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    Halloween Haunts
    Halloween Haunts
    Halloween Haunts
    Ebook171 pages2 hours

    Halloween Haunts

    By Dorothy Davies

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Halloween has been done to death (excuse the pun!) over the years but the brilliant Gravestone Press authors ignored that and came up with exciting and suitably horror laden stories for your Halloween reading treat. Children versus adults, spooks versus anyone they can find, the stories range far and wide, resulting in an anthology Gravestone Press is proud to add to its catalogue.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFiction4All
    Release dateOct 5, 2021
    ISBN9781005758417
    Halloween Haunts
    Author

    Dorothy Davies

    Dorothy Davies, writer, medium, editor, lives on the Isle of Wight in an old property which has its own resident ghosts. All this adds to her historical and horror writing.

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      Book preview

      Halloween Haunts - Dorothy Davies

      HALLOWEEN HAUNTS

      An Anthology of Horror Stories

      Edited by Dorothy Davies

      Published by Fiction4All (Gravestone Press) at Smashwords

      Copyright 2021 Dorothy Davies

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      CONTENTS

      The Dissectionist – Lena Ng

      The Congress of Familiars –David Turnbull

      Night Creeps – Chris Rodriguez

      Halloween Dream - Dorothy Davies

      Mortaki – Dan Allen

      Darkness Follows – Carie Juettner

      Collecting Treats – Daniel L Naden

      Masklore –Michael H Hanson

      Night of the Goblins - Kevin Jones

      Once In A Blue Moon – Diane Arrelle

      A Graveyard Haunting – Stuart Holland

      Legride and the Matter of the Ripper Murders - Scott Harper

      Vengeful Spirits – Olivia Arietti

      All Hallow’s Eve – Rie Sheridan Rose

      Halloween Again – Wondra Vanian

      Whispering Wood – Wendy Lynn Newton

      50% Halloween – Dorothy Davies

      When Your Skin Is On The Pumpkin – Dona Fox

      Book 1 - The Dissectionist

      Lena Ng

      The room was cool, the fire burning low in the hearth, with a bare concrete floor and bare plaster walls. The acrid smell of formaldehyde. The rolling trolley. His tools shiny, sharpened, laid out on the workman’s bench: a handsaw, scalpels of various sizes, forceps, scissors. The dissectionist, burley and broad, wearing his leather apron, stood at the width of the body table. The skritch of the knives.

      A loose arm hung over the table’s edge, anticipating, only slightly mottled, the red of the veins chilled into blue, like delicate branches on a dead tree. The skin was cold, icing into rigidity, grey; the eyes earth brown, muddy and opaque.

      The corpse monger stood at the door frame, waiting for his coin. Fresh from the garden, he said. Poor one, planted only yesterday. Unnamed, in an unmarked grave. No one will miss him.

      That’s what you said last time. The dissectionist’s graveyard voice could make any man’s skin crawl.

      The corpse monger shrugged. Should have guessed he had a long-lost cousin. They come out of the woodwork at the smell of money. He shifted his weight from leg to leg. The night waned and there would be more bodies to be gained if he were on his way.

      The dissectionist scrutinized the body with an expert eye. It was a nice specimen. No visible injuries, despite the pool of blood settling on the back. No outward deformities, although they would make good teaching examples for the medical students. The linen shroud had kept the insects at bay.

      He reached into a pocket and counted some coins. A discount from last time. And next time, I want a woman. I’ll pay a premium for one. The money exchanged hands.

      The corpse monger accepted the payment with a curdled expression, but made no argument. The last body had put both their livelihoods at risk. The dissectionist was also a dependable customer with whom he’d done much business over the years. He grumbled under his breath and disappeared back into the night.

      The dissectionist began with a broad cut down the length of the body, beginning at the neck, and ending down the full length of the torso. He slowly cut away the five major organs—the lungs, liver, kidneys, brain (after a short time sawing into the skull), and heart—from the connective tissue, preserving segments of the highways of veins and arteries routing into the structure, before placing each into a jar of preserving fluid. He worked down from the major organs to the smaller ones—such as the pancreas and gallbladder—until all seventy-eight organs rested in glass. Hours passed and the darkness of night gave way to the grey of early morning. The labelling and routing of the jars would be the next night’s work, along with the preparation of the skeleton. The dissectionist removed his leather apron, put out the fire, washed his hands, and locked up.

      The dissectionist trudged home through the empty streets, then through the dew-dampened fields to his lonely cottage. The interior was gloomy. No wood burning in the fireplace. No warm woman with a smile of welcome. Usually, he enjoyed the quiet solitude, but today for some reason, it felt empty. Some corner of his heart ached. He made himself a humble meal of cheese and stale bread, washed down with a mug of watery ale. Afterwards, he curled onto a cot and fell into sleep.

      ***

      This one was a beauty. Thick waves of mahogany hair. Unmarked skin like parchment. Thin from the ravages of consumption. Dead eyes, of course, but the colour of a stormy sea.

      The corpse monger’s liver-coloured lips stretched out in glee. A nice one, no? Saved it especially for you. What do you think?

      The dissectionist stood as though stunned into silence. Her beauty, so fleeting, must be preserved. As promised, he paid the corpse monger double as premium. With his morbid smile lingering, the corpse monger went on his way.

      The organs were small and slight, the lungs black from disease. The dissectionist removed all but the heart, which he left nestled in the body, and the eyes which he injected with formaldehyde. The empty cavity of her torso, he filled with sawdust and wood shavings.

