Hey readers,
It’s that time of the week again!
So, as I posted earlier, this week I posted two criteria options to follow:
Criteria A
Hero: A Guest
Villain: Clerk
Setting: A motel
Theme: Until death do us part
Genre: Horror
Criteria B
Hero: Blacksmith
Villain: The Queen
Setting: Castle and surrounding area
Theme: Betrayal
Genre: Fantasy
I’ve been slowly working on stories for both, but the one I’ve decided to share was the horror story.
I’d never written horror before, and I was surprised to find that I could not distinguish between horror and thriller as I wrote. As a fan of horror, this particular took me by surprise and it occurred to me that it was because I don’t find horror scary.
I also found myself writing this story more descriptively, with almost no lines of dialogue at all. It was an interesting change from my normal writing pattern, and I hope it captured the story well.
A bit of warning. This piece of fiction is dark, and violent, and graphic. Although there is a clear “hero”, I would also argue that the story portrays two “villains”. This is not a story to read if you’re not comfortable with graphic content.
Just as last week, I share with you my short story in its raw form, free of review and edit.
I’m not sure if my following story will meet the criteria, but let me present to you
Until Death Do Us Part
Pulling up to the roadside motel, Paul Stradford felt his blood chilled. His veins had been feeling the shredding of daggers pumping through them every mile as he drove through the lonely winter night. The cold, it seemed, was determined to keep him company.
He stepped out of his old Toyota Camry, a jalopy of its former glory. Looking down at his feet as they hit the frigid gravel, for the first in twelve hours he noticed that he hadn’t changed his shoes.
The black leather still glossy, their odor still fresh, these were the shoes he wore, not twelve hours before, to his wife’s funeral. These would also be the shoes he would to wear when he joined her again.
Taking his first breath of fresh air, Paul didn’t feel the wind bite at his flesh. He didn’t feel the sub-zero temperatures attack him with all the wrath the north had come to be known for. He was already cold and numb from his head to his toes. In stead, he just trudged his way through the vacant parking lot making his way to the dimly lit front door, a flickering neon front desk sign blinking overhead.
“Well, don’t you look like shit.” Came a voice over the front desk.
The man in question didn’t look much older than himself, or younger for that matter. He was somewhere in his thirties Paul decided. He looked him over disapprovingly, finding the clerks attire to be more offensive than flattering. He wore a stain-spotted shirt depicting the world ‘FUCK’ in bold across the bottom, hanging below a depiction of two bears in the act of fornication.
His name tag read “Hi, you can call me none of your damn biznatch”, and he wore a hat patterned in more profanity than Paul even knew was in the English vocabulary.
He, Paul though, was what immediately came to mind when thinking of trash.
“Long drive.” He muttered, not caring to prolong this exchange. “Room for one.”
“Grab whichever one you want. It’s a hundred-sixty for the night.” Twice the going rate, Paul thought.
Opening his wallet, he charged the bill it to credit and looking at the full rack of keys, grabbed the first one he saw. 208.
The room itself was small and dirty. The linoleum carpet revealed traces of cigarettes, clearly unvacuumed, and the sheets looked as though they’d never been washed. Inspecting the bathroom turned out to be a mistake, the trash filled with used condoms.
Returning to the bedroom, Paul sat his duffle bag on the end of the bed before taking a seat in the worn armchair in the opposite corner.
With the gentle hum of the hanging light overhead, Paul sat staring at the bag. He recounted the events that led him to his being in this shithole at the edge of nowhere, his wife dead, his heart hollow.
It wasn’t even a week earlier that he received a phone call from the police saying they’d finally found his wife. She’d gone missing nearly a year earlier, and there wasn’t a day that passed where he didn’t sit in torture, agonized by her whereabouts. When they told her she’d be found, murdered, his trauma redoubled at the realization that she’d been alive the entire time, a prisoner to some sick filths nightmare.
“Patricia,” he wept, “I’m so sorry.”
As the hours whittled by, the clock now reading three in the morning, Paul stood up again. As if a stature finding life for the first time, he slowly removed his clothes.
He started with his jacket, picked out by Patricia for their wedding nearly four years earlier. He never had an eye for these sort of things, and since her disappearance he found himself more often then not looking like the butt-end of a joke.
He folded the jacket and set it on the middle of the bed. Next, he removed his tie and shirt, adding them to the pile.
Unbuckling his belt, he pinched his finger on the buckle. He was surprised to see a single, solitary drop of blood escape from the wound. He stared at it curiously, almost surprised to see he still had anything left in him to bleed.
