Twenty Till Midnight

By Kirsten Langston

Eight eerie and disturbing horror stories take you on an unforgettable journey toward your darkest fears. A nurse possessed takes her revenge on a dying Catholic priest in "God's Children". A hellish vision leads to the horrifying destruction of a brothel in "Trick House." A teenage boy is stalked by a humanoid figure in "Stone Cottage Woods." A woman gives birth to a misshapen child with a taste for blood as General Sherman burns the city of Atlanta in "Ornella's Child." The women of the world disappear after receiving strange phone calls in "Gone." This collection is sure to leave you sleeping with the light on. An agoraphobic man unable to leave his house as he is slowly tortured to madness by an unseen assailant in "PHOBIA." Roy Hansen fishes his long-dead wife out of the sea and brings her home where she starts to move and walk in "Atheism." Writer Cran Evans attempts to overcome his writer's block with a very special desk in "Suicide Desk." This collection is sure to leave you sleeping with the light on.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kirsten Langston
• Release date: Nov 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9780988538054

Kirsten Langston

Kirsten Langston is a lifelong resident of the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of The Mad Season Series and The Priest Series.

Book preview

Twenty

Till Midnight

Kirsten Langston

Copyright © 2018 by Kirsten Langston

TABLE OF CONTENTS

God’s Children

Gone

Trick House

Stone Cottage Woods

Ornella’s Child

PHOBIA

Atheism

The Suicide Desk

God’s Children

The heat weighed everything down, crawling through the house like a disease. The upstairs was stifling, but he would not be moved. He could not be moved. Not anymore.

It was hard to remember a time when he was not sick. It was hard to remember a time when he was robust and full of life, for surely there had been such a time. He was not always the frail thing, wasting away in the bed. The four poster crowded the room, the wood dull and dark and smelling faintly of mildew and disappointment. He was in it. The size of a child now. No more than a small man, where once he had been a big man. She remembered the day he carried her on his shoulders during the Fourth of July Parade. She had been frightened of the noise, the crackles and booms echoing across the road. The drums had frightened her, the rat-a-tat giving off a clean sound but frightening her all the same.

She had been a fearful child.

Trapped alone in the house with the dying man and the thing downstairs. But she did not think of the thing downstairs. She did not stop to consider what would happen when she went back down there, what she might find. She only went about her business of washing him, washing his frail and wasted body with the lukewarm water because he said the cold was too cold.

How had she come here? How, she wondered, was this her life?

She thought back to the days before and then the days after. Before and after. Before the priest. After the priest. After he had gotten sick. Before when he was a strong man. Before she knew about the thing downstairs. After…

Alaina was a sturdy girl. That’s what her father had said. She was sturdy. She played lacrosse in high school. She envied the small, petite girls, with their blonde hair and cherubic faces. Saints, they were. Alaina was thick and broad backed and the nuns used to make her lift all the heavy things and push the desks around, and in the Nativity play she was always a man or a beast. The shepherd or the ox. That was Alaina.

She had believed in religion. She had believed in God and the Devil. She had believed as her parents had believed. She turned his nearly naked body, like Christ he was now, thin and twisted, his ribs plainly visible, jutting out like ridges. His skin was white, papery, even where she had moistened it.

He barely spoke now. She was waiting for him to die.

The priest flashed through her brain – his white collar and his black shirt and slacks, his hands stiff with black hair, the gold watch tangling in the black hair. The girls gathered around him at recess. Where’d you get a watch like that, Father? Lisbeth asked slyly.

He had never taken anyone else in the basement. Only Alaina. Said he needed help down there. Come down to the basement and help me move these boxes.

Why don’t you get one of the boys, Father? Sister Gregory had wanted to know.

Never you mind, Sister, the priest had replied.

She turned him gently on the mattress. It was filthy, but she didn’t care. It wasn’t her job to change the sheets. He hadn’t soiled them. The bottoms of his feet were stained black. He lay on his back again, settling against the gray sheets that used to be white. His hands moved quickly, striking out and grabbing her by the wrist. Alaina startled. He wheezed and his face split into a grin.

