The Gate: 13 Dark & Odd Tales Read online

  “Listen, make sure you get that box of toys up into your bedroom. You don’t want to forget anything and then come crying to me later when you can’t find it.”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  His father shuffled into the house. The two large men helping with the move followed him in, the living room couch balanced between them. After they entered his mother came out. She wiped sweat from her brow with a paper towel, which she then stuffed into her back pocket. She noticed Ryan watching her and waved.

  Ryan sat down in the lush grass and opened the box before him. He removed a G.I. Joe action figure and positioned it so its head touched its feet. Then he placed it in the grass and flicked it with his finger. The action figure tumbled away in an uneven roll before it toppled over. He ran his fingers through the grass. It felt so unlike the grass they had in Sacramento. That had been soft and a bit ticklish to the touch; this stuff was coarse and rubbery, like the spines of a dog’s chew toy.

  “How are you today?” a voice asked. He glanced up to see a man approach him from across the street. On his face was a wide smile, the widest he’d ever seen.

  “Okay,” said Ryan.

  “My name is Mister Higgins. What’s yours?”

  “Ryan Talbot.”

  “Nice to meet you, Ryan Talbot.”

  “You too, Mr. Higgins.”

  His mother had walked up to them. She beamed at the man and stuck out her hand. Her golden hair bounced. “Hiya,” she said. “Tracy Talbot. I guess we’re neighbors now.”

  The smiling man nodded. “It looks that way. Nice to see the old Ginsberg house occupied again.”

  “Luckily it was available. We had to move pretty quickly after Ronnie – that’s my husband, he’s inside – was offered the job here.”

  “Well, I’d say we’re pretty lucky to have you, actually. You seem like swell folks.”

  “Thank you. We try. Do you have children?”

  “No. Unfortunately, the missus is infertile. We’ve tried to put it out of our minds.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to…”

  “Make no mention of it,” said the man. “Nothing personal.”

  “Okay then.” She cleared her throat. “By the way, I like the look of this place. It’s pretty. Colorful.”

  The man reached down and patted Ryan on the head. “Yes, and I suppose it likes the looks of you folks, as well. I think you will enjoy your stay here immensely. We all do.”

  Ryan shuddered at the man’s touch, and he couldn’t explain why, but soon that sensation was forgotten and he was back to playing with his action figures again.

  “You’ll be here in Fhalmagal long time,” Mr. Higgins told his mother. “You’re needed here.” He glanced at Ryan.

  “You too, son,” he said. “You most of all.”

  THE CONTAINER

  OF SORROWS

  By Mercedes M. Yardley

  THERE WAS A GIRL. She sat at a white desk in a white room with her hands folded neatly in her lap.

  Peter stood before her with his pockets turned out.

  “I don’t have anything to give you,” he said. He spoke very quietly. Shame does that.

  She didn’t move, but he thought that she shook her head.

  “I don’t need anything like that,” she told him. “I do not desire your buttons or baubles, although I am sure that they are quite lovely.”

  He thought that she smiled, but she did not actually do that, either.

  “I don’t understand,” he confessed. He shifted from foot to foot. She really did smile then, but only in her eyes. He bit his lip and continued. “I thought…that you wanted something from me. In exchange for your help.”

  “Oh, but I do.” Her skin was white, and her hair even whiter, but only just. When she smiled—if she smiled—her lips were disconcertingly red. The rest of the time they were only the palest of pink. He had the impression that something parasitic sucked the breath from those lips while she slept, but what could he do about it?

  “Please tell me what you desire.”

  “I want to be happy.”

  “Then I will help you.”

  She pulled a ceramic jar out of nowhere. It was the color of sky and looked cool to the touch. He flexed his fingers.

  “This is the Container of Sorrows, Peter. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” He didn’t.

  Her lips barely twitched but it was as if the snow melted and he tasted spring.

  “This is how you will be happy. Tell me one of your sorrows. I will keep it here for you, and the burden from that particular sorrow will be no more.”