Undoing his trousers, and stepping out of his briefs, he now stood naked in the room. Naked save for his wedding band.
Even now, he felt the weight of the band as a ball and chain on his conscience. It was his duty to love, honor, and protect his wife and he failed. He felt the burden of his failure weighing on his hand every moment of every day.
But he would change that.
Returning to the sordid bathroom Paul looked himself the mirror. He’d maintained a decent physique, choosing to burn away his anger and frustration throughout the year at the gym instead of sitting at home. The empty house was always the last place he wanted to be, but he knew he needed to wait there, the faintest of hope acting as a tether.
But now his reflection looked ragged; worn and tired from the hours behind him, and from the minutes ahead. He’d come here for a single purpose. He’d come here to put an end to the ghost that plagued him.
Taking a razer out from a travel pack he brought in his him, he took to trimming his face. Each bristle that fell was as if the weight of led were being weighed off of him. Without realizing it, he quickly began to shave off all his hair. He started with his face, his beard, his eyebrows, his head. He shaved his underarms and legs, and even his crotch. Never once did he flinch as he cut his flesh, and when he was finished he stood there as a messy bare patchwork of cuts and blood.
Finally, he thought. This is me.
In the year since her disappearance, Paul had stopped caring for his personal hygiene. He couldn’t dare face himself in the mirror, and quickly became a man he no longer recognized. Now, standing naked, he felt as thought he reflected on the outside the turmoil that had scarred him within.
Returning to his room he opened his duffle bag, pouring its contents onto the bed.
He’d brought with him a few bottles of lighter fluid, two jugs of gasoline he’d filled up on the way, some emergency flares, some rope, and a taser.
Holding up the taser, he stared quietly at the electrifying blue light, its buzzing echoing like a drum in his ears.
How lovely, he thought to himself.
He had a single destination in mind. He had come here for a reason after all.
Earlier, standing before the soon to be grave of his wife, among the myriad of friends and loved ones who’d come to see his beloved Patricia off to a better place, there was a lone figure who did not belong.
Paul and Patricia had never been the extroverted types. They didn’t make new friends, and while they were close to the people they knew, they weren’t known for joining in too many gatherings.
But there, among these faces so familiar stood one man that was a stranger.
A dirty looking man who’s face betrayed his identity as a smile was clearly visible upon it.
Yes. He’s the man who took her from me. It’s his fault I’m alone now.
He’d followed the man for eleven hours on the road thereafter, all the way to this motel. He’d watched as the man stepped out and made his way to the front office, never to step out again. He’d left to prepare so that now he could take from ‘none-of-your-damn-biznatch’ what was taken from him, and he would make him suffer.
As he made his way out of his room, leaving a trail of gasoline as he went, he began to reminisce of the day he first met his Patricia. It was by no means a romantic encounter. He had been having an unspoken argument with a car as he tried to cross the street, both insisting the other move first. In a fit of pure synchronicity, or serendipity as he preferred, they both became fed up at the same time, and less then five seconds later Paul ended up with a broken leg. The driver of the car? Patricia. In hindsight, it made his heart smile in ways he’d thought he’d already forgotten.
Standing at the front office door again, peering in through the window, he could see the young asshole still behind the desk flipping through dirty photos on his phone.
For the briefest of moment’s, he thought he saw a flash of his wife reflected on his screen and his anger boiled. With muscle coiled, and his tendons ready to burst, it took every ounce of his restraint not to break in there and choke the life out of him. To take his phone and forcefully stuff it down his throat.
Not yet! he scolded, himself.
Reluctantly turning his back to the walking filth, he faced the empty parking lot once more. His car, he thought, looked like it could use a good washing. Maybe a new coat of paint.
Lighting one of the flares he brought, he tossed towards the pool of gasoline he’d left to spread at the base of the stairs to the second level. There, coming to life with force and vitality, a serpent of fire burst towards the stars. A snake of flames quickly chasing its way back to his room, its ferocity dancing and spreading as it closed in on its target.
Just as quickly as the flames found his room, they erupted further finding the remaining gasoline. The room, blowing up with a roar so loud Paul found himself wondering why the movies did it so quietly.
“WHAT THE HELL!?”
His voice came fast and loud next to him.
The little shit stumbled out of the front office, his pants barely fastened from his leisure activity.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Paul spoke, refusing to look at the man.
