R is for Revenge: A-Z of Horror, #18

By Jeamus Wilkes, Josh Schlossberg, Bob Johnston and 10 more

R is for Revenge is the eighteenth book in an epic series of twenty-six horror anthologies. Between these pages you will find a collection of thirteen shocking tales from some of the greatest independent horror authors writing today. From avenging spirits to nature's wrath, abused youths to jilted lovers, R is for Revenge brings a brutal and heartbreaking selection of horror tales that will satisfy the human desire for vengeance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Cape Publishing
• Release date: Jun 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223544227

Book preview

Red Cape Publishing Presents…

The A-Z of Horror: R is for Revenge

DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2023 Red Cape Publishing

All rights reserved.

Cover Design & Interior Artwork by Red Cape Graphic Design

www.redcapepublishing.com/red-cape-graphic-design

I Only See Her When I Choke

Jeamus Wilkes

I only see her when I choke.

The first time Fay appeared to me was moments after Daniel Cajeda punched me in the stomach and stole my bike. My memories of Fay sometimes play a mental version of Twister, but I’ll do my best to line them up first to last. That is, the ones I’m willing to share. Whatever that chronology has become, my first encounter with her stays in the number one spot.

When Daniel was already half a block away—hauling ass on my red banana-seat Schwinn, popping wheelies and laughing—I still wasn’t able to take air into my lungs. One shot in the gut from his clenched fat fucking fingers and my body felt like it was turning inside out, stomach first. Somewhere in all of this, I’d fallen onto the cement. Later I’d discover the skinned and scabby elbows I earned from this.

On the blistering August sidewalk, I rolled onto my side, my lungs now screaming for air, when I saw Fay standing in the middle of Woodmount Boulevard’s rocky dirt-filled median. Her feet looked like they were buried in that dirt up to the ankles. Fay’s skirt was muddy and bloody, and her blouse the same, except for the squirming things crawling up from the inside of its threadbareness and falling off the edge of her neckline. Maggots.

Her face was a child’s expression of hatred, and was jaundiced with purpling veins. The dull orbs of her eyes held lolling milk-clouded raisins inside, and her matted hair moved, cracked, and disintegrated with tumbleweed fragility. Of all these things, it was the waft of putrefaction from Fay that factored the most in shriveling me with fear. And that only happened when I finally took air in through a reverse scream.

The second I took in that precious air, Fay disappeared, leaving only a small dust-up from the rocky dirt where her feet had been planted. Before this happened, her face screwed up and her mouth seemed to be opening to scream—a counter to my trombone gasp, I guess—and she revealed a maw full of rows of milk teeth cradling a porous hose of gray tongue.

I no sooner caught my breath when I retched the half-digested cocktail of a hot dog and two Otter Pops I had for lunch with firehose pressure. This seemed to go on and on in a writhing horrific fashion until it slowed into dry heaving. My abdomen felt like someone had shot a bazooka into it at point blank range. Cars sped by on Woodmount, only a few bothering to slow down, but none stopping for the eleven-year-old puking his brains out. I grew up in a great southwestern city where most adults were concerned with the important and steadfast business of being walking assholes.

For years, my friend Mikey would refer to that moment as that time Daniel Cajeda knocked a hot dog out of you. But I knew it was Fay’s first appearance that caused my epic upchuck. The only time my stomach felt worse was two days later, when I found my bike parked in its usual spot in the garage. I was staring at it when Mikey called to tell me that he heard from his dad—who read about it in the local paper—that Daniel was strangled to death, his body found under the row of elm trees on the west side of Bloom Park. It explained why my parents and I had heard one screaming siren after another fade in and out the evening of that day my bike was stolen. Bloom Park was just a few blocks away from my house, and every time I rode past that west side spot, I couldn’t clear it fast enough. My dad stopped taking me there for our weekly game of croquet. I miss croquet with Dad.

