So You Came?

Posted on August 15, 2016 by Helen
Image credit: Eugene Sergeev/Shutterstock.com

Image credit: Eugene Sergeev/Shutterstock.com

So you came? Even after all the warnings, you dared to approach?

Did you come to quell your fears, or satiate your curiosity? Do you know it’s all the same. either way? I’m here, I’m always here, and if you make it through, you never make it back.

And if you don’t make it through, you never make it back either.

Rites of passage are cruel, and painful, and fraught with danger. Didn’t you know that? Didn’t you think before you responded to my siren call? I almost pity you – each and every one of you that come to try. Trying is something, after all. Unlike your lily-livered comrades, you ventured forth. I could almost respect that. Almost.

But what I think doesn’t matter. I am here to stop you, to rend and tear, to break you down. In blood and bone and suffering you either die in this tunnel, or you are reborn. It’s al the same to me.

It’s always all the same to me. I am but a humble functionary.

So choose your weapons, if there are any to choose, and prepare. This world is far more savage than you realise, and you will finally get to see the truth. All that remains to be seen, beyond that, is whether this is truly the first, or last, thing you ever really see.

So you came? My ugliness and threat did not dissuade you? I will tally you all, like tokens or a way I may one day be free. I will drink your blood my friend and perhaps, perhaps, you will drink mine. And we shall be friends, for a very little time.

Let us begin.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2016

Posted in Horror Flash Fiction | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Raven

Posted on August 8, 2016 by Helen
Image Credit: Marcin Perkowski/Shutterstock.com

Image Credit: Marcin Perkowski/Shutterstock.com

In those days the raven was her friend. It would alight her windowsill in the earliest hours of the morning, sentinel to watch over her. Life was hard,and she needed a protector, and it seems to find her and follow her.

In the first days it was a comfort as her mother died of a mysterious illness. In her family, so poor, this terrible loss was marked by her being required to take on an adult’s responsibility for the home, long before her teenage years had prepared her for, and she would weep into the night, long and silently, only appeased by her raven in the morning light.

Later her father also died, inexplicable and devastating, through a mining accident. Money dried up, and she needed to go to work in a local store for pitiful wage, to support her young brother and keep the wolves from the door. She toiled so hard her back would ache and her fingers felt worn to the bone. Her brother was too young to understand or help, and no-one in the town would lend assistance. It was a cruel time, a cruel place, with only the raven for her friend.

Then when the raven came once more, even her brother passed away. A whooping cough blight in a fevered, terrible night, with the raven at her windowsill as the terrible morning dawned, to comfort her once more.

“Our family is cursed” she told the raven. “And I am the last one left.”

Winter came hard and long, and her failing health crept up on her, a thief in the night. All alone she almost welcomed the death that lurked at her doorway. It is time, she thought, to join my family, gone before. She had no fear, for as the raven came and perched for the first time at night upon her sill, she felt the call and finally understood.

Little psychopomp, the raven, her friend at first and last.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2016

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Hever House

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Helen
Image credit: Rommen/Shutterstock.com

Image credit: Rommen/Shutterstock.com

Hever House burned on April 3rd 1928. No-one ever knew what started the conflagration, be it accident of intent. My family, being its owners down a long and dark ancestral line, had some reason for regret at its loss. To all reports it was beautiful, an architectural wonder, far in advance of the buildings of the time. It burned too bright, my grandfather used to say, and so in the end it had to burn.

But it burned even before then, or so I understand it. Long before the raging beauty of resolute flame arched magnificent out of its highest windows, in its depths it stoked fires of a different kind.

My great great uncle owned Hever House. He was an artist, and one of some repute. In the manner of all those artistic, he had his little ways, including that he refused to paint anywhere but within its walls. All the moneyed of society would come to have their portraits done, and none had any complaints. But the monied in society rarely do – then or even now. They walk in a kind of unseen safety, defended then by pedigree and dollars, and now by only the latter.

But the artist painted others, less financially fortunate. I believe the stories, knowing my family even now. How children and young adults would go to him but never emerge again. They say enormous, complicated, twisted paintings of youth adorned his walls. They say they were of paint but also blood. They even say that in the paint itself were the grindings of pure bone. My uncle’s art, a god giving new life to those taken.

I like to think one of the lost was cared for by someone, that someone noticed the loss of at least one. And I like to think that maybe they set the fire, reducing the monstrous artistic vision, and the artist himself, to dust. I don’t like my family, or my heritage, and it would be sweet to know Hever House fell that way, in the end. Not just an accident, not just a strange twist of fate.

