Mladen and Del review ‘Hokum’

Image courtesy of Neon.

“Hokum” Starring Adam Scott as tortured asswipe Ohm Bauman, Peter Coonan as bumbling bad guy Mal, Florence Ordesh as wispy but likeable Fiona, Brendan Conroy as decent Cob, and others. Directed by Damian McCarthy. 1 hour, 47 minutes. Rated R. Theatrical release.

Plot summary: Caustic Bauman is a successful novel writer with a past that haunts him. He heads for Ireland to disperse the ashes of his mother and father at the place where they honeymooned, a backwoods hotel. There, Bauman encounters a bundle of characters who lead him toward a reckoning filled with terror and regret and salvation.  

Spoilers: Gotta tell you something about the movie to make the review make sense. No?

Mladen’s take

If I had to guess, and I will, “Hokum” will probably make a little bit of money in the theaters before getting shoved into the capacious jaws of the beast of streaming. That’s too bad because this horror crime thriller of a film is pretty darned good on a couple of planes.

More than anything, the movie’s sound effects and score are superb.

Even at the old theater where Del and I saw the film, the speakers generated an immersive mood. Rain plinking gutters. Wind sweeping through the canopy of towering pines. The hotel creaking from age or moaning from its disused basement. It was all so crisp and satisfyingly phlegmatic. Loved it to no end.

The cinematography was real. No computer-generated imagery here. The narrow stone passageways, the ghostly honeymoon suite, the cramped dumbwaiter, all practical effects well used.

“Hokum” builds suspense, throws in a jump scare or two, and ends with a satisfying, if not dubious, lesson: The truly evil do get punished, at least at the Bilberry Woods Hotel.  

To top it all off, the movie offers nothing obscene. Blood doesn’t spray. Guts don’t spill. Heads aren’t separated from shoulders. There’s no nudity. Normally, the lack of any of those in a horror movie disappoints me. Not so in this case.

“Hokum” plays very nicely with lighting. Dimness is the film’s ally. And there’s no better way to create it but with the use of the plain and simple incandescent bulb. Their orange glow doesn’t travel far. It seemed that the “Hokum” set was designed to eat light. It barely reflected from any surface. It cast shadows that trifled with your imagination. Lovely, indeed.

What’s the consequence of masterful use of lighting in film. Is there a demon looking up at you from the dumbwaiter’s deep shaft? Maybe. What’s that circling you? Only its silhouette is visible through the thin fabric of the curtain shrouding the bed where you’re hiding.

My principal gripe with “Hokum” is the chattiness of the Irish folk who Bauman encounters at the hotel. They disclose more than warranted to the stranger in their midst and continue doing so.

Also, I’m no fan of the suicide. It’s misplaced as a story arc. The person offing themselves may have been a dickhead but there was no evidence of suicidal tendencies or, for that matter, ideation.

Still, the film’s moodiness, coupled to the good acting by all the principal players, makes for good horror. “Hokum” is but a witch’s cold breath from an A-.

Del’s take

Wait just a minute, Mladen. Aren’t you the one who said, “Why are you making me watch horror?” as the trailers ended and the opening credits for “Hokum” rolled across the screen? I thought you didn’t like horror. Yet here you are, giving an A- to a horror movie. You old softie. I bet you like cats, too.

But you’re right, Mladen. “Hokum” is a damn fine movie, worth every pixel of your digital approbation. But I should clarify – “Hokum” is not a horror movie per se, although it’s being pitched as such. “Hokum” is a haunted house story that evolves into a murder mystery, in the spirit of 2000’s “What Lies Beneath.”

Kudos to Adam Scott for reigning in his comedic impulses and delivering an excellent dramatic performance as the unlikeable Ohm Bauman. Mladen, did you notice the possible significance of his first name, “Ohm,” which is a measure of electrical resistance? You might say he’s stubborn, which would play well with the image of the ram skull, another symbol of unyielding resistance. Bauman is a hard-hearted fellow who has shut off his feelings after a tragedy of his childhood, one for which he blames himself. Yet he yearns for the true vision of himself, just like the goats that climb onto cars in this movie because they seek a reflective surface after eating the magic mushrooms of the forest.

Kudos also to director Damian McCarthy for his steady hand at the tiller, eschewing the temptation of jump scares and gore in favor of mood, shadows and eerie music to build tension in this very scary movie. McCarthy seems to recognize the less seen the better in a movie where everything we’re witnessing just might be a fever dream concocted by a hallucinogenic fungi.

My only quibble: At one point Bauman becomes trapped in a room. I kept asking myself: Why doesn’t he simply break out a window and jump?

Still, “Hokum” is a terrific example of horror, ghost stories, murder mysteries – whatever you want to call them – done right. It pits the Ugly American against Old World Courtliness, and in the end … well, I won’t say, because I don’t want to spoil it for you. Do go see “Hokum” in the theater. It’s much spookier that way.

Oh, and Mladen, I’ll call your A-.

Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and writer.

Image courtesy of Pxhere by way of a Creative Commons license. https://pxhere.com/en/photo/1222994

INTRODUCTION

The hardest thing you may ever have to do is bury a child. The second-hardest is burying a parent.

When my father passed away, only a year after I wrote this story, I felt like an orphan. Worse, I was now responsible for my mother. I had two siblings, but one lived 35 miles away and the other a thousand. I lived only a mile or two from Mom, so I became the go-to sibling for Mom Problems – the stopped-up sink, the car that wouldn’t start, the strange sound outside the door at night.

Was I up for the challenge? We’d soon find out.

Not a week after Dad passed, Mom was on the phone asking about a piece of paperwork from the bank. It was about her IRA. I came over to check. It looked like all the funds had been withdrawn. How was that possible? Mom started crying. She had no idea what to do, so I told her I’d take care of it, and the next day I was at the bank trying to find out what had happened.

Turns out, it was a kind of receipt. When the IRA was taken out of Dad’s name and put in Mom’s, a new account had to be created and the funds rolled over from Dad’s account to Mom’s. That’s all.

But it was the first of many, many jobs I had to do for Mom over the coming years. She passed in 2022, outliving my father by 24 years. That was 24 years of medical emergencies, hurricanes, car accidents, balky washing machines and scam artists who prey on the elderly I presided over. I look back on it and wonder how I managed – while working a full-time job and dealing with my own medical emergencies, balky washing machines and scam artists.

It was stressful and solutions were hard work – but nothing like the solution provided by the dutiful son in this short story!

You’ll be pleased to know this is NOT autobiographical, and it wasn’t based on real events.

If you’re not pleased about that, I sure am!

THE DUTIFUL SON

“It’s perfectly normal to feel guilt when your parents pass away,” Bob Harrison said quietly, his voice in resonance with the gloom that shrouded the living room. It was a dark day, and the curtains were drawn, and two kind and gentle people had just died.

The other man, young Ed Masters, reached to the side of his La-Z-Boy and yanked the lever that raised the footrest. Then he leaned back and stared Bob straight in the eye and said, “I should have spent more time with them, but that’s OK. My parents will live in me for the rest of my life.”

Harrison nodded. “Yes. In all of us.” He did not know if the words would comfort Ed, but he felt he must try. Barbara and Clayton Masters had been loving and devoted members of their Unitarian Universalist congregation for many years, and now they would have every answer to every question life had ever posed to them, having passed away within a day of one another, a rare partnership in existence that transcended mortal bounds. Harrison almost envied them, but he would mourn only their absence as they had gone to whatever better place lay in store for them.

But young Ed had rarely attended services, and Harrison doubted he harbored any belief system at all. So Harrison had dropped by to visit, to make sure Ed was holding up OK. It was the least he could do for Barb and Clay.

“Will there be services?” Harrison asked. Ed shook his head.

“Nope. Why should there? My parents are alive. In me.”

Harrison tried not to let a frown creep into his expression. Young Ed seemed firm in his convictions – too firm, for somebody who had just lost his parents. Harrison pressed on.

“Will your parents be buried or cremated?”

“Neither,” Ed said.

“I don’t understand.”

Ed rolled his eyes. “Look, I know you’re trying to help, but I don’t need it. Really.” He stretched in the recliner. “I don’t feel any guilt about not spending time with my folks. I’m with them all the time. I’ve taken care of that.”

“What have you done?” Harrison asked.

“I’ve taken care of it,” Ed answered evenly, a whiff of anger heating the words.

