Von Otto's Child & Other Forsaken Offspring

By Daniel Bautz

Sometimes scary, sometimes uplifting, sometimes funny, but never dull. From angels to demons, Halloween to Christmas, from endings to new beginnings, every story gives the reader something different than the last.

 

Award Winning Author Daniel Bautz delivers a sketchbook of twenty-two stories and illustrations that refuse to be denied. Some come from nightmares, others from an epiphany, others from parts unknown. Each stands on its own, the only common thread, the mind that conceived of them.

 

Journey into this orphanage of forsaken offspring and prepare to experience something unique.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniel Bautz
• Release date: Mar 17, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224434039

Book preview

Von Otto’s Child

&

Other Forsaken Offspring

A Collection of Tales

Daniel Bautz

––––––––

Sled Dog Publishing

U.S.A.

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

First Edition Copyright 2021

Second Edition Copyright 2023

Cover Design by Daniel Bautz.

Cover Copyright 2021

Sled Dog Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright.

Scanning, uploading, or any other distribution of this book without permission is theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from this book, other than for review purposes, please contact the author.

Sled Dog Publishing

Marysville, Ohio 43040

To the sun,

whose light is the only way the moon is seen.

To my big brother,

always my better and always my inspiration.

To my parents, who allowed me to be me, different.

I dedicate this work of my heart, mind, and hands.

Foreword

Dear Reader,

The book you hold currently is not thematically cohesive. It’s not a collection of one type of story, and there is no narrative weaved throughout. So, no worries if you feel the need or inclination to jump about. Please, do so with abandon.

Some stories are short, others not so much. The only thread that runs through these little yarns is that I wrote them with only their writing in mind. No boundaries ever existed in their telling. No singular genre, point of view, particular audience, or ideation restricted their creation.

Some of them might be whimsical, others spooky, others outright nonsensical, and others, if I may hazard, touching. The hope in compending this sketchbook was to refresh, express, and stoke my passion for creating, and to do so without bounds.

The illustrations are all pencil and charcoal. Rough, fast, and more so an attempt to capture a mood or feeling than a literal interpretation, I hope they add to the overall feel of this volume.

I hope you enjoy the offspring of the mind, never written to be more than they are. Abandoned to the desktop of my computer, orphaned. Some may have appeared elsewhere, but now find their forsaken selves together.

You can keep up to date on my writing by visiting DanielBautzCTP.com and subscribing to the newsletter.

Thank you for reading.

Daniel Bautz

Von Otto’s Child

and Other Forsaken Offspring

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Distant Thunder

Whistling In The Dark

Little Light of Mine

Barking At Ghosts

You Are Not Alone

Caught In Costume

Widder Paxton’s Bargain

The Important

Scorpion Waits On The Stairs

Made Of Clay

Power of Dreams

Pennies on the Roof

The Old Tree Stump

More Weight

Time Enough

Snowy Stairs

Winter’s Wicked Winds

Entertaining Angels

One Last Letter To Santa

Zeb and Big D

Weaker Than Others

Von Otto’s Child

Distant Thunder

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It begins like gentle drumming, faint, safe. It whispers of the coming of a changing storm, but it's so far from here. It bumps across the darkened skies and settles. Threats of turmoil, chaos, and peril in the bass notes from miles off. For now, the distant thunder is little more than a warm reminder of the other storms. The ones that did not deliver on their menace, the ones that breathed life into thirsty flora, the ones that lulled you to a deep, restful repose.

The storm bellows, causing the earth to quiver. Its lightning flashes come closer, bringing noise. Blinding light, a tremolo of deep resonance shakes the ground. Distant no longer, the gale has arrived with its terrible power and fearful instruments. Its chaos creates change, molding a new world by tearing away the old. The tempest works its hands of entropy, spoiling well-laid order. Following each flash, the rumble is deep, rollicking laughter pulsing the foundations cherished.

A storm is always coming, change is already here, and we lack the strength to resist. We ride through the storm as it bulls over us. Its swath of might pours through our lives, and we are changed, better or ill, changed. Weathered but not beaten, we ready for the next storm and challenge the skies and its rulers. Change will come. Distant, its rumble a warning. This storm is here, and it brings something to fear.

Whistling In The Dark

You purse your lips, curl your tongue, draw the chilly night air deep in your lungs, and blow it out. The high-pitched tune breaks the silence enveloping you, joining the sound of your feet striking the ground in a lonely symphony. In the wilderness, traveling an abandoned path, dark, and the dark is alive and hungry. You can’t see the things skulking alongside and behind you. More frightening, the phantoms ahead of you.

