Horror Matinee (A Short Story Double Feature) Read online

  Copyright © 2011 by Matthew Alan Hughes

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  First Digital Printing, 2012

  Contents

  [1] Time To Rest

  [2] The Man in Red

  Time To Rest

  There’ll be plenty of time to rest when you’re dead. That’s what his old man had always said, and now he had a heck of a lot of time to rest. A heart attack at forty-seven, and he had earned himself a permanent vacation to Pleasant Valley Cemetery, where he spent his days pushing up daisies and his nights feeding the worms. Mark had to laugh at the thought. He couldn’t believe the old man had been gone ten years.

  Despite how much he resented his dad for never being there when he was a kid, he used the old man’s slogan all the time. It was, like it or not, his own motto. It got him through college with a 3.98, and then a job working for Banks and Smith Finances. It had gotten him promoted to Junior Vice President of Investments at the ripe old age of twenty-nine.

  Mark Lyman was thinking of that saying as he stepped out of his taxi and joined the suit-clad mob as it pressed between the pillars in front of the New York Stock Exchange. For a moment he felt disoriented, and then he merged with the crowd. The crowd was like an animal, with each person part of its anatomy. If everyone moved in unison, things went smoothly, but if anyone faltered, the beast would collapse. One person falling down could cause a log jam right in the middle of the main entrance, and would probably result in at least one person being trampled to death. But just like every other day, they passed through the doors, into the building where the world turned.

  A high definition monitor on one of the walls showed the closing stock prices for the previous day, October 23. He smiled. It hadn’t even occurred to him that this was the anniversary of Black Thursday, the start of the stock market crash of 1929. It was fitting that today he planned to make a small fortune. He had some not-so-legal inside information on a large software company that would be making a major announcement later today. Their stocks would open at ten dollars a share, and be worth several hundred by the closing bell. By then he would own, through some side investment brokers, most of the stocks the company had available. His four million dollar life savings would be transformed into eighty million dollars.

  There’ll be plenty of time to rest when you’re dead, Mark suddenly thought, but there’s no time like the present to hit the crapper. As the crowd began to disperse, he veered towards the nearest restroom. It was part of his morning routine.

  He went directly to his favorite stall, right against the back wall, but there were a pair of leather shoes visible beneath the door. He frowned and went to the stall at the other end of the room, observing the age old tradition of always taking the furthest stall from the nearest occupied one. With a quick glance at the floor to make sure he saw no feet sticking out of that one, he pushed the door open. He sat his briefcase down next to the porcelain god, and dropped his pants to make a quick offering before the start of today’s business. He let out a soft sigh as his butt settled onto the cold black seat.

  The restroom was surprisingly empty this morning. There were days when he’d seen a line of men all the way out the door, but today he seemed to be one of the only people needing to relieve themselves. It was for the best, he thought. He almost always ran into someone who for some reason or another liked to break the unwritten rules of bathroom etiquette. Don’t talk to the man in the stall next to you. Don’t talk when standing at the urinal; stare straight ahead silently until you’re done. Then wash your hands and get quickly out the door.

  Mark unfolded his New York Times and began to read. The headline declared Hotshot Wall Street Investor Dies in Fatal Copy Machine Accident. Without quite meaning to, he laughed out loud. He felt his cheeks darken, and quickly began thinking of something to say if the person in the adjacent stalls was to ask what was so funny. The fellow probably just thought he was crazy, laughing in the restroom.

  Who gets killed by a copy machine? he thought. Really, how do you get killed by something as simple and as common as a copy machine? You have to be pretty stupid.

  But the other man didn’t say anything. Mark was glad. He looked back at his paper, trying to find out exactly how one was killed by a copy machine. About a paragraph in, he saw the explanation.

  As he waited for a copy to print, his tie was caught in the machine’s rollers, and he was choked to death…

  Mark laughed again. Getting choked to death by a copy machine was funny. He briefly thought how unsympathetic he sounded, but that quickly faded. Someone had to be pretty stupid to get his tie caught in a copy machine, but to have it get caught and then choke you to death was ridiculous. Anyone that stupid deserved whatever he got. He wondered how a man like that had ever gotten a job working on Wall Street. He must have known somebody important.

  Maybe he should have worn a clip-on.

  Suddenly Mark caught a hint of the odor that was drifting down from the other occupied stall. It was the smell of rotten meat, or three-day-old road kill. Whatever that man had eaten for dinner the night before seemed not to be agreeing with his stomach or something. And it was starting to ripen up the restroom really quickly. Mark covered his nose to keep himself from losing his own breakfast all over his New York Times. It was one of those moments everyone has experienced in a public restroom, but you rarely ever talked about it.

  The last time he could remember smelling anything that horrible had been after the last business trip he’d gone on with his father. He’d left a box of chicken out on the kitchen counter, and by the time they’d gotten back to New York it had been well passed spoiled. His apartment reeked of bad chicken for months. It was just one of those smells that you could never get out. And suddenly he was afraid that the smell of this man was going to get into his clothes. He couldn’t walk around all day smelling like this.