Harrison spread his hands. “I ask because Barb and Clay were well-liked by the members of our congregation, and we’d like to honor their memory somehow.”

“Then have your own services,” Ed snapped. “I’ve already had mine.”

Something was wrong here. That dull, boorish component to young Ed’s personality was hanging over the room like a thundercloud, grief-stricken or not. And he did not seem so grief-stricken at that, Harrison heard himself thinking. Young Ed seemed almost defensive.

“What became of the remains?” Harrison asked.

Ed glared at him. “Is that important?”

“Yes,” Harrison shot back. “Barb and Clay were my friends, and I want to know what you did with them.”

He could see the color rising in young Ed’s cheeks, the anger blooming there like some horrible, crimson flower. And then just as quickly it broke, and Ed let out his breath in a hitching sigh that somehow seemed contrived.

“Will you please just leave me alone?” he sobbed. “Yes, I should have spent more time with them, but I’ve taken care of that. They’ll be with me always now.”

Harrison stood up abruptly and glowered at him. This was an act, a facade, a pretense of grief to throw him off track. He had the horrible feeling that the bodies were here, in this house, and an image sprang to mind of two desiccated corpses being discovered in the back bedroom years hence. It was more than Harrison could bear. Barb and Clay deserved better than that.

He marched down the hallway and began searching the bedrooms. Behind him, he heard young Ed shouting, “What the hell are you doing? Have you gone crazy?”

He went through the bedrooms, and the back bathroom, and then he tromped down the stairs and into the basement. He climbed back upstairs and thumped up into the attic.

Nowhere. They were nowhere. He came back downstairs. Young Ed stood in the hallway by the kitchen, leaning insolently against the wall. Harrison drew up to him and hissed, “I don’t know what you’ve done, but I’m calling the law on this.”

Young Ed smirked, “Be my guest,” and crossed his leg, bumping the kitchen garbage can. The lid toppled over, but not before Harrison spotted the bone inside, gnawed to the gristle.

A lump formed in his stomach. His gaze wandered to young Ed’s eyes. For the first time, he saw the true insanity lurking there.

“I told you,” young Ed said, his voice devoid of any emotion that could be called human. “My folks are alive. In me.”

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 Warner Bros. Pictures.

“Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” Starring Jack Reynor as Charlie Cannon, Laia Costa as Larissa Cannon, May Calamawy as Detective Dalia Zaki, Natalie Grace as Katie, and others. Directed by Lee Cronin. Two hours, 14 minutes. Rated R. Theatrical release.

Spoilers: Mladen took the week off so no, there shouldn’t be any.

Plot summary: An American family living in Egypt suffers a tragedy when their daughter is abducted by persons unknown. Eight years later, the family receives shocking news: Their daughter has been found. They bring her back to their home in the States only to discover she’s no longer the innocent child they knew and loved.

Del’s take:

If you were thinking “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is a re-imagining of the Brendan Fraser Mummy franchise of 1999, allow me to disabuse you of that notion. This is a different story in every way, and I can’t say I enjoyed it more than its romantic and adventurous predecessor.

“Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” belongs to a genre I call “gorror,” a portmanteau of “gore” and “horror,” because like many horror movies today it relies on gore, blood and cruelty to generate its tension. I long for the good old days when moviemakers understood the theater of the mind is the best venue for scary tales of the supernatural. Remember films like “The Innocents” or the Robert Wise production of “The Haunting of Hill House,” where the antagonists were rarely (if ever) seen? Those movies were terrifying because they allowed the audience to imagine what might be lurking in the shadows. Ridley Scott gave us only fleeting glimpses of the alien for that very reason.

I could give you a laundry list of shock-value scenes from “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” but I’ll keep it to just this one: At a funeral wake, the body is knocked from its coffin and a young girl laps up embalming fluid oozing from the corpse. Does that scare you, or make you want to vomit? You can share my plastic bag.

It’s a shame because I really wanted to like this movie. The premise was interesting enough: An American family is living in Egypt, where the father works as a journalist. One day their daughter Katie is abducted from their back yard by a mysterious crone. Authorities are unable to recover the girl and the family returns to America heartbroken. Eight years later they receive a call – Katie has been found. But she’s changed. She’s no longer verbal and suffers seizures and other health maladies. The family brings Katie to their home in Arizona where terrible things start to happen, embalming fluid-sipping notwithstanding.

From that point the movie degenerates into a series of scenes intended to revolt and disgust. These scenes are punctuated with moments of explanation – some might call it too much explanation though I’ll never complain about a movie making its intentions clear. At least the script attempts to capture some of the anguish a family would experience under those circumstances and Jack Reynor as the dad, Charlie Cannon, delivers the appropriate pathos, although at times his horror more closely resembles Moe from The Three Stooges finally noticing his hair is on fire. Natalie Grace is appropriately sinister as the altered Katie Cannon. The most memorable character was May Calamawy as Detective Dalia Zaki, who struck me as a kind of Egyptian Clarice Starling. She presented a quiet, sometimes callow dignity and determination that made me want to root for her. Verónica Falcón was also very, very good as Larissa Cannon’s mother, although her role wasn’t very large.

My problem with “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is its cruelty. As an up-and-hopefully-coming horror writer I was always told to never place a child in jeopardy, that audiences wouldn’t like it and editors wouldn’t buy it. Obviously that maxim doesn’t apply to cinema as kids in peril have existed in film for decades, long before “The Exorcist” gave us Linda Blair’s head spinning on a pole back in the early ’70s. But even that can be overdone and “The Mummy” takes its best shot, not just with children but everyone. Two hours of toenails being ripped out and tongues being lopped off, and I was ready for this movie to end.

I’m grading “The Mummy” a B-. I had meant to give it a C+ but I remembered some of my more generous grades for other movies that weren’t as skillfully put together and I reconsidered. “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is a well organized movie and its conceit is clever, but the relentless cruelty and its focus on body horror relegate it to mere gorror status.

I’m much more fearful of what the eye can’t see, but the imagination can. I hope Hollywood rediscovers this simple rubric sooner than later.

Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and writer.

Image courtesy of Pickpik by way of a Creative Commons search.

INTRODUCTION

I’m trying to think back to the first moment I experienced a fear of heights. It has something to do with my father.

Lest you believe this sounds like a therapy session, I mean, quite literally my father.

I couldn’t have been more than 3 or 4 years old – I’m thinking 3. My dad was active duty Air Force and we were stationed at either Vancouver or Spokane, Washington. We were living in base housing.

One night, my dad picked me up and put me on his shoulders. I remember thinking I was about to fall off. I had nothing else to hold onto, so I grabbed his forehead in a death grip. We headed off down the hall. My head bonked against the opening to the hallway.

I remember being so afraid of the highness that I couldn’t wait for him to put me back down.

A couple of years later we flew to Spain, and I was not bothered by heights. I did have one episode of acrophobia in Spain. We were touring a castle and had to navigate a narrow board that crossed an abyss between two turrets. I had to get down on my knees and crawl, I was so afraid. But on the flight home I was fine.

Cut to age 14. I was flying to Detroit to spend part of the summer with my sister and her husband. Mom put me on a DC-9 out of Eglin Air Force Base in Northwest Florida. I was to fly from there to Dothan, Alabama, then to Atlanta, where I would change planes and fly direct to Detroit. I thought that was pretty cool, being able to do that by myself at age 14.

The plane hurtled down the runway and leaped into the air. I took one look out the window and my brain swooned. I remember thinking, “Oh my God, I’ve made a mistake,” and in a moment of panic I actually considered walking up to the cockpit – you could do that in those days – and asking the pilots to turn around and let me off. But I was paralyzed with terror so I averted my eyes from the porthole and looked straight ahead, up the aisle. Eventually, I was able to look out and not seize with fear. By the time I got to Detroit I was mostly OK.

Needless to say, I’m not a fan of flying. I have an irrational fear of heights. It’s not just airplanes – I find ladders difficult to manage, and climbing up on my roof to clear tree limbs and leaf litter has become a challenge. I realize airplanes are the safest way to get from Point A to Point B, that the odds of dying in a plane crash are lower than ridiculous … but I don’t care. I’ve beaten the odds many times before, in things totally unrelated to air travel, and I don’t want to be on an airplane the next time I defy the impossible. Lottery ticket, yes. Handsome boyfriend, yes. Delta 787, no way in hell!

