Uncanny Tales

By C.L. Kelley

In these nine tales of the uncanny, reality itself becomes unstuck, and nothing is as it seems. Abandoned towns hide cosmic horrors and forgotten rites. Doppelgangers plague a traveling salesman. Patterns in bathroom graffiti take on sinister meaning to a beleaguered grocery clerk. Mirrors don't cast reflections, masked singers spread songs of madness, and feral creatures stalk the dark corners of the city.

The other world is there, only a misstep away. It has been waiting for you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: C.L. Kelley
• Release date: Jan 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386456933

Book preview

Glyphs

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Someone had added to the graffiti in the men's bathroom last night. While the store had been closed and locked. Maybe it had been one of the stockers with some twisted and determined sense of humor, but I doubted it. No, this was something else entirely. Not that I wasn't used to the second stall in the men's bathroom being a sounding board for every pervert and lunatic in this town. It was like they all knew to come here. Like they wanted me to see it. Wanted me to witness it.

A lot of it was your standard profane drivel for any high-traffic bathroom: phone numbers promising a good time, misspelled racist slurs, crude anatomical drawings. A few tried their hands at body function poetry. None of this would usually be worth mentioning and would not have caught my attention had it not been for the other, stranger things that I had never seen anywhere before. Only a couple had been scrawled when I had signed on as a bag boy at the start of summer, and now, a month in, there were definitely more. Exponentially more, in fact, and getting more detailed all the time.

Near the toilet, a woman had been drawn with her hands covering her face, weeping. The picture was very detailed, with the contorted pose of the body in perfect proportion and perspective. Above the coat hook, a pair of eyes peered out, narrowed with malice. One of the eyes had a double pupil. Someone else had drawn a skeletal tree with what looked like a human dangling in a noose from one of its gnarled branches. The tree must have taken a couple of hours to draw at least, and it had been done in pen, without any mistakes.

More than just the drawings were multiplying. Message after message appeared on the walls, whose meanings I could only guess. I always thought of the stories behind the usual juvenile bathroom graffiti with not much more than an eye roll, but not these. Thinking about these stories chilled me inside.

N.P. knows about the basement on Fadden St.

It's hungry.

One day you'll all be sorry for what you did to me.

I told you she was listening.

They won't stop crying.

The mirror isn't working.

Help me I am in Hell.

Some of the phrases were just phone numbers, with a specific time instead of who to talk to for the best of a particular service.

I wondered why none of my bosses, or co-workers for that matter, had said anything about it. Or what about customers, so eager to complain about anything? And who was putting these messages on the walls? Every time I cleaned the bathroom, these thoughts nearly possessed me, and they were increasingly on my mind away from work. Not that there was much else to keep my mind busy these days. My parents were saying that I was being quieter than normal, even for me. Typical of them, to stick their noses in my business.

At first I tried as hard as I could to clean the graffiti off the walls, though that wasn't very successful. I scrubbed and scrubbed, barely blurring the images. It was almost as if they were etched on. And the next time I worked—sometimes the very next night—the few messages I had managed to attack were redrawn and rewritten. Eventually, I gave up trying to take care of the graffiti in this way.

One of the things I thought about was why this bathroom? Why one in a chain grocery store, with its glaring florescent lights and neat tile floors?  Cakes with smiling cartoon characters rested not 30 feet from the stall. It didn't quite make sense. But maybe that was the point.

