Collapsed Veins: A Short Story Collection

By Stephanie Rabig

A dinosaur in a cul-de-sac. Housesitting gone wrong. A grieving woman drives through a blizzard, but the road conditions aren't what she should be worried about. Homages to Stand By Me, and John Carpenter's The Thing.

 

These and fourteen other stories are waiting...

 

For Sale: One Nightmare

Working Hard or Hardly Working?

Decisions Made on a Halloween Night

Only Trying to Help

Never Trust a Husky

How to Time Travel from the Comfort of Your Own Backyard

Pass It On

Her Three Commandments

The Bough, Breaking

A Helping Hand from Peter Pan

Here We Are, As In Olden Days

Childcare

When the Night Has Come

Cul-de-Sac

Cinderella and her Demon Godmother

Not-Deer

Moonlight

And the Strength of the Wolf is the Pack

Toy Soldiers

 

Cover art by Gemma Amor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephanie Rabig
• Release date: Dec 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223150442

Stephanie Rabig

Stephanie Rabig has been a horror fan all her life (her grade-school librarian remembers her because she tried to check out Dracula while in kindergarten). Favorite subgenres include creature features; isolation horror (esp. snowbound. Thanks, John Carpenter's The Thing!); and ocean horror.  She also writes romance-- paranormal and alternate-history--with her partner-in-crime, Angie Bee (check her out on Tumblr @ zombeesknees). Author photo by ctrlaltcassie on Instagram

Book preview

For those who need them, trigger warnings can be found at the back of the book.

Cover art by Gemma Amor.

Here We Are, As in Olden Days originally appeared in Santa Claws is Coming to Deathlehem.

A Helping Hand from Peter Pan originally appeared in Slash-Her: An Anthology of Women in Horror.

Cul-de-Sac originally appeared in Monstroddities.

Cinderella and her Demon Godmother originally appeared in Diet Riot: A Fatterpunk Anthology.

For Sale: One Nightmare originally appeared in Shiver: A Chilling Horror Anthology.

Moonlight was performed on the Something Scary podcast.

FOR SALE: ONE NIGHTMARE

The dog was barking again.

Natalie yawned and got up from their bed, grumbling. Her husband Scott remained asleep, which wasn't surprising. The man could sleep through a tornado siren—and had, one memorable and panicky night.

I know, I'm coming, Natalie muttered. You wake up Tabitha again and you'll be spending the night on that porch.

It was an empty threat; Rosie had a reason to be barking. A raccoon had taken up residence under their porch last week, so far avoiding every trap they'd set.

She peered out the window as Rosie continued to frenzy-bark beside her. Hey, she said. Enough. Shhh. Look, it's not even out. Once or twice, when Rosie had started barking, she'd been able to catch sight of the raccoon wandering around the driveway, searching for more food.

Rosie kept barking.

I swear, dog, if you don't let me get some sleep I'm—

Something moved.

A hand, snaking out from underneath the porch to cling to the stained wooden boards, joined immediately by another. The figure, grinning, his eyes locked on hers; hauling himself up and onto the porch like a drowning man onto a boat, like a clown emerging from the sewer—

Natalie snapped out of it with a yelp and frantically looked around, her vision confronted by swirling snow in every direction.

The storm had only gotten worse since she'd pulled over.

Four hours ago, she realized, looking at her phone. God, she hadn't thought she was that tired.

Extenuating circumstances, she thought, the sarcasm turning to a bitter ash that coated her mind.

She stared out the window, at the snow that was coming down impossibly harder, and groaned as she rested her head on the steering wheel. She'd turned off the engine for a quick nap, not wanting carbon monoxide or whatever to fill up the car. If the exhaust pipe got covered in snow, she was pretty sure it could happen. Or was that just an urban legend?

Trying to focus her thoughts, she shook her head and rubbed at her eyes. The only things she knew were that it was goddamn freezing in here, and that there was no way she was making it to her parents' tonight.

She hadn't even told them she was coming. They were expecting to bring her back with them next week, after the funerals.

She'd assured them, time and again, that she'd be fine until then. There was paperwork to take care of—so much paperwork—and the police might want to talk to her again or bring her good news for once and if things got too hard she'd check into a hotel. She was fine.

And then she'd fixated on the caskets.

The man hadn't come out from under the porch. When she'd woken up at the dog's frantic barking, she'd automatically headed toward the kitchen, only to blearily realize as she looked around the empty room that Rosie was in a different part of the house. In front of Tabitha's door, barking and yowling, standing up on her hind legs to paw uselessly at the wood.

From inside the room, she heard a man's laughter.

She'd screamed, a sound borne equally from rage and panic that she never before could've imagined coming from her own throat. She'd tried to open the door and found it locked.

