Stark Tales

By Rob Vagle

Seven spooky tales including:

Love that haunts both the living and the dead. A supernatural little lending library found in front of an abandoned house. One cursed sword, once unsheathed, will kill upon the wielder's first stroke, falls into the possession of sword swallowers. One sad, disintegrating mind watches the world go by through the front door peephole. A runner encounters horror at dusk. One haunted bathroom stall serves as a confessional. And a black cat defends her territory against the human monster.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dog Copilot Press
• Release date: Oct 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393059820

Rob Vagle

Rob Vagle's short stories have appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Polyphony, Heliotrope, and Strange New Worlds. He lives and writes in Tempe, AZ. He grew up in Minnesota and lived in Eugene, OR. for fifteen years. Stories and novels published by Dog Copilot Press, available wherever ebooks are sold. He drinks coffee.

Book preview

Stark Tales

Stark Tales

Rob Vagle

Dog Copilot Press

Copyright © 2020 by Rob Vagle

All rights reserved.

Knock On Wood first published in Pulphouse Fiction Magazine #6, Spring 2019, WMG Publishing.

Confessional first published in The Devil Is In The Dust, 2020, Dog Copilot Press.

Cat Noir first published in The Devil Is In The Dust, 2020, Dog Copilot Press.

Cover Art copyright © by mythja at depositphotos.

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 written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Contents

For Your Spooky Reading Pleasure

Ghost Lighter Than Aluminum

Lending The Truth

Tyrfing And The Sword Swallower

Knock On Wood

Breaking Her Stride

Confessional

Cat Noir

Who Is This Writer-dude?

Also by Rob Vagle

For Your Spooky Reading Pleasure

When October arrives and the weather gets cool, a certain dark pleasure arises for scary, unsettling tales. The days grow shorter, the nights longer. It’s the month for Halloween. A month full of ghosts and goblins and witches and pumpkins and black cats.

In these pages you will find seven stark tales. Some with ghosts. Some with hauntings. There’s even horror in here. And a curse or two.

Come closer and let me whisper tales of the dark.

---

Rob Vagle

Mesa, Arizona

October 2020

Ghost Lighter Than Aluminum

She didn't know why he haunted her so, but she awoke whenever he entered the room. Identified by the same rhythmic footfalls and their sharp, purposeful stride. She came out of the walls, these walls made of sheet rock and lined with tubes of metal, aluminum. She never asked why because she rushed into the room as if she were pushed from there, fully awake.

He smelled of earth tones, of dirt, of pine trees, of musty fallen leaves. Sometimes he talked, a deep baritone voice laced with gentleness. He brought the room into focus and she saw sunlight pooling on a hardwood floor, the windows yellow and bright. The circular things with spokes hanging from the ceiling reminded her of windmills or weather vanes, but this too she wasn't ready to ask about.

He was dressed in a bathrobe, holding a mug of coffee. She could smell the strong coffee and knew she'd smelled it before. After numerous times of him awakening her, she desired to touch him. She moved across the room, shot towards him like a magnet attracted to metal and held out her hands to brace for a collision. Her hands pressed against his back and couldn't grasp a thing, not even that bathrobe with the waffle weave.

He shivered, his shoulders rocking back and forth. He dropped the coffee cup and it shattered on the floor. He spun around. She raised her hands and pulled back.

He saw right through her as if she were made of cellophane. This broke her heart. It sank like stone dropping down, down to her feet. Shattered on the floor like his coffee cup. With her eyes, she pleaded with him to see her. Where was her voice, why couldn't she speak?

She got a good look at his face such as it was in it's pale and cold state. Dark eyes wide searching the room beyond her. She'd seen that face before, traced every line of that sharp nose and thick cheeks.

He walked quickly out of the room and she found herself sinking back once again into the walls.

He brought someone else in the room with him the next time she awoke.

He said, I've felt watched in this room for the last two weeks.

A tall woman (she even towered over him) with long crow black hair. She wore a shawl and whenever she moved her arms it looked like she had wings. This woman spotted her right away. And she stared at her, her eyes seeking the depths of her.

It was right here when I was touched. It felt frigid and hostile, he told the other woman.

It was as if the woman could paralyze her with just her eyes. She couldn't move, didn't dare to move, or incapable of moving, she didn't know. The words he used hurt her, slapped her heart with each syllable. She felt warmth and desired to ooze warmth from every pore and she certainly wasn't hostile. What could he be thinking? What was he thinking?

She's here, the woman said.

His head turned, frantically trying to see her.

You know her. You two made love in this very room.

Ally?

The name triggered memories, her memories, of which she wasn't prepared. They flickered across her mind like an old eight millimeter film.

Memories came back in fragments and non linear.

She relived her death. Her legs pumping the pedals of her midnight blue Cannondale road bike, she began to cross Bethany Home Road on Nineteenth. To her right, a black BMW bearing down on the intersection too fast to stop. Her heart raced and she literally whispered Not today, just like the characters on Game Of Thrones from HBO. No, death would not take her today, but the BMW's front bumper swept away her front wheel anyway. To quickly for her to comprehend, she became entangled with the bike frame as the car mowed over her. Pain came with bright flashes of light. After that light, came darkness.

Brian had a mother-in-law apartment in the