Del Stone Jr.

Post Office ( a short horror story )

July 10, 2026

Image courtesy of Phillip Pessar by way of a Creative Commons license. https://www.flickr.com/people/25955895@N03

INTRODUCTION

I hate writing.

I really do.

I think my attitude toward writing is similar to that of my friend, Ray Aldridge, who once said (and I think he was quoting yet another writer), “I enjoy having written.”

That suits me. If I could forgo the teeth clenching, hair pulling, sick-in-the-gut stomach-wrenching AGONY of writing, and skip to the part where I look upon the finished work, knowing it is as good as I could make it, and feel the satisfaction that any new parent feels … well, life would be grand.

But life isn’t grand, at least so far as writing is concerned, and I try to avoid the painful bits as much as I can. Some people like to “talk about writing.” Not me. I hate talking about writing. Some people enjoy belonging to writers’ groups. Not me. Apart from the social aspect I think they’re a waste of time. And some people like writing about writing. Not me.

I take that back – mostly not about me.

This story is one of two exceptions.

The first, titled “Artist,” is also available as a Kindle e-book (minor sales pitch) and you can get yourself a copy here. Please buy it. I’m poor.

This is the second.

It’s a story about writing – more precisely, a story about submitting what you write.

That’s a neglected aspect of the writing conversation. You never hear people talk about the process of submitting their manuscripts for publication – it’s always about the artistic, as if they don’t want to acknowledge that a big part – maybe the biggest part – of writing is the business part. You know, the ugly, brass tacks part with editors and agents and lawyers and contracts, royalties and earn-back expenses and all the other crap that has absolutely nothing to do with lying in the clover and studying the clouds for inspiration but is absolutely essential for anyone who hopes to become a published writer.

When I finally stopped talking about writing and began actually writing and submitting my work for publication, the world was a different place. The earth’s mantle had just cooled and there were dinosaurs that stood between me and the mailbox, ferocious man-eaters who discouraged me from venturing into that bloody neighborhood. When I finally worked up the courage to go forth, a whole new subset of monsters emerged.

Those would be the monsters of impatience, and paranoia.

Back in those days there was no such thing as e-mail. You typed your manuscript on paper, inserted it into a large manila envelope, included a second manila envelope – self-addressed and with the return postage contained in a wax envelope of its own – and dispatched this package into the postal ethers. Hey, that’s what they told us to do.

I soon learned the error of their ways.

For instance, those little wax paper envelopes containing the return postage? They often did not find their way onto my self-addressed envelope. Instead, the envelope would arrive postage due. Ha ha, how could it be that the noble editor had somehow misplaced my valuable return postage, ha ha?

And those manuscripts I had laboriously typed? Sometimes they arrived folded in half. Sometimes stained with spaghetti sauce. Sometimes with sarcastic notations on the manuscript itself.

I soon learned to not submit the actual typed manuscript, but a photocopy. I explained to the editor that this was not a simultaneous submission, that I merely photocopied the original to protect the manuscript from damage incurred in the mail (ahem, yes … in the mail … right).

One part of this process I could not control was the length of time between the moment I mailed the manuscript and the moment the editor’s response appeared in my mailbox. I think every freelance writer is familiar with that part of the writing – the Vigil at the Mailbox.

That might be the most painful obstacle to becoming a freelance writer – waiting for the editor to get back to you. You want your story to sell, and you want to hear the good news as soon as possible. Wouldn’t two weeks be sufficient time to hear a response?

Well, no. Turns out two weeks is the length of time it takes for an editor to receive your submission, instantly reject it, and drop it back in the mail. Two months is the more likely norm. Meanwhile, as this invisible drama is playing out, you, the writer, stand at your mailbox every day, eyeing the bundle of letters and parcels the mailman is carrying to your box. Any large manila envelopes in there?

Yes, the Vigil at the Mailbox.

“Post Office” was inspired by such a vigil. One stretch in the 1980s – I don’t remember the exact dates – most if not all of my manuscripts were suspiciously late getting back to me. I was accustomed to the longer-than-expected waiting period, but this was ridiculous. It seemed like eons since I’d last gotten a yea or nay (almost always nay). What the heck was going on?

The longer this drought continued, the more paranoid I became, until it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, something that did not meet the eye was going on. Something malevolent. I am, after all, a horror writer. It was not too much of a stretch to suspect an evil entity at the post office was holding my manuscripts hostage.

Batshit crazy, right? Of course it is, in the blessed light of hindsight. But before you go off thinking Uncle Del has wandered from the rose garden at the asylum, let me reiterate – I’m a horror writer, and horror writers experience these kinds of weird departures from rational thinking. That’s how we come up with story ideas. In fact, that’s how I came up with the idea for “Post Office.”

I passed off the story as a lighthearted confection, a joke, something not to be taken with the same weighty gravitas of a real horror story. I think that’s why Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith accepted it for Pulphouse. They seemed to recognize it was written with the tongue firmly implanted within cheek.

