and my old man, God rest his soul, had come to town to listen to the ball game on the radio at Gunderson’s Bar and Grill, on account of our own radio was busted. This was in prehistoric times before everybody and their uncle had a television set for every room in the house, and when people weren’t quite so touchy when it came to youngsters bearing witness to the public consumption of mass quantities of alcohol. So anyway, there we were at Gunderson’s trying to hear the radio over that crazy, pissed off wind outside, pardon my French, when Tobias Wyrd burst in through the door. He was a mess, clothes ripped up, all bruised up and bleeding from cuts all over his hands and face. We figured somebody had jumped him. Times were tough and it wouldn’t be the first time somebody got rolled for the change in their pocket. My dad said Tobias looked like he’d just seen the devil himself. Thinking back on it, dad might have been right.

That night, Tobias reminded me of that scientist in the old Boris Karloff version of Frankenstein, especially that scene where he’s yelling It’s alive! only Tobias was yelling I saw it! I saw it! over and over again.

Tommy Gunderson, who’d inherited the bar and grill from his old man Chet, was all set to lay Tobias out but my old man held him back.

Saw what? Dad asked Tobias.

Lothos, Tobias whispered, all the life suddenly drained out of him. The threshold. I saw it. I saw it at the threshold.

Dad grabbed Tobias and shook him. What the devil does that mean?

Tobias started to say something then his eyes got real big, even bigger than they’d been when he first stumbled in. Oh God, the threshold! It’s still open! he yelled, and ran back out into the night. And that was the last time anybody saw him. They say on some nights you can still hear Tobias yelling from somewhere inside the mansion, and that on Halloween night you might even catch a glimpse of him because that’s when the walls are thinnest between the lands of the living and the dead. Who knows, maybe that was the threshold Tobias was talking about?

But look at me, standing here chewing your ear off while you still have so much to do. I’d offer to help but I’m afraid I wouldn’t be of much use. With all the rain we’ve been getting lately, my joints have been snapping and popping like a bowl of Rice Krispies. But that’s what age does to you. Some people say time’s a harsh mistress but personally I think she’s a flat-out bitch, pardon my French. I’m going to take off now and let you get back to work but I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other again real soon. In