  He felt stupid. He stared at his shoes. They had holes in the toes.

  “Do you…not wish happiness?”

  Her voice was strangely brittle, as if she was trying not to cry. He was hurting her somehow, he decided, but that didn’t make any sense. He took a deep breath.

  “I miss my mother,” he said, and the words fell from his mouth like vapor. The girl opened the jar, and the mist zipped inside. She closed the lid with a satisfying click.

  “There,” she said, and her smile was real this time, genuine. “Don’t you feel better?”

  He thought about his mother, gingerly. Her warm brown hair, the apron that she used when she baked cupcakes. He thought about her more aggressively. The police telling his father that they had discovered a broken body. The funeral in a town without rain.

  “I don’t feel sad,” he said in wonder, and the girl looked pleased. She kissed him, and he woke up.

  Peter’s lips burned where she had touched him, and he kept his fingers pressed there for most of the day. When the boys razzed him about his poorly trimmed hair, he didn’t mind so much. When they taunted him about his mother being a whore who got what was coming to her, he was surprised to find that he didn’t care at all. He ate dinner silently and changed into his worn pajamas without being asked. He brushed his teeth and climbed into bed with an eagerness that would have been pitifully endearing if anyone had seen it.

  He fell asleep instantly, and there she was. She was wearing white flowers in her hair.

  “Did you have those flowers yesterday?” he asked her.

  Her cheeks flushed delicately. “No.”

  Peter didn’t know what to say. “I had a better day at school than usual. Thank you.”

  The girl again brought the smooth blue container out of thin air. “Tell me another sorrow, Peter. Tomorrow will be even better.”

  He thought. “I’m tired of being called poor.”

  The mist of words spiraled into the Container of Sorrows. He nodded his head once, and she nodded back in a very serious manner.

  And thus it went. His sorrows disappeared. “I hate seeing dead birds. I wish that I had a friend. My father doesn’t notice me.”

  The jar devoured his sorrows with an agreeable hunger. The pale girl’s lips turned up all of the time and her eyes began to sparkle. Peter grew more confident at school. He stood up straight. He looked people in the eye. He made friends.

  He was almost happy.

  On the last night that he came, something in the air had shifted. The atmosphere was holding its breath, and it was undeniable.

  “Hey,” Peter said, leaning casually on the white desk. “There’s only one sorrow that I have left.”

  “Only one?” asked the girl with something that sounded exquisitely close to hope. Her eyes shone. Her white hair and red lips were glossed with delicacy and fragile expectation. She produced the Container of Sorrows and carefully removed its lid. Peter’s sorrows ghosted around inside, smelling of lavender and brokenness.

  “Natalia Benchmarth never looks at me at school.”

  The vaporous sorrow swirled from his lips and settled into the jar. The girl’s white fingers didn’t move, so Peter put the lid back on for her.

  He smiled. “Now I’ll be brave enough to talk to her tomorrow. Thank you very much, Girl of Sorrows. I am happy.”

  The girl held the jar very close,
and she looked up at Peter. Her lips were pale, strawberries buried under layers of ice. He was reminded of that feeling that he had once, long ago, where he thought that something supped from her lips at night. How frightened she must be. How alone.

  How silly.

  “Goodbye,” he said, and kissed her cheek. Had her touch once burned? She was ice under his skin. She was a corpse. Peter turned and walked away without looking back.

  There was a girl. She sat at a white desk in a white room where she wept, clutching a container full of somebody else’s sorrows.

  Mercedes M. Yardley wears red stilettos and writes whimsical horror. She has been published in Shock Totem, John Skipp’s Werewolves and Shapeshifters: Encounters With The Beast Within anthology, the Hint Fiction anthology, and is represented by Jason Yarn of Paradigm. “The Container of Sorrows” was originally published in The Vestal Review.