It was something I shared with my dad until Daniel’s murder. In hindsight, I’m not sure why we hadn’t relocated our games to another park. Maybe Daniel’s murder was too close an association with it. I felt bad because it was like stealing a source of joy from my dad when the games didn’t resume. We could never do games at home as we had no significant lawn to play on, only rock landscaping. A few years later, when I was a new high school freshman, I tried to resume games with him. But it was during the time he got sick, cancer boring a path from his colon to his brain. It was renal failure that made him comatose and killed him in the end. The cancer had riddled his kidneys in its rapid metastasis, and my dad’s progressive illness made dialysis treatment impossible. His brain was eaten enough that for days before his death, his mouth rigidly hung open, and glazed brown eyes stopped recognizing me as he moaned for hours on end. The night he died at Providence Hospital, I was beside his bed and I began to sob with grief, my breath hitching. By the time Fay showed up, her appearance was brief. She could do nothing, as my father was already dead.

***

At East El Paso High School, I played intramural soccer during the Autumn lunch hours of my sophomore year. Non-athlete that I was, the distraction of physical activity helped get my mind off of death-and-dad. It was ten minutes into my team’s third game when Sam Cookson, an ungodly-sized junior who ate 5’5" kids like me for breakfast, tried to launch a soccer ball from one end of the field to the other.

What interrupted this was my abdomen getting in the way of that soccer ball at near point-blank range. My feet didn’t get to the ball in time for the block, but my torso did. To Sam’s credit, he immediately ran to me and appeared to feel remorse about the incident. But Sam’s feelings didn’t mitigate events in the immediate and soon after: Me, fading in and out of consciousness with an inability to get air in or out of my lungs, on the ground, kneeling, squatting, glimpsing the aluminum bleachers populated by lunchtime attendees shaking their heads, laughing, pointing, and Fay.

She stood there by herself near the top row, distant, but recognizable. She was staring at me. But as I fought for air, I saw her countenance follow Sam as he backed away from me. Regaining my breath, each inhalation made Fay’s decaying and shadowless form skip in and out of my vision like the end of a flashing and noisy school film reel until she was suddenly gone from my sight.

The soccer game resumed after I’d been walked to the sidelines by Mrs. Burress, one of the East El Paso High P. E. teachers who’d volunteered to supervise and co-referee the lunchtime intramural games. Her voice was even sharper than its usual steak-knife delivery.

"You look a little dazed. I’m sending you to the nurse’s office. Hey."

The increased volume of that last word jerked my gaze away from the bleachers to Mrs. Burress’s face, and her present concern further narrowed when she looked into my eyes.

Are you on something? she asked, putting her palm to my forehead. Your eyes are solid black.

The last thing I remember before losing consciousness was my eyes falling to Mrs. Burress’s dolphin-hem shorts, then an increasing tunnel vision, moving stars, and a feeling of falling down into a deep and dark chasm.

I awoke in an ambulance, already hyperventilating as I was being attended by an EMT with a ponytail, military arm tattoos, and bad breath. He was trying to stick an IV needle the size of a fucking icepick into one of my veins he’d slapped into shape after tying off my upper left arm with some rubber tube.

Then I saw Fay pacing behind the EMT. This was disorienting, both in the present tense of the event and in my memory, as there’s no room to pace inside an ambulance. Through my fluttering eyelids, the shutter speed of her appearance was again strobing. I struggled to breathe against the pain of icepick needles, the rubber tube pinching my arm hair, immobility against restraints and whatever the fuck else my brain was trying to process. The lights inside the ambulance flickered every time they hit a bump. In all of the craziness, I was grateful the siren wasn’t wailing.

Later that evening, Sam Cookson’s mother telephoned to report him missing after he failed to show up at home four hours after school let out. Three days later, Sam’s body was found two miles from his house in an irrigation ditch that ran along the south side of Patchley's Auto Parts. Eponymous proprietor Stringer Patchley had spotted Sam’s water-and-weeds-logged corpse while he was taking trash bags out to a small black Sun City Waste Control dumpster that sat aside his auto parts store.