So I wrote this story, an homage to my phobia about flying.

As an acrophobe I can’t imagine a fate worse than being stuck on airplane, terrified beyond words, alongwith a hostile individual hellbent on scaring the living shit out of you. That actually happened to me, on a flight from Pensacola to Los Angeles. I was seated next to a guy who was flying to Houston – he designed video games for a living. When he found out I was afraid to fly he spent the entire flight suddenly grabbing my arm and whispering, “WHAT WAS THAT SOUND?” Needless to say I wasn’t amused.

But there was something else I wanted to say in this story – that anger, hatred and vengeance are often unfocused. You see that so often in this world of 2024, especially involving politics and issues such as LGBTQ rights and the rights of women. People treat their hate as a matter of convenience without bothering to check the facts first. It’s sad that each of us must rediscover the wheel when it comes to the things we think we know, opposed to what is truly there.

I haven’t flown in 24 years. Now that I’m retired, travel is an option. I would love, for instance, to visit Spain, where we lived for three years, and try to find my boyhood house. But to get there will require a trip across the Atlantic Ocean aboard a jetliner. Does enough Xanax and Valium exist in the world to get me there with my wits intact?

If I find out, I’ll let you know.

Meanwhile, what’s that sound?

—

THE FEAR OF FEAR ITSELF

The first hour

From five miles up, Paul Westerbrook thought the ground resembled an impossible dream of heaven.

Impossible, he thought, his depth of focus shifting to his reflection in the airliner porthole. Impossible that I could be here and the ground could be so far away.

He watched his image. Shafts of sunlight slanted through the row of portholes on the opposite side of the cabin, back-lighting his head so that his face was masked in shadow. Darker pools filled in the spaces around his eyes and mouth.

He might have been staring at a skull.

And he could hear a rushing sound. Not the dull thunder of a flood but a fine sandpapery hiss, the sound of air whistling over the bright aluminum skin of the 767 as it hurtled through the thin atmosphere, its engines and wings maintaining a hair-trigger equilibrium between thrust and weight and lift, and he could feel the plane sinking and rising as variables of air density and wind velocity and engine compression altered the formula in tiny but noticeable increments that brought mists of perspiration to his forehead as he tried to calculate the forces of turbulence necessary to send the airplane spinning out of control –

He slammed the porthole visor down.

He squeezed his eyes shut.

And he recited a silent prayer: Please, God. I’ll do anything you want. Just get this plane on the ground safely.

Somebody was speaking to him. He blinked.

“Did you want something to drink, sir?” A flight attendant. She was older than most, with thin, blond hair, pale skin and high cheekbones. She had the calm look of a kindergarten teacher handing out waxed Dixie cups of warm Kool-Aid. The aniline blue uniform of South Air smoothed the curves of her body and gave her a confident, almost motherly aspect.

A bump rattled the plane. Paul grabbed the back rest of the seat in front of him and felt his palm slide greasily over the plastic upholstery.

Finally, he said, “A drink? Yes,” and was instantly ashamed of the tremor in his voice. “Bring me a couple of Valiums and a bottle of Crown Royal. That should do the trick.”

The attendant smiled warmly. “White knuckles, eh?” she whispered, and he nodded too quickly. He thought he must look to her like a contrite child.

“Do you fly often?” She was easing into the seat next to him, and he thought he could feel a shuddering vibration passing through the floor of the airplane and up through the frame of his seat. Or was that a change in engine pitch? Was the pilot throttling back as a warning light suddenly blinked red, or was a turbine starting to rattle as hairline cracks widened into chasms of flawed metal and the blades prepared to fly off the shaft like knives thrown by a blindfolded magician –

“Not much. But from now on, yes,” he said. And he had made the decision himself, hadn’t he? In spite of Gail’s subtle coercion, he had accepted the position of regional buyer for the McAndliss chain of department stores, a promotion that would give him more opportunities – a final chance as it were, because twice before he had refused offers like this for whatever reason had seemed important at the time, and if he’d refused again … Well. Gail would have said nothing, but her measured ways of doing things when she was angry would have spoken volumes. You are an indecisive and fearful man, she would have thought, adding: I don’t know why I married you.

So he’d accepted the offer.

But the job required flying.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” the attendant said and laid an utterly cool palm on his hand. Her skin was as dry and smooth as a pool hustler’s chalked cue. “Most people experience a little anxiety while flying. Sometimes it’s acrophobia, claustrophobia, or even a combination of the two. Are you afraid of heights?”

Paul nodded once. Heights. God, yes.

She patted his hand. “My father used to say, ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself,’” She shook her head sadly.

Paul nodded without enthusiasm. At that moment he didn’t care about borrowed aphorisms. He simply wanted to be on the ground.

“My father was an airline pilot.” She smiled mysteriously. “He never worried about … the unexpected.”

A staticky voice scratched from the cabin speakers. It was the captain, announcing that Air South’s non-stop service from Los Angeles to Atlanta had reached its cruising altitude, that passengers could remove their seatbelts, that their flight time would be about four hours and 45 minutes – Paul stopped listening. His heart seemed ready to jump out of his throat.

The attendant gave Paul’s hand a reassuring pat and stood up. “I’ll bring you a cocktail and check to see how you’re doing.” At that moment the whining throb of the engines shifted to a lower, almost subliminal pitch that seemed to resonate through Paul’s bones. His stomach looped into a tense knot.

She looked at him and said, “Try not to worry, Mr. Westerbrook,” and her gaze hardened for a moment, as if a layer of ice had formed over her eyes and melted, long enough for her to whisper, “If the plane crashes, all the worrying in the world won’t change a thing.”

Then she was padding silently toward the rear of the airplane, and the terror was swarming all over Paul again as he tried to remember when he had told her his name.

The second hour

Paul wondered what Gail was doing at this moment.

In his mind’s eye he saw her at the dining room table, her leather portfolio beside her with papers spilling between the teeth of the zipper – homework papers or tests to be graded, the things teachers carried with them. She would remove the papers and arrange them into neat stacks and attack them until they were back inside the portfolio.

That is, if she were there. And not next door.

When he landed at Hartsfield International Airport he would go home in a taxi. After 17 years, their marriage could no longer supported airport reunions.

But he envied her. He envied her discipline and her stubbornness and her immunity to fear.

“Here’s your drink, Mr. Westerbrook,” the flight attendant announced. Two other attendants were pushing a drink cart up the aisle, tossing ice cubes into plastic glasses like crap shooters and popping the tabs on cans of 7-Up and Coca-Cola.

He thanked her nervously and drained half the glass in a single swallow. The liquor seemed to cauterize the lining of his throat. Bourbon and Coke – mostly bourbon. He wasn’t a bourbon drinker, but anything with alcohol would have served the moment.

He glanced at her nametag: It said TESS.

She slid into the seat next to him and in a conspiratorial whisper said, “Do you like the drink? That’s the way my father liked them – heavy on the bourbon.”

Paul took another sip. Why hadn’t she asked him what he wanted to drink? He thought to ask, but said, “You mention your father often. You must love him very much.”

Her gaze became unfocused, and a tracing of a smile crossed her lips. “Yes,” she said. The smile dimmed to an expression Paul approximated with regret. Then she was back to business. “Now finish that drink because the first officer tells me we’re headed for some rough weather.”

Paul felt ice crystals forming in his blood. Rough weather? Turbulence? Something cold was sliding along the lifeline in his palm – a drop of moisture, either condensation from the cup or chilled sweat. He managed to stammer, “Will – will it be bad?”

The flight attendant – Tess – shrugged. “You never know, especially with this flight crew.”

He raised an eyebrow and took another hit off the drink.

“The first officer has been drinking since we left LAX,” she said.

The liquor burned like lye. It caught in his windpipe and he choked, spraying bourbon over the tray. He hacked until his eyes burned and tears smeared everything into watery blots of shadow and light. When he was finally able to breath, he wheezed, “But isn’t that – isn’t that against the rules?”

She frowned. “You’re darn right it’s against the rules. Honest to God. My father would have a heart attack if he could see what goes on in the cockpit these days.”

“But why doesn’t the Captain put a stop to it?” Paul babbled.