I tried to shake off these thoughts and go back to my crappy job, to the parade of small town weirdos outside who ordered me around as if I were an imbecile. I had been working the job since April, and I quickly saw how they had me pegged. Just because I didn't talk much and worked a menial job made me stupid, apparently. Never mind that I had just graduated near the top of my high school class, though in a town like this, that wasn't much of an accomplishment. One of the many reasons I felt compelled to skip the self-congratulatory exultation that comes in the wake of graduating. I couldn't wait until August when I would—well, what? Go to college? Maybe. Though I had been admitted into a couple, I hadn't registered for any classes yet, and the deadlines were ticking right away. Maybe I would get in my car—my parents went halfway with me on an old Plymouth—and drive until I got somewhere that looked completely different from anything I'd seen before. Certainly there was nothing for me here, and the boredom was crushing me. I tried to reread some old paperback science fiction novels I had sitting around the house, but I couldn't stay focused long enough to really absorb anything or get a sense of escape. I didn't have anyone to talk to or socialize with since I'd had a falling out with Carl five months ago. What a mess that had been. We still hadn't talked since then, and I didn't see that changing anytime soon, not after what he did. There were other minor acquaintances, but no one seemed to be able to find any time for me. Perhaps it was this combination of restlessness and boredom that made my mind latch onto the bathroom writing, giving me a puzzle to solve.

One night I dreamed of being in that bathroom. It was dim—instead of florescent lighting, there were only a few guttering tallow candles on the floor in random places. I cleaned the wide bathroom mirror over the sink and saw my reflection start to scream as the stall door behind me slowly opened and some thing emerged, oozed out, whispering in a thousand voices.

***

In early June the scrawls were worse than ever. The aggression and obscenity in them crystallized, passing from the realm of the schoolyard into the charnel house. Both the words and the drawings were like something you would see in a serial killer's fantasy sketchbook. People were horribly and vividly mutilated. Boschian bird-men ripped people apart. Someone had drawn a crude, child-like picture of a girl skewered by a gigantic butcher knife, writing under it, I've killed her and you'll never find her. There were still more messages that sounded like instructions, such as If someone with a child's voice asks you to open the door do not let them in it is a trick. And there were more dates, more phone numbers.

One night I called one of them.

I didn't call from home, for a number of reasons. Instead I drove out to the grocery store. Though I was now eighteen and technically allowed to leave the house at nearly midnight, I just didn't want to risk starting an argument. My parents weren't bad sorts, but I didn't particularly care about their interest in whatever it was I was doing. So I discreetly left while they were sleeping. They were both like logs, so I didn't have to worry about the car waking them up.

Even at this not-that-late time of night, the town was dead. All of the shops had shut down, and except for a run-down honky tonk, there was no night life to speak of. The grocery store, too, had been closed almost two hours by this point, and it would be a couple of hours more before the restocking staff showed up, so I had a pretty good window to call.

The wide stretch of the parking lot, pierced periodically by the weak glow of lamps, looked truly desolate. Darkness loomed beyond the glass windows of the store. I cut across the parking lot and parked it in the fire lane in front of the store. For some reason I wanted the car to be close. My heart pounded in my chest, and I berated myself for doing such a stupid thing. Maybe this was all some big joke, and the phone number would connect to the answering machine for a vacuum repair service. But I had to know.

I stood next to the run-down pay phone, with its ripped book of thin yellow pages and its own scrawl of blessedly normal graffiti. Even at this hour of night, the lingering heat made my skin prickle, so I couldn't tell if I was sweating from that or anticipation. My timing was good, so I only had to wait a few minutes before my watch read 11:53 PM, the time written on the wall. I had readjusted my watch to the official time earlier so that I wouldn't risk running fast or slow, which of course didn't exclude the person that wrote the message doing that. But somehow I felt that they hadn't made that mistake. After putting in the coins, I punched in the number. This one was local. Too many were local. I listened to the line ringing a few times, and then a click sounded softly as the line connected. I didn't know what exactly I had been expecting, but not what I got.

Without a pause or an inquiring hello, the person on the other end growled Who the hell do you think you are, calling here? The voice was perhaps a woman's, but it had an odd artificial quality, like the person was just pretending to talk in a woman's voice.

Momentarily stunned, I couldn't even stutter in response, which the voice took as an invitation to continue.

