Thanatophobia

By Ben Roswell

A supernatural horror story about a young woman named Elizabeth who has lost both of her parents in an accident a year before. She lapses into a depression and develops thanatophobia (fear of dying). Elizabeth then takes out an advertisement where she promises to pay anyone who can convince her that there is an afterlife. Lots of flakes and unsavory characters offer to help but she is intrigued by a message she receives from a Catholic nun. She goes to visit the convent..and the "nun" takes her on a terrifying journey that she'll never forget...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trellis Publishing
• Release date: Jul 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201465773

Book preview

THANATOPHOBIA

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BEN ROSWELL

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THANATOPHOBIA

SCENE OF THE CRIME

SLASHED

PALE BLOOD

I, VAMPIRE

VAMPIREVILLE

AMY’S LAST WORDS

BLOODSUCKER

It had all happened a year ago, but Elizabeth Shaughnessy could still, almost every day, feel the cold water on her skin.

Even on a hot day – if she was in someone’s car, the warm Pacific wind on her face, say, or even at the beach – it would suddenly come over her. Even if she was indoors, sitting at her desk, standing at the kitchen stove, the sun bright and hot out the nearest window. Out of nowhere, it would suddenly be there. The physical sensation of rain on her skin, as real as could be. The sudden chill through her bones. The impression her hair was matted down damp onto her forehead and neck; and she would invariably look up to the sky, or raise a hand to wipe the non-existent water from her eyes.

The fear came with it. The sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, the dizzying horror that was like a sharpening and a blurring of all her senses all at the same time. She would be living a normal day. Correction: as normal as a day can get for someone who feels responsible for the death of two people. Not normal, exactly, but a day like any other, now. And then the feeling came, and it was like her life had tilted off its axis all over again, and all possibility of hope and peace was yanked from her. It really felt that way, like a physical removal, like hope and peace were parts of her that an unseen force had reached in and suddenly ripped out from somewhere inside her rib cage. She felt it. She couldn’t see it, it wasn’t there – it was nothing but an echo of that one horrible day.

But she felt it.

ONE

She couldn’t go to sleep without help anymore – pills, sometimes, but more usually a bottle of the kind of thing her father drank. She couldn’t wake up without help, either. A half-dozen alarm clocks. She had one of those apps where you punched in a wake up call time and a stranger from halfway across the country rang you at the agreed time, like at a hotel. At first it had been a new person every day: one day a chirpy teenager, the next a retiree, looking to be make his early mornings, disturbed by the insistent call of a failing bladder, into something useful. After a while a young man called Tony – upbeat, Latino voice, East Coast accent – became the man who woke her up every day, after she’d slept through every one of the six alarms, batting her phone away resentfully to silence them. She knew nothing about Tony. He would have told her everything about himself – this was a social app, after all, and the point was that strangers could connect, and share a moment. Elizabeth didn’t want to connect, or share a moment. The app developers strongly recommended reciprocity. Sign up to wake somebody up in a different time zone, in exchange for another user being the one to kickstart your day. Elizabeth didn’t do that, either.

It’s bright and warm out there in California, man, Tony was saying today, his monologue pretty much in full flow before Elizabeth had even picked up the phone. I got your weather on my phone, right, it’s fun to know what it’s like in another person’s shoes—

As if the weather determined what a morning was like in another person’s shoes.

Tony would keep calling unless she acknowledged she was up – that was how the app worked, and Tony was nothing if not a diligent participant of the sharing economy. Thanks, Tony, she croaked. Talk to you tomorrow. She hung up without waiting for him to pause.

She stared at the ceiling, blankly. Most people, Elizabeth occasionally reminded herself, started their day with a loved one, or with a determined stretch of their limbs in a single bed or, most likely, a quick check through their email or Twitter or Facebook. She’d been one of those people. Now she woke up with a feeling of leaden heaviness, a fear of the day to come, a knowledge – as sure as she knew the Earth was round – that she would not make it through the day. Obviously, she would and did. It did nothing to quiet the dread in her heart the next morning, and every morning after that.

