Horror Short Tales

Tale of Mommy-Twin

Whence returned night, perpetuated the same madness haunting our lives unlike any other: The Mommy-Twin.

That was what she’d made us call her, times when she had us and it were revealed she wasn’t the true mother. True mother was good, gracious and loving, put our security and happiness above all else. Mommy-Twin occasionally seemed good, as long as it weren’t yet discovered she were the fake. When truth came to light, that’s when she’d change.

She’d only come, tried to take us away with her at night. When darkness swept the land, and home were concealed, the last place on an Earth deserted, she came and entered with sweeping force. Always mad, always screaming, dressed the very same as true mother, wielding her nails as knives and fists like clubs.

As with on this night, things usually started with Mommy-Twin catching us off our guards, getting jump on true mother. We all would be startled awake, affright at the clamour of some destructive element. Brother would come running into my bedroom, hop on the bed beside me in our pajamas, we’d embrace. Per next we’d hear forth our mother going, up and defiant, heading downstairs, fearing the worst for her …

… Mommy-Twin then came in with a force like explosive static-electricity. Blackness of night in our crepuscular home soon lit up, and then the unintelligible hysterias, psychotic cries and madness followed shortly thereafter …

Brother and I’d leapt from bed, ran out through the corridor into the upstairs bathroom. In there were doors either side, but only that contiguous of the corridor locked. The other we huddled against, as was normal, planned to utilize mass and force to keep it tight shut. Typically, we couldn’t hold.

The two of us conspired together, listening to the fight, the psychosis of it. Our hearts broke to not to be able to help true mother. We’d wished to be brave for her, utmost desired, as she was for us, but knew our efforts would be in futility … that if we’d tried, she’d only be upset. In the past we’d attempted lending aid, though it only felt as though it made things worse; the times we made to help rendered her vulnerable, arose her deepest fears, because we were out there in the open, whilst amplifying the willful rage of the Mommy-Twin.

Soon enough, amidst their cataclysmic mayhem the cries and shouts of each their voices blended. That’s when things became confused; sometimes Mommy-Twin used the trickery as decoy, to tantalize and tempt us; rarer times, true mother defeated her before we’d ever have to see her, then arrived to console us on the bathroom floor …

In those times, we’d always know in feeling it were her … generally either it didn’t take long to sensate other times that the other wasn’t. Sometimes, they’d even shapeshifted incidentally, and the other would become true. But, in the times we didn’t see her at all, and mother would prevail throughout darkness bringing unto us her love, and stayed, felt like none of it’d ever happened, as though Mommy-Twin never existed … the day following those times always felt good, spirits renewed, darkly peaceful in the chill, resoluteness of ours autumn …

… But now, their combat, clawing-raking-biting, the fight was being waged in the foyer, below the stairs. Of these times, almost certainly we’d be coming into contact with Mommy-Twin. We’d probably be disoriented by the nuances of the circumstance, and wouldn’t know who from which, thus mother’s in the same.

Theirs cyclone of insanity flurried upstairs, crash-bang-crash up a flight of the staircase. Everything now had modulated louder, more real and tormented, utmost delirium. The fight came closer, against the locked door … since it wouldn’t budge, the metamorphosis spiralled around the walls, about the concentric corridors to the hallway of the other door.

In a moment, the whole thing changed quite drastically … chaos became fell, swirled around in its silent.

Peering through the keyhole: a shocked, bloodshot, hazel-grey eye.

Desperation slammed into the door, the force managed to open it up a crack. Then it forced more inwards, and half the face and half of a foot wedged between the door and doorframe.

‘My babies, children! Rejoice. Come with me, quickly, before she gets up!’

The face was maniacal, furious in intensity. They’d both seemed vicious. We’d thought it was Mommy-Twin, though weren’t entirely sure. We did what true mother told us to always do, pushed harder with our strength to close the door.

In the next instant, the indisposed resuscitated, flung herself and slammed the face of the other against the threshold. We were therein immediately stabbed with a swell of pity, believing maybe we’d been wrong not to let the mother in.

Brother and I rallied, together worked harder, vigorously, to shut them both out. They fought on in theirs scene of madness, a delirious insanity real as the comfort of mother, of the love in caress of her arms, embrace that told you everything was going to end fine. Just now, true mother couldn’t tell us everything would be okay. Nor would she.