I don’t remember what happened to all those stories. Maybe they came back. Maybe I queried the editors, received no response, and withdrew them from consideration.

But I do remember this:

I really did wonder if somebody at the post office was stealing my manuscripts.

Ha ha … you laugh. Try slipping a gift card into a your niece’s next birthday card and drop it in the mail.

See what happens.

—

POST OFFICE

David reached into the metal throat of the mailbox and pulled out a clutch of white envelopes. His face was already pinched into a scowl, and as he scanned the return addresses and dealt envelopes onto the sidewalk, the scowl tightened. When the last had fluttered from his fingers, he uttered a single, derisive snort.

A Visa bill. Two solicitations: one from Greenpeace (printed on the envelope in screaming blue characters was “This is the year of Antarctica!”) and the other an invitation to buy National Wildlife Federation Christmas cards … in August. An inquiry from J.C. Penney asking if he were satisfied with his recent purchase of an MCS stereo receiver. A letter from a cousin who would probably be wanting money.

No letters from editors today. And certainly no checks. No large manila envelopes, his address typed neatly on an adhesive label and taped to the envelope for good measure.

Seven months now, and no manuscripts. Not a single one had come back in the mail.

—

David studied his log sheets, as if the titles listed there would affirm he had ever written any stories.

The one about the two buddies arguing over the existence of monsters – that one had disappeared a couple of months ago. The lesbian magazine never answered his query about the love-murder story. Likewise with the cube-that-ate-personalities piece he’d submitted to that men’s magazine.

He flipped through the log sheets.

The monster-in-the-closet story was missing.

The walk-in-the-dark story was missing.

The insect-revolt story was missing.

The end-of-the-world story was missing.

The killer playground story. The ghost story. The zombies. Amok computers.

All of them.

Missing.

—

David was a horror writer. He wrote about monsters, both real and imagined. He wrote about things that go bump in the night.

But mostly he wrote about evil. Not evil with a capital E, the evil that is pronounced with the inflection on the second syllable, as it is pronounced in those Vincent Price movies. Not an ecclesiastical evil.

David had important theories about evil, theories he could express and test only within the confines of fiction. He had decided long ago that evil was not conscious or calculated.

Evil was not the rotted face of The Beast.

*Image courtesy of Phillip Pessar by way of a Creative Commons license. https://www.flickr.com/people/25955895@N03*

To the contrary, evil was simply a random breakdown in order. Evil chose its victims for no reason, inflicted undeserved torment on them, then inscrutably departed. Evil was a sort of anti-entropy.

To test his theories, he would take protagonists, everyday working Joes, and deposit them in execrable circumstances – for no reason at all – then have them try to wriggle their way out within the constraints of the story’s logic. Many – most – did not succeed, and that was fine with David. It validated his theories. If evil were random then there was no such thing as justice. And in a literary context, if justice were the hero riding off into the sunset, then David would have his heroes ride off into the sunset … in a hearse.

David had 15 horror stories “making the rounds” at publications as diverse as Playboy and one of those self-important literary magazines at the university upstate. Fifteen stories was a good body of work for a new writer hungry for his first sale, he thought. Fifteen stories. The time he had first picked up a pen, he hadn’t dreamed he would write 15 stories.

Fifteen stories about evil. And now they were gone.

—

If he could have believed each story was lying on an editor’s desk awaiting final approval for publication, he would have been patient … patient and goddamned jumped-out-of-his-socks ecstatic. Wasn’t it the editor of that back-to-nature magazine in California who told him having a story accepted was only a matter of it crossing the editor’s desk on the right day? Sure. She’d said that. She’d written it on a rejection slip.

But all 15 stories in seven months? Christ. Some of those losers had been “making the rounds” for two years. Editors didn’t like unhappy endings. Even if they validate important theories about evil. The possibility that all 15 stories had been accepted simultaneously was as improbable as all 15 being simultaneously swallowed up by the behemoth that is the United States Postal Service.

No. They were not lying on any editor’s desk.

—

Somebody was stealing his manuscripts.

Somebody who worked at the post office.

He was certain of it, as certain as he had ever been of anything. He deposited his manila envelopes in the same “out of town” slot used by other post office patrons, and he collected the mail as soon as the delivery man dropped it off. He wasn’t misboxing the manuscripts and they weren’t being filched from his mailbox. He had gone over the problem like an old woman worrying at a knot in her apron string, and the only unknown quantity that consistently emerged from his deliberations was the post office.

—

But why?

Why would somebody at the post office steal his manuscripts? Mail tampering was a federal crime; what kind of person would jeopardize an enviably secure civil service position to torment a two-bit horror writer, even if the two-bit horror writer had important theories about evil?

To David, the question began to assume a familiar and unsettling quality.