You are going through a phase of depression, was how her therapist, Risa, put it. Risa was a nice enough lady. She was in her forties and attractive, long blonde hair and wide blue eyes and a strong, athletic body. She looked the way happy middle-aged Californians are expected to look. She wrapped herself in shawls, even on warm days, in soft, autumnal colors, and when she smiled, which she did often, it looked like she meant it. Elizabeth couldn’t help comparing herself to Risa. She noted all of this every time she walked into her office, and she would get a mental image of how the two of them: the beautiful, well-adjusted, happy Californian therapist in her expensive chair with its extra lumber support; and the small, mousy twenty-four year old with dark hair and Irish blood, sitting so shamefully on her couch it looked like a huge hand was pinching her shoulder blades together and folding her forwards.

Depression is not easy to fix, Risa told Elizabeth at least twice a month. "In fact, it isn’t something you can fix. There is medication you can take, but that is a chemical adjustment. There is cognitive and talk therapy you can go through as a process, as you are doing here, and that is also a management technique. It’s very possible you could move through this phase of depression and never experience depression again, but that is a rare thing. Most people who experience depression have a chemical, clinical imbalance. In your case, hopefully, the depression is directly connected to your trauma, and will be dispelled when we come to terms with the trauma."

The trauma was Risa’s word for that day. Everyone else called it the accident. Elizabeth just called it that day. The day everything changed.

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People don’t usually think of rain when they think of California. Why would they? It’s a state famous around the world for going through a record-setting drought and water crisis. But up in northern California, where Elizabeth’s parents lived, in a small town outside San Francisco, it rained, and often. It was raining that day.

Matthew and Fiona Shaughnessy’s families had both come from Ireland around the same time. Matthew and Fiona had grown up on the rough streets of downtown Manhattan, back when some parts of Manhattan was still rough, back when crossing Elizabeth Street was like crossing a border between two countries, Irish on one side and Italian on the other. They met, they went to a couple of dances, they got engaged, they got married, and they had Elizabeth, who grew up an only child, because your birth nearly wrecked your mum, it did, as her father put it. Guilt woven straight into her life’s tapestry, right there, from the first instant. Matthew did well enough at factory work to become a factory foreman, then supervisor. He ran his own business for a while, and then he was headhunted by a big outfit in San Francisco, and the whole family moved out to California. The American Dream, more or less. Elizabeth was fourteen.

Elizabeth finished high school, got into USC, found a job at an insurance company. Matthew retired; he and Fiona moved out of the city and to a small house right across the bridge in Marin County. The family got together three or four times a year: birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas.

The day everything changed was the day after Christmas.

The Shaughnessy Christmas routine was pretty set in its ways, by now: Elizabeth flew up to San Francisco on the twenty-third or twenty-fourth, Matthew picked her up at the airport, she spent three or four days at home – the house her parents called home, in which there was a replica of her own childhood bedroom, but in which she had never actually lived – and then Matthew and Fiona both drove their daughter back to Los Angeles, spending a day in her city. They stayed at a fancy hotel and spent their days packing Elizabeth’s fridge and kitchen cupboards with foil-wrapped leftovers and endless jars of preserved holiday foods. Then they drove home, leaving their daughter to do what kids do, as they put it, on New Year’s Eve – that’s a kids’ holiday, luv, was how her father always put it, in answer to her enquiring what plans he and Fiona had for the last night of the year. And then the two generations of Shaughnessys didn’t see each other again until Fiona’s birthday, in the spring.

It was December 26th, last year. Boxing Day. It’d been an ugly Christmas. Elizabeth had just gone through a break-up (Daniel, musician, two years older, controlling). She hated her job. She took family visits for granted. All of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day she’d bickered and snapped and moaned that she was wasting her time, that she should have stayed back in Los Angeles where the insurance company was piled under with work during the holiday season. Complaining – entirely fictitiously – that it was hurting her career to be four hundred miles away for Christmas. She was just unhappy. Aimless. And it had to be taken out on someone. That’s what parents are for, right?

