Quarter to Midnight: Fifteen Horror Short Stories Read online

  She was immeasurably relieved when dawn arrived. Anna felt exhausted and fragile, as if she were held together with fine threads that might break at any moment. The trees were too thick for her to see the sun directly, but she clambered to her feet and guessed which direction the light was coming from. She then turned herself in a quarter-circle, so that she would be walking south. She knew the park was north of the town, so if she walked far enough, she would eventually arrive at the fence.

  With the light at her back and the torch batteries starting to fail, she began walking as briskly as her sore legs would let her. After about an hour, she stumbled on the river that wound through the woods. She was parched, so she stopped for a drink and to wash the scratches on her arms. Then she followed the river for another kilometre before she recognised the section she’d visited the night before.

  She was tempted to bypass her camp entirely, but curiosity and necessity won out. Her camping equipment had been expensive. Besides, she didn’t fancy the idea of walking for five hours without water or food. Anna traced the path from the river to the clearing where she’d set up camp, and stopped at the edge of the trees.

  Her campsite was wrecked. The tent was shredded. Its torn tarp, still tethered to the ground with pegs and rocks, flapped limply in the breeze. Her gear had been ripped from the bag and lay about the clearing like shrapnel. Even the stones she’d used to make the fireplace had been hurled away from the cold charcoal and half-burnt branches. The trees surrounding the clearing had suffered, too. Deep gashes marred their trunks, and many of the lower branches had been torn off.

  Anna stumbled through the remains, stunned, hardly absorbing the sights. She paused to pick up one of her saucepans—one side had been crushed in, and it was pocked with holes. She dropped it to the ground.

  What did this? What’s strong enough to cause this much damage?

  She didn’t stay long; it felt too unsafe to linger, and she saw almost nothing worth salvaging. Her backpack had been torn in half, but she managed to tie one of the pieces up well enough to act as a bag. Into it, she loaded the only undamaged saucepan, a spare jacket, tent pegs, and an empty water bottle. She also found her shoes–thankfully intact, though a little dirty–and switched them with the comfy sneakers she’d been wearing. Everything else had been destroyed.

  Anna paused to look about the scene one final time before turning back towards the river. She had a long hike from her campsite to the edge of the woods, and she knew she would be grateful for a full water bottle.

  She’d been drained by the fear, the running, and the night without sleep, and Anna found herself stumbling over the exposed roots and rocks as she made her way down the incline. She kept her eyes focussed on her feet and didn’t look up until she was nearly at the water’s edge.

  A girl was standing in her way. Anna stopped short, nearly crying out from shock. The girl faced away from her, watching the water swirl over the smooth river stones. She was wearing a tattered dark dress, and her thick black hair was matted with twigs and small leaves.

  Anna gaped at her, trying to understand what she was seeing. What’s a child doing in these woods? Does she live here?

  As the girl swayed gently from side to side, a new thought entered Anna’s mind. Does she know what attacked me last night?

  At that moment the wind changed, and Anna gagged on the sudden thick stench that blew over her. It was much stronger than it had been the night before. An automatic fear response made Anna stumble backwards, her shoes slipping on the forest floor, until her back hit a tree.

  The girl turned languidly, and Anna clamped a hand over her mouth to stop herself from screaming. The child’s eyes were entirely black: no iris, no whites, just black gashes sitting in the impossibly pale face.

  No… they’re not eyes… they’re holes.

  Where her hands should have been were claws. Thick and curved, they were as long as Anna’s forearm. They draped down the side of the child’s dress and nearly touched the ground. Something was also protruding from her chest. Something metallic and familiar. My knife.

  The girl opened her mouth and laughed. Her eyes–or where her eyes should have been–crinkled, and her red lips spread wide. The harsh, cruel sound that came out of her throat was far louder than any human could have made.