Within madness, the scene dissolved.

***

We escaped that place, the forsaken home, freed for the first time. Never before had we been able to leave, go anywhere else. For a while, there were only happiness in each other. We went far, free, always thrice another, felt good, safe, at last.

Today was different, however, stranger to how we’d felt prior. Where we’d went felt wrong, all of it eerie, peculiar, uncanny, like things had in the past.

Hands-in-hands, true mother walked brother and I down an old road, then along a wide earthen plateau with a jagged, crater-like crevasse spliced in the centre. She led us over it, into the nether of Earth, directed us by the hands beneath dirt, trees, grass and water. And then she took us down deep below.

A colonnaded, dank atrium spread before us in the dark. The cavern was abandoned, gated with enormous cage bars. A great zoo animal might’ve once been stored hereby. The cave-roof had crevices, and parts of the floor were dimly lit. Mother walked us in.

Ahead there, sitting crisscrossed-applesauce in the centre of the floor, Mommy-Twin. We knew what this was, an arrangement, settlement … either brother or I would equate that compromise. We were each of us afraid, both very joyless and very fearful.

True mother stopped us moving directly before Mommy-Twin – for the first time thereof we’d noticed how deranged she truly was. She weren’t hiding. Wasn’t any longer pretending true. Her lips remained curled in a malicious smirk. She didn’t move an inch, nor look up.

Mother handed my little palm into Mommy-Twin’s gentle, sinister grasp. Without word, they turned from us and walked away.

Mommy-Twin brought me down softly onto her lap, wrapped both her arms strangely around me in an embracive caress. This were to be my new life, the reality of a young boy. Now there weren’t anywhere I could go to get away, escape. Mommy-Twin mussed my hair, ran her fingers through my scalp … I felt her kiss me delicately, protractedly and winningly on the top of my head.

We watched as they left.

Familial Unbridled

Our family lived an isolated life in the wildernesses of a forgotten place …

… a father we had, diligent and calculating, not afraid to be stern or God-handed with those of us kin. I also had three siblings, two sisters and a brother, myself the second male and third-oldest. Then we had mother, too.

For many years, all was as it were had ever been, without progression or alteration yet nor secession or nonfulfillment. Although, then things changed, became abruptly quite different. I’d believed it up to me to deceiver these strangest whereabout whereas thus dark turns lurked, clung to in the prisms of their minds; now I think that, had I known from the beginning, I would’ve left things alone entirely.

***

I’d woken up to the cold day beneath the marbled pillars and soft, satiny silks of thine canopied bed. I got up from bed, washed, dressed and downstairs thus went. The family weren’t immediately there. Shortly then came the first of those howling affairs.

***

I found them later that day, after returning home from a trek in the boundless wood. As I’d entered the great Victorian, coming in through the backside French double-doors, they’d been sitting on the couches in father’s drawing room. They were composed like a mannequin aristocracy, a perceptible air of strangeness in the aura of their manner. Each of them was garbed traditionally, clothes only previously worn on celebratory occasions, our women in flowing gowns with voluminous, wavy hair, men in tuxedos with gel slicking theirs back.

The turn for events that followed, which landed me below the depths of mine misery, can be attributed to the courses in that afternoon. So as I’d entered the drawing room, the comfort of repose in their bodies shifted, tensed up, ease and posture of each face changed to vindictiveness. Greyness slunk into the room, polluted the hues of theirs flesh. It happened they did so, and horrifyingly right then, became unlike me for the first time in my life.

‘Good day o’ shooting, oh father?’ I’d asked the old patriarch.

The man spoke nothing back to me. Nor did any of them affect they’d merely heard me speak. Rather, they remained impossibly still, only faintest stirring of quivers in the muscles of cheeks, brows, kneed hands, as though they were built up of paper-machete and a delicate breeze had flitted the air, disturbing them there.

I smiled at my idle siblings, expecting this to be some foul game they’d convinced our parents in on. ‘Brothers and sisters, how doth thee studies protest o’er this fine afternoon?’

Again, thine query was met with their silence, their stillness, their cold, callous and unmistakeably vacant indifference. I’d felt I must’ve tumbled into some inexorable nightmare, yet rented from the night. Perhaps soon, I might wake up, unto their smiles and exuberance.