So her father decided it’d be best to drive down to Los Angeles on the twenty-sixth, straight after Christmas, not on the twenty-ninth, as they’d usually planned. That’s why we have the car, darling, he’d said, so we have the freedom to travel whenever and however we choose. He’d tried to sound relaxed but his smile was strained. Matthew Shaughnessy wasn’t the stereotype of the short-tempered Irishman. You couldn’t tell if he was frustrated or angry at someone unless you were family or a close friend, someone who knew the tell-tale signs: the smile that remained frozen a bit too stiff as he spoke. The eyebrows perched just an inch too high to look natural. The stiff, unhappy gait of his walk. Elizabeth made note of all three as her father helped her put her bags into the car that Boxing Day morning.

It had annoyed her even more, of course. She wanted her parents to behave as badly as she had, to lose their temper, to shout at her, so she could blame them for ruining the holiday. She needed the situation to escalate so she could justify spewing all the bile and frustration she was desperate to spew. Instead Matthew and Fiona smiled, collaborated, apologized, bent over backwards. It made Elizabeth feel even more tightly wound.

Matthew Shaughnessy did conform to one Irish stereotype: he drank. A lot. He also, like all good Irishmen, claimed it had little effect on him. That he could handle it. Telling him he couldn’t was a surefire way to put him on the defensive. So, on that Boxing Day afternoon, feeling spiteful and impotent, aware that her father had had too much to drink at Christmas dinner and then had topped it up with a bit of the hair of the dog that bit him that morning at breakfast, Elizabeth gave him an earful about drunk driving. The whole first hour out of Marin County she preached to him about it, in her most outraged tone. Told him he was endangering his family, what was the matter with him, who acts that irresponsibly, all for a macho idea that alcohol has no effect on him – and on and on and on, until her father, jaw clenched and shoulders tight, agreed to let Elizabeth take the wheel for the rest of the drive to southern California.

It was raining that day.

Elizabeth could never forget her father silently steaming in the passenger seat, his body exhaling heat, so full it was with pent-up frustration and anger; or catching the look in her mother’s eyes, downcast and sad, when she looked in the rear view mirror. She stopped focusing on the road, so preoccupied was she with the pain she was causing her parents, and with her own resentment at now knowing she should apologise, but not knowing how. She was so preoccupied she took one of the turns on the 101 too quickly and too wide. She didn’t know she had lost control of the car, the wheels spinning on the slick road, until a second after it had happened. She didn’t even see the car coming in the opposite direction – the young parents in the front, the three children screaming in the back, all five horrified faces clear as diamond and forever etched in her memory, in spite of the grey, driving rain – until her front bumper had hit and her own car had gone spinning through the rail guard and into the rock face. The impact was so startling it was like the entire planet, like all of existence, was suddenly shaking, and not just the car and the Shaughnessy family sitting inside it. Elizabeth blacked out for what surely must have been just a fraction of a second. But by the time she opened her eyes she was soaked, the rain blowing into the car through the shattered windscreen like a sheet of frozen nails. She felt horror even as, briefly, her mind grappled with what just had happened. These things don’t happen in real life, it stammered wildly, people don’t die in car crashes in real life, this happens to other people, not to you, just an accident—

The voice inside her head was still panicked as she turned towards her father. A gasp died inside her throat as she took it in: his punched-in skull, like crumpled up paper; the blood and rainwater on his shirt; the left eyeball bursting out of its socket and peppered with glass shards. She felt warm skin on her hip and looked down at the mangled, twisted, misshapen body of her mother, thrown clear out of her seat until she landed, bones broken, in between the two front seats, her left hand resting against Elizabeth’s waist, the wedding ring glinting on her wet, glinting finger.

Elizabeth’s own leg and shoulder were broken, although she wouldn’t even feel the pain until almost an hour later, when she’d been lifting into an ambulance and was being driven, at breakneck speed through the relentless, terrifying downpour, to the hospital. They told her later she’d been screaming the whole way, screaming for her mother and father, screaming to take it all back. She didn’t remember that. She remembered being silent, stunned. She remembered knowing her life as she knew it was over.

Dean Martin was still singing Christmas tunes on the ambulance radio.

TWO

The coffeemaker hissed as it dripped. The eggs sizzled and popped in the pan. Elizabeth stood in the kitchen, unshowered and unchanged. Her phone – and Tony, the only person she spoke to every day now – were back in