  Anna dropped the water bottle and started running. The smell was making her dizzy, so she held her breath as long as she could. Her aching legs screamed under this new strain, but she didn’t let herself stop as the laughter followed her up the incline.

  She ran through the demolished camp, not even sparing a glance at the slashed trees or shredded tent. She thought the creature was right on her heels, just waiting for her to slow down before it dug its claws into her back.

  She was exhausted. As the smell and the laughter gradually faded, Anna let her sprint slow to a brisk walk. Her limbs were shaking badly, but she didn’t stop moving. She knew which direction she needed to go to get out of the infernal forest, and she focussed on walking as quickly as her burning muscles would move.

  She hadn’t collected any water, and by midday, she was parched, but the reappearance of healthier trees and vines encouraged her to keep walking. The cuts in the trunks soon disappeared, and she thought the atmosphere felt lighter.

  Then she unexpectedly broke through the trees and found herself facing the fence. Its new significance hit her as she gazed up at it with mingled relief and revulsion. What’s the chance it has nothing to do with protecting the woods, and everything to do with protecting the town?

  She didn’t want to linger inside the forest for even a moment more than she had to, so she threw her makeshift bag over the fence, then wrapped her fingers through the metal wires and began to climb. The effort drained her remaining energy, and when her feet touched down on the other side she sank to the grass and closed her eyes. The sun, something she hadn’t felt since she’d entered the woods, played over her skin. She smiled, then her smile turned into tears. She covered her face with her sweaty, dirty hands as the enormity of the events finally caught up to her.

  She didn’t have long to rest, though. As she took a deep breath to clear her pounding head, she caught traces of the bitter, rotten scent she’d come to associate with danger.

  She sat up, her fear returning and feeding energy into her aching joints and weary bones. She scanned the edge of the woods but couldn’t see anything. Still, she stood, feeling the blisters in her feet burn, and began walking again. She made a guess about which direction she’d left her car, and after forty minutes, she found it, still hidden behind the bushes. She slid into the driver’s seat with a sigh of immense gratitude.

  Anna was famished and thirsty, so she stopped by the town’s small eatery. She must have looked ghastly—the patrons all stared at her with either curiosity or pity as she pulled herself onto the stool in front of the counter.

  The waitress, young and plump, with a short crop of black hair, eyed her cautiously. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Anna said, rubbing at her raw eyes. She’d decided on a white lie during the drive into town. “Been backpacking. Couldn’t find a hotel for last night. Can I get the biggest breakfast you sell and a jug of water?”

  “Oh, yeah.” The girl’s demeanour changed instantly as she motioned at the line cook. “Backpacking can sure do a number on you, eh? I went through England last year, and I stayed in a place with roaches everywhere and cold showers. I thought I was going to die.”

  Anna laughed weakly, but her attention was focussed on the progress of her breakfast on the grill.

  An aged grizzled man sitting next to her chuckled. “If I didn’t know better, I would’ve thought you’d come out of the woods.”

  “Lay off it, Bern,” the waitress said, scorn and affection mingling in her voice. “She don’t want to listen to your horror stories, I’m sure.”

  Anna waited until the waitress had gone to clear off one of the tables, then she turned to Bern. “What about the woods?”
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br />   The man’s cracked lips split into a grin, and she saw that he was missing at least half of his teeth. “Oh, you haven’t heard of the monster, huh? It’s our local legend. I’m the resident expert on it, you know.”

  Anna leaned on the bench, indicating that she was giving him her full attention, and he continued gladly.

  “Twenty years ago, those woods used to be very popular for camping. Lovely place, it was, with lots of wildlife and a big stream weaving through it. Then, all of a sudden, campers started disappearing. At first, the police thought it was particularly bad luck that three couples had gotten lost on the same weekend, but then they found the bodies. It was a real horror show. They were torn apart–hardly recognisable–with their organs scattered about them like a halo.