  SINS OF OUR FATHERS

  PETE MUNROE HUNKERED DOWN IN HIS CAR and sped down the highway, leaving North Hampton behind him. He couldn’t get away fast enough. His mother’s memorial service had lasted longer than anticipated, with countless dignified ladies from the Smith College Center for Women’s Studies walking up to the podium to offer their respects and fondest memories to the remembrance of the great Jeannie Marie Monroe. He couldn’t stomach it. She’d only been dead a few weeks and he thought of her every day, but reliving her past accomplishments brought out that sense of longing again; the realization that no matter how much time he’d spent by her side, her career – her first and only love – always came first. A stab of jealousy twisted its way into his brain. He loathed the fact those women, random faces he wouldn’t remember in the morning, got to experience a side of his mother that he never would. The side that was strong. The side that cared. The side that made a difference.

  It’s not fair.

  He steered his old Chrysler toward a steep turn and sped up as he went around, loving the sensation of instability as the side tires momentarily lifted off the ground – racing with himself, just like his long-deceased grandfather taught him. Another ache of resentment formed a tinge of bitter fluid in the back of his throat.

  Now I’m all alone.

  At the exit for route 83 he pulled off the highway. A closed shopping plaza haunted the empty lot to his left. He checked the dashboard clock. 12:52 AM. It’d taken him almost two hours to get home. Not that it mattered any. His apartment would be cold and lonely, as usual.

  Tears trickled down his cheek. He wiped at them with the cuff of his shirt. Sniffles hiccupped through his sinuses. He choked for a moment and pulled into a closed gas station before his vision went blurry. Get a grip, Pete, he scolded. You’re embarrassing yourself.

  It took only a few minutes for the dirge of sorrow to wane. He mopped up his cheeks with a napkin from the glove compartment, blew his nose into it, crinkled the soiled paper into a ball, and tossed it on the passenger seat floor. He sat in the darkened area between two street lamps for what seemed like an hour, trying to gather his thoughts. Things always get better, the great Jeanie Marie Monroe used to say, but only if you’re strong enough to force your way through it.

  He remembered those words clearly, as well as the ones that usually followed.

  Too bad courage isn’t your strong suit, Peter. You’re weak, just like your father.

  “Leave me alone,” he groaned.

  He shuffled in his seat and yanked the wallet from his back pocket. Opening it, he rifled through the pictures, foggy beneath the faint shine of the dome light, until he reached his destination; an old, torn, black-and-white photograph. He raised it to his face, studying the image the way he’d done with ever-diminishing frequency since childhood. A kind man with round cheeks and a thin, almost pointed nose smiled back at him. With his hair parted to the side, the top rising up against the gray backdrop like the Rock of Gibraltar while the front wisped across his brow, and the twinkle in those benevolent, thoughtful eyes, the man-child personified innocence. Pete shook a bit and then folded the wallet, taking time to watch his own reflection in the rearview mirror. There were so many similarities between himself and the young man in the picture. Too many.

  He never knew his father, for Jonathan Monroe took his own life when little Peter was two years old. He recalled the many times his mother told the story; how Jonathan, out of work for over a year and feeling like a shell of a man, sat in his car one evening, behind a gas station much like the one Pete found himself at now, stuck the barrel of a revolver in his mouth, and permanently ended his temporary pain with a single squeeze of the trigger. Jeanie damned her dead husband’s name every chance she could, constantly letting her son know the legacy of failure from which he’d been shaped. She never remarried, never dated for longer than it took to fulfill her physical desire. And she made sure her son understood her actions every step of the way, poisoning him with her own inner hatred until now, as a thirty-two year old man, Peter Monroe had become an anthology of pain and rejection best left unread. He screamed and threw his wallet at the front windshield. He hated them both.

  But the phantom of the unfamiliar that was his father refused to leave.

  A rap on the window broke him from the doldrums with the subtlety of a cannon blast. He jumped and glanced to his left. A spectral figure hovered outside the car, its darkened face pressing against the glass. Pete stared straight ahead, using the hood ornament as a focal point while trying to get his breathing under control. When his heart rate slowed to a pace that didn’t feel like it would bust through his chest, he turned back to the unexpected guest and rolled down the window.