The key was in her desk drawer. Unable to bear the thought of moving away from the door for even that long, she'd kicked it open instead. It took her four tries.

All the noise should've woken Scott. Even he wasn't that hard of a sleeper.

The police would tell her later that he'd been dead at least an hour by the time Rosie cottoned on to the intruder's presence. One window left open for the cool night breeze, one screen cut with too little noise to wake a sleeping dog. One plus one equals two. Two dead bodies.

Three, really, if you counted Rosie. But the math wasn't as neat then.

Two dead bodies. Two caskets. Tabitha had loved her 'morning hugs'; she'd toddle into their bedroom and scramble up onto the bed and sprawl on top of them, trying to hug both of them at once and giggling wildly.

Now she would be buried alone. She and her father would be right next to each other, but that didn't matter, did it, still closed off from each other instead of her little girl where she belonged, in her father's arms, and she should have done more research, should have checked if it would be okay to bury both of them together (as it turned out, there was precedent for it). But she hadn't checked. She'd let them down. Again.

Someone had stood next to her bed and stabbed her husband in the throat and she hadn't woken up. Then he'd crept to their daughter's room and closed the door and locked it. How long had Rosie barked that night before she'd finally stopped pressing the pillow to her ears and gotten up? Five minutes? Ten?

Separate caskets.

She'd fled out to the garage and started the car, driving off without her coat, her purse, her license. The only reason she even had her phone was because it had been in her pocket.

Natalie turned on the engine, groaning when she saw that the gas gauge was hovering uncomfortably close to 'E'. Needed to call Triple-A first thing in the morning, see if someone would just bring her a gas can instead of towing her to the next station.

Fuck, it was cold.

A bar, she thought. There had been a bar not too far back; she'd considered going in. That was when she'd realized she didn't have her purse. There'd been a horse on the sign, lit up in red neon, and she'd smiled because it reminded her of the Red Pony from the Longmire books and then she'd cried because she and Scott used to watch the TV series together and she'd driven on by, only to pull over about ten minutes later.

Ten minutes, she thought. And she hadn't been going highway speeds. She could make that walk.

Or she could turn the engine on, she thought. Snowdrifts were definitely piling up out there. At worst, she got a warmer night's sleep, and at best...

No. No, those should definitely be turned around. Worst case scenario was dying.

Still. Wouldn't be suicide, not really. Maybe she was just the Little Match Girl, all grown up, taking what bit of warmth she could before the inevitable.

Natalie shoved the car door open before her thoughts could continue to spiral that way, the blast of cold wind shocking her back into her right mind.

For all that she just wanted to slam the door shut again and huddle in her car, she made herself take a step back the way she'd come, then another. The wind pushed the snow into indiscernible patterns; sometimes it was ankle-deep and sometimes she found herself almost buried to the hip, even though she knew she was still on the road.

She remembered last Christmas, snuggled with Scott on the couch, each of them with a glass of hot chocolate—dark for him, mint for her—watching John Carpenter's The Thing as the wind howled outside. One of the characters had gotten lost in a snowstorm, hadn't they, even though they'd had a line tied to them? And hadn't pioneers gotten lost between their own houses and their barns if the whiteout got bad enough?

This wasn't a full whiteout, though. She could see in front of her, if only for a foot or two. And she could make out the glow of the streetlamps through the gusting snow. She just had to follow those lights, and she'd be fine.

Natalie stared up at the streetlamps as she stumbled along, watching the fat snowflakes dart in front of the light, sometimes whirling in the wind and sometimes rocketing toward the ground.

If she focused on them enough, she could almost ignore her breath coming out in icy plumes, almost pretend that she'd remembered her coat.

At least she was still in her thick plum-colored sweater and jeans. If she'd had her panicky breakdown while she was in her nightgown—

Unlikely, a cruel voice in her mind whispered. You got blood all over it and haven't bought a new one yet, remember?

Fuck off, she muttered through numb lips, blinking futilely against the onslaught of snow.

Pretend you're on a movie set, she thought, as her teeth began to clack and rattle together, reminding her strongly that they were just bones.

Bones. From two separate bodies in two separate caskets.

Movie set, she thought again. You're filming a scene. Trudging through the wilderness, closer than you know to safety. There's camerapeople and PAs and all sorts of workers just out of your line of sight, waiting to get you a cup of coffee and a blanket as soon as you're done.

It helped, for a minute or two. Or five? She wasn't sure how long it was taking her to walk from streetlamp to streetlamp. Maybe that was how she could measure time now. One streetlamp, two, three, four.

How many to the bar? She hadn't counted streetlamps then, just minutes.

No matter how many times she went outside in winter—to scrape ice off a windshield, to have a snowball fight with Tabitha, to walk Rosie—it always surprised her how quickly it seemed that she'd never been anything but cold. It drove everything out of her mind except the chill, and she could swear that she'd never been warm before and never would be again.