Alaina screamed. She twisted out of his grip and backed away, her heels coming against the dirty baseboard. Gray. Used to be white. Maybe it all used to be white.

He wheezed and wheezed and held out his hand imploringly, but she would not go near him again. She backed out of the room and went softly down the stairs.

She was alone until Lois came to change his sheets and do the laundry. Easy to lift him now, not like a few months ago.

The man lay upstairs, nearly paralyzed and dying, his legs like twigs, blackness eating him up from the inside out.

The heat twisted through the old house. Two stories, but the rooms were small. She grew quieter as she turned onto the second landing and looked at the room that lay out below. The sofa was worn, the coffee table scarred. The floor was a deep, blood-red carpet, holes worn in various spots. The dark-green curtains were moth eaten and tattered. The whole place was decaying.

She went quietly down the stairs, hoping she wouldn’t disturb it. The thing.

She reached the ground floor without incident and looked around. Nothing. She walked to the kitchen and started to work on his medications.

Her hands shook, so intent was she on her task. So worried it would make an appearance. But what if it did? The hairs lifted on the back of her neck.

Her hands shook as she glanced around. The kitchen hadn’t been touched in decades. Everything was small. The countertops were cracked, the old stove barely worked, but nothing could be changed. He liked it that way.

The day he hired her, she had been new to the job. A caretaker. A nurse. A healer. She had been fresh out of school, her white uniform starched, her dowdy black hair pinned out of her face in a severe bun at the nape of her neck. She was no longer the girl from before. She worked hard to become lithe. She was a runner. Hers was the body of an athlete. When she unpinned her hair, she was almost pretty.

I need someone to help me after my surgery.

Yes, she said. I’ll be here every day.

It was the night of the surgery when she saw it. He had been upstairs, languishing in the heat. It had been hot then too, the heat rising into the second story until it felt like hell.

She was watching TV, ignoring the noises coming from his room, the groans and creaks of the old mattress, his unconscious muttering. Her hair stirred in a breeze and then the voice came.

Alaina.

She turned, so sure it was him. But it couldn’t be him. Behind her on the couch was the figure. Almost see-through. It smiled. Its lips stretched into a wide grin. There was no discernible face, just the horrible mouth, stretching and stretching wider, becoming a black, gaping hole where a mouth should have been.

It was person shaped but amorphous. It was hideous.

And so here you are.

She couldn't speak, so great was her terror.

I have been waiting for you. Waiting here all this time. Knowing you would come.

The voice was in her head.

Go back to hell, she said coldly. Go back with the other demons to hell.

A noise from the little room upstairs and it was grinning maniacally now, what passed for a head cocked to one side.

Alaina thought of the man upstairs. She blanched.

It laughed again and she watched as the figure faded.

She had wanted to call someone, but she had no one to call. Death had come for her parents years ago. There was no one else. No one left.

She ignored the moaning of the man upstairs and she stared at the space of worn carpet where the thing had been.

He had not recovered well from the surgery. He had gotten an infection. She cleaned his wounds every day, but at his advanced age it was not uncommon to get an infection. The infection had given way to partial paralysis, and now he was completely dependent on her.

The man in the bed. The thing in the house.

Alaina left the kitchen. The air behind her stirred and she knew it was there. But she did not turn around.

Behind her, following her, it started whispering in her head in a sing-song voice.

He’s there. Right up there. Brought up from the basement. Remember when you were a little girl? And he took you in the basement?

It laughed.

Why did you come back, Alaina? Why did you come back? she muttered to herself.

Behind her, it made the sound of bugs skittering across the floor and the wheezing laugh came again.

Gleefully in the sing-song voice, it said, Maybe she wants to kill!

* * *

He was locked in the house with a mad woman.

The woman had come to him seeking employment. He had recognized her immediately – Alaina from St. Joseph’s so many years ago. He was wizened now. Old. She was a middle-aged woman, black hair pinned back severely, eyes squinted as if she needed glasses.

She had acted as if she had not recognized him, and why should she? Gone was his lustrous, black hair.