I was already licking my lips, somehow knowing what he was gonna say. It felt like someone had lit a fire cracker in my tummy and filled my veins with pepper. My mouth was all squelchy and full of spit that dribbled down my chin. There was a hole in my stomach the size of the Grand Canyon and nothing was gonna make it go away.
“Come on, laddie.” Wesley J. turned around, sniffing the air and raising his rifle to his eye. “Let’s go hunt ourselves some tiger-men.”
D.P. Prior is an author and editor working in the South of England. He has a background in the performing arts as an actor, director, and playwright. He is a founder member of the legendary rock band Sergeant Sunshine and has written and recorded countless songs. He has extensive experience as a mental health professional and has studied theatre, film, classics, history and theology at bachelors and masters levels.
He runs his own editing service with his wife, Paula: www.homunculuseditingservices.blogspot.com
He is also the author of the Shader series, which includes Cadman’s Gambit and Best Laid Plans. He has also written The Chronicles of the Nameless Dwarf—including The Ant-Man of Malfen and The Axe of the Dwarf Lords. Also in his library is Thanatos Rising from The Memoirs of Harry Chesterton.
For all things Shader please visit: www.deaconshader.blogspot.com
For The Nameless Dwarf, please visit: www.namelessdwarf.blogspot.com
Facebook page: www.facebook.com/derek.prior1
NIGHT NIGHT
by Daniel Pyle
Early Saturday morning, before the sun rose, before the birds woke and started their new-day chirping, Henry Clement pulled a steak knife from his pocket, watched the dim light from the bedside lamp reflect off the blade, and then leaned over his sleeping brother and stabbed him six times in the throat.
It was a messy, amateurish job, but he had expected that. He’d never killed anyone before.
The first thrust barely penetrated the flesh on the side of Jerry’s neck. Jerry started to scream, to thrash. Henry put more muscle into it, and the second two stabs went deeper, turned the screams into soft gurgles. Those three wounds probably would have been enough, but Henry punched the knife in three more times anyway. Just to be sure.
Blood spurted from Jerry’s neck, pooled on the pillow and mattress around his head. He slapped a hand against the punctures and looked at Henry with wide, disbelieving eyes, like he must have been dreaming this. His hand slipped through the blood and fell to his side. He lay there for what seemed like a very long time, flopping, unable to breathe, a man-fish. And then he let out a final, wet cough, spraying more blood across his already-drenched chest, and stopped breathing. Deflated. Dead.
Splattered blood dripped down Henry’s face and across his nostrils and lips. A particularly heavy spurt had hit him across his chest and left a crimson mark from his shoulder to his hip. Like a sash.
Henry dropped the knife on the mattress.
“I’m sorry,” he said and kissed Jerry on the forehead. His lips left a bloody print between his brother’s eyebrows. Tears streamed down Henry’s face, sluicing through the blood and dripping onto Jerry’s neck and shoulders.
Henry wiped his eyes and stared past the body, through the bedroom window. Still dark, of course. Nowhere close to daylight. Mandy would be by to see them sometime today. She might arrive as early as ten o’clock, after she’d fed her children breakfast and sent them off with her husband on some kind of adventure, or she might wait until after lunch, until the whole lot of them returned home from the zoo or the park or a matinee. Whether she continued to come because she wanted to or because she felt it was her sisterly duty, Henry didn’t know, but she never missed a weekend.
Still, whether it was before lunch or after, it didn’t really matter. Henry had never worn a watch, and there was no clock in the bedroom, but he guessed it couldn’t have been any later than four in the morning. That left him plenty of time to do what needed doing.
He grabbed Jerry’s arm and pulled-jerked-rolled him off the bed. They fell to the floor together. Jerry’s face smacked the hardwood with a juicy thud, and Henry fell on top of him, panting. He wasn’t exactly a weakling, but he hadn’t realized how hard it would be to move Jerry’s corpse.
Dead weight.
He ain’t heavy. He’s your brother.
He considered dragging Jerry into the bathroom, pulling him into the shower and washing off the blood. Except what would be the point? The blood was gruesome, sure, but washing away the gore would reveal the stab wounds, and he doubted those would be any less horrific.
No. No shower. Let the doctors or the undertaker or whoever was in charge of such things worry about the cleanup.
He got up, lifting Jerry to a standing position, and backed across the room, looking over Jerry’s shoulder at the bloodied bed sheets. So much blood. He’d expected a lot, had visualized it repeatedly, but he guessed he hadn’t been prepared for the reality. He stopped once, halfway across the bedroom, steadied Jerry, and vomited on the floor between Jerry’s feet.
“Sorry, man,” he said. As if Jerry could hear. As if the puking had been Henry’s worst offense of the day.
He spat out the last bit of bile and dragged Jerry the rest of the way across the room, looking everywhere but at the bed.
In the hall, their parents stared down at them from wall-hung photos—old portraits with the couple looking young and bright eyed and ready to face the world, newer pictures in which they appeared tired, wrinkled around the eyes, disappointed. Henry thought they would have understood why he did what he’d done, if not approved.
He dragged Jerry past the bathroom, leaving red footprints on the rug and all kinds of bloody smears on the walls, stumbling, grunting, sweating.
Getting down the stairs was going to be the hard part. Henry pictured himself stumbling on the first step, crashing end over end to the landing below, paralyzed, Jerry’s corpse on top of him, pressing down on his lungs, suffocating him.
He took a deep breath, bit his bottom lip, and dragged Jerry down the first step. For a second, he thought it was going to happen exactly as he’d imagined. His foot slid to the edge of the step, and gravity tugged at him. He grabbed the railing, let Jerry’s body slump against him, and managed to keep his balance. Barely. He stood there for at least a minute, fingers wrapped around the handrail, panting, afraid that even the smallest movement would send the two of them over the tipping point and into a bone-crushing tumble. Jerry’s head flopped to the side, and suddenly Henry was looking into a dead, glazed eye.
Henry shivered and closed his own eyes. His arm trembled, and he knew he couldn’t hold on to the railing forever. Adrenaline and determination had gotten him this far, but he could feel exhaustion creeping in. A physical and mental drain. Keeping his eyes closed, he backed down one more step. His heart thumped irregularly, and for a second he thought he must be feeling both their hearts, his and Jerry’s. Except that was ridiculous. He was psyching himself out. He needed to stop thinking and start moving.