She shook her head wearily. “This sort of thing goes on all the time – it’s not unusual. All the airlines have problems with alcoholic pilots.” She hesitated and cocked an ear. “Did you hear that?” She listened a moment longer. “It sounded like they shut down an engine.” Paul felt his eyes goggling. She tittered, and it was a sound without mirth. “I guess not.”

She walked away, humming softly. Paul stared blankly at the seatback ahead of him. A pit seemed to have opened in his stomach, claiming everything inside him and giving back nothing but black fear.He wished he could fold himself into that pit and simply disappear until this ordeal was over. He wished he could return to the heavenly ground.

The third hour

Paul sat rigid in his seat. He could hear a metronomic pulsing, the sound a wheel bearing on a car makes when the grease has been reduced to sludge and metal is rubbing against metal and the entire wheel assembly is about to fly apart. He listened closely, his ear filtering out the extraneous noises of people chatting, and he could hear it: a droning throb modulated by regular basso pulses that seemed to beat through the airframe itself, the sound of weary machinery about to fail.

He listened.

It was the sound of his own heart.

God, he thought, if Gail could see me she’d – she’d –

Tess was suddenly in the seat next to him. “Did you enjoy your drink?” she asked happily.

Paul nodded, and asked distractedly, “And how is the first officer enjoying his drinks?”

“Fine, fine,” she said dismissively, ignoring the sarcasm.

“What about – ” Paul hated to say the word, as if saying it would make it real, “those storms. Are we through them yet?”

Tess’s eyes narrowed into a playful squint and she shook her head. She raised the visor and pointed. Paul risked a quick glance and then twitched his eyes away as the vertiginous change in perspective caused him to swoon. On the horizon he had seen … clouds. He was no meteorologist. But they resembled volcanos of turbulence and violence. He slid the visor back down.

“Cumulonimbus, Mr. Westerbrook,” she said gravely. “Thunderstorms. Hell breathers.” That last part came out in an overdone stage whisper. On the ground he would have laughed at her melodrama, but up here, trapped in this cabin, he could only stare, dumbstruck with terror.

“Those are the same clouds responsible for most airplane crashes,” she said.      “For instance, the worst disaster in aviation history occurred on the Canary Island of Tenerife when two 747s collided during a thunderstorm. Over 500 people …” She clasped her fingers around an imaginary matchstick and blew silently.

Paul squeezed his eyes shut and turned away. Why was she telling him this? She knew he was afraid. Why was she doing this to him?

“To quote my father,” she said, her voice suddenly solemn, as if she were about to recite a catechism, “`God created thunderstorms to keep pilots humble.’ But then thunderstorms aren’t the only reason airplanes crash.” The fingers came up for another accounting. “Mechanical or structural failure is the second-leading cause, followed by pilot error, mid-air collisions – and did you know, Mr. Westerbrook, that even disturbances by passengers have been blamed for airplane crashes? Did you know that?”

He dared to open his eyes and look at her. She looked back with a knowing smile.

He heard loud voices from the rear of the airplane. Tess’s head went up like a wolf sniffing the air for deer scent. She hauled herself out of the seat with surprising litheness.

Paul looked back, fearful of what he might see. An elderly woman was standing by her seat and the man next to her – Paul could see only the man’s bald pate – seemed to be in some kind of distress. Paul settled into his seat and shivered.

A man wearing the South Air uniform appeared in the aisle, striding toward the rear of the plane. He was tall, his hair grayed at the temples and his face framed with lines. Paul thought he must be the captain, and the sight of him came simultaneously as a comfort and a shock. What could be happening that required the captain’s intervention?

After a few moments, the captain reappeared, moving toward the cockpit. Paul loudly cleared his throat.

The man stopped and Paul said quickly, “Is everything all right, Captain?” He thought his voice sounded muffled and indistinct, as if a ventriloquist had spoken the words for him.

The man grinned and said, “Everything’s fine. An elderly gentleman was having a problem with his ear.” He pointed to his own ear. “The pressure. But now he’s fine.” He hesitated and added, “Oh, and I’m not the captain. I’m the first officer.”

A tremor shook Paul. This man didn’t look intoxicated. But Paul had heard stories about pilots’ abilities to hold their booze. Maybe this first officer would return to the cockpit and knock back a stiff belt of bourbon and snicker about the chicken shit in seat C15 who was about to crap his drawers.

Without thinking, Paul asked: “Sir, are you drinking man?”

The first officer chuckled. “Excuse me? I’m a member of the LDS church. We don’t drink alcohol.”

“And what about the storms,” Paul blurted, hearing the panic rise in his voice but not caring. “We’re flying into storms, aren’t we? Thunderstorms. Hell breathers.”

The man looked baffled. “No,” he answered tentatively. “We’ve got a few stratocumulus at about 70 degrees compass heading, but no thunderstorms.” He tucked his tie into his shirt. “Just relax and enjoy the flight, sir. We’ll be in Atlanta in about two hours.” He walked away.

Paul felt a prickly sensation across his body, as if his skin were cooling and shrinking back around his bones.

Lies.

She’d lied to him.

In the jumble of his emotions a thought loomed – something he could never quite forget. A lie Gail had told him. About the man next door, and the afternoons she spent over there, “tutoring” his son. He remembered the vow he’d made to never believe anything anyone told him without confirming it himself.

Lied to. He’d let himself be lied to again.

“My God, I’m not believing this. I’m really not believing this.” Tess was in the seat next to him, smelling of spilled bourbon and petrouli and a faint whiff of sweat. “That man in B28 – he had a gun! He threatened to shoot up the airplane!”

Paul shook his head. He said, simply, “No more.”

“Thank God Karen – she’s the flight attendant responsible for rows 20 through 38 – saw what was happening and stopped him.”

Paul closed his eyes. “We’re not flying into bad weather.”

“She wrestled the gun away from him before he could pull the trigger,” Tess continued, a hard edge forming on her words.

“The first officer hasn’t been drinking, either,” Paul went on.  “He’s a Mormon, for Christ’s sake.”

“Do you have any idea what a bullet would do to this airplane?” She seemed to be talking to no one but herself. “What would happen?” she murmured questioningly. “The cabin would lose pressure, and rapid decompression might damage the flight controls – no, this airplane has electronic flight controls. It’s the older jets with mechanical flight controls, like the 727, that might have problems. But the pilots could lose consciousness. The plane could crash, I suppose.”

“Have you heard anything I’ve said?” Paul asked, his voice rising. The plane jiggled and his heart raced a moment. “What were you trying to do? Scare the shit out of me?”

She shook her head, her gaze refocusing into a glare. “Mr. Westerbrook, are you familiar with desensitization therapy?”

That caught him off guard.

“It requires that a person who is afraid of something be repeatedly exposed to the source of his fear until he becomes desensitized to it.” She paused and sighed. “That’s what I was doing. I apologize if I frightened you, but it seemed the best way to handle the situation. Like my father said,” she added cheerfully, “You have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

Paul clenched the armrests until veins stood out on his hands. “Is that so? Well tell me, what do you think your father would say about a flight attendant who scares the living shit out of her passengers? That’s not exactly standard procedure.”

Her expression chilled to absolute zero. “He wouldn’t say anything, Mr. Westerbrook. My father is dead.”

Instantly, Paul’s anger swirled away. He mumbled, “Oh.”

Her stare was blank. “He was killed in a plane crash. Three years ago. In Houston.”

The breath eased from Paul’s lungs in a slow, defeated sigh. Some emotion, yellow and bitter like shame, began to gather inside as he tried to imagine the grief she must feel when she came aboard an airplane. He found that it was beyond his comprehension.

She picked at her jacket. “I was only trying to help.”

He nodded slowly. Maybe he had been too harsh. Finally, unsatisfactorily, he said, “OK, let’s just … forget it. No more fairy tales about storms or drunken copilots or crashes.”

Tess said, “Fine,” and got up to leave. Paul touched a finger to her sleeve and added, “The first officer told me the man in the back was having problems with his ears. So no more fairy tales about whackos shooting up the airplane. OK?”

She gave him a puzzled look. “I guess he was trying to reassure you. Truth is, the man really did threaten to shoot up the airplane. Karen took the gun away from him and gave it to me.” She whispered urgently, “Look, Mr. Westerbrook. This airplane is like a miniature city – all the things that happen in a city can happen up here, too. People fight, get drunk, die – “

“No more fairy tales!” Paul said out loud, fresh panic making the hairs on the back of his neck brush against his damp shirt collar. His voice warbled beyond the narrow perimeter of the seats around him. Another passenger, a young woman who was reading a novel, glanced his way. “We agreed. No more fairy tales!” He started to clamber out of his seat but realized he had no place to go, so he sat back down and stared stonily in the opposite direction.