  Mark was just about to cut off the water works, wipe and run for the hills, when he heard the merciful flush from inside his favorite stall. He sighed in relief. After a momentary pause, he heard the door to that stall open, a footstep, followed by what sounded like something being dragged across the floor tiles. Then there was another footstep. Then another drag.

  Through the crack in his stall door he saw a figure walk to the sink and start washing his hands. He was wearing an antique looking pin stripped suit, and one of those odd looking fedora hats mobsters wore in the nineteen twenties. He was walking with a horrible limp. As he walked, he dragged his right leg behind him. It was like watching someone with a wooden leg, but how many people working on Wall Street had prosthetic limbs? And the smell had only grown stronger!

  Mark almost screamed for the man to go back and wipe again. How could any one person put out that bad of a smell, he thought. And why didn’t it go away when he flushed? He must have eaten one awful dinner last night. Or else, he’d messed himself on the way to the restroom.

  When Mark finished his business, the man was still standing at the sink. The water still whooshed from the faucet, filling the room with the constant sound of running water. And the smell continued to linger. As a matter of fact, it seemed to be growing stronger all the time. Mark was beginning to think that the man may have missed the toilet all together and made his deposit on the tile floor. It was common courtesy, when you knew someone had really stunk the bathroom up, you gave them a thirty second head start so they could save face, but the guy was
n’t leaving. And Mark really needed to be getting to work.

  For some reason, he really didn’t want to meet the man behind his closed stall door. If he did, he would never be able to look at him again without thinking about that smell. Every time they passed on the auction floor, Mark would remember the extremely pungent odor. He’d be lucky not to burst out laughing.

  Not that it was any laughing matter. Whatever had caused the smell surely wasn’t healthy. Maybe the man had stomach cancer, or some kind of horrible virus. Maybe that was the smell you made when you were dying. He’d read in a book once that people with cancer in the digestive track would often have very bad smelling bowel movements and gas. Perhaps this poor guy had cancer. That was another reason he wouldn’t want to meet him. He’d always wonder how much longer the man had.

  There’ll be plenty of time to rest when you’re dead, Mark thought, and he suddenly wished he could get to work.

  But the man kept washing his hands. He could hear the water splashing off of his hands, onto the ceramic bowl of the sink. And it seemed like the more he washed, the worse the smell got. Now it no longer smelled as much like rotten meat as it did a rotting carcass. It was like the smell of a dog that had been lying dead on the side of the road for a week, in the middle of August.

  Mark neatly folded his paper and shoved it back into his briefcase. He wanted to go. He wanted to go very badly, but this horrible smelling man wouldn’t quit washing his hands.

  Finally he’d had enough. Mark got to his feet, pulling his pants up with him. He flicked the lock on the door, and gently pushed it open. A sudden gust of wind hit him in the face, and his stomach lurched. He’d been mistaken. It wasn’t the smell of a dead dog on the road; it was the smell of a hundred dead dogs locked in a trailer. He covered his mouth with his hand, and fought off the urge to vomit. It was a close catch. He planned to bypass the sink and just run out, screw the bad hygiene. He could wash his hands in the upstairs bathroom.

  “Excuse me sir, can you help me?”

  Mark froze. The man was talking to him.

  “Excuse me sir, I think there’s something wrong with my leg,” the speaker said. “I think I might need a doctor.”

  Mark looked up and screamed. He stumbled back into the stall, fell over the toilet and bang his head on the wall. His vision swam white for a moment, but that didn’t matter. An image of the man at the sink was stuck in his head. Even if he closed his eyes, he could still see that face staring at him. It was horrible. Worse than the smell! Without even realizing it, he lost his breakfast down the front of his suit.

  “Sir, please!”

  He heard the step drag sound again, and was on his feet. He threw open the stall door and ran out of the bathroom. But he couldn’t stop seeing the man. Beneath his hat had been a skeletal face that looked like it had collided with a brick wall at a hundred miles per hour. The eyes had still been intact, but one of them had lain uselessly against a worm eaten cheek, dangling only by dead nerves. The nose was smashed back into the face, and the right jaw and cheek were jagged bones, and pressed way out of place. Most of his teeth were missing. The leg that he had been dragging was broken just below the knee, and the sharp end of the bone stuck out through the cloth of his pants, which were soaked with dried blood.

  “Come back ple—” he heard before the door slammed closed behind him.

  Mark ran, pressing through the crowd that was still making its way into the building. Under normal circumstances he didn’t think it would have been possible, but people must have seen something in his face—or down the front of his suit—because they moved. In less than a minute he stood on the sidewalk in front of the Stock Exchange, breathing in New York air in deep gulps.

  He jumped when a hand gripped his elbow. “Sir, are you okay?”

  He spun, and there stood a woman in a blue nightgown. He threw his arms around her and fell forward, his head resting on her shoulder. It had to have been a dream, he thought. That man was dead. Had been dead for some time. Dead people don’t get up and walk around. They…rest.

  “There was a…he was...did you see that guy?” Mark asked hysterically. “I think he was dead. I mean, he looked dead. I don’t know how he could look like that and not be dead.”

