Frightmares: A Fistful of Flash Fiction Horror by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page B

clouds as they pirouetted around the Big Top. Fingers seemed to emerge, beckoning the fog to blanket the ground. I shifted nervously.
    “You’re scared of fog?” Josh laughed at my expression. “Baby, it’s just clouds! Look, we can dance on the clouds tonight!
    “Uh. What the . . . ?”
    A grinning clown materialized out of the dense fog only a few feet away from us. His blue Mohawk and peeling pancake make-up made me take a step backward. His pursed lips were painted in a perpetual smile. But the clown’s eyes riveted me the most. Gray, like the fog around us, they didn’t reflect light.
    “Hey man! You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that!” Josh yelled. He tried to push the clown back, but his hand sank into the clown’s torso with a sickening crunch.
    Josh stared at his arm, now firmly lodged in the creature. Its grin sharpened into a sneer as Josh strained to free his arm.
    “It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real!” I repeated to myself using the words my shrink had taught me to banish my recurring nightmares. How often had he smiled condescendingly and assured me that killer aliens, zombies and monsters didn’t really exist? My nightmares were figments of my over-active imagination and a brain that was basically undisciplined and dysfunctional. Once I secured a real job and walked around in the real world, I would have normal dreams like everyone else.
    “It’s not real,” I repeated once more.
    The zombie clown sank his teeth into Josh’s neck. The fog turned red as his blood spurted out around the clown’s mouth, fine red drops misting my face, slaughtering my mantra, leaving me helpless.
    This is the real world, and there’s no such thing as nightmares.

A NEW SUIT
     
    JOHN HUNT
     
    Charles awoke with a start, naked and cold on a concrete floor. Laying in darkness, he could only make out vague, indistinct shadows. He tried to sit up but screamed when searing pain, sharper than any knife, radiated up his legs. His shriek echoed around him, high pitched—a stranger’s scream. He ran a tentative hand down his thigh, and recoiled when this light touch produced disproportionate pain. The strange lumps in his thighs suggested that his legs were broken. He realized he would have to crawl out of here, dragging the now-useless appendages behind him.
    He’d picked a fight with a little guy in a bar. He recalled a fist connecting with his face followed by a blurred image of the barroom floor, wet with boot prints, rising up to meet him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d lost a fight; he was a big guy, six-feet-six and thick with muscle, who’d spent years cultivating a nasty image justified by his malicious actions. He’d even been incarcerated multiple times for his violent tendencies. He was the guy with the handlebar moustache, scruffy face, beady eyes and jailhouse tattoos—the guy no one ever dared to fuck with. Until now.
    A blinding light snapped on, catching him in its spotlight like a broken beetle lying on its back. The dizzying illumination revealed old crumbling brick, and water sliding down the walls to collect in cracks on the floor. Charles realized he was in a derelict building, far from any help. He looked up when the shadow fell upon him, and was alarmed to see that the little guy was naked.
    “I’m not into guys,” Charles stated.
    “Neither am I,” the little guy growled.
    “Then what do you want?”
    “A new meat puppet . . . something that fits better than this bag of bones. I think you’ll do nicely.”
    “What the hell are you talking about?”
    “You’ll see.”
    The little guy opened his mouth, and Charles heard a pop when the man’s jaw bone dislocated and his mouth grew impossibly wide. A sound like the buzzing of crickets filled the room. Black, hairy fingers resmbling spider legs sprouted from the little guy’s mouth and then folded back to grasp the distended cheeks. The fingers pushed outwards, stretching the skin like rubber