This one was tough. For the Terribleminds Game of Aspects (Halloweenie Edition) the d10 of Destiny dictated:
Southern Gothic
Evil Awakens!
Strip Club
Stage Magic

Hoo boy. Happy Halloween!

It was another hot, muggy night, but the wind was low, meaning the mugginess was not supplemented by the heavy, muddy water of the bayou. Still, it was the sort of weather that drove men from their sweltering places of work and the oppressive presence of disappointed wives to the red lights and cheap drinks at Stella’s Corner Hitching Post, where the ladies wore a fine sheet of sweat for reasons other than the weather.

Sugar fought down the urge to step out the back door and light up a cigarette. Quitting was proving more and more difficult, but her promise to her son was ever-present in her mind. Candy walking in and hanging up a light robe that smelled like Marlboros right next to Sugar’s tiny makeup table and mirror didn’t help matters.

“I should not have worn these heels.” Candy looked down at the clear, long stilettos currently strapped to her feet. “I’m going to trip and break something next time I go out there.”

“Child, you’re a pro. You’re going to be fine.” Sugar tugged at her white string bikini, knowing the stage lights would bring out the extreme contrast between the scant garment and her skin. “You know the guys like you in heels like that. They make your butt look fantastic.”

“We’re not all naturally endowed like Hecate out there.”

Sugar frowned, peeking around her mirror towards the stage. Hecate was dancing to something slow and sensual, grinding on her pole and shooting smoldering looks out at the audience. A newcomer, she was quickly rivaling Sugar as the most sought-after girl at Stella’s. In addition to her looks, she was known for using things like slight of hand and the occasional pyrotechnics element in her routines.

“Still not sure where Stella found her.”

“I’m not sure she did.” Candy was changing into her black bikini, preparing for the insanely popular double-show she did with Sugar. “Word ’round the sewing circle is that Hecate sauntered into Stella’s office and pretty much demanded a job.”

Sugar turned back to the curtain and the view beyond. While most eyes in the main room of Stella’s were on Hecate’s hips and other curves, Sugar found herself looking at Hecate’s fingers. Each nail was painted a different color, almost all of them were earth tones, and the way she moved her fingers seemed to have little to do with beckoning men closer to the stage. It made Sugar extremely uneasy.

The men started to shift in their seats, and not in the usual way of Stella’s customers. They all leaned towards the stage, transfixed by Hecate’s movements and gestures, and when the roving spotlights shifted away from them, pinpoints of red appeared in their eyes. Hecate began to laugh, spinning on the stage, raising her arms above her head. She finished her turn facing backstage, and her smile only brightened at the sight of Candy and Sugar.

“Sisters! You really should join me.”

Candy, shaking, moved to obey, but Sugar put a hand on her shoulder.

“What’re you doing to them?”

“Giving them a brand new show with more magic than usual. You know how men love a show.”

Sugar took a closer look at the audience. “They look hypnotized.”

“Darling, they’re men. They get hypnotized when you take off your top.”

“But this… why are you doing this?”

“The aggression of men’s done more to hurt us and our world than anything else; it’s time we used it for ourselves rather than let them do what they want.”

Candy blinked. “How does that make us better?”

Hecate shook her head. “Precious child. These sorts of men claim to want freedom and equality, but do you feel equal when you need to be up here shaking your ass to feed yourself?”

“There’s nothing wrong about what we do. If you object so much to how men treat us, why come here in the first place?”

“Sugar, my dear, you don’t seem to understand. I’m not here to entertain. I’m here to right wrongs that have waited centuries to be righted. Words always fail so action must be taken. These men will act as I want them to act, and no words will be necessary to make things right.”

“And what you’re doing is right? I don’t see how. You want to make these people into puppets! That’s just as wrong!”

Hecate shook her head. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Sugar.” She snapped her fingers.

Men rose from the seats nearest to the stage and surged towards Sugar. She backed away towards the dressing room and the back door she knew was twenty paces behind her. Hecate moved in behind the half-dozen men she’d summoned to the stage, smiling as they reached for Sugar.

“You see? Even under my influence, child, men are only after one thing.”

Rough hands took hold of Sugar as she fought back. She nailed one of them in the groin with the tip of her heel, another she bit on the hand, a third she scratched across the eyes. But more were coming, and it was getting more and more difficult to see Hecate, or Candy.

There was a dull thud from somewhere in the crowd. One by one, the men collapsed, and finally Hecate swooned, falling on top of them all. Candy stood behind her, a bottle of champagne in her hands.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I didn’t know what else to do.”

Sugar got to her feet. “It’s okay. It’s okay, Candy, you did the right thing.”

Candy nodded, though her hands still shook. “Well… what do we do now?”

After getting more clothes on, Sugar and Candy found quite a bit of cash amongst the sleeping patrons of Stella’s. They opened beers throughout the club, and left Hecate atop her pile of men. Sugar grabbed her cell phone as she and Candy walked out.

