Soon: Four Chilling Tales

By Abby Goldsmith, James Maxey, Rebecca Roland and Sarah Kelderman

Ghosts, cannibals, perverts, freaks... they might be in your neighborhood. Even under your own roof. They're definitely in this collection of four tales of contemporary horror by acclaimed authors James Maxey, Abby Goldsmith, Rebecca Roland, and Sarah Kelderman. Learn what horrors lurk just beyond your field of vision... horrors that will reveal themselves... Soon.

"Joe's Spider Farm" -- Joe runs the Spider Farm, a trailer park populated by retired carnival freaks. Good people, once you get past their frightening exteriors. One day, a former circus geek shows up, seeking refuge. Can a dark-hearted man whose only talent is biting the heads off chickens fit in among the kind souls on the Spider Farm? Or will the geek transform the peaceful paradise into the freaks' private hell?

"Handicapped" -- A suburban cul-de-sac is full of 'For Sale' signs, because neighbors fear the deformed recluse. But now a real estate agent has vanished, and her husband is about to learn that not all deformities are birth defects.

"Shadow Man" -- Visits to a child psychologist ought to help young Pablo get over his trauma-induced nightmares. No one trusts a child who says his nightmares are real.

"Pretty Doll" -- She yearns for a girl who will play with her, because it's been such a long time, and she's so pretty. Look, there's blood pouring from the cuts on her arms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fiery Press
• Release date: Oct 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781540121066

Abby Goldsmith

Abby Goldsmith is a video editor, with SF/F short stories and articles published in Escape Pod, Fantasy Magazine, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, and several anthologies. She’s an alumni of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and the Superstars Writing Seminar. As an animator and game content writer, Abby is credited on more than a dozen Nintendo games for Nickelodeon and Disney. She lives in Austin, Texas, after a decade in Los Angeles, California, and a decade in Southern New Hampshire.

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Four Chilling Tales

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Grand Matter logo

All characters depicted in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Compilation Copyright © 2013 by Abby Goldsmith. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Joe's Spider Farm copyright © 2013 by James Maxey

Handicapped copyright © 2013 by Abby Goldsmith

Shadow Man copyright © 2013 by Rebecca Roland

Pretty Doll copyright © 2013 by Sarah Kelderman

Cover Art Shereber's pin-up copyright © 2013 by Renzo Podesta

Cover layout copyright © 2013 by Abby Goldsmith

Interior Illustrations copyright © 2013 by Abby Goldsmith

First electronic publishing: October 2013

Table of Contents

Joe's Spider Farm

Handicapped

Shadow Man

Pretty Doll

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About

Joe's Spider Farm

by

James Maxey

There's a little sign up where the dirt road connects to the gravel road that says Joe's Spider Farm. It's easy to miss. Joe keeps saying he'll put up a bigger sign to make us easier to find, but I know he won't. Anyone set to find us will find us, sign or no. Joe's Spider Farm isn't a place you happen to stumble across.

We've got a pretty little home up here. Fifty acres total, although our trailers sit on just two of them, smack up against the Virginia border. Joe's great-granddaddy used to make moonshine up this way. Gives the place a seedy history to go with its seedy present.

Odds are good if you're the kind of person who knows about Joe's Spider Farm, you're into freaks. Used to be, we'd come up here in the winters to hunker down and wait it out until the weather was good enough to start the carnival circuit again. Of course, the world's changed a great deal even in my lifetime and now most of the trailers here stay parked all year round. Not a bunch of gigs for freaks these days. If you're a freak who can't find work anymore, Joe doesn't charge anything for you to set up your trailer and hook into his septic tank and well. Joe just likes the company. He gets along with pretty much anybody as long as you don't mess with his spiders.

If you've got a thing about spiders, Joe's ain't the place to be. One reason the little sign at the end of the road is so hard to spot is because of the white cloud of webs hanging off it. During the summer when you're driving up, you'd think we were overrun with caterpillars from all the webs weighing down the branches; but no, they're spiders gone all feral. Joe's shipped them in from Argentina, from Australia, from Vietnam. He's got spiders round here that eat birds. You don't wake up to a lot of chirping on Joe's Spider Farm.

But there's nothing sinister about the place, if you're cool with spiders. We're actually a gentle people, a kind little family. We just happen to make money by receiving visitors who'll pay twenty bucks a head to stare at us. Not that all we do is just sit around and get stared at. We're showmen, professionals. We're always working on something new.

The latest addition to our show? Well, I have to say, there's a story behind it. It began on New Year's day. Round here, winter is an iffy thing. You're just as likely to be walking around in shorts and sandals as you are to be needing your long johns and boots. New Year's this year was the warm kind, so Tibby was getting ready to show off his latest gimmick.

Tibby is actually one of the more famous members of our little family. You might have seen him on the cover of a newspaper in a supermarket checkout. They call him Lizard Boy although his real name is Tiberius Jackson. His friends call him Tibby. Boy is a bit insulting, since Tibby's a black man, and about seventy. He's a little guy though, skinny, and his scaly skin is more green than black. He's a good sport about being called boy. He even tried to market himself as Dinosaur Boy when those dinosaur movies were big, but it never caught on.

So Tibby got this little remote controlled boat for Christmas and, being a born showman, within a week he figured out a new act. On New Years, we're all of us standing round waiting for the big debut. All of us on New Years isn't that many. Even freaks have families to visit during the holidays. Only a handful of us stick around. There's Joe of course. He used to travel around as the Amazing Spiderman until a lawsuit put an end to that. Joe is a squat fellow, his torso is about as close to