AWAKE: Tales of Terror

By Lou Rera

AWAKE: Tales of Terror, is Lou Rera's newest collection of short stories in the horror genre. These tales are a collection of supernatural crime, murder, insanity, obsession, greed, paranoia, fear, and revenge. Rera writes of dark places and dysfunctional people, where some of those people search for their own salvation.&nbs

• Language: English
• Publisher: NightWriter Publishing
• Release date: May 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9780578636825

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AWAKE: Tales of Terror Copyright © 2020 by Lou Rera

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020901842

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Name: Rera, Louis Vincent

Title: Awake: Tales of Terror / Lou Rera

For information contact;

Lou Rera

lourera.com

Cover Painting by Glen Orbik

Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro

ISBN: 978-0-5786368-1-8

ISBN: 978-0-5786368-2-5 (e-book)

First Edition: April 2020

Nightwriter Publishing

nightwriterspublishing.com

"...bad writing usually arises from a stubborn

refusal to tell stories about what people actually

do to face the fact, let us say, that murderers

sometimes help old ladies cross the street."

Stephen King

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

The Tales

The Hatbox

Visitation Rights

The Mommy Woman

The Facts in the Case of Dr. Blackwell

Awake

Clown on a Segway

The Cemetery

She Loves Me Not

Reunion

Artist in Residence

The Scarecrow

The Last Time He would Tie His Shoes

Satan’s Salon

Author’s Note and Postscript

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

By Edgar Allan Poe

Acknowledgements

For my father

The Hatbox

Around four in the morning, Gil descended the attic stairs with a hatbox under his arm, looking—searching—unable to shake the feeling that something was with him, attached to him like a parasite to a host. He downed two tranquilizers, even though he’d been drinking bourbon since ten. He sat at his desk, trembling, surrounded by boxes from the day he had moved in four weeks before. He pulled out his laptop and began to type:

I need to tell Laura, but it’s late, too late. I’d frighten her to death with a phone call. I wouldn’t believe it myself (and I’m not sure if I still do, now that some time has passed), but in my gut, I know a very frightening thing happened in the attic. Terrifying doesn’t adequately describe the experience. I’ve read enough King and watched enough Argento and Craven films to understand what the word horror means. I wonder if what happened to me could be called horror. I don’t know. I wasn’t physically hurt, but I could feel its touch and the heat of its breath on my face. I can’t even write with any clarity what actually did happen. The fear is still that raw.

I felt things in the attic. I heard voices. And then there was that smell—a terrible, putrid, sickly sweet smell. An odor I’d experienced only once before—in college, when I attended the autopsy of a man killed by smoke inhalation. The smell of death.

Gil needed to rummage through the attic. But the August sun beat down on the old Victorian, and the space held onto the heat like a miser to a penny. He’d waited to go up there until the end of the day, just around dusk. He continued:

When I climbed the pull-down stairs, the heat hit me like a crushing wall of humidity. I know people can hallucinate from heatstroke; was that it?

The house had been willed to him by way of the family estate. For weeks, he’d been clearing the old furniture and junk. The inheritance was not a generous gift secreted in the small print of a will. He’d taken ownership by bloodline, pure and simple, as he knew he would someday. Everyone else in his family tree was dead. Not that they would have wanted it when they were alive. The place had initially belonged to his paternal great-grandfather, but it had remained empty for decades. Gil remembered listening to relatives who spoke of the place as if it were a precious heirloom, and yet no one chose to live there. They spoke of the house with an almost fervent reverence. But there was a nervousness in their voices, particularly when discussing his great-grandfather.

When he was a teenager, Gil asked his father if they could walk through it. Without hesitation, his father refused. Then, in a softer, gentler tone, he said, Everything in there has been carefully covered. The expensive items have been wrapped and boxed. ‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ as they say.

Gil let it go, finished high school and went away to college. He ended up staying in Annapolis because of Laura and did the commute to his job in Baltimore. They both were fine until he received a call from an attorney requesting they meet to discuss his inheritance: a circa 1860, free-of-charge Victorian home.

