  Horror/Scary
This week: Edited by: W.D.Wilcox  
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Under the unblinking gaze of the full moon, Bill rushed between the silent statues, granite slabs, and markers of the dearly deceased as though he were zigzagging a dark and complicated labyrinth. With pressing urgency, shovel cocked over his left shoulder, the beam of his flashlight danced wildly over the gravestones as he scanned the names of the dead.
Finally, he stopped at a marble marker, blank but for the carved image of an angelic cherub sitting atop the curve of the headstone with an open book upon its naked lap. Its face was sad and pitiful, tarnished and discolored, yet ever-watchful; its eyes appeared as if they would blink to life at any moment and shine a sick and yellow hue, ill, and pooled with tears of pus and disease.
Tearing his gaze from the face of the small statue, and looking down, he played the flashlight over the grave. The depression was still there; not as deep as he remembered it, but still there all the same.
Dropping the light, he swung the shovel from his shoulder and kissed the blade. “It’s all up to you now, baby. You gotta help me find it. You gotta.” He flipped the shovel around and stabbed it into the moist skin of deep earth.
Even in his frantic work, his breath laboring madly, he heard a mewling sound of pure terror, and at first he did not realize that he had made the sound himself.
He stopped digging and swiftly explored the upper portion of his face in the manner of a blind man seeking an impression of a stranger’s appearance, crystals of ice clustered around his spine.
His forehead was no longer a smooth plate of bone. It was lumpy, knotted. Strange excrescences had arisen in an apparently random pattern, and a narrow gnarled ridge of bone had appeared down the center of his forehead, extending to the bridge of his nose. He felt thick, pulsing arteries along his hairline, where there should have been no such vessels.
His body was beginning to re-form itself, and he could not stop mewling, even as hot tears sprang to his eyes.
“My God, no! Not now! Not when I’m so close....”
Again he turned to his work, but this time the urgency had turned into horror-filled panic.
Faster he shoveled dirt to the left and right of the deepening hole; faster still, he haphazardly threw muck and debris straight up into the air, racing to unearth his salvation.
Through it all, his voice as thick as mud, he mumbled his pathetic prayers to defeat the ominous deadline and exhume his only hope of survival.
Caught helplessly in the tide of change, he groaned, hissed, gagged, and whimpered as he dug, but time was running out.
The change smashed through him as if it were a bolt of lightning blasting through a tree, the current entering at the highest point of the highest limb and sizzling out through the hair-fine tips of the deepest roots.
Hot tears flooded from his eyes, and rivulets of thick saliva streamed from his mouth. His breastbone cracked, shuddered, swelled larger, and sought a new shape. His spine creaked, and he felt it shifting within him as it curved up into hunched and deformed shoulders.
Then, he found it…a small black box, still half-buried.
Dropping the shovel from his claw-like fingers, nearly transformed into a creature the world has never seen before, he stretched down and pulled the box from the hole.
Scraping the skin of dirt and mud from it, he held it to his chest as though it were a child once lost, and now found. Rocking his body to-and-fro, he tried to soothe it, as if he were attempting to pacify a crying newborn.
Slowly, after a time, he set it on his lap and opened it. A cocoon of pure white light enveloped him, and in a vile and whispery voice, he said, “I’ve found you. I’ve finally found my muse!”
It was then that he was able to finish this very newsletter.
Until next time,
may you never lose your muse,
billwilcox
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Creepy Crawly Valentines
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#1387593 by Not Available. |
Excerpt: He kissed her as she sat, the unmistakable scent of sulphur and clotted blood on his breath. She tried not to flinch as his cold, sharp fingers brushed away the trail left from her previous tear. In front of her the servants placed her meal: A raw, bloodied heart atop a timbal of fresh vegetables. Smoky ribbons of steam still curled from it on the frosty air as it cooled.
Excerpt: I smile as her heart stops beating. It is done, and I am eager to join her in death, to show her all the things I couldn’t before. I withdraw from her body, before it traps me in its hollow core. My joy is short lived as the wind stirs, bringing with it a faint whisper. I pause, straining to hear the sound. Every fiber of my being tingles with delight and my eyes drift shut. The whisper grows into a melodic lover’s serenade.
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#1378670 by Not Available. |
Excerpt: The creature hissed and clapped its hands once. When it did, vines wrapped around her wrists, tearing into her skin. Her vision and strength returned. The creature laughed again and crept over the cliff's edge, lithe body like a serpent. "I can pull you up." It stretched down, long fingers just within reach. She couldn't see how it hung on. "I only ask for one thing in return."
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#1407109 by Not Available. |
Excerpt: My soft soothing voice lulled him into a false sense of slumber, creating the illusion of eventual freedom. The spell remained unbroken until I lifted the foot-long machete from the steel tray.
Excerpt: You see, love does not like to be taken for granted -- ever! It does not have a conscience or any regret for its actions once it has been spurned. Love knows only one way to get back -- one way to get even with the person that scorned it. True love, intense love -- can kill you. Which is why I am telling you this story. My true love has but one purpose in mind . . . to kill me.
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Screaming Emails
alanscott
Submitted Comment:
OMG, Bill! No wonder I like your stuff so much! I'm a big fan of Stephen R. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant stories, too.
Great newsletter!
-Alex
KimChi 
Submitted Comment:
Thanks for defining the "reluctant hero". She shows up a lot in my stories, and now I know why--we all want to see the underdog become the hero. Writing or reading, there's a vicarious triumph in skewering childhood demons on a teeny little pen.
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Horror/Scary: February 11, 2009 Issue [#2878]
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