—

The problem, as David saw it, could be approached two ways.

There was the direct method. Make an appointment with the postmaster, explain to him what was happening and ask for his help. This had its advantages and disadvantages, the disadvantages seeming to outweigh the benefits. The postmaster would not take kindly to the suggestion that mail was being stolen from his office. And if, indeed, the manuscripts had simply been lost in the mail, David would not be able to show his face in the post office without feeling like a fool. That would be a disaster. What writer could practice his craft without using the post office?

There was the indirect approach. A threat, directed to the culprit himself. Through the mail. Very discreet, and no risk of exposure. And if it didn’t produce results, he still could meet with the postmaster, though God forbid it should come to that.

He feed a sheet of paper into his typewriter and began to type.

—

DEAR SIR OR MA’AM:

HAVE YOU ENJOYED YOURSELF? I IMAGINE YOU HAVE. WHAT BETTER WAY TO TORMENT A WRITER THAN TO STEAL HIS WORK. YES, I SUPPOSE YOU HAVE HAD A GOOD LAUGH OVER THIS. IT HAS TAKEN ME SEVEN MONTHS, BUT I AM FINALLY ONTO YOU. AND I INTEND TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

IF THIS NONSENSE DOESN’T STOP, I WILL CONTACT YOUR SUPERIORS. I WILL PRESS CHARGES. I WILL DO EVERYTHING IN MY ABILITY TO SEE THAT YOU DO NOT HAVE ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY TO HARASS ME.

I WILL GIVE YOU THIS CHANCE TO SQUARE THINGS WITH ME. DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT TAKING ANOTHER MANUSCRIPT, AND RETURN THE ONES YOU HAVE STOLEN. DO THIS AND WE’LL CALL IT EVEN. WE’LL LEAVE IT AT THAT.

SINCERELY,

DAVE

—

He hoped the thief was actually reading his manuscripts. It didn’t seem likely somebody would go to the trouble of stealing an envelope without at least taking a peek at what was inside.

And if the thief did read his note: Would he respond? David thought not. It was a bluff, plain and simple. What could David really do? Both of them knew the answer to that.

But threats seemed so much more forceful from the print aspect. Perhaps it would frighten the thief into returning his work. Perhaps he would leave David alone. And David would not have to make a fool of himself at the post office.

—

David paperclipped the note to a stack of blank pages to give it the feel of a “manuscript.” He inserted these into a manilla envelope. He included a rigid sheet of carboard, as he always did, so the “manuscript” would not be mutilated as it made its way through the mail. He even included a self-addressed, stamped envelope for the “manuscript’s” return.

He addressed it to himself.

There.

That afternoon, he drove to the post office. As he entered the foyer, he studied the faces of the postal employees ensconced behind their work stations. He watched to see if they watched him as he deposited the envelope in the “out-of-town” slot.

None did. But he knew that did not mean they hadn’t seen him.

—

He went over it again.

If the envelope did not return, somebody had stolen it. That was the agreed-upon conclusion.

If the envelope returned, either the thief had taken the day off, or David had beaten fantastic odds – either to his detriment or benefit.

He almost hoped it would not return.

—

Two days after mailing the “manuscript,” David opened his box to find a large manila envelope. His heart literally skipped a beat. It was addressed to him, the way he had typed it. The cancellation mark bore yesterday’s date. Everything was in order.

David stared at it, his emotions frozen somewhere between embarrassment and relief. The post office, it seemed, was blameless, which left no easy explanation for the disappearance of his manuscripts. Either they were lying in dead-letter files at 15 post offices scattered across the United States, or 15 editors were still weighing their decisions or simply hadn’t gotten around to breaking the good news to him. His breath hitched at that prospect, and he quickly corrected himself. You know that isn’t the answer. He would have heard something by now. A letter. A phone call … something. It didn’t take seven months for an editor to decide if a story was worth publishing.

Then what?

He considered it all that afternoon and into the night, and the more he denied the possibility that all 15 stories had sold, the more quickly his imagination seized on the idea. Could lightning strike 15 times? He thought it could be done, though it wasn’t likely. Poker players sometimes drew to a royal flush more than once in a night. Bowlers sometimes rolled 300 games twice in a row. Couldn’t a writer with important theories about evil enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime hammerstroke of good fortune? As the hours crawled by, that possibility evolved into a probability, and David began to feel better about himself.

Fifteen sales in a year. Christ! If it had happened – God, he hoped it had happened – he would burst upon the fiction field like no beginning writer before him. The synergy of those sales would lead to others, a novel, movie screenplays, a career as a full-time editor. …

Success. He spoke the word, tasting the syllables, and thought nothing had ever felt so good in his mouth in all his life.