Tess tapped him on the shoulder. He refused to look at her. So she said in an exasperated tone, “Does this look like a fairy tale?”

He looked. Resting in her palm was a tiny revolver.

The fourth hour

Impossible, Paul thought, squeezing a sweat-soaked lump of napkin as if he were pumping a vein to give blood. This is impossible.

The airplane had entered an area of clear-air turbulence. It roller-coastered through the ice blue sky like some kind of Six Flags ride, sliding down invisible flumes of air to abruptly surge higher. His inner ear told him this was all wrong, and the glands in his jaw began to ache, a prelude to motion sickness. But he promised himself he would not puke. He would not add that to his list of miseries.

He thought of the old man and the dainty gun Tess had showed him, and his heart pancaked into a spin. It made no sense. Why would the man want to kill himself and everyone else aboard?

Then a final question occurred to him: How could the man have smuggled a gun past the metal detectors and X-ray machines?

The first officer has been drinking since we left LAX.

Thunderstorms, Mr. Westerbrook. Hell-breathers.

And, finally, The man really did attempt to shoot up the airplane. Karen took the gun away from him and gave it to me.

Lies.

He couldn’t stand it. He undid his seatbelt and marched toward the rear of the airplane. An attendant who was sitting in the last row of seats spotted him, rolled her eyes and moved to get up, but he was already upon the bald man hunched in Seat B28.

Paul’s first impression was that the man had died a thousand years ago and the airline was returning his body, filched by graverobbers, to its rightful resting place in some Egyptian tomb. The man was old. His flesh was wrapped around his skinny bones like yellowed cellophane, and his hand shook with a palsy that seemed to consume all his energy so he could do nothing but squat in the seat and stare straight ahead, his drooping lips permanently bent into an atrophied frown.

Paul thought: This man couldn’t have brought a gun aboard.

The elderly woman sitting next to him glanced up. Paul asked, “How is the problem with his ears?” and the woman answered in a brittle rattle, “Oh, he’s doing much better – “

Somebody planted a hand on Paul’s shoulder and he jerked around, expecting to see Tess’s leering smile. But it was the other flight attendant. She said irritably, “Sir, you’ll have to return to your seat – “

Paul seized her by the shoulders and her eyes grew round and afraid. “Tess,” he hissed. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I think Tess has lost her marbles. She’s got a gun!”

The woman shook off his hands. “I don’t know what you’re talking about but you’d better return to your seat – “

“I’m talking about Tess!” he said angrily. “She’s got – “

“Keep your voice down!” she snapped. “You’ll cause a panic. I’ll make sure the Captain hears what you’ve got to say.”

The plane dropped suddenly and they both grabbed seatbacks to hold on. An overhead bin unlatched and the lid flew up with a plastic clatter that startled the woman with the novel, who glanced up apprehensively and then buried herself in the book with a look of ferocious concentration. Paul turned and scuttled down the aisle.

A newspaper clipping lay in his seat.

Next to it was a bullet.

He held the bullet before him like a jeweler assaying a gemstone, his emotions bouncing between fascination and outright terror. And then he turned to the clipping.

The headline read: “40 survive crash at Houston.” Paul could not stop himself from reading the story.

“An Air South jetliner carrying 62 people crashed at Houston’s International Airport on Monday, but only 22 people were killed in what authorities describe as a heroic effort by the flight crew to land the crippled jet.

“Air South Flight 6212 was only 1 1/2 hours into its nonstop flight from Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport to Los Angeles when the crew radioed a distress call and asked for emergency clearance to land at Houston.

“Emergency crews stood by as the Air South jet, a Boeing 727, attempted to make a wheels-up landing. The jetliner broke into three pieces before finally coming to rest on a taxiway.”

Paul scanned the story, and then his eye came to rest on a string of cold paragraphs midway through.

“FAA crash investigators on the scene said the pilot reported a rapid decompression incident at altitude that resulted in damage to the jetliner’s control systems.

“Officials would not comment on the `incident,’ but survivors who spoke with reporters said a hysterical passenger apparently opened an emergency hatch to `get off the plane.’

“Officials would not confirm the report, but one of the survivors, a man identified as Paul D. Westbock of Atlanta, was taken into custody by airport security personnel and later transferred to the federal detention facility in Kingwood.”

The date on the clipping was three years ago.

It all came to him, all of it, the pieces falling together, and Paul found that he could not sit down, that he had been overtaken by a kind of numbness as explanations finally meshed with events, and he would not sit down until this airplane was on the ground, his memory serving up a final shocking image of Tess and the dainty little gun – a lady’s gun, really. He had to tell the Captain what was happening. He had to. Because there was nothing left for Tess to do now but kill him.

He stepped out into the aisle and began hurrying forward.

As he approached the bulkhead that separated coach from first class he heard her say, “Where are you going, Mr. Westerbrook?”

She was sitting next to the emergency hatch. She motioned for him to sit down. He paused and weighed his chances of making a dash for the cockpit. The gun was cupped in her palm.

She stood and pushed him into the seat next to the hatch.

“You should be in your seat, Mr. Westerbrook,” she hissed.

“It wasn’t me,” he whispered. He heard his voice starting to crack. “The names aren’t even the same.”

“I was on that flight,” she said, ignoring him. “I tried to help the man who was afraid. But as you read, I didn’t do my job very well.” She swallowed noisily. “My father was the pilot. He died. But I lived. So did the man. He never undid his seatbelt.” A tremor ran through her. “Somehow that doesn’t seem right.”

Paul watched her hand. He wondered if he could grab the gun. In his mind he saw Gail laughing at him: Why would you even consider such an absurd thought; you’re an indecisive and fearful man. I should’ve divorced you and married Thornton next door.

“I want you to do something,” Tess said, and Paul knew she was no longer speaking to him. “I want you to make it right.”

Paul shook his head. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said, but he thought he knew exactly what she meant.

She turned and skewered him with a stony stare. “I want you to open that door.”

His heart clenched around the words. He tried to imagine doing that – grasping the release lever and pulling OUT, then UP, and the hatch popping away like a champagne cork and air blasting out, into a sky-blue void, sucking him with it, with nothing below but miles of tumbling emptiness and gyrating terror –

No, no, his mind rejected it with a convulsive shudder that brought real tears to his eyes and had him fumbling for his seatbelt.

“Unfasten your seatbelt and open the door,” she said evenly.

“No,” he whimpered, scrunching his eyes shut. “It wasn’t me.” He winched the belt tight and grabbed the armrests and sat that way a few trembling moments, daring to peek after nothing happened. He saw that Tess was gazing at him almost tenderly.

“Don’t you understand?” she asked softly. “I know it wasn’t you. But it doesn’t matter. You’ll do. You’re the best I can do.” Then her eyes narrowed into slits and the last inflection of sanity departed her voice and she whispered slyly, “Unfasten your seatbelt and open the door.”

He shook his head no. No. No.

He could see the rage building in her, a flaming, almost artificial blush of crimson rising in her cheeks. A vein pulsed in her neck. She appeared ready to explode.

She undid her seatbelt with a practiced snap and stood and glared down at him. The color of her uniform seemed to go from blue to black.

“All right,” she muttered hoarsely. “Then I’ll shoot the goddamned pilot and copilot, and we’ll all go down. And it’ll be your fault, Mr. Westerbrook. Just like before.”

Later, he would reflect on this moment either consciously or in nightmares and realize he had acted without thinking, in a way that was decidedly untimid, and that his actions came not in response to some admonition or coercion. He simply acted.

He grabbed the emergency hatch handle and pulled OUT –

 – she turned and her face was a smiling rictus of triumph –

 – and then he pulled UP –

 – her expression collapsed into dawning horror –

 And the cabin exploded as the hatch blew out and was snatched into the screaming slipstream and then everything was pouring through the socket in a bellowing shock wave of frigid air and papers and pillows and every loose thing inside the cabin that could fill the vacuum. The plane lurched sharply and began to dive. Paul felt himself being sucked into that freezing, screeching storm and grabbed the armrests of the seat next to him, his heart whamming with sledgehammer blows, until the seats themselves began to tear away from the cabin floor and jitterbug toward the opening.