This, though...she'd just thought of Tabitha, of Rosie, and for once she didn't feel any grief. No tears stinging her eyes. The snow had driven away everything except her body's instinctive desire to get warm, dismissing grief as something unnecessary to survival and therefore unimportant. She'd be grateful for that if she wasn't so cold she hurt.

Another lamppost.

Natalie trudged forward, slipping on the snow and nearly tumbling. She hit her knees but forced herself up again. She knew with some deep instinct (the one that should have warned her, should have warned her right away that her child was in danger) that if she fell completely she wouldn't get back up.

How long did it take to develop frostbite?

She pictured herself walking into the bar; nose and ears and fingertips black with frostbite. The poor bartender would probably be—

What bartender? she suddenly thought. It was almost two in the morning. Surely a small roadside bar wouldn't stay open that late, even if the 'road' was a highway.

Then she'd break in, she thought dazedly. Get warm, apologize in the morning, call Triple-A, get her purse, pay for a broken window.

Another lamppost.

She stopped moving then, because underneath that lamppost, it looked like...

Was someone standing there?

Couldn't be, she thought, closing her eyes tightly and shaking her head. They'd just been standing there, perfectly still, apparently unaffected by the storm.

Just imagining things, she thought, trudging forward again. Sure enough, when she dared to look up instead of at her own feet, the figure was gone.

Still, that silhouette, the height...

No.

She reached the lamppost and circled it, reassuring herself that there was no one there. No footprints besides hers in the snow around it.

Natalie looked up again, toward the next lamppost, and saw more lights just beyond it. Neon red.

The bar. She could see it now. And she wasn't going to fall to frostbite or hallucinations or anything else, not when she was within sight.

Though her mind felt more energized, if only for a few seconds, her body didn't follow suit. She wrapped her arms tighter around herself, wondering if a person could accidentally break their own ribs, and forced herself forward, one after another after another, her tennis shoes and socks fully soaked through, her feet numb.

The OPEN sign was on.

Oh thank god, Natalie thought, no longer trusting her mouth to open and words to form. She got a mental image of trying to speak and the snow filling her mouth, blackening her tongue with frostbite instantly, leaving it to wither and die as it forced its way down her throat next...

Trying to push away the gruesome image—it was hard when she couldn't seem to keep track of her own thoughts, much less control them—Natalie stumbled to the front door of the bar, turning the handle.

It opened and she stepped inside, collapsing when a burst of warm air enveloped her.

Between the sudden warmth and the rustic décor, for a few seconds she actually believed she was in the Red Pony, that she'd look up and see Henry Standing Bear behind the bar, talking to his friend the Sheriff, and Walt Longmire wouldn't give her excuses about how there was no evidence of anyone else in the home aside from the cut-open screen, wouldn't lecture her about how leaving the window open had been unsafe while she was still staring at her child's blood underneath her fingernails. He'd find out who did it and then the guy would be in jail and she could move on, that was what her father had awkwardly said, told her that she could start to heal and move on once the stranger was caught.

Shakily, she got to her feet, seeming to tremble even harder now that she was inside and safe.

Didn't need to call Walt, she thought, feeling a piece of her mind shatter like thin ice as she took in who was actually standing behind the bar. Didn't need a Sheriff's help finding the stranger.

He was right here.

There was something she hadn't told the police.

They believed the intruder had let her live because he'd heard a noise outside, been worried he'd be caught and just run.

There hadn't been a noise. He'd grabbed hold of Natalie, who was still screaming—all rage gone, only grief now. Her daughter in her bed and her dog at her feet.

And he'd asked her, Are you satisfied with your purchase?

Two weeks ago, one of her online book-club friends had been short on rent. Megan had put up a bunch of items in her Etsy shop, and Natalie had bought a few in order to help keep her head above water.

She'd added a drawing of a banshee and a cryptid sticker set to her cart, and then she'd noticed the last item in the store: a nightmare.

Megan didn't detail what exactly it was; there was just a lot of flowery language about your worst fears come to life! and open if you dare!. It was $20, and she'd added it to the cart, too, curious about what her friend might put into the grab bag. It reminded her of those 'time machine' boxes she'd seen once upon a time on Ebay, where people just mailed someone a random box of parts with a promise that, put together properly, they would indeed form a time machine.

She'd gotten the package, framed her drawing, put the cryptid stickers on her laptop case, and then eagerly picked up the last item.

It was a small carved box, etched with red and silver designs. She'd opened it—and found nothing.

Natalie had tamped down her instinctive disappointment, told herself that the box itself was kinda pretty, and set it without a second thought onto her bookshelf.