“WHAT!? WHAT THE FUCK!?” It didn’t take the asshole more than a second to put two and two together as he looked upon Paul’s naked physique. “I’ll fucking kill you man!”
But as he came at Paul, expecting to kick the shit out of him, he was instead greeted with the stinging end of a taser, immediately felling him to the cold earth.
“Like you killed my wife?” was the only response Paul could think to offer as he began tying up and gagging the murderer with his rope. He was never much of an outdoorsman and didn’t know the difference between a bowline and a figure eight knot, but he figured his mess of knots upon knots would hold just as well.
Dragging the deadweight back into the office, throwing him onto the floor, Paul began to cover him in the lighter fluid he’d carried down with him.
“I wasn’t sure how I’d feel when I found you,” Paul began monologuing. “or how I would do this. I’ve never been much of a hand-on sort of individual you know; always paid the serviceman to take care of things for me.”
Throwing the now empty bottles away, he began to look through the office.
“When I finally found a department store, I couldn’t decide which method I should go with.” he continued, “I mean, they have so many tools. Chainsaws, hammers, so many knives. They even have this fancy tool for cutting chains!” he mused.
Finding the shits phone, he began to scroll through his photos, revealing a myriad of obscene photos and videos. Disgusted, he threw it into the fucker’s face.
“But then I realized something,” he began, starring into the terrified eyes of the maggot beneath him. “wouldn’t it be great if you could feel what I feel? This constant burning inferno that consumes ever bit of my flesh, every waking moment of every single day?”
He looked upon the sack of meat at his feet, only now noticing pants half pulled.
Must have fallen when I was dragging him in. Wait!
An idea came to his mind, and without taking a moment to question himself he pulled down the little pricks briefs, exposing him. Then, in the same breath, he opened his second bottle of lighter fuel and began to shower his genitalia, leaving the half empty bottle sitting under his scrotum.
“I’ve had an idea, Mr. None-of-your-damn-biznatch,” he began with a bemused look on his face. “why don’t I start here? You won’t complain, will you?” He asked, kicking the bound man in the face repeatedly, breaking his jaw in the process.
“Great. Now I have your putrid blood all over my foot.” He spoke in disgust.
After somehow managing to find a clean towel to wipe his foot with, he returned to find the prick had managed to crawl his way outside. He didn’t make it far of course, but it was enough to enrage Paul out of his carefully maintained composure.
“You think you can run away? Did you let her run away!?” he shouted into the night. “Did she beg you to let her go!? Did you even care that she had a husband!? A life!?” He repeated, kicking his bare heel down on the man over and over again.
Oh no!
In his rage Paul had brutally beaten the man, and for a moment he was worried that he’d killed him before he could exact his revenge. But fortunately, the man sputtered a bloody cough and his fears were washed away from him.
But laying there, writhing in agony against his restraints, he also appeared to be trying to say something.
He couldn’t imagine it be anything of worth but being a believer in tradition he decided to hear the pitiful lumps last words.
Grabbing his broken jaw, forcing the shit to scream, Paul lifted his head up closely enough to hear his pathetic plea for help. His desperate attempt at reasoning with the husband of the woman he’d had his way with.
“I made you.” Were instead his words before spitting a mix of blood and saliva into Paul’s face.
Dropping him, leaving him for dead, he returned to the front office to get his last flare. As he lit he, starring at the mangled, broken body of the man before him he had a singular thought.
Yes. You did.
With that last thought, Paul ignited the putrid sag of flesh.
As the echoes of the mans screams pierced the frigid air, a howl of agony in the otherwise quiet isolated roadside motel, Paul quietly closed his eyes, a quiet peace taking the place of the hole in his heart.
Walking through the flames, back inside his room of the burning motel, Paul took a seat on the end of his bed.
He couldn’t smell the burning of his own flesh singe his nostrils, nor hear the screams of his own agony torture his ears. He didn’t feel the floor of the room as he fell in writhing pain, or notice when his lungs, cooking from the inside out against the smoke filling them gave up. Even as he lay dying, Paul could not heard the screams of other women imprisoned in rooms nearby.
No, he was at peace now. And as he lay there, dying, he thought to himself one final thought.
I’ll be with you soon Patricia, until death do us part.
The End
Adam Guillemette
**I made one slight edit at the end, inspired by @OneHandedWriter on Twitter. It was just too juicy not to include.
I hope you all enjoyed reading this. I look forward to next weeks criteria submissions.
Please leave them in the comment box below
Dream – Imagine – Create
A.
A Life Imagined 