Trust and Other Nightmares

By Richard Gazala

From time to time when I take a break from researching and writing my thrillers, I write short stories such as the ones collected for the first time in this new anthology, Trust and Other Nightmares. Each of these stories has its germination in nights when my sleep was suddenly savaged by ethereal visions and sounds sufficiently disturbing to wrench me from tangled, sweat-drenched sheets. Some of them have seen a bit of daylight before now, and the last two debut here. All of them are spawned of the dancing skeletons and reanimated corpses that plague the bleakest, blackest hours preceding my blessed dawns. They include Trust, without which a murder-suicide pact is merely revenge’s favorite recipe; Rougarou, where a terrified boy learns it’s never easy to tell monsters from saviors in a desolate Louisiana swamp; Frankie’s Last Affair, where we’re taught that if a thing is truly art, someone has to suffer for it; Canis, a post-apocalyptic tale where the wolves in sheep’s clothing have no lock on cross-dressing, and Showtime, in which a famous television psychic medium’s dirty secret is he knows there’s no such thing as ghosts.

I hope you enjoy this collection. If it scares you enough to keep you up a night or two, I know just how you feel. As this anthology demonstrates, I sleep well rarely.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Gazala
• Release date: Aug 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9780983924708

Richard Gazala

Richard Gazala was born in Ohio, at the bleeding edge of the 1960s. When he was young, his family moved to Beirut, Lebanon, where they lived until the Lebanese Civil War erupted. After Beirut, he finished high school in Massachusetts, and England. While living abroad he traveled around the Middle East and Europe, picking up enough Arabic and French to embrace or avoid trouble as circumstances dictated. He attended Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, where her earned a B.A. and a J.D. He has practiced law for over thirty years, and is a member of the bar of the United States Supreme Court. He currently lives in Virginia, where he's a thriller author, voracious reader and reviewer, lawyer, music aficionado, guerrilla chef, excursionist, and public speaker.

Book preview

Welcome to My Nightmares

Imagine yesterday’s burning breath simmering on the back of your neck. I can feel it right now, remembering a sweltering evening in 1975 that influences my writing to this day. I was a teenager then, freshly delivered to American shores from the horrific Lebanese civil war that was to last 15 more years, and I was still months shy of a driver’s license. On the same night Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven first mesmerized me, a couple hours later I was swallowed whole by a half-crazed throng of feverish thousands bearing witness to Alice Cooper’s Welcome to My Nightmare tour in support of his record album of the same name. Amid the ruined graveyard and the menacing spiders and the dancing skeletons on the stage, at one point during the show Cooper sawed off the head of a giant Cyclops to the accompaniment of growling bass and quavering footlights. Politicians at the time feared Cooper’s gory shock-rock theatrics so much they tried to shut down his productions, which only served to douse his hellish flames in pure gasoline. Like Cooper, Poe and his macabre tales of reanimated corpses and torturous murders were no favorites of polite 19th century society—to this day some attribute Poe’s curious premature death to the wiles of disgruntled politicians.

I always think in nightmares. They are the lingua franca of all my stories, even the ones that don’t readily lend themselves to classification as citizens in good standing of the horror genre. Some of you may be familiar with my novel, Blood of the Moon. I’m working on its sequel now. Both those books are thrillers, and neither would be considered works of horror. Fair enough, but I refer the reader to Chapter 15 of Blood of the Moon. Whenever I rap at keyboards, nightmares are never far from my fingertips.

Hence, this anthology. From time to time when I take a break from researching and writing my thrillers, I write short stories such as the ones now before you. Each of them has its germination in nights when my sleep was suddenly savaged by ethereal visions and sounds sufficiently disturbing to wrench me from tangled, sweat-drenched sheets. Some of them have seen a bit of daylight before now, and the last two debut here. All of them are spawned of the dancing skeletons and reanimated corpses that plague the bleakest, blackest hours preceding my blessed dawns.

Exciting as it is to present this ghastly authorial medley, I’m equally gratified to introduce the visual art of a stunningly gifted young talent, Abigail Fundling. Abbie created for us the Smokin’ Skull cover image gracing this compilation, and this is her first opportunity to display her work to the large audience it rightly deserves. I think myself fortunate, and I couldn’t be prouder, to have her cover illustration as a seminal part of this endeavor. I’m supremely confident the world will come to seek and appreciate Abbie’s creative ingenuity evermore as she hones her bountiful powers over what is sure to be a long and fruitful career in the arts.

Without further ado, welcome to my nightmares. When you finish them, I bid you a good night to sleep, perchance to dream sweet dreams.

Perchance not.

– Richard

Trust

I’ll do it if you do it, she repeated.

Ella’s words drifted up to curl softly round Robert’s sweaty ears, like the nearly imperceptible wisps of silvery clouds caressing a nigh full moon glistening high overhead in the starless black sky.

Robert finally dropped his shovel. It bounced once noiselessly, shedding fresh dark soil onto thick green grass before settling on the ground. He inspected his bleeding palm in the moonlight. Shaking fingers grubby with moist brown earth pinched a long splinter of wood and twisted it out from the meat of his hand. He held the jagged piece close to his face, inspecting the shard with pale blue eyes bleared by lonesome years. Years laden with the oppressive guilt of an unkept promise. Through its reflection in worn varnish on the wooden sliver, the moon stared at him. The unwavering expectation he sensed in that stare made him gulp slowly, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his dry throat.

Robert looked down at Ella. You know I’ll do it, he whispered. The cool night breeze caught his words and carried them up into the rustling leaves of a stale poplar tree a few feet away. The tree still bore timeworn scars in the shape of Robert’s and Ella’s chiseled initials. Old love letters encased in a crooked heart carved in the tree trunk with the same sharp blade Robert now felt pressing insistently against his right thigh through the pocket of his muddy jeans.

Robert dropped to his knees next to a half-empty bottle of cheap red wine. An unsteady hand lifted the bottle to cracked lips. He swallowed desperately, savoring the burn of the wine on his tongue before it wound its way down to warm his belly. He carefully placed the bottle next to the discarded shovel. Watering eyes drifted over Ella’s frail features and the tattered lace of a drab bodice that he remembered had once been so lustrously white. He took another swallow.

Do you believe in God? he asked.

Ella was silent a long time before he heard her say, I think people get the gods they deserve.

Robert nodded slowly. "I know it’s no excuse, but I made you that promise with my loins burning and my head full of snow. Not that I didn’t