The manila envelope was lying on the floor next to the file cabinet where he kept his log sheets. His gaze fell on it, and a tremor of guilt ran through him. Guilt, and embarrassment. The envelope seemed to eclipse everything else in the room, testimony to a faint heart, a small, suspicious mind, somebody who thought small and worked small and was small in shameful ways. Like believing their manuscripts had been stolen … and wrote threatening letters. He frowned and picked it up, not believing, for an instant, that he had done this shameful thing. He opened it. He would destroy the note. He would tear it into confetti, maybe burn the pieces when he was done, and nobody would ever know how bush league he had sunk.

He yanked out the contents, and in that moment, time stopped. It just stopped. His heart stopped. The tides of his blood ebbed, all at once. His surroundings, the room, the house, the world, ceased to exist. Everything but the note.

Scribbled beneath his typewritten text was: YOU WANT YOUR STORIES? COME DOWN TO THE POST OFFICE AND GET THEM.

He dropped the paper. It see-sawed through the air and tapped against the carpet. A glacier of breath was locked at the back of his throat, but he did not think to let it out.

He thought, How did he … and his mind frantically replayed the moment he had first opened the envelope. Had he noticed that it was already open? No. The flap had been glued to the envelope. The way it should have been. The way he’d done it.

It was impossible.

He looked up and in his mind’s eye he saw the image of a huge “out-of-town” slot floating dreamily. It seemed to be smiling; it seemed to be leering at him.

It seemed to whisper his name.

—

At 9:45 the morning after, David got into his car and drove to the post office. He took with the manila envelope. The note was still inside.

Impossible or not, he intended to have his questions answered.

—

A neat stack of manila envelopes was deposited in David’s mailbox the next day. If any had bothered to count them, they would have gotten to 15 before stopping.

But nobody counted them. Not the mailman, because the envelopes were heavy and he only wanted to be rid of the damn things.

And not David. Because for all his important theories about evil, he had not come back from the post office.

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

Image courtesy of PickPic by way of a Creative Commons license.

INTRODUCTION

Does comedic horror exist?

The producers of the “Scream” movies would say so, I think. But in fact, is “Scream” funny?

Well, it is my studied opinion that within the context of horror, yes, it is funny. I would call it gallows humor. It is funny the same way that “American Werewolf in London” and even the “Evil Dead” movies are funny.

These movies, and their cousins in book form, don’t take themselves seriously, not like “The Exorcist” or “The Shining.” And you know what? That’s OK. There’s a place for black humor in horror. Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, would give that statement a thumbs up. I think.

When I sat down to write “Siren’s Song” I didn’t intend to produce a work of comedic horror. That’s just how it happened. I mean, c’mon. How could you write a story about a man who kills and dismembers his wife because of her relentless singing and now she haunts him from the faucets, toilet and shower drain where he disposed of her body, and it not be funny? That’s humorous, not in a literal, family relations kind of way. For horror, anyway.

So here you go. Meet Myron, long-suffering husband to Phyllis, who yodeled her way to an untimely demise. Myron carved her into small pieces and flushed her down the toilet or pushed her down the shower drain, and now she’s singing his … well, certainly not praises. More likely his negative attributes. And that’s where they exist at the moment of this writing, an uneasy, horror-stricken balance of power between murder and retribution.

And isn’t that the way it goes so many times in a marriage, two negatives holding each other in a kind of check – not mate, just check – that goes on and on until their collective life comes to and end. …

Or does it?

—

SIREN’S SONG

Myron heard his wife singing in the shower.

Only problem was, Myron was in the shower too. And Myron’s wife was dead.

“Not fair,” Myron said miserably, staring at the drain – your average, Norman Bates “Psycho” shower drain – from which his wife’s warbling song emanated. “Phyllis deserved to die.”

Image courtesy of PickPic by way of a Creative Commons license.

And it was true. Phyllis had deserved to die. A frustrated Ethel Merman – and only a person of Myron’s generation would have known who Ethel Merman was – Phyllis had sung to Myron and sung and sung and sung until one day, Myron had simply –

“MOOOOON RIVERRRRRR,” the drain squalled –

– snapped, like the proverbial rubber band wound too tight.

Myron left the water running but stepped out of the shower. He tiptoed across the icy tiles to the vanity and opened the cabinet. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror; “Oh God,” he shuddered and slammed the cabinet shut.

Every bit of 58 years. With tits like his grandmother’s and that poochy, old man’s gut between his navel and his dick. And gray chest hair, for God’s sake. Gray chest hair smeared in cold, slimy strands across his sagging, grandmotherly titties.

“Not fair,” he muttered and scuttled back to the shower. He remembered a day when he liked what he saw in the mirror, when he could run his hands over his flat chest and press his palms into taut skin and let his fingers wander to his crotch, imagining they were Sophia Loren’s fingers, or more forbiddenly, Mrs. Andrew Williamson’s fingers as she handed him a Coke while he throttled back the lawnmower. She’d wanted him all right. But he’d been too stupid to know it, a kid mowing lawns for spending money. But she’d wanted him.