You think calling from that grocery store pay phone is going to protect you? As the voice paused to hear my answer, I could hear faint shouting in the background, like people arguing. Then a sound like someone crying. Pleading. A wave of nausea hit me hard, but I managed to say, How are they writing so much on the walls? Somehow it didn't occur to me to ask why they were writing in the first place.

The voice now sounded more amused than angry. Giggling like an engine trying to catch, it said, Why don't you ask them yourself? They're already there.

I shot my head up to look at the dark windows facing me, but I didn't wait around. Slamming down the phone, I tore into my car, taking off so fast that I literally burned rubber. I didn't dare look in the rear view mirror.

A couple of days later, when I'd had a chance to calm down, I called Information to look up the number in a reverse phone directory. I thought it would be unlisted, but it was there, under Shipman Research, Inc. The address was on Fadden Street. In the light of day, I drove out there. Oddly, Fadden Street was a residential neighborhood, not too poor but far from ritzy. Where Shipman Research, Inc. was supposed to be was an ordinary looking two story brick house, somewhat in disrepair, surrounded by a high wooden fence. A sign was posted that read Beware of Dog, though someone had torn the Dog part off. I kept driving.

***

They came for me a week later, while my parents were visiting my aunt and uncle. It was the first time all summer that I knew I was going to have the house to myself for any significant length of time, and I enjoyed it. If I were going to college in the fall, I didn't relish the prospect of a roommate. Maybe I would live off-campus, though the idea of affording a place by myself was a bit of a joke. I relaxed on the living room sofa, channel surfing, trying to find something to take my mind off what was happening. Of course the graffiti worsened, and took a turn for the quietly sinister instead of the explicitly violent. One picture was of a man with his back turned, and just looking at it, I felt that to see his face would be an awful thing. One of the messages scrawled on the wall had sent me running from the bathroom with trembling legs and pounding heart, begging another bag boy to finish the job. It said, He's watching us. Below was my phone number.

No date or time of day attached to that one. Now every time the phone rang, I was afraid of who it might be. I never answered the phone myself these days, which had once made my father miss an important phone call. I stood in the kitchen, watching it ring and ring, while my father called from the bathroom, Could you get that? Are you even listening?

Thinking about these things, I didn't know why I thought being at home by myself was such a great thing. I was long past the point where I could convince myself that this was all the product of a bored, restless imagination. Now I could only accept that it was reality, or that I was delusional and had gone insane. Increasingly, I felt like I would prefer being insane. I just wished that I knew someone to talk to about all of this, I mean really talk to without sounding like I had lost it.

At least I wished that someone else could see the writing the way I did. Earlier, before I had made the phone call, I had tried to force perception on one of the other baggers. I had asked Josh, a freckled rising senior who ran track at school, if he would help clean the bathrooms. I could tell that Josh thought this was an odd request, since I usually liked to do things by myself. But when I agreed to take care of restocking the milk—a chore that Josh hated—I got my help. While Josh went to work on the stalls, I wiped down the mirrors, keeping an eye on him, seeing if he would flinch or at least say something about all of the weird graffiti, but he was completely silent as he scrubbed the toilet. I felt cold hands tearing at my stomach: maybe I really was crazy. Trying to keep the edge out of my voice, I said, So what do you think about all the writing in the stall? That's some messed up stuff, yeah?

For a moment Josh didn't respond, but then, without looking up, he said Just the same kind of dumb crap you'd find anywhere. Nothing that weird. Man, these people need to learn how to spell.

Before I realized what I was doing, I was at the mouth of the stall, and Josh whirled around. Fear flickered in his eyes like I was about to hit him. I almost did.

What do you mean, 'nothing that weird'? Are you crazy? Hysteria rose rapidly. I jammed a finger at a picture like a medieval woodcarving of a grove of stakes with people broken and skewered on them. Look at that! Do you know how long that probably took to draw, with no mistakes? Are you really telling me that you've seen something like that before? At this point, I was blatantly shouting at him.