 Something larger flew overhead and banged into the hatchway.

 Tess.

 He peered over his shoulder and saw her clinging to the edge of the hatch, her body flapping against the 767’s aluminum skin, and beyond her was empty sky and clouds – a confluence of every terror Paul could imagine brought to horrifying reality only inches from his face. But again he acted without thinking, and this too he would look back on and wonder where the courage had come from.

 He reached for her.

 They locked eyes for a moment, and what he saw in her was malice refined to its purest essence. She mouthed two words. She gave him an evil smile.

 And then, she let go.

All the hours afterwards

 They let Paul go.

 He passed every lie-detector test. The gun was registered to Tess. And another passenger, the woman who had been reading the novel, corroborated parts of Paul’s testimony.

So they let him go.

And when he returned to work, he told his superiors he could not do the job. He didn’t care what Gail thought.

Because Tess had told him, just before she let go.

She had said, “Next time.”

And there would not be a next time.

—

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 Searchlight Pictures.

“Ready or Not 2 Here I Come” Starring Samara Weaving as Grace MacCaullay, Kathryn Newton as Faith MacCaullay, Elijah Wood as the lawyer, Sarah Michelle Gellar as Ursula Danforth, Shawn Hatosy as Titus Danforth, David Cronenberg as Chester Danforth and others. Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett. 1 hour, 48 minutes. Rated R. Theatrical release.

Plot summary: Sitting on the front steps of the Le Domas family mansion after the deadly events of “Ready or Not,” Grace MacCaullay finds herself swept up in a new, deadlier hide-and-seek style contest as members of four families vie for control of the High Council, a body that serves Mr. La Bail, aka Lucifer.

Spoilers: Does the Devil wear Prada?

Del’s take

Grace MacCaullay has just defeated the entire Lucifer-worshipping Le Domas clan in a night of bloody mayhem at their now flaming mansion. The authorities rightfully suspect Grace as having committed many felonies, but she’s injured. She’s taken to a hospital. She’s grilled by a detective who has already decided her guilt. Her estranged sister, Faith, is summoned, as Grace never removed Faith as her emergency contact. And then. …

She and Faith are brought before the shadowy High Council, where they learn (a) the Le Domas clan wasn’t the only collective of rich bitches who sold their souls to the devil for worldly wealth, (b) Grace’s destruction of the Le Domas family has created a vacancy at the head of a cabal of devil-worshippers called the High Council, and (c) four new families will compete for that vacant position – and the immense power it conveys – by sacrificing Grace and her sister to Mr. La Bail, aka the devil, before the sun rises the next day.

Sound familiar?

Yes, “Ready or Not 2” is about power. In an opening scene, Chester Danforth – before he is smothered by his children – watches a war play out on the TV news, then picks up his telephone, orders a cease-fire, and watches the breathless announcement of a cessation in hostilities on the very same news broadcast. And yes, “Ready or Not 2” is an eat-the-rich indulgence in wish fulfillment, especially in 2026, as the 1 percenters pad their velvet-upholstered cushion of wealth and control at the expense of poor suckers like you and me.

But what “Ready or Not 2” really wants to be is a John Wickian-style semi-comedy about the power of family, which is the weakest of its three subtextual pillars. The whole family-comes-first theme is largely irrelevant to the matters at hand – the bloody extermination of wealthy parasites and their useless scions as creatively and graphically as possible. In fact, the constant intrusion of guilt becomes annoying – how often can Faith remind Grace that she abandoned her little sister, that she “wasn’t there”? Americans are besotten with this notion of familial abandonment. It’s become trite, an easy fallback when an icing of emotional resonance is needed for tension or motivation.

The comedic aspects of “Ready or Not 2” are somewhat clever and operate on multiple levels, but the overall tone is one of satire, not slapstick, though some scenes definitely qualify as physical humor – the rocket launcher, for example. Dialogue has its moments, too, but the quality of the writing isn’t as sharp or as hilariously acerbic as something like “Doctor Strangelove.” Overall, the humor tends to trivialize, not satirize, making it impossible to view “Ready or Not 2” as anything but a trifle.

As is the case with many horror movies these days, even the ones alleged to be funny, “Ready or Not 2” is drenched in blood, and some of the violence crosses the line between horror and torture porn. For example, an extended battle between Titus and Faith became a teeth-loosening, rib-cracking orgy of mayhem that goes on far too long. Were Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett were taking far too much pleasure seeing their female character get her ass kicked?

The first act is slow, but acts two and three pick up the pace, redeeming “Ready or Not 2” as an entertaining movie. But like a SnapChat message sent late at night, anything of significance fades by morning, relegating “Ready or Not 2” to the sales bin of disposable entertainment, stat. Again, it’s a trifle. Nothing more.

I’m giving it a B. See it in a movie theater.

Mladen’s take

Samara Weaving and Kathyrn Newton are very good actresses. Their faces express as much about what they’re thinking as the words they’re saying in “Ready or Not 2 Here I Come.”

Also praiseworthy is the pit massacre near the end of the movie. Clearly, it was modeled on the way the Trump administration operates.

Between the sisters’ back-and-forth squabbling and rehashes of family history and the pit, there are a few chuckle-inducing skits. I enjoyed watching Elijah Wood play the anti-Frodo, though his rendition of a Mephistopheles wedding prayer and ritual could have been more joyful.

But, none of these bits of the positive make “Ready or Not 2” good.

Again and again and again, the protagonists and the antagonists make damnably poor choices, because, I don’t know, the scriptwriters were too unimaginative to come up with more realistic ways folks end up making dumbass decisions. Either the estranged but re-uniting sisters prolonged their misery by, say, not shooting or beheading the brother-and-sister team trying to kill them to get the chairman’s seat on the bedeviled High Council or the antagonists, whose souls have been sold to Satan, turn out to be remarkably poor shots or too conniving for their own good or just too maniacal. Come on, you’re allied with Beelzebub. Wouldn’t that automatically imbue you with capacity to have at least one of the, oh, dozen, 50-caliber bullets you fired from a high-end sniper rifle find its mark?

One other bit in the movie irritated me. It’s the poor choice of vocabulary. Whenever one of the devil worshippers violated a devil worship bylaw, they would metamorphose into a fountain of gelatinous goo that had a large splash radius. The younger MacCaullay called those splatter events “combustion.” No, no, no. The evildoers didn’t catch fire. They didn’t burn. They exploded, goddamnit.

More deeply disappointing, though, was that my building hope was dashed. As “Ready or Not 2” progressed, I started to hope that the elder MacCaullay would figure out a way to knock off Lucifer or at least subvert Hell by turning it into an alternative Heaven. No such luck. The best she was able to do was initiate the pit mayhem, which, though much appreciated, felt like she had failed to finish what she was dragged into.

I have not watched the first “Ready or Not” and I had no expectations for “Ready or Not 2.” In fact, when Dusty asked us if we’d like to see the movie, I confused it with another title that appeared in theaters in late 2025, “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t.” I knew nothing about “Ready or Not 2” before I saw it. So, my review is sincere, my counsel untainted. You can wait for this one-notch-above-a-C+ movie to hit the streaming circuit.

Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and writer.

Image courtesy of A24.

“Undertone” Starring Nina Kiri as Evy, Michèle Duquet as Mama, and Adam DiMarco as Justin. Written and directed by Ian Tuason. 1 hour, 34 minutes. Rated R. Theatrical release.

Plot summary: A podcaster who is caring for her terminally ill mother begins to see parallels between her personal situation and a series of terrifying audio files.

Spoilers: No.

Del’s take

Mladen was unable to join me for “Undertone.” He was in Tennessee, hunting fossils. I’ve told him repeatedly if he wants to find an old stone he’s got my number, but he never listens.

His loss, because “Undertone” is quite a good movie. It eschews the modern approach to horror – jump scares, gore, full frontal monster – and relies on the viewer’s imagination to conjure the deepest scares, reminiscent of “The Innocents,” the Robert Wise production of “The Haunting of Hill House,” and Ridley Scott’s “Alien,” all masterpieces of horror. But where “Undertone” shines is its use of light and sound as a storytelling device.