  “Then the search parties–the ones who had been looking for the missing people–started coming forward with strange stories. Talking about seeing a little girl, and saying there was a really bad smell, too. I never went into the woods, but one gent who stopped by my shop told me it gave him such bad heebie-jeebies, he’d had nightmares for a week.

  “Well, the police assumed it was some sort of serial killer, and called in reinforcements from nearby towns. There was a big investigation about it. Just about everyone within a ten kilometre radius got questioned. Then some of the officers who’d been searching the woods started going missing, too. Those that got out repeated the same story—they’d been attacked by a girl with dead eyes and claws instead of hands. The cost and body count escalated. The deaths only ever happened in the woods, so eventually, the town decided the smartest thing to do was make the whole forest off-limits and put up a fence. It’s been eight years since then, and whatever lives in those woods never comes out, but no one who goes in there to stay overnight is ever heard from again.

  “There are a lot of stories about what the monster is and where it came from, but it usually involves witchcraft. People reckon it’s either a girl who’s been cursed or a witch whose spell backfired. They say it appears as a child wearing a black dress during the day, but after midnight, it transforms into an unspeakable monster and tears apart anyone it finds in its woods.”

  Bern finished his story and slurped at his coffee with a satisfied smile. Anna’s plate of food had been placed in front of her, but she hadn’t even noticed. After a moment of silence, she picked up the fork and began eating mechanically, hardly tasting the greasy food.

  Anna returned to her car, unlocked the driver’s door, and slid into the seat. She set it into gear and began cruising out of town, her slow speed disguising how badly she wanted to escape from its grip and never see it again.

  Bern’s story sounded fantastical–impossible even–except that she had seen both the girl and the beast with her own eyes. She’d heard the laughter, smelt the overpowering odour, and looked into its ghost-white face. Bern had said no one escaped from the monster’s clutches if they stayed overnight. I got lucky. I had a weapon and used it at the right time.

  As she turned out of the town and onto the freeway, a strange smell filled the car. Anna froze, taking her foot off the accelerator and letting the car slow to a crawl before she dared raise her eyes to the rear-vision mirror.

  The girl sat in the middle of the backseat, clawed hands draped in her lap, her wild hair framing her ghost-white face and empty eyeholes. Her mouth spread into a brilliant smile at the cleverness of her trap. Anna’s eyes met the place where the girl’s should have been, and the girl broke into her terrible, consuming laughter as she lunged forward.

  CUTTY STREET LAMP

  Growing up in a rural farming town, I heard a lot of advice that was supposed to keep me safe. Don’t wander into the woods, don’t get into strangers’ cars, and don’t go near the lamp halfway up Cutty Street.

  The Cutty Street Lamp was half superstition, half urban legend. Just like some people tried not to walk on cracks in the sidewalk or didn’t like it when black cats crossed their path, people avoided going through the light cast by that streetlamp.

  During the day, the light was off, and no one paid it any more attention than the other four lamps on that street. But after dark, anyone sitting on the low brick fence that bordered the cemetery opposite the lamp would see something very interesting.

  Cutty Street was the most direct route from the east side of the town to the shops in the centre, so it wasn’t a quiet road

  When I was a child, I liked to sit opposite the light on nights when I didn’t have homework. It made ten-year-old me feel like a hero to have my back to the cemetery and my face to the light no one wanted to walk through as the blood-red sunset faded into darkness. I would sit on the brick wall and weave braids out of the long grass that grew there or pick up a handful of gravel and try to throw it through the third slat in the stormwater drain a half-dozen feet away while I counted how many people avoided the light.

  Pedestrians looped around the light. Some gave it a wide berth, even crossing the street to be clear of it, while others walked in a tight semi-circle, just barely skirting the circle of light the lamp created on the sidewalk. For most people, it was almost a subconscious action.

  To be fair, it was a strange sort of light. The other four lamps lining the sidewalk cast a normal, warm-white glow, but that particular lamp’s light was tinged blue. It wasn’t so strong that it looked clearly wrong, but compared with the lamp twenty feet down the road, it was slightly off.