Josh looked at the drawing, then scanned the entire stall. He frowned and had that confused, far-off look of someone trying desperately to remember an important bit of information. But then his face straightened, and he stood up, pushing past me, saying, I've got to stock the milk. You have fun reading fart rhymes, weirdo. I knew that no matter how hard I tried, no one would acknowledge what I saw. Some might even react violently. I was in this alone.

Suddenly, a knock came at the front door, bringing me out of my thoughts and back to the present. It was a weak knock, almost too weak to hear, even though I had turned the TV off a few minutes earlier. I jumped so high that I almost fell off the couch. Twisting around to face the door, I hoped that maybe I had been hearing things. But after a few seconds, another series of weak knocks sounded across the living room, more urgent this time. I stood slowly and walked toward the door, body rigid with tension, drawn to it as if in a dream. I stopped a foot from the door, irrationally wanting to be far enough away that nothing could reach or punch through the heavy oak door to grab me. However, I had to try and see who it was, so I moved closer. I put my eye up to the peephole cautiously and flicked on the porch light. The light didn't come on.

The knocks came again in rapid, panicky bursts. Being this close, I could now tell that the knocks were low on the door.

Who's there? I managed to say, knowing it was a dangerous question. Nothing responded at first, but then, softly, came a child's whimpering whisper.

Mister, please let me in. Help me.

Blind instinct already made me begin to unlock the deadbolt—before I remembered the warning I had seen on the stall. I slammed the bolt back all the way and quickly returned to my place a foot back from the door.

No, I almost shouted, trying to sound imperious, You are not welcome here.

More whimpering that turned into crying. Please...please...it's so dark out here and I'm scared. I think somebody's been after me. Please let me in before he gets me. Even after that many words, I still couldn't tell if it were a boy or a girl, just that they were very young. I wanted very much to open the door, but I kept saying to myself that it was a trick.

The phone in the kitchen began to ring. The child outside was no longer crying.

It's for me, it said flatly. They thought I'd be done by now.

I backed more away from the door while the phone continued to ring, madly insistent. The knocking began again, pounding the door. I stood, frozen with uncertainty, until I finally rushed into the kitchen and unplugged the phone. I was afraid that it would keep ringing, but thankfully, it fell silent after I yanked out the cord, leaving the air vibrating for a moment from its noise. The knocking at the door stopped just as abruptly, and I then faintly heard the slapping sounds of someone running down the sidewalk.

An hour passed before I plugged back in the phone, though I still left it off the hook. I went to my room as soon as my parents got home and pretended to be asleep so they wouldn't try to talk to me. I barely slept that night, and the next morning I went out onto the porch to check to see why the light bulb wasn't working. The light was high up above the door, so I had to drag out our small step ladder to do it. Looking at it, I saw it hadn't been broken, as I had first suspected. Someone had unscrewed it slightly, just enough so that it wouldn't come on.

***

I knew that if I remained passive, they would find some way to get to me. I was tempted to beg off cleaning the bathroom, but monitoring the transformation of the stall was my only hope of keeping tabs on what was going on and what they might do next. The graffiti now covered almost every available inch of wall: flash shots of every horrible impulse that ever slithered across the human mind, every nightmare that haunted the darkness. And yet, it was as if those illustrations were now just trying to taunt me. I knew now that the real terror lay in those cryptic messages and phone numbers. The rest was diversion.

Toward the end of July, I decided, against all fear and rational thought, to go directly to the source. I wanted to see the hidden things for myself, to confront it so that it could see that it didn't have me on the run. I would go to the store at night, after closing and before the stocking. I knew I had a window of a couple of hours, which would be plenty of time for whatever was going to happen. I was only dimly concerned that these actions might cause me to be seriously hurt, or even killed. I had to discover the face of this thing that was driving me crazy.

The next time I worked the shift before closing, I unlatched the loading door at the back of the stockroom. This kind of sliding door also could be locked from the outside, so I could fasten it when I left. If I left, a voice in the back of my mind taunted, but I ignored such logic. At midnight, just like when I had made the phone call, I drove back to the store, circling the car around to the back. The rear of the store was surrounded by a small grove of trees, which would hide me from surrounding eyes, though the store wasn't exactly in a residential area in the first place.