He took a leave of absence from his job and convinced Laura to think about moving with him. I’ll get things settled here then fly you down to check the place out. If you don’t like our free home, then I’ll sell it, and we’ll stay in that dingy two-room apartment in Annapolis. How’s that sound? Laura agreed.

After he settled a few legal issues, he moved into the place. He quickly realized the family stories about the house were just exaggerations. His aunt Charlotte had often told the same tale about his great-grandfather. She said that in WWI, he was hit with machine gun fire in the Meuse-Argonne offensive in France. Most of his face was blown off; luckily he didn’t lose his eyesight. In 1918, the marvels of plastic surgery did not exist. He was forced to wear a tin mask fashioned in an English hospital. With great drama, Gil remembered his aunt saying, Why that poor man suffered the tortures of the damned. Even the Phantom of the Opera would have fainted dead away if he’d laid eyes on that unfortunate man’s face. And yet, he still married. Can you imagine?

Gil dismissed the lore of his heritage. He owned this house now and was determined to go through each and every room. The furniture was protected, but when he uncovered everything, it turned out to be just old, cheap, musty pieces from the 1920s. The lamps were Sears and Roebuck, not Tiffany’s. An old catalog he found in a closet revealed that a nine-piece set sold for $22.50 back in 1926.

And so it went. Gil moved through the house room-by-room, clearing the place so that he could either live there or sell it. The job was tedious and uneventful, until he’d started work in the attic. Rattled, he called Laura.

Gil, my love, can you hear what you’re trying to tell me? she said.

Hold on. Just for a minute, try to imagine what you’d do if you were alone at home and someone tapped you on the shoulder, but when you turned around, no one was there. Before you say anything else, try something for me. Shut your eyes. Then tap yourself on your shoulder forcefully. Can you imagine for a few seconds what I’m talking about? I could feel her breath on my face. I had the lights on, and yet I couldn’t see anyone. It felt like someone was standing right in front of me. I heard her moaning. Loud moaning.

You mean like my friend Chrissy with her boy toy of the week? Laura said and laughed.

No, no, wait. I’m not joking. You’re alone in the attic, it’s hotter than hell, and that same nobody taps you on the shoulder again, but this time she screams in your ear. Can you get what that would be like? No one was there, Laura—but I did feel and hear her!

What are you doing over there with another woman? she asked, then laughed again. Silence. I was joking. You still there, Gil?

Jesus, I know how it sounds. Forget it, we’ll talk later. He hung up.

He was convinced there had been an entity in the attic room with him. He could feel a physical presence occupying the space, and it left behind something he couldn’t articulate. To say it made the room cold made it a cliché. But that’s what he’d felt.

Before his bizarre experience, as he was going through the trunk in the attic, he’d hit a snag. The top shelf of the chest wouldn’t come out. The leather handles were intact, but he couldn’t lift the shelf out to access the lower compartment.

He tried again. He gave the handles a hefty yank, and finally the shelf popped out.

Ah, Jesus. Gil expected more. This was the last room in the house he needed to go through. Some would call it wishful thinking, but he thought for sure, after all the past decades, almost one hundred years, he would’ve found something of value.

There was a single hatbox at the bottom—nothing else. Gil carefully set the shelf the floor and adjusted the work light to get a better look. The hatbox was almost the same greenish color as the outside of the trunk, and it was very old. It must have been from the 1920s. The box was round, approximately eighteen inches wide, and at least as many inches deep. Gil could see that there must have been a leather strap on the top section, but that was long gone, leaving only the arrowhead-shaped ends where the original top strap had been connected. The metal loops where the handle had been attached were still there, but badly rusted. The edges of the hatbox were frayed. There was something odd about the appearance of the box’s age. It looked old, yet it didn’t. The covering on the hatbox looked new, the leather smelled good and felt supple. But the handles, latches, and other hardware looked like they were from the 1920s. Gil thought it odd; it made him feel uncomfortable, and he couldn’t say why.

Since the box was round, it still had a handle on the circular front with a small brass lock above it. The hinges were on the opposite side. Gil used his thumb to pull down the button to open the latch, but it was rusted shut or locked, perhaps both.

He was pissed off. All the work he’d done over the last six or so hours, clearing the inferno of this space, only to come up with a hatbox.