  My mother was a very superstitious woman, and among her other advice–don’t break any mirrors, don’t go to sleep in the middle of a fight, and don’t play with Ouija boards–she occasionally reminded me to keep away from the light on Cutty Street. When one of her friends saw me there and passed on the news that I’d been watching the lamp at night, she panicked and, through tears and threats, made me promise not to go near it again.

  She was a good woman, and I loved her dearly, so I stopped my nightly habit. For the next few years, I saw very little of the light. I still travelled down Cutty Street, usually during the day, and I couldn’t stop myself from glancing at the lamp every time I passed it.

  When I was twelve, my cousin came to stay with us for a few weeks. His parents were going through a nasty divorce, and his mother had wanted to give him a break from it. Todd was a year older than me and impressed me as being the height of cool.

  Todd wasn’t an unpleasant person, per se, but he was surly and not entirely happy about being turned out of his home. I was overly eager to please and let him have whatever he wanted. After he complained about how uncomfortable the spare mattress on my room’s floor was, I swapped with him so he could sleep in my bed. When we watched movies at night, I always let him pick. I tried to introduce him to my friends, too, but they didn’t like hanging out with him.

  “They’re babies,” he told me one night, lying in my bed, arms folded behind his head as he stared at the ceiling. “I don’t blame them, though. There’s nothing exciting in this town. If they were in the city, they’d harden up real quick.”

  I hated hearing Todd complain about my town, so I cast around for something that would impress him. “We had a murder here a few years back,” I said. “A guy killed his wife and buried her in his backyard.”

  Todd snorted. “Just one murder? No serial killers? We’ve got plenty of those in the city.”

  I was deflated but not deterred. “There’s also lots of bears in the woods. We’ve got to bring a gun whenever we go in there.”

  “I’ve seen bears in the zoo,” Todd retorted. “They’re not that scary.”

  Then my brain lighted on the relatively insignificant six feet of Cutty Street that had always fascinated me. “We have a haunted streetlight.”

  Todd glanced at me out of the corner of my eye, and I knew I’d got his attention. “What?”

  “There’s a lamppost that kills anyone who walks under it.” That was, I admit, a pretty big exaggeration. I’d seen a few people walk through the light before, and they’d always shivered and picked up their speed as
soon as they realised they’d stepped into the unnatural light. I was twelve, though, and trying to impress one of the least impressible people I’d ever met.

  My cousin had rolled over to fix me with a scrutinising stare. “You’re making this up, aren’t you?”

  “No!” I felt offended. “It’s real. I can show it to you.”

  “Right now?”

  “Yeah, sure, whatever.”

  And just like that, we rolled out of our beds, pulled clothes on over our pyjamas, and snuck out the back door. My mother watched TV in the front room of the house in the evenings, so it was easy to climb over the backyard fence and into the lane that ran between the houses without her knowing. From there, we could follow Roger Street towards the city centre.

  I knew my mother would check on us before she went to sleep, but that wouldn’t be for another hour at least, and I hoped I could show Todd the light, prove that our sleepy little town could be just as impressive as his stupid city, and get us back into our beds without my mother being any wiser.

  Todd was showing more interest in me than he had since he’d arrived. He asked about the lamp, and I told him about its blue sheen, the cemetery it sat opposite, and the way no one walked through its light.

  I led Todd to my familiar seat on the cemetery fence and was pleased to see it had hardly changed in the years I’d been away from it. I sat, waited for Todd to grudgingly sit next to me, then pointed to the lamp on the other side of the road.

  “That’s it?” he said, scepticism lacing his voice. “It doesn’t look that scary.”

  I was miffed, but tried not to let it show. “Can you see the blue light? It’s darker than the lamp down that way.”

  Todd squinted between the two lights, not looking impressed. “Maybe a little.”

  “Well, just wait,” I snapped.