You continue to whistle your song. Maybe, a favorite hymn from a damaged faith you cling to? Perhaps, a tune highlighting your most perfect day? Or a nameless ditty you make up as you move through the spiraling, grasping mist? The unknown hunts you and your eyes search for something substantial or defined. You seek a threshold to step over to save you from the preternatural at your back. You whistle louder, keeping the gooseflesh from knowing why it is there.

Your feet strike the ground, one step after another, each quicker than the last. The oxygen for whistling waivers as you labor to find the way from this dark world where ghosts are real, and demons can hurt you. The song begins to lose its rhythm and structure. Sound wheezes out of your lips as your stroll in the night begins to grow into a jog. Your chest burns as the chill of the air and extra exertion steals your breath. You don’t know what, but you know something is closing in as your song begins to lose its tune.

You force yourself to hum the song that you can’t keep in a whistle.

Security, safety, and a familiar warm place are your only desire. To insulate yourself in the embrace of knowing what waits for you. What expectations you know offer fulfillment, what faces you can count on for kindness, what dreams are safe and attainable. Your biggest wish is to find yourself off the sidewalk this witching hour, passing the cemetery on a foggy, biting October night.

Little Light of Mine

Alton liked corners. Feeling the walls against his back told him nothing could sneak up on him. Propped up and wide-eyed in the corner of his room, he watched the shadows. Some he knew made sense, others he eyed with suspicion. A pile of clothes oddly organized, conglomerations of toys, and the spinning shades of the ceiling fan. They seemed poised to strike. Ready to pounce on him if he lost his focus. He held his phone in his hand, squeezing it as he watched those shadows.

Stay focused. Shadow monsters only moved when unwatched. It was deep night, and the sun would make itself known soon enough. His tired mind begged him to sleep. Alton knew better. They’d grab him and pull him into their world.

In their world, they ate little boys. One nibble at a time. Savoring each morsel. Each bite washed down with wine made of children’s tears and accompanied by a symphony of fruitless cries for a parental rescue. A world where dark things crawled on you and burrowed under your flesh.

In one perverse final insult, using your skin, the monster took your spot in the family. Your parents would wonder why you behaved out-of-character and surly but chalk it up to hormones or some other anxiety inducer.

Even if you made it back from this world of shadow, it was too late. All your prayers, teeth brushing, baths, and helping old ladies across streets would be undone. The monsters destroyed reputations in days, sometimes hours. He’d seen it. At least, he’d heard about it. No. Alton wasn’t risking it.

His phone vibrated, pulling his eyes to the illuminated screen. That was the opening needed. It looked like a pile of dirty clothes stacked on his desk chair, but skeletal dark hands shot out from the silhouette. Stretched across the room, the hands wrapped around his ankle. Icy and rigid, the grip felt like a chain ratcheting around his joint. The hand tugged him from his corner. He tried to stop it, but the corner gave him nothing to hold onto.

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Scream! Alton tried to scream. Another hand clasped around his jaws, its nails digging into the back of his neck. He screamed anyway. The hand muffled that noise as he slid across the beige carpet under the bed and toward the open dark cavern of his closet. Icy fingers wrapped around his mouth, a steel grip around his ankle, he thumbed at his phone. Hoping it would call someone or make a sound. The flashlight on his phone popped on, a beacon in the dark bedroom. His shaking hand turned the light toward the closet to whatever was pulling him into that dark hell.

Pale eyes stared at him. They didn’t reflect the light back but absorbed it, ate it with a voracious appetite into their shimmer gray-blue fog. Glistening, loose, translucent skin oozed and folded over red sinew and musculature. The mechanics of the monster visible to any unlucky enough to see it. A pink tongue dripped with yellow saliva as it cleared the mucous from the pointy razor-sharp teeth. The mouth traveled the circumference of the oval head at the end of a spindly and crooked neck.

The hand couldn’t muffle the scream much after that. The floor vibrated with Alton’s terror. His free hand tried to grab the bed legs, but his fingers only rubbed against them as he slid past. He attempted to pull the ichor-covered fingers from his face, but the slime and flesh came free as his fingers slipped over it. He grabbed at the carpet. The strands, too short, offered no purchase.

The thing pulled him into the closet. His grab at the wall halted the journey