Razor's Edge: 8 Tales of Horror and Suspense

By Mark A Daniel

These 8 horror stories are set in the late 80's. The victims (or heroes) can't be rescued by a cell phone call, a text, or a post on social media. And yes, smoking was allowed on planes (it's in "Final Descent").

The terror is real, nonetheless.

Enjoy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark A. Daniel
• Release date: Jun 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781088165256

Book preview

1

RESURRECTION

The camera lights glared in his eyes as he stood before the crowd in a late-night rain. The rain had set in tonight earlier than expected, but this only added to the mystic atmosphere. The crowd and the cameras focused on him as he was chained and shackled (in the tradition of all escape artists, great or otherwise) and placed into the large black coffin. He had performed the ritualistic expose of the casket innards to satisfy the skeptic that there were of course no trap doors or false bottoms. As the lid closed in over him, drowning out the narration of the emcee, he began his work. He regurgitated a key which was tied by a minute string to his lower left incisor. Taking the key with his teeth he laid on his side, curled up, and unlocked the shackles which bound his hands to a strap around his waist. At the same time he was being lowered into a pit to be buried under six feet of dirt. A slight impact marked his arrival at the bottom of the pit as he worked the shackles on his feet. Images of Poe teased his confidence as the wet dirt made at first loud claps, then distant thuds on the outside of the death bed.

This was a feat which he had been planning for years. One which the great Houdini had only practiced once and which had almost taken his life - thus one which he had never performed, leaving the honor to one James Colefield to perform sixty-two years to the date after Houdini’s death on Halloween of 1926. Houdini had died twenty-seven years before Colefield’s birth, yet James had observed his performances again and again on what footage was available on scratchy black and white film, in the vast literature which covered Houdini’s acts, and in his dreams as well. All of the sword swallowing and card tricks he had done were nothing now but petty performances. Escape had at first been Colefield’s hobby, it was now his life. He had duplicated several of Houdini’s masterful contortions, escaping from prisons, straitjackets, and locked chests. Now he had the chance to go beyond what Houdini had done and delve into ground (so to speak) where Houdini himself had turned back.

His hands and feet freed, he moved quickly. His time was as limited as his air. He quickly freed himself from the remaining locks and chains and proceeded to free himself from his custom coffin. It had no false bottom, true - but the ‘solid’ lid was made of two separate arching pieces of wood which were in fact designed to split when kicked firmly enough from the inside at the appropriate point in the joint. The large ornamental locks on the outside of the coffin were for theatrical effect, no keys would ever be used on them. He kicked at the bottom of the lid. Nothing happened. He kicked harder, but again the lid did not split. His heartbeat picked up a little, but he kept the most of his senses as panic would only prove to shorten his time. He maintained his slow, controlled breaths. Pulling back his leg until his knee hit the top of the coffin he kicked once again. This time a load of dirt caved in on his feet and ankles as the lower quarter of the coffin lid gave way. He pulled his feet from underneath the pile of dirt and by scuffing each knee on the lid of the coffin was able to tuck each foot under its respective side of his buttocks. He then tucked his head to his chest and held his arms out in front of himself as he worked his upper body to the lower end of the coffin until his chest was upon his thighs. He then rocked back and forth on his haunches as he worked each foot back to where his head had been. In a period of thirty-six seconds he had reversed his position inside the coffin and was now lying face down with the opening he had made just above his head. He went through the motions in complete darkness. He had practiced all of this, in a way. The deepest he had actually practiced at was three feet. The principle was, however, the same. The only sounds were those of his own breathing and movements. Rolling to his right side he used both hands to scoop the dirt which lay by his head down to where his feet now were. As he did so an equal amount of dirt caved in from above the opening, replacing the displaced dirt. The twenty-four cubic feet available inside the coffin was equal to the twenty-four cubic feet of dirt which separated him from the anxiously awaiting crowd above. It was no coincidence that the length of the coffin matched the depth at which he had been buried.

He moved the dirt in the coffin downward. Suddenly the dirt stopped falling in from above. He hesitated for a moment. The dampness had thrown an unknown coefficient into the equation. The ground above had become so dense with moisture that it could not collapse inward so easily. His next moves had to be careful and precise as it was these unknown coefficients that were so deadly. They were in fact what had killed many in his trade, many in other trades as well. (An unknown coefficient had, in fact, killed Houdini). Quickly he climbed up inside the hole which he had created above the coffin opening. With his head and shoulders out of the coffin he began digging upward. The damp soil presented a whole new set of contingencies which he hadn’t even considered.

The crowd watched and the cameras rolled as the light rain developed into a heavy downpour. The ground had absorbed what it could, and small veins of water were beginning to flow down the slight slope of the naked hillside. The narrator was making the most of the added danger in a blatantly melodramatic fashion while below Colefield continued to dig, slowed incredibly by the sudden wetness of the surrounding dirt. A feeling of heat and exhaustion suddenly racked his frame. He realized what this meant. He was running out of air. Keeping his concentration as best he could he continued to dig his fingers into the dense mud overhead. He continued to pull large clumps of ground from above and throw them into the coffin below, whose open mouth mocked him, threatening to pull him back in for a more permanent binding.