  “Can I help you?”

  The stranger poked his head into the open window. It was a boy not more than sixteen years old, with skin the color of coffee, round cheeks, and dazzling green eyes. The kid smiled at Pete, revealing a set of slightly crooked teeth.

  “I’m kinda lost,” he said. “Could I get a ride?”

  Pete sat back and sighed. It was late, and the idea of giving a total stranger a ride didn’t seem like the smartest of choices. He shrugged. What the hell, he thought. Look at him. He’s just a kid. And at least I’ll have some company.

  He gestured to the empty space beside him. “Get in.”

  The kid jogged to the passenger side, opened the door, and slid into the seat, kicking aside the debris piled on the floor. He stretched his arms above his head. “Thanks,” he said, looking at Pete with a wide, beaming grin.

  “Where you heading?”

  “East Windsor. Just off route 5. It’s pretty easy to get to. You know where that is?”

  “Of course. It’s a bit of a drive, though. What’re you doing out in Vernon?”

  “Went to the movies with a couple friends. It ended an hour ago and after I took a piss I walked outside and they were gone. Guess they thought it’d be a cool joke to leave me here.”

  “That sucks.”

  The kid’s smile grew even bigger. “Yeah. But hey, at least I don’t have to walk home.” He winked. “You’re my savior, bro.”

  Pete chuckled. “Thanks. What’s your name?”

  “JT,” the kid said, shaking Pete’s hand.

  “Pete Monroe,” he replied, and for a moment thought he noticed a tinge of hesitation in JT’s previously amiable expression. “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah. Just tired, I guess.”

  “Okay then,” replied Pete. He threw the old Chrysler into drive. “Let’s get moving.”

  * * *

  Having had enough of the freeway for one evening, Pete stuck to the back roads. JT grew increasingly quiet as the trip went on, going from the occasional question – do you like hip-hop, isn’t Rhianna hot, isn’t Connecticut the most boring place in the world? – to a soft hum, to eventually clamming up. Pete paid the kid no mind. He couldn’t blame him for feeling uncomfortable – it had to be more than a bit frightening, being trapped in an automobile at the mercy of a strange adult with nowhere but the woods to flee into if trouble started. I just have t
o take it easy, thought Pete. Got to remember not to act like a sicko. The statement made him laugh for the first time that evening. It felt good. His teenage passenger didn’t respond.

  “We should take the Suffield Bridge,” said JT twenty minutes into the journey.

  “Nah, route 5’s quicker,” Pete replied.

  JT shook his head. “There’s wicked construction at the town line. Went through it on the way out last night. The road’s all torn up, with all them grooves and loose rocks and stuff. We bounced all over the place.”

  Pete thought of his decrepit car’s failing suspension. He looked at the clock again. 1:15 AM. Cutting through Windsor Locks would definitely be better than bottoming out and getting stranded in the middle of the night.

  He eased gradually through the commercial area of town – a never ending procession of strip malls and supermarkets, placed curiously close to each other; the Mecca of profit-making, suburbia at its miserable best. He took it slow, making sure to keep his eyes peeled for those little nooks the police cars usually hung out in. Last thing he needed was to be pulled over. Not that he’d been drinking or anything like that; it’s just that cops, with their haughty swagger and condescending way of speaking, made him uncomfortable.

  Before long the highway on-ramps passed them by. There was no traffic on the bridge. The Connecticut River, a chasm of darkness on either side of the guardrails, was their only companion. The image of his car careening over the rails and plunging a hundred feet into the cold water below popped into his head. Wouldn’t be so unusual. Especially in this family. Pete’s body trembled and his mouth went dry. He felt prying eyes on him and tried his best to ignore it.

  Just get this over with. I need sleep.

  A bright plume of light flashed across his vision, snapping him to attention. Something lay across the road up ahead, at the bottom of the rise leading to the traffic light. He squinted, trying to see past the gleam of his headlights. Another flare went off, brightening the pavement. The object glowed bright orange. Pete’s mouth dropped.