“YOUUUU LIGHT UP MY LIFEEEEEE!” the drain yodeled. Myron sighed and stepped into the warm spray.

Then Phyllis had come along, and he’d settled for her, the operative word being “settled.” Thirty years he’d settled for her, their marriage no less than hell’s mortgage where you paid off the principal the first year and spent the rest of your life trying to overtake an interest load that only grew larger and larger, no matter how much money or attention you threw at it. The debts and the misery and the anger had piled so high Myron could see nothing else, and Phyllis had sung through it all no matter how many times he’d told her just to shut the hell up, her off-kilter contralto ever reminding Myron that he had been a fool for marrying her and a coward for not leaving her.

“THAT’S THE WAY – UH HUH UH HUH – I LIKE ITTTTT!” the drain tittered, and Myron rolled his eyes. Disco? Death did not become Phyllis. But then she had not died easily, Myron thought, remembering the afternoon when she had launched into a verse of “Ave Maria” and he had gone after her with a machete. She had fought him the good fight, screeching all the way, and he had liked the sound of her screams. But in the end he had cut her into tiny pieces, rinsing all the gooshy stuff down the bathtub drain; the bigger chunks he’d flushed. The last to go had been her tongue, still languidly waggling as he yanked the trap from the bathtub drain and forced it down the pipe with the handle of a plunger.

Then the singing had begun.

Petula Clark. The Cure. Threepenny Opera tunes. Diana Ross. Nursery rhymes. And Ethel Merman, god forbid, baaaaad Ethel Merman. It hooted from the drain pipes and gurgled from the toilets, and while Myron could not put a stop to it, he had one way of changing Phyllis’ tune.

“Just shut the hell up, Phyllis,” Myron whispered, squatting in the bathtub, his old man’s belly pooching out even farther. He uncapped the bottle of lye and poured it down the Norman Bates drain.

The song faltered, and became a hitching scream.

Now that, Myron said to himself, his knees creaking as he stood, was something he thought he could live with.

About the author:

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

Image by Oakley Originals of Flickr. https://www.flickr.com/photos/oakleyoriginals/

Introduction to “The Thing in the Dark”

I’ve always been afraid of the dark. To this day, I’m hesitant to go outside at night. We live in a dark neighborhood. I don’t care how many streetlights they install, it still looks dark dark dark at night.

You never know what’s hiding out there.

I remember one night – I must have been about 14 – Mom ordered me to take out the garbage. Our garbage cans were up next to the fence on the side of the house. Next door the house was vacant. It had been empty for awhile and leaves had piled up in the yard and weeds were getting tall.

I carried the paper grocery bag full of trash through the carport and out to the garbage cans. As I lifted the metal lid from the can, I heard the telltale crunch, crunch, crunch of somebody walking through leaves. The people on the next street over had their backyard porchlight on. I could see, in the glare of that light, an eclipse moving toward me, a human-shaped shadow approaching out of the dark.

The hair on my arms stood on end. My skin froze. I think my heart stopped.

Then suddenly, I was free. I dropped the garbage and the lid and sprinted for the front door. I burst inside the house, slammed the door and locked it.

Mom asked me what was wrong. I told her, “Somebody’s out there!”

I had a shotgun, an old 20-guage bolt action, hanging from a wall rack in my bedroom. She told me to go get it. I did. It wasn’t loaded, but that didn’t matter.

Together, we went back outside, Mom hefting that ridiculous shotgun.

“All right, you son-of-a-bitch! I’m gonna blow your goddamned brains out!”

Silence.

“I’ll blow your brains out!” she shouted again.

I picked up the bag of garbage where I’d dropped it, hurled it into the can and slammed the lid closed. Both of us hightailed it back to the house.

Months later, we found out that somebody had been living in the crawlspace under the vacant house. They had a mattress and a flashlight set up under there. The idea that somebody was there, watching us come and go, still creeps me out. And that’s what prompted me to write “The Thing in the Dark.”

It was one of 13 under-a-thousand-words stories I created for a project called “13 Seconds” I hoped to sell to a comic book publisher. My friend C.M. Terry planned to illustrate each one.

Alas, that project didn’t sell, but along came “365 Scary Stories” from Barnes & Noble. I submitted all 13 stories and they bought seven, including this one.

The others are the following:

“And Baby Makes 13”

“Crisis Line”

“Mall of the Dead”

“The Garage”

“In the Wilds of the Suburbs”

“The Tooth Fairy”

“The Thing in the Dark”

—

THE THING IN THE DARK

Danny scrunched his eyes shut and pulled the covers over his head, entombing himself in darkness and silence.

On this night he would see nothing. He would hear nothing. He would spend the night in his bedroom without once screaming for his mother, his voice climbing the panicky octaves until even the sound of his own shouts frightened him.