The story is about Evy (Nina Kiri), a podcaster who is caring for her terminally ill mother (Michèle Duquet). She is living in her mother’s house, a small, claustrophobic relic from a bygone era. At odd hours of the morning Evy manages to squeeze in her paying job, that of a podcaster focusing on paranormal events. She is a skeptic; her creative partner, Justin (Adam DiMarco) is a believer, an obvious parallel to the relationship between Dana Scully and Fox Mulder of “The X-Files.”

Justin has received a collection of 10 audio files from an unknown contributor that are believed to prove the existence of a demon, Abyzou, a creature of European folklore who steals children because she cannot have a child of her own. As the audio files are played countdown-style over a period of days, Evy begins to realize they describe events taking place in her personal life, and her grasp on reality begins to slip.

“Undertone” is rife with subtext – religious guilt, familial guilt, and weightier issues such as Evy’s pregnancy, and whether she should keep the child or have an abortion, and her growing exhaustion in caring for her mother. But “Undertone” is as much a vibe as it is a story. The spooky atmospherics operate like a fourth character. Tuason directs the eye to a darkened doorway behind Evy, as if we should expect to see something there. The house is perpetually cloaked in shadow, just as Evy’s life is at the moment. Sounds reverberate throughout – a clock ticking loudly, the refrigerator cycling on – but there are other sounds heard by Evy – a crying baby, a nursery rhyme played backward that may contain a summons. Are they real? We don’t know. When Evy puts on her headphones, all sound ceases and the silence becomes monolithic. These elements enhance the suffocating milieu of Evy’s predicament and amplify the themes of guilt and isolation.

Nina Kiri is excellent as Evy – she appears in virtually every scene – while Adam DiMarco’s Justin, who appears only as a voice on the phone, is the rational appositive to what may be Evy’s descent into madness. Or is it possession? Again, we don’t know. Michèle Duquet’s Mama rarely moves, but when she does, be prepared for the unexpected.

“Undertone” is Tuason’s first movie and cost about half a million dollars to make. Expect more from this talented writer and director. I appreciated the dearth of modern horror movie tropes and the ingenious use of light and sound to convey dread.

“Undertone” rates a B+, maybe an A.

Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and writer.

Image courtesy of StockVault.

INTRODUCTION

This story is about a hypocrite.

A particular kind of hypocrite. The Republican kind of hypocrite.

Full disclosure: For most of my life I was registered as a Republican. The Republican Party was the party of reason. It was the party of moderation. It was the only responsible political choice for people like me – decent, simple, hard-working individuals who believed in living within their means and delaying gratification.

The Democratic Party represented a wholly different set of values. The Democratic Party was about taking your money and hard work and giving them to somebody else, usually somebody who was unwilling to work hard or delay gratification. The Democrats were about welfare, and socialism, and a new set of values that eschewed the traditional strengths of American culture.

So I remained a registered Republican for most of my adult life. But along the way, the Republican Party changed.

This change began in the 1980s, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Christian conservatives, through instruments like the Moral Majority, began to organize and seize control of the Republican Party. Over the years this lingering conservativism, masquerading as religionism, held on and festered until it found a new champion in Donald J. Trump.

Trump was, in my estimation, the worst president in the history of the United States. I won’t belabor his sins, but suffice it to say he wrecked the country AND he divided it. Maybe you don’t share that opinion. Maybe you’re wrong.

The end result is a group of people who not only don’t mind if their leaders lie, cheat and steal, but a generation of Americans who believe lying, cheating and stealing are normalized.

What an astonishing departure from everything I’ve known over my lifetime. To think, these folks believe lying, cheating and stealing aren’t so bad because everybody does it, including the president!

Worse, they lie to themselves, and that’s what “The Fire People” is about.

Here we have a woman who outwardly presents as a religious, conservative, moral person. But look beneath the veneer and you find somebody who isn’t what they seem, somebody who aspires to a different kind of life, one that they outwardly condemn when it’s somebody else but secretly embrace for themselves.

Fate has a way of tripping up people like that, and that’s exactly what happens to the protagonist of “The Fire People.”

She gets what she thinks those other people deserve.

I wrote this story in the late ’90s but sadly, it’s more relevant today than it was back then. I guess it’s true that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Del Stone Jr., July 18, 2024

—

THE FIRE PEOPLE

… and if I die before I wake,

I pray the lord my soul will take …

It was the smoke alarm that hauled Gabby out of a dream-filled sleep, a barb of sound hooking through her left ear, through the center of her brain, piercing muzzy, subconscious images of guilt and sin and virginity.

She did not know what was happening, and staggered out of bed to answer the telephone or thumb the buzzer on the alarm clock or remove the clothes from the dryer. But after a moment of eye-rubbing she recognized the shriek, and her skin seemed to shrink around her bones. Oh my, she gasped to herself, and she almost said it. She almost spoke the sacrilege:

Oh my God.

She reached for the doorknob without thinking and – too late now – it was hot, hotter than the little travel iron set on “cotton,” and the door swung open as she jerked her hand away, a surprised gasp whistling through her lips. A wave of twisting heat and light rolled into the bedroom, as if she had just popped the door on the oven after baking a tray of dinner rolls.

Fire – fire – fire –

Flames blew up the stairwell with a roar, chewing along the pebbled ceiling and gnawing at the banister and reaching for the register at the top of the landing. The air was filled with the cauterizing stench of chemicals and woodsmoke, and Gabby could think only stupid thoughts: How did this happen? What did I do to deserve this?

And then she was crawling for the sliding glass door at the other end of the bedroom, which opened to the fourth-floor balcony – never mind what she would do then; all that mattered was escape. And as a part of her brain tallied the losses – her clothes and furniture, the photographs of her Sunday school students and her great-grandmother’s Bible and the gold-plated crucifix pendant given to her by the Reverend Thomas Miller for her years of service to the Antioch Baptist Church – another part of her glanced back resentfully at the advancing flames, and that was when she saw them. Sinister movement amid the ugly glare.

The fire people.

Her muscles froze, and the breath eased out of her so that her belly grazed the furry nap of the carpet. Although she knew she must get out now or die, she could not tear herself from the sight of them.

People, in the fire. Of the fire.

People with huge, swaying breasts that seemed filled with jellied gasoline, and bulbous penises that twitched and sprayed bright arcing gobbets of lava. Copulating. Fornicating.

People fucking.

They raced across the ceiling in a kind of frantic insectile glee to roll against the draperies so that the fabric exploded in flames, or shoved impossibly long, bright, arms into the air register so that it fumed inky smoke, or rolled across the bubbling carpet toward her, shimmying under the bed where she kept her magazine photos of naked men … Oh no, don’t find them, I didn’t put them there, not mine … and then the closet doors jumped open and the fire people swept napthic penises and breasts down the breadth of her wardrobe, and the other things in there, the little box of sex things, the gels and straps and mechanical devices, so that the contents erupted in a righteous blaze that flanked her, a gallery of jittering, undulating shapes rising between her and the balcony.

Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the lord my soul will keep … the children’s catechism sprang perversely to her mind, and as the fire people circled her and drew closer, reaching out with the promise of an embrace that would boil the meat from her bones, the next verse of that simple prayer hovered at the back of her thoughts, and she knew exactly what she had done to deserve this, and which lord had come to take her away … and keep her. …

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 by Pexels.

Introduction to “The Garage”

Craig Terry gave me the idea for this story. He didn’t own a garage.

I met Craig in the 1990s. I was working at a newspaper, editing copy, putting together sections, and Craig was hired as a staff artist. He was also a talented political cartoonist but I worked with him on illustrations for my feature sections. Through our interactions we came to be friends. I didn’t find out later that he and his wife were friends with my mom. Small world.

At one point Craig expressed an interest in getting into comics. I had dipped a toe into that world, thanks to my friendship with Dave Dorman and Lurene Haines, and it also happened that I was working on a project called “13 Seconds,” a collection of 13 very short horror stories – all under 1,000 words – that I was hoping to sell to Joe Pruett at Negative Burn. I asked Craig if he wanted to illustrate them and he said yes.

In talking with Craig about “13 Seconds” I mentioned I was scrounging for another idea for a story. That’s when he told me his idea about a messy garage. I can’t remember the details but what emerged from that conversation was this story, “The Garage,” about a man with perhaps the world’s messiest garage – and oldest stash of hoarded goods – in the world.