Their necks craned, almost perfectly in unison, to the French doors I’d come in. They erected and walked toward me, rigid as mobile stones, passed me by, and like mechanical technology, tight-up as the recurring figurines in a wall-clock contraption, they’d went out to the yard through the springs, the gardens and fountains, down the interminable, steep hill leading out to the dark forest. They left the door slight apart, ajar so I felt the colder air of outside. Through the glass, I’d watched them go.

***

Of that night, I’d had terrible mares and terrors which seemed even worse than those in the day. I’d awaken thrice, each time covered with cold sweat. To calm myself for falling back asleep, I exhibited spiders in corners of ceiling as spun webs, cocooned and devoured prey, listened to the distant howl of wolves, felt the pale moonlight damp on my face, talked with the ache of my soul. Nothing of any sensible wisdom had I gained out any of this.

***

The fateful day were quick as twenty-four-hour-next. I’d emerged from slumber, cast thine auspiciousness unto the jowls of that day fervidly, with a determination at utmost and audaciously concerning myself whatever needed be towards uncovering the origins of this secret newly afflicting my being.

***

I’d found them quite quick, in fact right away. I believe that in their malevolent catatonia they’d awaited me. Beneath the stairs I saw one first, thine youngest sibling sister, looking pale and whitish in a tattered blue child’s gown. This were odd, as she was well into bloom, and hadn’t worn the outfit for the turn of half-hundred moons.

‘Dear sister, fare thee well?’ I’d asked.

Before her lingering dissipated, the notes of her face had finicked in aspect. In the bat of an eye, she were gone before my eyes.

This happened with mine two other siblings, before I reached mother and father, seated candidly beyond the opened mahogany doors of father’s study.

I couldn’t make anything intelligent of this insensible madness. Were it I were suffering from a delirium? But it couldn’t be. It all felt so real. Yet false yet. I had to inquire, as a man may not tolerate long a haunting from his own family.

Father dissolved, yet mother thereby remained. I’d sat down opposite her on a divan, made the aspect of thine face beseechingly as possible, reached up to implore with desperate hands, poised below her skewed face.

‘Mother dearest, what sort of treachery is this?’ I cried aloud.

For a while I’d feared she wouldn’t move, though feared more when she did. Her head tilted ever slightly to the side, vaguest signal of affirmation, and I still think her glossed-over eyes gazed me a second. At least, she’d noticed me before the rest.

***

I came to on the arched summit of the sloping hill. The first trees far behind cast shadows far. The family stood above at the back of the house, and for their stillness and silence might’ve well been statues. As the ineluctable, titan-like force dragged me invisibly down, through the bowels of the dark forest, I watched them blur as the distance swallowed their nefarious visage.

Until I fell into the hole.

***

The place were dark, old rotted room of decrepit furniture, everything out of order. Doorways were in the centre of the four walls, an encompassing corridor adjacent. As I’d fretted the manacles holding me there, I sensed the great terror circling the corridor before entering the room … his face ruinous, demented skull, lacerated mouth, extended tongue, consumed me voraciously. Here dwelleth, I remain.

Two Babes in a Wood

I was in a forest of green when the green sickened, and as the sky blackened frocked for shelter into a dim cloak of shadow, yet the Earth wouldn’t give.

Where I stood was cleared and paved smooth. All around were trees and fauna, and that all the flora were become ill. The borders of woods were raised on embankments. Two young children stood in the cape of the farthest, boy and a girl dead-ahead, where I grew forcibly transfixed on their shadowy vaporous silhouettes.

Their eyes hung on me as mine to them in the darkness that swallowed the woods. An inexplicable terror plagued my heart, the anxiety that lurks in the back of the mind that blares when courage bursts. I noticed whence as their pupils dilated, became vast then shrunk, eyes changed tones of red and yellow and icy blue that oozed black reciprocally.

Unstoppable wraiths drew me in. I felt them closer, fated pulled ellipses, and once I’d drew nearer couldn’t cease. This force bound me unimaginably. Brought me toward them, as darkness unto thine heart melded theirs. Their faces remained stone pallets, clear, cold and evil to behold.

Suddenly the path diverted. I were no longer stuck. I broke free of the diminishing force, revivified and turned away with their eyes ever masted on me.

I fled ere without looking back.