Nothing would breathe beneath his bed. Nothing would growl behind the closet door. Nothing would scratch the window behind the curtains. It was all in his imagination, he told himself, reciting the mantra that had been drilled into him by his exasperated mother. How many nights had she staggered into his bedroom, her breath sickly sweet with bourbon, to dump herself on the edge of the mattress and yank back the covers and blabber at him drunkenly about his foolish, childish fear of the dark? How many times had she come into the room angry, then seen the look of stark terror in his eyes and try to salve her anger with sloppy kisses and stern but gentle insistences that he look under the bed, or in the closet, or through the part in the curtains?

*Image by Oakley Originals of Flickr.*

https://www.flickr.com/photos/oakleyoriginals/

Always, he had checked. And always, nothing was there.

But it was the light that chased them away, he told her, and then her anger would return and she’d stalk from the room, slamming the door behind her, and he’d try to sleep with the light on until sometime later when she’d snatch the door open – a loud rasping that always sent his heart jumping into his throat – and flick it off.

The terror would begin anew.

But tonight he would put it out of his mind. That scrabbling sound beneath the bed – that was the floorboards vibrating from a passing truck. The shudder from the closet door – it was not the furtive movement of the runner within the track as a clawed hand slowly drew the door ajar. And he did not hear a soft thumping at the window, as something out there tested the glass for a way to get inside. These things were all perfectly normal occurrences that the darkness transformed into mysteries, things that would go totally unnoticed in the blessed light of day. In fact, if he peeked at the closet door he would see it was shut, as he’d left it. If he yanked back the covers and hung his head over the edge of the mattress, he would see a jumble of toys beneath the bed and nothing more. From the window, he would see the soft glow of lights brightening the neighborhood windows.

If he peeked – if he peeked – he would see that it was all in his imagination, and that he had nothing to be afraid of. If he peeked.

He slitted an eye and eased the covers back.

The closet door was open.

The mattress shimmied ever so slightly, and the pressure of the bedspread on his legs decreased as something lifted the corner and began to probe softly for something to – something to grab and haul beneath the bed, an ankle, a calf, the arm of a trembling 9-year-old boy –

Bobby hurled himself from the bed and hit the light switch.

Nothing there. Closet door, closed. Toys beneath the bed.

And then he heard it. A tapping at the window.

He tiptoed across the carpet and paused at the curtains, knowing with dread certainty that if he dared look out, something horrible would look in –

“Bobby! Let me in!” the whisper snaked through the glass.

It sounded like his mother.

“Bobby? Are you there? Let me in! I heard a noise outside. I went to check and – and I locked myself out! Let me in!”

It really did sound like his mother. But Bobby hesitated.

“Let me in, dammit,” the voice whispered. “I think there’s someone out here!”

What if it weren’t his mother?

Bobby, there’s someone out here – I hear them!”

What if it were something using his mother’s voice to trick him into opening the window?

“Open the goddamn window!” the voice said, louder this time, a tremble of fear wiggling through the words. “Bobby, please!”

And if he opened the window, it would reach in with its claws and grab him around the throat –

“Bobby – oh, Bobby – ” the voice wailed.

– and the blood would splatter the walls and the bedspread and the closet door –

He heard a scream and a low-throated growl, and then a thrashing sound, as if some kind of struggle were being waged outside.

He stepped away from the curtains. He padded back to the bed and slipped beneath the covers. He could hear his heart pounding. It might have been a monster’s heart pounding.

But he would get through this night without calling his mother. Because it was all in his imagination.

About the author:

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

Image courtesy of Raw Pixel.

Introduction to “The Tooth Fairy”

This story was based on an actual experience, though I didn’t run into any Freddy Krueger-style monsters from dreamland.

We had a grocery store in town at the time – Food World – which was my go-to destination for cheap beer and cigs. Yes, I smoked back then – this would have been in the ’90s, and you could still get a carton of cigarettes for about $10. They put them in display cases that were accessible to the public. It was a much more trusting time.

One night I headed over to Food World for something – I forget what. I don’t think it was cigarettes, but it might have been. Food World stayed open until 9 p.m.; otherwise, I would have had to do my cigarette shopping at a convenience store.

I remember walking into the store and thinking: This is strange. Something about the bright fluorescent lights overhead throwing everything into stark, electric contrast, made me feel as if I were walking through a Dennis Etchison short story. Not only that but the store was ghostly quiet. Hardly anybody was shopping. You could hear every creak and groan of the building.

As I said, strange.

I got whatever I was looking for and went to the cash registers. Only one was open, and there was a person ahead of me. I remember seeing all those packages of meat rolling down the conveyor belt to be scanned and bagged. Why would somebody come to a grocery store late at night to buy lots and lots of meat?