That biggun was looking straight up. Bugs already gone after that poor boy’s eyes, Patchley said to a reporter decades later. The reporter, F. Bud Groman, was writing a true crime book on the still-uncaught killer dubbed the Schoolboy Strangler publicly by the media and not-so-publicly by law enforcement. The strangler’s discovered victims would eventually encompass more than school-aged children and males, but the name stuck. Sam had likely been murdered the day I last saw him on that soccer field. His neck had been squeezed so hard his spinal cord was compressed by 50% and his trachea nearly flattened. I didn’t know these facts when I first found out about Sam’s murder on the evening news the night before I was discharged from the hospital.

The medical conclusion on what happened to me was that the solar plexus syndrome (i.e., getting all of the fucking wind knocked the fuck out of your fucking lungs) incurred by the soccer ball accident escalated into some sort of panic attack (and this would evolve into a decades-long panic disorder for me). Informally, the resident doc, whose name I cannot recall, told my mom they could find nothing seriously wrong with me other than a bruised abdomen and bruised ego. In my experience, most resident docs can be real dickheads, and I wanted to take the bruised ego crack and shove it up his ass, but I was glad to leave the hospital.

On the way home, my mom made a stop at Sonic Drive-In so we could celebrate nothing seriously wrong. But I knew something was seriously wrong, as some sort of twisted fallen guardian angel was murdering people she perceived attacking me. Daniel Escajeda was a genuine attacker, but Sam Cookson certainly wasn’t. Fay’s appearance at my dad’s passing was only linked to one fact: I only see her when I choke. And in the uncontrolled hyperventilating grief when I saw Fay observing my dad’s body, I knew something that made me even more afraid of Fay than ever, if it were possible: She was disappointed. Disappointed she couldn’t strangle the life out of my father. Disappointed she couldn’t destroy the source of what in that moment was destroying me.

***

It wasn’t long after leaving that hospital room that I knew I had to name the terror, name the thing that haunted my suffocating steps, name the phantasm I only saw when I was choking for air. Enter Roget’s College Thesaurus in Dictionary Form. A paperback all students had to purchase for AP English. In a world decades away from Google and smartphones, it was magic. Nothing less than a spell book you could use to conjure creativity and improve your writing, and the dictionary form, while less comprehensive, made the whole spellcasting process rocket-fast. Roget's and Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style saved my eleventh-hour academic ass repeatedly. I looked up the entry for ghost, and the word fay leaped off the page.

After going through all of my dad’s dictionaries and the full set of Encyclopedia Britannica my mom still kept in our living room’s narrow floor-to-ceiling bookcase, I got familiar rapidly with fay and its associated word family. I knew its root, fae, was more closely associated with fairy-folk and magic and the like in myth and legend. Fay’s audible doppelganger and fraternal twin, fey, branched into relations with clairvoyance, death, and obscure unworldliness. All of it worked. Up to that point in my life, nobody knew about Fay except me. She was the most hidden of my closet’s skeletons and closely guarded dirty secrets I kept in the dark. But mentally I couldn’t keep saying the demon, or the ghost, or night hag, or whatever. I had to name it. I had to name her. And I named her Fay.

***

Jack.

It was seven years after high school, and I was working as an area manager for B. Dalton Bookseller when I turned at my name being spoken. Mrs. Burress was recognizable even though she was wearing a smart pantsuit and not the sneakers, gym shorts, polo shirt and whistle I was used to in high school. She was looking over her shoulder at me as she stood in BDB’s criminally small Science and Nature section of the store. We both turned to face each other directly. I was holding an oversize clipboard with endless pages of tractor-fed greenbar printouts and doing some type of important shit like inventory reconciliation, or some other dumb nonsense designed to terrorize the BDB store employees in a half-dead Las Cruces, New Mexico mall.