“Stella, it’s Sugar. Hecate tried to throw a private party at the Post. I thought you should know…”

Courtesy istaevan

For Terribleminds’ Flash Fiction Challenge Five Ingredients Make A Story:

“I don’t have any idea where that storm came from.” Mark brought down the newspaper he’d been holding over Janet and himself when the squall began. They’re come back inside to get Janet’s oversized golf umbrella, which she tended to take with her to scenes during inclement weather. More than one intern had spent a good deal of time holding it up as one or both of them bent over a fresh body.

“Me neither.” Janet shook out her long, red curls and turned towards the lockers. “Let me just get the…”

Mark stepped into the morgue fully after her. “Umbrella? Is that the word you’re missing?”

Janet didn’t answer him. She reached back and flipped on the lights. The examination tables, trays full of tools, bloody sinks waiting to be hosed that prompted the suggestion of drinks, and storage doors both opened and closed became illuminated under the harsh florescent bulbs.

“Where’s our John Doe?”

Mark blinked, silently counting the corpses he could see. Then he counted them again.

“Did Steve or Andrea come in here?”

Shaking her head, Janet started checking the storage units. “Doubtful. They’d still be here scrubbing, I think. Besides, Steve went home early today. Something he ate.”

Mark ran a hand through his short dark hair, more as a habit of thought than in the pursuit of dampness. It was a habit he’d tried to break, considering how often his hands were covered in gore. He began pulling back sheets on the corpses on the slabs while Janet continued checking the doors. Minutes later, they looked at one another with the same expression.

“This is impossible.”

“You’re telling me.” Mark put the sheet back over Mister Falkner’s sweet old face. “Corpses don’t just get up and walk out of the morgue.”

“Unless the zombie apocalypse has begun.”

“If that were the case, wouldn’t more than one of our guests be ambulatory right now?”

Janet couldn’t stop smiling. “Maybe John Doe is Patient Zero. He’s already on the loose, ready to spread his curse and craving human brain.” She extended her arms, rolled her eyes back, and shambled towards Mark. “Braaaaains…”

Mark laughed. “Have you been drinking already? Let’s check the security footage before we call up the CDC and Norman Reedus.”

The terminal on their desk had no answers for them. Approximately three minutes after they’d left the room, the security cameras all registered pitch darkness. Even though they were designed to record even in low light conditions, neither mortician saw anything on the monitor. The other feeds throughout the building were normal.

“I’ll call up the security desk. We should check to see if we’ve been hacked.”

As Mark dialed the number, Janet looked over the desk towards the box of personal effects that had yet to be collected. She stood up and walked to the box, and after a moment’s examination, reached inside for the notebook. It was old, bound in leather and singed along two of its edges. Inside many of the pages were burned. She suspected that someone had held it over a fire for an extended period of time, perhaps to persuade the John Doe to do something in order to save it.

Mark hung up the phone. “IT is checking the server logs now.” He paused, seeing Janet poring over the book. “What’s in it?”

“Some of it isn’t even in English. I think it might be Latin.” She turned the pages carefully. “Where did they find this guy?”

“From what I understand he was a transient. Hung around the library and the surrounding area. A couple of college students found him on the steps.”

Janet nodded. She remembered examining the body: a pair of stab wounds to the chest had been the cause of death. More than likely, he’d been jumped and shanked by one of his fellow transients over food or territory. They’d found no possessions on him save for this notebook and a wooden cross on a string. Considering all of the inverted pentagrams and inscrutable runes throughout the notebook, she couldn’t rule out the fact the two items were related.

“Listen to this.” She put her finger on her place in the notebook. “‘Despite the supposed righteousness of man, especially those considered saved by the Gospel or some other means, evil continues to permeate the world. The descendants of the Nephilim either perpetuate or police that evil, struggling to maintain a balance between man’s salvation and annihilation. This is their task, their curse, and their burden, the high price of their power and immortality.’ That’s crazy, right?”

Mark shook his head. “Too much moonshine, or something.”

The lights went out. The monitor in front of Mark blinked out of existence. For a moment, neither mortician spoke. Mark slowly got to his feet, quite unsettled at how perfectly dark the windowless morgue had become.

In front of Janet, a line of light appeared. It was as if it was being drawn with an invisible finger, sketching the outline of a doorway next to the desk. When it was complete, light poured from the opening in the middle of the air. Mark glanced around, and felt Janet take his hand. In the darkness, illuminated by the portal, they saw yellow eyes, dozens of pairs of them, staring at them in silence.

A hand reached out of the doorway. It was dark-skinned, shot through with glowing blue veins, its fingernails sharpened into talons. It gently took hold of the notebook. Janet let go, and the hand retreated into the doorway. It winked out of existence, and a voice rang through the morgue.

TELL NO LIVING SOUL.

The lights snapped back on. They were alone in the morgue. Still holding his hand, Janet turned to Mark.

“I think we should go drink now.”