All kinds of thoughts sprang to mind, thoughts that only a writer of scary stories would consider, all of them involving caged beasts back at the house, or something with a taste for blood, or maybe an evil presence in one’s dreams, foreshadowing the awful things it had planned for you once you fell asleep.

Unless you were already asleep and this was part of your nightmare.

Is the Jimmy of “The Tooth Fairy” asleep and dreaming these events? Has the nightmare invaded his waking hours? I’m not sure. I will say I’m not a fan of ambiguity in horror stories, but in this case I think it works.

One more thing: When you were a kid and your mom and dad told you about the tooth fairy who comes at night and finds that tooth under your pillow and gives you money for it, did they ever say why the tooth fairy wants your tooth?

Did they ever tell you what the tooth fairy does with that tooth?

I didn’t think so.

And I’m not sure I want to consider the possibilities.

—

THE TOOTH FAIRY

A pack of cigarettes. That’s all Jimmy wanted. A pack of cigarettes, and the safety of his townhouse, and sleep.

But sleep brought the Tooth Fairy, and that was no good. The Tooth Fairy … a monstrous vision of teeth clicking and snapping at him from his nightmares, set within a face as pale as moonlight on dead flesh, surrounded by a field of black, as if Jimmy’s fear of the world had taken on a predatory life of its own.

So Jimmy couldn’t sleep, and after reaching for the pack of Marlboros on the nightstand and coming up empty, he’d climbed into his blue jeans and sweatshirt and had driven to the 24-hour Food World across town, a careful visit to the grocery store, a foray into a realm he tried to avoid. The world was full of horrors, yes: murderers and thieves and liars. But it was the little deaths that nibbled at his soul: the petty indifferences and incessant sales pitches and the all-consuming, voracious demand for his attention that warped him and transformed him into something unnatural, so that his time away from home became a gauntlet of senseless noise and chaos, and his time at home took on the quality of a siege. What lay between had become one thing:

The Tooth Fairy.

But if he remained awake all night he might eventually collapse into that merciful land of exhausted unconsciousness that lay beneath fearful dreams. So.

The supermarket was electric and weird this time of night, the lights as bright and the aisles as quiet as an oncology ward. They kept the cigarettes up front where the store manager could watch for shoplifters. But nobody was there. Jimmy yanked a pack from the kiosk and walked straight to the express lane.

Another customer was already there, dressed in a broad, gray duster that brushed the linoleum floor. He was unloading groceries onto the moving belt in front of the register, and the teen-aged cashier was running them across the scanner. Big cuts of meat, bloody and shiny in the preternatural light.

Jimmy sighed and scanned the racks of tabloids. Famous actor is really a vampire. Woman gives birth to 17 babies. Rendering of Mr. Spock found in Egyptian tomb. Jimmy shook his head. Nothing shocked or amazed him anymore. It was all a blizzard of images and sounds.

The scanner beeped. Steaks and flanks trimmed in opaque fat. The man certainly liked his meat, Jimmy thought, watching him stoop over the shopping cart and extract packages and set them down on the belt. The girl whipped them across the scanner and as Jimmy studied her, he noticed she would not look up, not even once. A fellow sojourner, he decided. Probably waiting to start her weekend.

The man slapped down dripping packages. Jimmy peered around the sweep of the man’s duster and saw heaps of meat still in the cart, cuts of meat he’d never seen before. The man dropped a shrink-wrapped package on the belt and the scanner bleated. The girl waved it across the laser three more times, and each time the scanner refused to ring up the price. She gazed at the bar code with an exasperated look. Then her face went white.

She dropped the package. She snatched her fingers away and wiped them on her apron. She glanced up at the man, then, and her lips trembled, as if a scream were forming behind them but refused to come out.

The package contained an assortment of jawbones.

Jawbones studded with perfectly normal incisors and canines and molars. One of them had a gold filling.

Jimmy felt a part of his brain go numb, like a pot roast that had thawed on the outside but remained frozen on the inside, and a tiny gasp escaped him so that the man turned and looked down at him, and Jimmy recognized the bloodless pallor of that face and the picket fence of teeth that sank into his sleep, and he knew this time he would not awaken in his bed, the sheets drenched with sweat, to wonder how he might keep the world at bay another day.

“Hurry home,” the man whispered in a tissue-soft, dreamlike voice. “Hurry home and go to sleep. I’m hungry.”

The cigarettes slipped from Jimmy’s fingers and went bumping down the belt, where they joined the man’s other possessions.

As the world sank its teeth in, and would not let go.

About the author:

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

Photo courtesy of ph.

I say this story was written in 1988 but I wouldn’t quote me on that.

It was written in the 1980s, I’m sure. It has the tone of my ’80s fiction – bleak sketches usually set in a rural back road or bar. I worked the night shift at our local newspaper and afterwards, we night-shifters would venture out in search of a cheap watering hole or, if not a bar, a convenience store with cold beer, and off we’d go, into the hinterlands, because it was there a beer-drinker was not likely to be pulled over by the boys with the blue-and-red lights on their cars.