About half an hour later, he was sitting on the ledge of the attic entrance with his feet on a rung of the pull-down ladder. When he moved the box, something inside rolled and shifted. There must be something other than a hat in there. He set the hatbox next to him. And then something touched him.

He had calmed down considerably since he’d pushed the pull-down stairs back into the ceiling. In fact, he was starting to doubt anything he’d told Laura on the phone. He felt embarrassed he’d let his imagination run amok. It was late, and he could pick the lock on the hatbox tomorrow and go through the contents then. He would give Laura a call when she got home from work. He’d say he was sorry for hanging up, and explain he’d just lost it due to the extreme heat.

But before sleeping, there was more to the story that he wanted to get down. He continued typing:

I wouldn’t classify my mood as depressed, but I’m disappointed with myself for letting my imagination get the better of me. I had thought that I’d find something in this old place. The attic was my last hope. I don’t know why. I felt as if my family had had a bit of a checkered past, so I figured I’d find a trinket of value, an heirloom, or even some contraband tucked away, something hidden since the day it was stowed there.

After all that wasted effort, I was hungry, but I didn’t feel like driving to an all-night diner. I headed toward the kitchen. As I entered, I felt a coldness as deep as a freezer at a supermarket. I smelled something odd, a mix of flowers and something else, maybe incense. He thought about what he’d experienced. Gil tried to make sense of the night. He hit Return twice, then continued:

That’s when I saw her.

I thought I’d left the front door open and that a friendly and, I might add, quite lovely young woman was standing at the other end of the hallway, near the kitchen entrance. The light from the kitchen lit the right side of her dramatically, as if I was watching an actress moving into a spotlight onstage. She looked inviting, the way she stood there with one leg thrust out from the bottom of her dress. Her hemline had small iridescent beads arranged in an elaborate pattern. She appeared to be a woman of wealth. Whoever she was, she was incredibly alluring.

The scene played out in slow motion, mesmerizing me. She held a round box with both hands, like the hatbox, but smaller, much smaller. It didn’t occur to me at first why a woman I’d never seen before would be standing there at close to four in the morning. But then, even though I had the lingering haze of alcohol rolling through my brain, it hit me:

She’s not real.

Her image came into focus, like putting on a pair of glasses and being able to see clearly for the first time. She wore clothes that looked like they’d come from a theatrical costume shop. There was a distinct musty smell as she moved. She was a pretty thing, but now I could see she had dark circles under her eyes. Her smile felt forced, like someone was poking a gun into her ribs. I took a step closer. Her face had a translucent quality that looked mottled, with very faint blue and greenish blotches just beneath the skin. I couldn’t be sure, but the discolorations seemed to move slightly on their own, in different directions, like shadows under a lake of ice.

I was in awe, but afraid. This was not the same as something touching me in the attic. If I were to admit I was actually looking at a ghost, then what did it mean for everything else I’d ever believed? Was there really a God? Aliens? Maybe all of the things I’d always doubted actually possessed seeds of truth. At that moment, I believed in the possibility of ghosts.

I froze in place. Suddenly her movements blurred in fast, almost frenetic motions, like a film clip that had been sped up. I’d seen episodes of American Horror Story, and this apparition had the same type of creepiness. In one episode, the show’s video revealed a body walking like an upside down gymnast, only her skin was sickly white, and she looked dead. In another, there were little children with their eyes burned out. But that was only TV.

When I looked at the woman in front of me, I thought I saw a maggot wriggle out from the corner of her left eye. I felt both enticed and repulsed. I was transfixed by her strange, unsettling beauty, so much so that I didn’t realize that she’d moved toward me. I wouldn’t say that she was walking, because she wasn’t. She floated toward me. No, not that. I can only explain her movement in terms of what I know. I felt I was watching a Hitchcock film shot with lenses designed to bring an object closer to you. I wasn’t moving, and neither was she. Yet we were nearer.

I shut my eyes tight. I scrunched and contorted my face until I could feel real discomfort, in the hopes that I’d snap out of any dream I was experiencing. (I wondered, was I in the throes of a severe mental collapse?)

I was positive when I opened my eyes again the woman would still be there. She was. I felt a stark and awful premonition of death about her—not how she