Mark didn’t take his eyes from where the portal had been, and the eyes that had watched them from behind and beyond it. He stepped back towards the door.

“Good plan. I like this plan.”

Inspired by this scary story in three sentences I wrote for Terribleminds.

“How long has this house been here?”

Charlene shrugged. “‘Bout as long as I can remember. I used to pass it when I went jogging in the mornings.”

Sam was making his way up the overgrowth path towards the house. It was burnt out but relatively intact, sitting in Miller’s Field like a destitute hobo. The barn was also in need of some repair, but was somewhat intact. There’d been talk around town of tearing the house down and rebuilding, but nobody seemed willing to do that. Sam needed an Eagle Scout project, and doing what the adults were reluctant to do seemed like a good place to start.

“I’m sure there’s a reason nobody wants to touch this place.” Charlene was repeating herself, she knew, but Sam could be terribly stubborn sometimes.

“You don’t think it’s just less political than other stuff they want to do?” Sam picked his way forward carefully, avoiding the weeds and thistles that had burst through what had once been a paved driveway.

She rolled her eyes. “Believe it or not, not everything is politics to adults. Pick up the pace, would you? This isn’t how I want to spend my leave.”

He looked over his shoulder and smiled. “Okay. Sorry to drag you out here. Let’s just have a quick look around and get out of here, so I can write up my proposal.”

He headed right for the charred front door, which hung on a single hinge. Charlene moved to follow, but her toe caught on something and she dropped. Cursing herself for not looking where she was going, she pushed herself up from the blackened soil to see the skeletal hand that had tripped her.

Swallowing a mouthful of fear (you’ve seen bodies before, you’re okay, you’re okay), she gingerly turned fully to examine what lay half-buried in loose soil and persistent weeds. If she hadn’t stepped off of the former driveway, she would have never seen it. But there it lay, the bones charred and the skull’s mouth open in a silent, dirt-filled scream.

“Sam? I think we should leave.”

Looking up, she couldn’t see him. He’s already picking around inside. She dug around in the dirt a bit, finding an old Zippo lighter, a ring of keys, and an half-burned, torn, and decaying notebook. Charlene flipped through it; most of it was inconsequential stuff, grocery lists and reminders. Towards the end, as the burns got worse and worse, she found the first evidence something was really wrong.

They stay in the attic, just in the attic, we’re not sure why.

She turned back to see who ‘they’ might be, but there was nothing. She resumed reading forward.

They took my son, my son is not my son, his eyes are dead, why would they do this to a child?

Charlene’s blood ran cold. She turned to the last page.

I’m the only one left, I have to go, I have to leave, I know where the gas line leads out of the house, I’m going to finish this, for my wife, for my son, before they take me, before they take anyone else.

That’s when she heard Sam scream from inside the house.

“Sam!” She dropped the journal and ran into the house. The interior was blackened from fire, the kitchen worst of all as it had been the center of an explosion. She found the stairs, taking them two at a time, feeling them about to give under her feet, deciding not to care.

The attic door was a pull-down panel from the ceiling that revealed more stairs, she took those two at a time as well. The first thing we saw was Sam, backing away slowly from a corner, flashlight in hand. The attic was as burnt as the rest of the house, and little outside light came in through the slats in the walls and roof. His light was trained on the corner, and the figure crouching there.

It looked like a boy half Sam’s age, just over three feet tall, huddled there like it was frightened. It stared at Sam with milkly, colorless eyes, its skin ashen and covered in burns and black pustules. Charlene set her jaw. Is this the son of the dead man outside?

“Sam, back towards me. Slowly. I’m here, it’s going to be okay.”

“Okay.” He took a step back towards the stairs. The creature in the corner growled and moved in response, shifting from a huddling position to a crouch. Charlene felt her body tense.

“Soon as you’re on the stairs, we’re going to run. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Charlene angled her body, prepared to either bolt down the stairs or jump up into the attic. Sam’s left foot touched the top step on the drop-down panel. The creature hissed, and with a movement so fast Charlene would have missed it if she’d blinked, it leaped across the attic and pinned Sam to the floor.

Charlene was in the attic in the next heartbeat. Instinct and training had her grabbing the thing by its left shoulder with her left hand, while her right went to its neck and under its chin. Its putrid hands were around Sam’s neck, and he was choking, barely making out Charlene’s name. Muscles built from hauling 50-pound packs across Iraq and Afghanistan worked in concert, and while the creature was no longer strictly human, it was still the body of a burnt little boy. She lifted it away from Sam, and then moved her left and right hands in different directions until something snapped like a brittle, dry twig.

The blackened corpse went limp in her hands and she threw it away. Sam got up and put his arms around her, crying into her shoulder.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, sis.”

“It’s okay, Sam. I’m here.” Charlene held him close. She felt a pain in her right hand, looked past Sam’s shoulder, and saw the angry red bite in her palm.

“Everything’s going to be all right.”