Mrs. Burress.

She smiled and rolled her eyes. My name is Beth. Beth Chavez. And it’s miz. She waved her ringless left hand’s fingers at me, her nails a red so deep they were almost black. She had on more makeup than she usually did as a P.E. coach at East El Paso High, and her hair was the same dark brown, but shorter. I think you can call me Beth now, Jack.

And so I did.

***

I had lunch with Beth at El Fenix, red enchiladas for me and fish tacos for her, and for the first time I shared my story about Fay. I’d kind of reached a boiling point with it. It came pouring out in my conversation with Beth as I felt more and more at ease with her in that small Mexican restaurant booth. An ease that I wasn’t able to find before, even with my mother. When I reached a point of saying pretty much all I could say about Fay, Beth shook her head and sat back.

That is the most terrifying thing anyone has ever told me, she said. But I believe you.

Beth told me about her life and her career arc with the school district that included going from coach to counselor to vice principal at East El Paso High, all the while her trying to save a marriage that was failing at a faster rate than it was succeeding, and the ensuing divorce battle that lasted forever. As she shared this, the skin of my own conscience began to crawl as it dawned on me that I’d hidden a certain part of my story from Beth. The murders. She didn’t point out the obvious connection to Sam Cookson, especially, but most of my story with Fay happened off-camera from Beth’s line-of-sight, anyhow. The incident with Daniel, the visit in my dad’s hospital room, and other brief episodes that didn’t necessarily include a murder. But if there were murders, I certainly didn’t include them in my story to Beth.

Two years later, I married Beth. Her being ten years my senior didn’t bother us nearly as much as it seemed to bother or titillate other people, especially my mother (the whole thing sounds rather predatory, was Mom’s statement that ended up estranging me from her) or former classmates (everything from Ewww to Right on dude, you hit that hard!).  By the time I’d married Beth, I’d gotten comfortable with lying to her about Fay’s sometimes murderous wake. I’d gotten comfortable lying to Beth about many things, because the tendrils from my relationship with Fay would reach everything else in my life. And in the seven years I was married to Beth, Fay had found another way into my head. Because if I only saw her when I choked, there was one body change I went through that induced a significant amount of choking: sleep apnea.

***

About a year into my marriage with Beth, I knew I had apnea before the official diagnosis. The first time I awoke in bed screaming was about 1 a.m. Beth, a light sleeper anyhow, was up reading in her office in the next room when she said that, before the scream, she heard me struggling for breath after a protracted amount of loud snoring.

You’re okay, you’re okay, Beth said over and over. Fay was standing in the bedroom doorway in her usual garb and condition, soiled from the grave and rotting just enough to smell horrendous and appear like the maggoty living dead. Only she was older, taller, the corpse of a young woman and not a girl. But the milk teeth smile was unmistakable.

Beth tried to move my face to see hers. Are you seeing her? Jack. Jack! Are you seeing her? I looked at Beth's face and began to catch my breath. Her readers were dangling from her neck as she leaned over me, and her breath blessedly smelled like toothpaste and peach tea. Fay’s usual olfactory offense was gone, and the empty doorway only revealed our old family pictures on the hallway wall. For the first time, I noticed my wife’s hair had some gray in it.

***

After a few night terror episodes like this, Beth insisted I see a doctor. I did, and they referred me to a sleep center for a study. Surprise, surprise, I had apnea, and a pretty severe case of it. The CPAP machine took some getting used to, but it did help me breathe and Fay’s nocturnal sleep visits went away for the most part. The only exceptions were when the CPAP mask would get bumped, causing a leak and stopping the air flow designed to clear a path to my lungs, and the soft tissue in the back of my mouth would do its thing again and choke me. But these episodes became rare, and if the CPAP machine had feet, Beth would have kissed them even before I did.

I began to see a therapist who treated my visions of Fay in a clinical, stoic manner, which is just what I needed.