We sent a couple of sample stories to Joe and he passed on the project, but as luck would have it Stefan Dziemianowicz was editing a collection of very short horror stories for Barnes & Noble, “Horrors! 365 Scary Stories.” I submitted all 13 of my super-shorts and seven made the cut, including “The Garage.”

So there you have it, a story about a man whose garage is packed with junk The farther back you go, the older the junk gets, until it gets really old.

Who knows what else might be lurking in the musty confines of that storage space?

—

THE GARAGE

By Del Stone Jr. and C.M. Terry

“It’s a beauty, ain’t it?” Parker glowed, his voice equal parts admiration and pride, the voice of a man who had just shit the world’s biggest turd – and would now sell his story to Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

But Samuelson had to admit: It did have a certain grandeur, the way train derailments or airplane disasters unfold with strange beauty, layered within the horror.

The messiest garage he’d ever seen.

“Come on; let’s take a look,” Parker insisted, speaking in a reverent whisper.

Parker’s garage was a disaster, the chintzy bastard. Didn’t he every throw anything away? Samuelson’s gaze traveled over the Escher-like arrangement of junk: bicycle parts, wheel rims, sacks of aluminum cans, lampshades, a seamstress’s dummy, wire mesh crab traps, leaning towers of newspapers – oh God, the eye refused to take it all in. It gathered in drifts at the corners, rode the walls and scrunched against the ceiling, a critical mass approaching some terrible implosion.

“I’ve got a ’67 Eldorado somewhere under all this stuff,” Parker grinned. “But the best part is back here.”

He led Samuelson down a narrow path to the back of the garage. There, he wedged his shoulder against a door Samuelson hadn’t noticed and pushed. The door groaned and gave way. Parker flipped on a light.

It was another room … filled with junk. Old ice boxes, ironclad electric ranges, fans, Life magazines, wooden crates filled with empty Coke bottles. …

“The previous owners left this stuff here,” Parker beamed. “Lots of antiques. I’m gonna make a fortune.”

Samuelson could see the dollar signs glowing in Parker’s eyes. He gazed across the room, where he saw another door. “What’s back there?”

Parker frowned. “I dunno. Never noticed it before.” He tiptoed through the clutter and forced open the door.

Another room. Filled with junk. Crockery chamberpots and blackened andirons and dusty bottles and wooden boxes. Parker had his hands on his hips. “Jesus! I didn’t know this stuff was here, but God, look at it! Ain’t it great?”

But Samuelson was staring at the opposite wall. Another door. Parker noticed, and his jaw dropped. “Holy shit! That’s impossible! The house doesn’t go back that far!”

The room was filled with spears and quivers and hairy mounds of animal skins. The walls were covered with charcoal scrawlings of bears and lions and mammoth-like creatures.

Parker’s voice was filled with wonder. “I don’t understand it,” he said, spreading his arms to take in the room, “but it’s – it’s – terrific! Stone Age junk! Can you guess what this stuff would sell for? Can you? Millions, I’d bet!”

Samuelson grabbed Parker’s arm and began to haul him back. There, at the back of the chamber, was another door, an opening, really, blocked by a fall of stones. Behind the stones Samuelson could hear a scritching sound, and a basso rumbling, as if something very large waited on the other side. A cool finger of dread began to work its way up the knobs of Samuelson’s spine.

“C’mon,” Parker hissed, jerking away and stumbling off-balance across the room. “Let’s check it out.”

“No, goddammit,” Samuelson whispered. “Can’t you hear it? Can’t you hear it?”

But Parker was already shoving rocks out of the way and shouting over his shoulder, “C’mon, man! This is my lottery ticket! This is my ship coming in!”

Then the rocks at the top of the opening tumbled loose, and something – Samuelson could not say what – reached through and yanked Parker off his feet and into the gap so that Samuelson saw only Parker’s boots vanish into the darkness, trailed only by a snapped-off scream. …

And as Samuelson turned and sprinted for the door, a sickening image arose in his mind, an image of the lock somehow ratcheting into place behind them as they’d entered the chamber, because from the opening rocks were being hurled out of the way, and something with a growl that sounded a million years old was trying to break free.

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 .

Introduction to “The Hole”

I wrote this story as part of a project I called “13 Seconds,” a collection of one-page horror stories, each with an accompanying full-page illustration. Alas, that project never saw the light of day.

But the stories did. I sold seven to the Barnes & Noble anthology “Horrors! 365 Scary Stories.” The others found homes across a wide spectrum of publications. This story, for instance, was published in Dark Raptor.

What I tried to accomplish with “The Hole” was to glimpse the inner thoughts of a sexually repressed misogynist. In this case, he’s using the telescope sight on a rifle to spy on his sexy neighbor, who’s exercising and won’t sit still. Anybody who’s ever used a telescope sight knows movement will carry the targeted image out of the sight instantly, so it’s imperative they remain still.

In his zeal to get the woman to stay still so he can ogle her, the man gets carried away and … well, something unfortunate happens.

And yes, the word “hole,” as used in this story, has more than one meaning. The protagonist is a misogynist.

—

THE HOLE

Bobby blinked and strained to focus on the wobbling image in the binocular’s eyepiece.

He wanted to see if she had the hole.

But he couldn’t see. Peering from the sliding glass door that let out of his apartment bedroom onto the narrow, vestigial balcony … peeking through the slats of aluminum vertical blinds stained with cigarette smoke and the sharp exhalation of pent-up breath … the bedroom lights off so that if she glanced his way, across the apartment complex commons, a stray look that might snag on the glint of a reflection or his black shape superimposed against the lighter wall. …

But she didn’t look, and he couldn’t see … if she had the hole – the hole that all women who hated him had.

He cursed the binoculars. He tossed them onto the bed, where they bounced like a dead trampolinist. He needed magnification. He needed power.

He needed the scope on the Enfield.

He pulled the rifle from the closet and slid off the protective covering on the sight. He used the barrel to force aside – just barely – one of the blinds so he could peek through. The building facade jerked across his field of view, then a dizzying blur of patios, until he found her patio, at first unfamiliar because of its closeness. But he recognized her potted geraniums, her director’s chair, her faux copper wind chimes swaying from the crossbeam that traversed the patio.

And then he saw her.

Bouncing in the bedroom, an exercise video playing on the TV. Smooth and long-limbed and elegant – not pretty, not beautiful, but … sexy, the way some women transcend those overheated adjectives men use when they are together and talking dirty. She was wrapped in a skimpy pink lycra body suit, like some rare, imported confection, and her dark, dark hair was bound up into a pony tail that was tied off with a bandana, and she was bouncing and swaying and kicking in a way most men would have found sexy.

But Bobby wanted her to sit still.

Because he couldn’t see if she had the hole.

He twisted the focal adjustment screw and tried to zoom in on her, but she was moving so fast, her legs kicking out behind her. And then she was bending, up and down, up and down.

Bobby closed his eyes and swore under his breath. If she would just sit still for a moment. A moment was all he would need.

He slid open the sliding glass door. Now, with only a thin screen blocking his view, he might see better.

But she was doing the deep-knee bend thing, up and down, up and down, and he could not see – he couldn’t see, dammit.

“Sit still, bitch,” he muttered, and slapped the screen door open. It slammed against the frame and made a loud, clattering sound. His heart jumped and he yanked the rifle snout out of the blinds, afraid she might have heard and turned this way.

But no. She had her hands above her head and was bending at the waist, first to the left, then to the right, first to the left –

“Sit still, you fucking bitch,” he seethed and yanked the rifle against his shoulder to squint harder through the scope.

She was bouncing, bouncing, the exercise video seeming to bounce with her –

“Sit still, goddammit – “

Bouncing, bouncing –

“Goddammit – “ he couldn’t see, he couldn’t see –

 – bouncing –

He squeezed the trigger and the gun kicked and for a moment he could hear nothing but an eerie, feverish ringing. He squinted through the scope, and finally he saw her. …

Slumped over the television, her arms dangling, as if she had exercised herself to death.

But she was still, at last, and he saw it. The hole. The hole that all women had who hated him or ignored him or could care less if he even existed. What was this now? The tenth? The eleventh woman he had found with the hole? Someday, all the women with holes would be gone, and only women who cared about him would be left. He would see to that. He would make sure. They would be gone if they had the hole.

The cratered, steamy hole surrounded by a splash of blood.

The hole.

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 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?

 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:

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 .