      He opened a trapdoor in the corner of the workhouse, gathered the body and carried her down the creaking stairs. He wrapped her in linen and placed her in a sand-filled coffin, covering her remains. He had tinkered with the ventilation of the room and hoped this time the drying process would take and her body would preserve.

      He waited four weeks before checking back on the body. The results were beyond what he thought could be believed. She looked almost the same as the day he had received her, though there was some gauntness to the cheeks, some thinning of the lips. The linen shroud and internal sand had absorbed the body fluids which would have led to decay. It was now time to take her home.

      ***

      She was so small, she could be folded into a duffle bag. He carried her body back to his home. The clothes he chose for her were too large; his first wife was big-boned and full-fleshed and had sewed their clothing with care and he had a full wardrobe for his new bride’s needs. He propped her in a chair as he ate his meal. Afterward it felt strange, since it had been three years, to have another body in the bed. He smelled her hair as he wrapped his arms around her and his breath deepened into dreams.

      In his dream, his new bride was dressed in her white wedding gown. He bowed and she curtsied. In the otherwise empty ballroom, they began a wedding waltz. The room spun around and around. Their feet left the floor and they danced like marionettes in mid-air, as though in an invisible music box. He ignored the shadows in the corners.

      When evening came, before he left for work, he picked flowers from the garden, large rose blooms he placed on his new wife’s lap. His first wife’s body had well-fertilized the land. It was an accident, he assured himself. He didn’t mean to. He would ensure he would treat this new wife with more care. This wife at least would be silent, which would lead to no arguments. His dormant heart awoke into joy.

      ***

      The dissectionist whistled as he worked on the body. The corpse monger was strangely amused. Never seen a man enjoy his work so much, he said. Especially the work that it is.

      The dissectionist shrugged a shoulder. He now looked forward to the end of the night, to go home to an agreeable soul to whom he could unburden his problems, to a beautiful face who would worship him in silence.

      The body brought to him was another woman, though her face was weathered and worn as lived outdoors. A scarf was gathered around her head, and rings of silver hung from her ears. She looked suspiciously fresh and didn’t smell of the grave.

      He gave an inquisitive glance at the corpse monger. Don’t ask, the corpse monger said. Though she won’t be missed, for she was a wanderer.

      After the corpse monger departed, he undressed the body, feeding the clothes to the fire. He put the jewelry aside. The rings of silver from ears and fingers. The thin bangles. The necklace with the heart-shaped locket, the inscription within reading Love never dies.

      He lost track of time as he went about his dark work. A darting movement in the corner of his eye. The swoop of a bat as it flew across the room, chasing the insects which had been attracted by the fire. He took a cloth and waved it at the intruder. He rushed from one corner of the room to the other, trying to drive the bat back into the night. His foot caught on the unevenness of the floor, he tripped, and slammed his right cheek on the edge of the table.

      After a few days, the swelling had gone down but the shooting, stabbing pain remained. Nerve damage, the alley doctor had said. He had been prescribed a course of leeches, a minor blood-letting, and a tincture of opium to numb the pain that shot down his cheek to his jaw and onward to his teeth. Although it helped, over the next few months, the doctor turned stingy with the prescriptions and with ever mounting bills, he turned to the opium dens for relief.

      When the dissectionist emerged from one of these dens, he left in a cloud of haze into the chill of autumn. Tonight was the Feast of All Saints, the night where there was a blurring between the living and dead, the night when the living could dance with the dead. The opium dulled the pain, but his face still throbbed with a pulsing ache. The wind swept in from the graveyard and gave him a chill. The shadows seemed to dance and he didn’t know what was real and what was only a vision.

      At home, this time, his new wife didn’t wait passively to greet him. Her hair was put up in ringlets and she wore her finest satin gown the blush-pink of new roses. The necklace he had gifted her glinted in the gloom. Love never dies it read, and it seemed she had awakened. She curtsied, and surprised, he bowed. She put her cold hands in his, and silently they waltzed throughout the room, the hem of her gown with a quiet swish against the floor. Her heart, the only organ she had in her body remaining, seemed to beat in time to the silent music. She lowered her head to his neck. Despite the coursing of blood, his love for her blotted out the pain of her bites.

      Book 2 - The Congress of Familiars

      David Turnbull

      There was a dog barking in the night.

      It was twenty past ten on Halloween. Andy lay in bed, still buzzing from the night’s sugar rush. His zombie costume, an old school uniform dusted in flour and speckled with ink to look like mildew, hung on his wardrobe door like a dead man’s skin.

      The bedroom window was closed against the night frost, but the barking was obvious, loud and incessant. He heard his father on the landing. Somebody should do something about that dog.

      And his mother replying. It’ll quieten down soon. Probably a cat or a fox got it riled up.

      The dog didn’t quieten. There was a rhythmic three - two - three pattern to its bark. Bark-bark-bark. Bark-bark. Bark-bark-bark. Then a momentary beat before the pattern repeated. Andy listened intently. There was no deviation from the three-two-three pattern.

      If there was a fox or a cat, he thought, it would have ran off by now.

      Andy tried to figure out what kind of dog it was. A little dog like a Chihuahua would have a high-pitched yip-yip-yip. A terrier would be more yap-yap-yap. It didn’t sound like a German Shepherd. Andy settled on a Labrador.

      He heard his mother calling from the kitchen.

      "What are you doing out there? It’s

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