Absent Mercies: Six Weird Tales

By Mercy Loomis

These six weird tales don’t pull their punches.

SUCCOR THE CHILD: After viewing a sixth-grader’s bizarre chalk drawing, one impressionable townsperson begins to see more than just childish scrawls, and curiosity about the drawing’s subject becomes an all-consuming obsession—literally.

THE THING IN THE WATER: Daniel, a bitter artist, goes on a cruise to take his mind off his upcoming divorce. He meets Cliff, an old man who gives him a much-needed ego-boost. But when Cliff offers to help Daniel let go of his anger, Daniel discovers Cliff isn’t being altruistic, and the old man may be far older than he appears.

THE BOOGEYMAN: What stories do the boogeymen tell their little ones at bedtime? Thomas wishes he didn’t know, but he can’t get the monster under his bed to shut up.

THE GRANARY ANGEL: Steffi works on a nighttime graveyard tour in Boston. Recently she’s become obsessed with the statue of an angel at the Granary Burying Ground. The problem: there are no angel statues in that graveyard...and the angel no one else can see appears to be equally obsessed with Steffi.

THE BROADCAST OUT OF TIME: A live Christmas old-time radio broadcast is interrupted when the studio is invaded by a weird green mist.

THE TWELVE HUNTSMEN: In this grim retelling of the Brothers Grimm tale, Princess Cyrene will stop at nothing to win back the hand of the wayward Prince Roland.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mercy Loomis
• Release date: Nov 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005462703

Mercy Loomis

Mercy Loomis grew up in a haunted house, and has had quite enough of ghosts for one lifetime, thank you. Though she now lives in a 150-year-old house, it is remarkably ghost-free. (That, or they’re staying on the down-low. She doesn’t care which.)Mercy finished writing her first vampire novel when she was in middle school, and hasn’t stopped writing about them since. She loves stories about the paranormal because monsters are scary, but less scary than real people. Or at least less depressing.Mercy graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison one class short of an accidental certificate in Folklore. She credits her love of mythology to her mom reading Greek myths as bedtime stories, and her love of fantastical adventure stories to watching cheesy movies with her dad. Her love of history (and coffee!) is completely her husband’s fault, but she doesn’t know who’s to blame for the fascination with physics.She guesses that hanging out with Dad while he butchered deer also had an effect on her character, but exactly what effect, she leaves up to the reader.See what Mercy’s up to and find links to her other work at www.mercyloomis.com.

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Absent Mercies: Six Weird Tales

by Mercy Loomis

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2020 by Mercy Loomis

Cover image by Alain Frechette from Pexels

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment onlymay not be resold or uploaded for distribution to others. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work, or portion thereof, in any form, save for brief quotations used in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead (or undead), is entirely coincidental.

Succor the Child

The school carnival is a tradition older than I am, one that sweeps through my hometown each year with the same weighty inevitability of harvest-time. With no children of my own, I find myself attending more out of nostalgia than anything else. The halls of the elementary school are narrower than I remember, and children dart around me on their way from one activity to another, trailing glazed-eyed parents in their wake like embers from a sparkler.

The hallway walls are covered with art, each class showing off the young talent. I meander through the long corridors with no agenda save stopping outside my old classrooms and peering in at memories, listening to the chaos and looking at the pictures on the walls. The round yellow suns, the slash-of-blue skies, the m-shaped birds are all sort of comforting; there’d been no computers in my classrooms as a child, and even television had been a rare treat. Those familiar symbols remind me that, then as now, children see the world with the same eyes.

As I move through the building the drawings become less symbolic, attempting greater realism. My interest wavers, but I’m nearly to the far doors and I might as well go out that way than try to swim back upstream to the main entrance. The sixth graders are the last stop. Their pictures are depressingly mundane; still-lifes and portraits and animals reproduced from books, and I’m walking quickly now, hardly bothering to glance at the walls when I see it from the corner of my eye, like movement.

I stop and go back.

It’s a stark picture, almost vulgar in its contrasts compared to the colorful pieces on either side. It hangs crooked, off-center, as if it were taped up hastily. My eyes can’t quite make sense of it, but it draws me as its more traditional neighbors do not, and after a brief hesitation I carefully peel it off the wall and hang it properly. Despite my care, some of the chalk rubs off on my fingers.

As I take a step back I see that it’s not as monochrome as I first thought. Among the black and white and grey are smudges of color; a dark blue blending into black here, an underscoring of burnt umber there, creating a surprising feeling of depth. Sinuous lines rise out of the swirling background to writhe across the paper and beckon me closer. I oblige, one slow step at a time, until my nose is inches from the surface. There’s something to this drawing that’s not familiar, exactly, but I feel as if I should understand it, as if it’s one of those 3D pictures that will at any moment snap into focus if I can just figure out how to see it right. And yet, it’s not like that at all; these arcs and shades and highlights define something concrete, not some seemingly random explosion of colors. I’m giving myself a headache staring so hard, the edges of my vision going dark, black and grey and deep vibrant blue, until it feels as if those great sweeping lines are curling around me, about to envelope me and drag me into the picture and drown me in that roiling chaos…

Weird, isn’t it?

I stumble back a step, lightheaded and dizzy, and turn toward the voice. A middle-aged woman is behind me. She has that worn, life-drained look all parents get after their children have been around long enough.

It’s…very different, I murmur, rubbing my powdery fingers together. I glance back at the drawing, but it’s sullen and motionless.

That’s what comes of letting your kids watch too much TV, the woman sniffs, looking down her nose at the picture. We’ll be seeing that boy on the news in a few years, I have no doubt.

Geez, Mom. A youngster I hadn’t noticed rolls his eyes so hard I fancy I can hear them rub against his skull. He peeks around his mother and tugs at her arm. Come on already.

I don’t spend much time around children, but this one seems like he could be the right age. Do you know the boy who drew this? I ask her son.

The look he gives me drips with scorn. "I’m in seventh grade."

Of course you are. The words cross my lips automatically. One grade and the next are two different worlds and nary the two shall meet. Even I remember that much.

Daniel, don’t talk to your elders that way, the woman whines, her voice inflaming my headache. I want them to just leave. I want to be alone with the drawing again. Except we aren’t alone—people continue to walk around us, the parents shooting us dirty looks as they squeeze past, their squirming children hardly seeing us, their gazes fixed on whatever shiny thing farther down the hall they’ve set their hearts on.

Turning to me, the spineless matron continues her babbling. Peggy—that’s my Daniel’s best friend’s mom—she told me, on very good authority, mind, that this Tyler Leidowski, and here she waves dismissively at the drawing, "is in a gang."

She whispers this with a shudder, as if the word has some power to harm. I barely manage to not sneer. A town of seven thousand people in the middle of farmland, and this sixth grader is supposedly in a gang. I abruptly find myself excusing her son’s behavior.

I see. The words are little more than a growl. I try to moderate