  “It’ll be okay,” the woman said, trying to comfort him.

  “There’s something wrong with that guy,” he said. “Maybe we should call an ambulance or something.”

  The woman turned her head slightly, and he caught a glimps of the back of her skull. At the back of her skull there was a large gaping hole, which was leaking a mixture of some strange grayish matter and blood. And she smelt of death the same way his friend in the bathroom had. He hadn’t smelt it at first, but it suddenly hit him and he felt the need to regurgitate.

  He pulled away, and saw the reason the back of her head was missing. She clutched a small revolver in her hand, but she didn’t even seem to know it was there. She reached out to him with the hand holding the gun, and he screamed.

  Mark started to run, and ran right into another man, who looked much as the first. Like his body had struck something at a very high speed. Something hard, like the road. He looked up at the building, and his face went pale. It was covered with people. Dead people. Jumpers. As he watched, one plummeted to earth, falling right through a group of stock investors who didn’t even seem to notice. The dead man cursed, got to his feet and headed back into the building as if to try again.

  They were ghosts, he thought. All of them. He was surrounded by the dead, most of which didn’t seem to realize that they were dead. And those on the building seemed to be trying to leap from the building as they probably had on Black Thursday. One by one they were falling to the ground, and then getting up to try it again, trapped in a never ending repeat of the day they died.

  “Let me help you,” the woman with the gun pleaded as he backed away from the building. “Please…”

  Mark turned to run, and ran right into his father. As always the old man was in his black business suit, and he clutched his briefcase in one large hand. His skin was an odd color of gray, almost green, and seemed to have shrunk around his skull. He frowned down at the young man.

  His father shook his head and said, “Boy, what happened to your tie?”

  Mark looked down at the front of his suit. His tie had been cut off by the EMT’s just below the knot, which was pulled way too tight. Suddenly he couldn’t breath. He was choking. As he fell to his knees he could vaguely hear the faint whir of his office copy machine. He fumbled with his briefcase until he got it open, thinking he might find something to cut the tie off with before it choked him to death.

  The wind caught his New York Times, flipping it open to the financial section. Before everything went black he saw a photo of himself trying to duck away from the camera and read the headline: Software Company Stock Plummets Following Insider Trading Accusation. Below that the subheading said: Investor Dies in Freak Accident Soon After Discovery.

  For a moment he was lost in total blackness. The sound of the copy machine was the only sound he could hear, and it was so loud it made his head hurt. For a moment he saw a brief image of himself entering the copy room, leaning in close and hitting the start button. Then the darkness swallowed him again, and even the copy machine finally fell silent.

  There’ll be plenty of time to rest when you’re dead. Mark Lyman was thinking of that saying as he stepped out of his taxi and joined the suit-clad mob as it pressed between the pillars in front of the New York Stock Exchange. For a moment he felt disoriented, and then he merged with the crowd.

  The Man in Red

  Tiffany saw the man in red before anyone else, but that wasn’t surprising. The sick and twisted congregation that was gathered in the abandoned church was paying attention to nothing but the black clad minister that stood beneath an upside-down Celtic cross. The preacher spoke with all the passion of a television evangelist, quoting scripture from a book that was definitely not the Holy Bible. His attenti
ve audience swayed to and fro like a field of saw-grass, their sweaty bodies seemingly too close for the assortment of spiked dog collars and bracelets that most of them wore. She imagined that it looked a lot like mosh pit at a rock concert. All around the room candles flickered and the light they cast danced over their faces.

  But the man in red stood out. He looked like a man who took pride in his own appearance. Unlike the rest of the room, who wore the black clothes and makeup common among Goths, he wore a bright red silk shirt and dress slacks. Candle light glistened off of his shoulder length black hair, while the hair of most of the others either looked as if it hadn’t been touched in months, or had been pulled up into grotesque and heavily moosed spikes. The snarl of hatred on his heavily chiseled face was in contrast to the look of near ecstasy the enamored congregation showed.

  He moved intently around the back of the cathedral, never quite stepping out of the shadows fully into the candlelight and never taking his eyes off the face of the minister. His hands were clinched into tight fists of rage at his side. For the first time since her ordeal had begun, Tiffany allowed herself to hope she might survive. She had no idea who he was, but it was clear he was not one of her captors.

  When they had taken her, she’d had no idea what was going on. She’d been leaving work, later than usual because the restaurant’s books had been off by a hundred dollars, when a man—the minister that was now preaching the room into a frenzy—had stepped out in front of her. Before Tiffany could even think to reach for her mace, the man and an unseen accomplice had shoved a bag over her head and thrown her roughly into the back of a vehicle. As they drove she was continually asked very personal questions—“Are you a virgin?” “Do you believe in God?” “Do you have any blood diseases?” “Any STDs?”—and not knowing what else to do, she had answered each one of them honestly. Eventually they’d stuffed an ill smelling cloth over her mouth and nose, and she had fallen asleep. When she woke, she was here, naked and hanging upside down in front of a room full of people.