(Here’s a real challenge for you Jimmy! Let’s see how good you are at getting out when you’re held down by a ton of dirt, and you have no air to breath, and your heart isn’t beating, and there’s a granite block planted above you...)

An urgency began to take over his actions. He became less concerned with the mathematics of displacement and more concerned with survival. Suddenly the space he was lodged in began to decrease in size as the tunnel he had dug upward slowly closed in around him.

(Here’s a REAL challenge...)

Above, the crowd watched in that peculiar mix of excitement and horror as a five-foot section of the Southern California hillside moved a few inches, giving way to the forces of gravity and erosion in ever so slight a movement. A movement which stifled the melodrama. One young woman allowed a scream to escape her as the hillside gave way, sliding downward two feet more. Each considered what might be taking place in the ground below. The ‘safety men’, there were two of them, who were to intervene in the case of any serious trouble looked at one another. Both of them were considering what the Great Colefield had said an hour before show time. Under no circumstances were they to intervene until seven minutes had passed. It had only been three. Each man considered the possibilities. Each knew the other’s thoughts from the emotion in the eyes. Only the pride of their buried friend kept them from grabbing the shovels and digging him out. It would have been much easier if they had just known all of the possibilities beforehand. Neither of them was about to incur the wrath like that they had encountered once before when they had pulled him from the underwater cage (red faced and gasping for air) a year and a half earlier. And this was much bigger than that. This was his career. Colefield had made that quite clear. Too clear.

His ribs came under the pressure of the moving earth as he tried to hold what breath he had been able to get. The ground closed in around his neck like the hands of a strangler. The pounding of his heart began to pulse in his ears as the flowing ground sealed him off entirely from any passage he had thus far tunneled. Thoughts of life and of death raced into his mind as he struggled to force his arms upward through the densely packed mud. His thoughts became foggy and his movements desperate as rationality gave way to the most basic animalistic drive to live. A loud ringing, then buzzing rushed through his head as his brain screamed for oxygen. He had had a similar feeling when he had almost drowned in a rafting accident in the Rogue River in Oregon. Then he had been pulled out from between the rocks after he had already passed out. He couldn’t pass out now though. No one could as easily reach through the three remaining feet of mud in the necessary time to make a difference. If he couldn’t get out on his own, he wasn’t getting out alive.

He opened his mouth instinctively to take in air, but his lungs refused to respond as his mouth filled with the gruesome flow. The ringing grew in intensity, and he began to see flashes of color, mostly red, as he fought to gain his freedom and maintain his consciousness. If he could just get one hand out he could signal trouble. For a moment he thought he could feel himself slipping. For a moment he thought he was sliding back deeper into the ground than he had been buried and that the surface was not even a part of his new reality. For a moment he saw the crowd above (below?) looking at a mound of slush from which no magician would come of his own force. He slid down and out. Clutching for even mud, but there was none. Trying to cry out, but there was no air. Then he thought he saw a light.

Quickly now he flew upward back into the darkness, fleeing as he could the images which sought to rob him of his conscious thought. He felt a large hand tightening around his waist and chest, and another tight around his neck. He thought he felt the impact of a fall and suddenly he remembered that the large hands were in fact oozing mud, and that reality was a matter of perspective. He could feel (well, kind of feel) his hands above him in the mud, though they seemed to work on their own now, separate from his current consciousness. In fact his entire body was heaving slowly upward seemingly of its own accord as he pulled downward on the mud. He could now feel something wet, though not heavy on his fingertips. It was rain. He forced all of his living energies into the present. He moved and heaved upward, thrusting his hands out of the mire into the air. He pulled his legs up underneath himself slowly and allowed the mud to ooze in beneath him, sealing him off from the coffin and creating a base against which he could now push upward slightly. It was much like swimming through the earth his subconscious mind thought to itself. He could now feel the ability to move his arms more freely as they became unearthed to the elbows, though his head still rested just under the surface. As his arms flailed they struck something hard, a large stone. He realized only then that he must have been in some kind of large mud slide Perhaps the whole hillside had slid away and he was, in fact, completely on his own. That would explain why no helping arms had grabbed his yet. He grabbed with both hands to either side of the stone and pulled. First his brow then his closed eyes slowly emerged from the ground as the earth tried to suck him back in. With all his remaining but rather spare strength he pulled himself up and out of the ground to the point where his nose and mouth emerged. He opened his eyes. Everything was wrong. There were no lights. There was no crowd. He tried to pull in a breath of air, but none would come. A great flash of lightning lit the night sky as the rain continued to pour. By the light of the lightning he could see flesh falling from his arms, bones protruding from his hands. He could see living creatures crawling through his skin, and a slab of granite between his hands. It stood like a tower before him. His name was engraved on it in large letters, followed by two dates. The first was his date of birth. The last was Halloween, 1988 - tonight, but only for him.

He screamed a silent scream as the ground pulled him back below.

2

HUNTING GROUNDS

Ed foraged through the garbage in the alley for anything that might help him make it through to the next day. He had found many things this way before, pocket change, bottles with a little something left in them, and an occasional can that held remnants of food. It was not as profitable as begging, but it was a little more dignified - as if the word dignity really had any meaning left for Ed.

He'd heard the word. The word was that it was wise to avoid this particular area, especially at night. Some of the other homeless folks, some whom Ed had known, were last seen in this area,