Stepping out of the car, I grabbed the long, heavy flashlight I brought with me. At least its metal body could double as a truncheon if I ran into something nasty, though I was left thinking that I should have brought a more formidable means of defense. Even this meager darkness seemed oppressive to me, and I sensed things in that bunch of trees watching me, seeing if I would really go through with this. I was eager to escape this feeling of exposure, so I climbed the stairs to the loading door and pulled it up a couple of feet. Laying on my back, I then rolled underneath into the store.

As soon as I stood up, I switched on the flashlight. Its beam shot ahead, letting me see stacks of boxes and metal shelving, a dingy mop and broom stacked against the corner of a grimy, gray-green wall. Though I could see where I was going, and I knew the layout of the store, I felt the darkness closing in, eating at my light. And I immediately felt that whatever I needed to see—or didn't needed to see, depending on your point of view—was just out of the reach of the flashlight beam.

I navigated through the storeroom, my light glinting off packages still wrapped in cellophane from shipping, looking like spun cobwebs. After moving through the maze, I emerged out of the double doors into the store itself. I was already afraid enough just being there at all, but even with this fear, I was surprised at how disarming I found seeing the store like this. Here were all the familiar shelves, liters of soda bottles, boxes of cereal, a stack of barbecue grilling equipment, all frozen in the darkness and silence. It was like diving into one of those drowned cities, floating by sunken buildings wrapped in weeds, seeing schools of fish swimming through the muddy cavities of parlors. I paused, my heart pounding, just managing not to make my hands shake, and listened, sweeping the beam across the store. The light didn't reach the far end of the store near the floral department, where for a moment I thought I saw something moving among the clusters of carnations and roses, their bright colors muted by the dimness. I managed to convince myself that it was only a trick of light, and I started to make my way cautiously to the other end of the store, where the restrooms were.

By chance I saw that I was headed down the housewares aisle, and I paused to pluck up a claw hammer from its peg. It wasn't a heavy weapon, but better than the flashlight. Hammer raised slightly, I continued down the aisle. I was getting close to the end when I thought I heard a noise. Stopping, trying to hold my ragged breath, I listened again more closely to the steady sound. Now there was no mistaking what it was. The faucets in the bathroom were running.

I froze, unsure of whether to turn and run. After all, wasn't this what I had come for? What did I think was going to happen? With tremendous effort I took another step forward just as the faucets stopped running and the door to the restrooms creaked open. From my position I was close enough to hear but still couldn't directly see the door. I could, however, hear the slow, clicking footsteps that went for a few paces, then stopped. I was quickly aware that there was a certain scent in the air that I couldn't identify—something acrid but not quite chemical.

Then a voice sounded out in the silence, softly spoken, almost a whisper, though it reached me clearly. The voice was androgynous and without accent, though the cadence of its speech was off.

Have you come to see my Art? it asked, as the footsteps began again. "I could show you places—places where it's real. Maybe you could end up on the wall."

The frozen panic immobilizing me broke, and I turned and ran toward the back of the store, harder than I had ever run in my life. The flashlight and hammer swung crazily in my hands, and the beam bobbed aimlessly in front of me, illuminating nothing. The footsteps behind me picked up into a run, too, but I dared not look back. I slammed into the swinging double doors to the storeroom, throwing them open, dashing around the walls of boxes toward the loading door, which was still mercifully open. My pursuer gained on me with every step, and I knew that any minute, hands—or whatever the person from the bathroom probably called hands—would grab onto me. What if the person behind me was the thing that had oozed out of the stall in my nightmare?

The loading door was upon me now, and with an agility unknown to me, I dropped and rolled through the crack. The hammer spun out of my hand, but I still held the flashlight. Luckily, I managed to halt my momentum so I didn't