No drama, just let me talk about it (and I’ll leave out the murders just like I do when I talk about it with my beautiful wife) and oh by the way give me some fucking pills.

So my therapist let me talk about it, and while he didn’t give me magic pills he did give me some recommendations on books and shit to engage in cognitive therapy.

Awesome, lemme do all the things to get this phantasm out of my head.

It was my GP who supplied the magic pills from the angle of treating depression. They came in the form of a popular new antidepressant called Mystyq, the commercial name for denexafil (100 mg was the magic number for me). My focus became better. The panic attacks and news articles about another Schoolboy Strangler victim being found were not only becoming rarer, but began to get further and further away in the rearview mirror. Mystyq occasionally caused some erectile dysfunction, but Viagra stomped that shit out like combat boots landing on sidewalk ants.

There was, however, a whiplash effect.

Viagra is awesome, but even a small amount made me a short-term nymphomaniac for the duration of the pill’s effect. Beth often would stop me out of exhaustion, or the sex would end when I began to hyperventilate near climax. And every single time that happened, Fay would appear. I would try to shove her out of my mind, but sometimes this didn’t work. So sex began to end with either visions of Fay, Beth’s exhaustion, or a flaccid penis when I was bypassing Viagra in trying to avoid Fay’s appearances.

I couldn’t have sex because of Fay. I couldn’t swim or do any exercise because of Fay. I couldn’t hold my breath for more than twelve seconds without Fay showing up. Years of scouring the internet for some story explaining a girl’s murder by strangulation or choking didn’t account for Fay’s existence. Only I knew about her, and she left a trail of bodies in proximity of me, all credited to the Schoolboy Strangler.

***

Let’s press the shuffle button on a playlist of Fay’s appearances and murders and see what kind of awesome soundtrack we can kick out for our listening and reading pleasure:

F. Bud Groman. The reporter who in the early Oughties began working on a book about the Schoolboy Strangler, discovered the aforementioned close proximity I had to Fay’s victims. He never knew about Fay of course, but Groman confronted me in a sparsely populated grocery store parking lot at night. Why he showed up at that time of day I had no idea, but after he started asking me about Sam Cookson and Daniel Escajeda, he got no further on his list of murder victims when I’d begun to have a genuine panic attack. He must have thought he caused some type of heart attack, because he backed off and quickly got in his nearby car, an old gray Ford Taurus with a green passenger door.  And that was the first time I actually got to see Fay murder someone. In the back seat of that Taurus, Fay’s silhouette was unmistakable, and as she leaned forward and the dash lights revealed more of her necrotic face, her black-rotted hands went around Groman’s fat neck and crushed it with the lightest of effort. When Groman’s eyes bulged as his Taurus trembled, I ran for my own car. When I got home I didn’t bother telling Beth about it, because I knew Groman would be dead, it would be on the news, and if parking lot cameras were ever consulted, they would only show Groman accosting me and returning to his car completely untouched during the whole incident.

Jaime Mayorga. The working part of an asshole and also the store manager at Dollarhouse Video (a local video rental store chain that I was assistant manager at during my first year of community college), Jaime always thought it was amusing to put me in a headlock from time to time. I guess, I just give off that KICK ME vibe to bullies. One time I was unable to breathe during one of these headlocks and lost consciousness. I came to okay, Jaime slapping my face and issuing a non-apology for being sorry that I passed out, and Fay made only the briefest appearance outside the front window of the video store.

She stared in at Jaime, and then she disappeared like moving out frame during a camera’s dormancy. A few days later I got promoted to manager, because Jaime never came back to work after that night he had me in a headlock, as he was found strangled to death in one of the men’s room bathroom stalls at a strip club called Sunny Tease.

Chesirae Stroup. Chesirae Stroup was a lifeguard, who by all witness accounts (especially my mother) was dragging her feet in getting me out of a public swimming pool and getting the water out of my lungs when I failed to return to the surface after a bad landing off a high-dive board.