Out there in the rural dark – the real dark folks don’t see these days because cities are too lit up these days – I found a mysterious tint to the world, what Yeats might have called that rosy afterglow of the realm which lies beside this one, visible only to young children who have not had their senses dulled by maturity and experience. Except this glow was of a darker variety, and I wonder if Yeats could have appreciated that, given his musings about the nature of the new messiah.

To me, there were mysteries to be discovered in the unyielding dark of the countryside, mysteries to be glimpsed not articulated but sensed in the way you know to stay out of that abandoned house in the woods, the one that looks something terrible might have happened there years ago, resulting in it being scorned by humanity. Your ability to sense hidden dangers depended on your willingness to believe.

Which is what this story is about.

When I was a kid there were mysteries in the world, things we did not understand and places we had not seen. But we wondered about them. There might be jungles and dinosaurs on Venus, or spindly, water-starved creatures struggling to survive on Mars. Who knew what lay in that jungle heart of darkness, or the deep ocean trench? Were flying saucers winging overhead, always when we’d left the camera sitting on the table by the front door?

But as time went by and we learned more, the world began to grow smaller and the mystery fade, replaced with cold facts (or hot facts in the case of Venus, a roasting hell hole of carbon dioxide). Poor Mars became an icy desert with air so thin you could not reasonably call it air. Flying saucers became swamp gas and ocean trenches were filled with nothing but silt and a scattering of weird, glow-in-the-dark shrimp.

Think “Excaliber,” and the world of magic giving way to a world of men.

I liked life better when I didn’t know so much about it, just as I liked my friends better when their thoughts weren’t paraded across a panoply of social media. Didn’t we all get along better before we found out so-and-so voted for that evil bastard Trump?

The lack of knowing every stinking detail about every stinking thing – and the curious imaginings that filled those gaps – made life magically delicious, to borrow a breakfast cereal jingle. And that’s what this story is about, in a darkly roundabout way.

Maybe there’s still a bit of mystery – and magic – left in this world.

Lord, I hope so.

“Animal” is available only on Amazon’s Kindle, but remember: You don’t need a Kindle device to read a Kindle book. Download the free Kindle app to your phone or tablet.

Order a copy of “Animal” by following this link.

(Cover image courtesy of ph.)

From Amazon

Animal: Revised, updated and enhanced with additional content, “Animal” asks the question, “If larks, and katydids, can dream, then can I?”

Billy Stafford would rather be home, in his bed, grabbing a few winks because tomorrow will bring a special challenge at his job and he’ll need his wits about him and. …

And here he is, at Earl’s Tavern and Package Store, listening to Bob Decker go on and on in a drunken stupor about crazy things – monsters in a lake, or Bigfoot, or UFOs. Worse, he’s forcing Billy to get drunk with him, which means tomorrow Billy will wake up with a headachy brain fog and everything will be for s**t.

Across the bar, two men are teasing the lady bartender about something they’ve got in their Jeep, something they shot out in the woods that day, something that nobody has ever seen before. Billy thinks Bob should be talking to them, not him. It’s all a crock of you-know-what and truth be told, Billy just wants to go home and sleep.

He finally disentangles himself from Bob and heads out the door, and the night should have ended there. But it doesn’t.

Because he sees something.

In the Jeep.

About the author:

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, Ello and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

About this book:

The book’s total length is 5,691 words.

Image courtesy of Del Stone Jr.

This will be a short entry because while I did a lot yesterday, I didn’t do a lot of different “lot”s.

Basically I wrote all day. I added about 2,000 words to my short story – gonna have to watch that word count because I tend to get flabby when I’m having fun.

It was a perfect day for writing. I woke up to rain, which meant leaf-raking was out. I had no pressing matters to which I should attend. So I wrote.

About halfway through the session I identified some logic flaws in my story which I hurried to correct. My next problem is one of character motivation and building the story’s internal logic. I’ve solved the motivation issue but the internal logic – and the building blocks to support that logic – aren’t clearly delineated. That’s always a problem for me but rewriting will fix it.

As usual I have doubts – again that’s the normal process for me when writing. I can deal with it.

So in other words everything is going fine with the story. I hope to have it finished this week. I beg the editors’ indulgence.

Meanwhile the forecast is for a WINTER STORM to sweep over Northwest Florida late Thursday night and Friday. We have an 80 percent chance of SNOW on Friday! Can you believe that? I won’t be driving anywhere Friday – that’s for sure.

Last night I had a movie blowout. First I watched the last half of Steven Seagal’s “Driven to Kill,” a predictable potboiler I’ve written about before. Then it was the ridiculous but fun “Red Dawn,” followed by Kevin Bacon’s “Death Sentence,” a really, really underrated action flick.

Del Stone Jr

Post Office ( a short horror story )

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