I shall never know, but when I view photos of its devastation I do fancy I see the myriad vengeful ghosts appeased and the artist trapped, burning still, in the flames he so richly deserved.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2016

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Flash Fiction – The Baths

Posted on July 25, 2016 by Helen
Image credit: Francesco Maltinti/Shutterstock.com

Image credit: Francesco Maltinti/Shutterstock.com

After the pain they would bathe you. After the torture there was usually blood, or bruised skin and aching muscles.

With some little kindness, sometimes they used epsom salts in the baths. You would sink into them, ignoring the dirt and grime, desperate in your need. Returning to the water as a child may yearn to return to the safety and security of the womb.

For half an hour they would let you float, processing the ministrations of the day. Music would be piped into the room, sometimes soft, sometimes discordant, usually both.

Sometimes you were alone and sometimes not, but you never shared your stories. You never spoke to others there. Some things are too terrible to speak of – putting words to them would make them more real, when all you needed to do in the brief bliss of the water was to forget.

I hated and loved the baths then, just as I hate and love them now, in more ordinary household surroundings. All the pain of those times is imprinted on me, colouring even the most simple pleasures with a darker undertow.

The undertow of the water, where often in those days I prayed for the bravery, the courage, to let the undertow drawn me down, that I might drown.

But bravery eluded me then, as it does now.

And that, of course, was part of their genius. Part of their plan.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2016

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Flash Fiction – Angry Child

Posted on July 18, 2016 by Helen
Image credit: Hyena Reality/Shutterstock.com

Image credit: Hyena Reality/Shutterstock.com

She was an angry child. And as they say, angry children grow into angry adults.

Her parents barely noticed, but then they barely noticed her at all. They were busy, of course, being ambitious, being successful, being wealthy. And so in turn she had all the toys, all the benefits, of their commitment and toil. But she didn’t have them, and she was angry, and they didn’t even notice that at all.

She did well at school. Anger can be a fire, like competition. Perhaps she also wanted them to notice her material, academic success. That’s all they cared about, after all, the successes of the world. But they didn’t even see that. Maybe they expected it and took it for granted, like her. Maybe they didn’t really care because it wasn’t about them. Maybe she was just an extension of them, if even that. And she was angry, so angry about that.

She grew into the angry adult any observer would have foretold. But there were no observers, not even them, not even her parents. They didn’t even see her that day, coming quiet into their home office, on adult tip toe. They were arguing about a point of business, or maybe politics. It was always one or the other, and she didn’t care which.

They didn’t notice the knife, but they did notice the pain. It was the last thing they noticed. Because by then it was too late to notice anything else, even her anger.

Far, far too late to notice the angry girl they should have loved, but only ignored.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2016

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Flash Fiction – Clown Gang

Posted on July 11, 2016 by Helen
Image credit: Sergey Shubin/Shutterstock.com

Image credit: Sergey Shubin/Shutterstock.com

The clown gang are professionals. You can hire them individually for parties and for shows and they will certainly play their part. But their real work is more hidden, and only those in the know understand. Only those in the know hire the whole gang.

It makes me think there is a reason for children to fear clowns, and for even some adults to feel that memory stir in the amygdala. Perhaps we share a consciousness on some fundamental level, and some actually see – in their mind’s eye rather than in reality – what this gang actually does when they are together. Together.

Tea rituals, like ancient Japan, come before strategy, war or conquest. A civility masking the savagery within.

You hire them for fear, for pain and for sin. You hire them for children, special children, and all the truth and power that may bring.

I’ve seen them work, in places that pass for hospitals, places that pass for respite and care. Terror is an effective controlling agent, and strong imagery – such a a clown’s visage and regalia – are effective tools to imprint young and impressionable minds. And those clowns, this gang, wear their evil very well. They enjoy it.

I wonder, have you ever met them? Does the sight now of clowns give you some uneasiness, some memory just out of reach? If so, don’t try to remember. You really really do not want to know what they would have done to you, if you ever met them – this clown gang.

This gang of clowns.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2016

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Fairy Tale (Horror Flash Fiction)

Posted on July 6, 2016 by Helen
Image credit: vera illina/Shutterstock.com

Image credit: vera illina/Shutterstock.com

Once upon a time there was a wicked magician who became obsessed with a young local girl. She was unimpressed with his tricks and fancies and loved another simple boy, and the wicked magician was furious. He determined if he could not have her love, no-one else would ever have the privilege, and in any case he would have her anyway, locked up, all to himself.

He built a magic house and one day, while she was walking in the woods nearby, he captured her and took her to his lair. In this monstrous, majestic place she was a prisoner kept in comfort but also in despair. For the magician told her she was no prisoner, no indeed, the way was always there for her to just find the right passageways out of the house and to her freedom.

‘I cannot hold you here against your will but you must find your way to freedom,’ he said. “Those are the simple rules of the house and both you and I are bound by them.’ And the evil magician chuckled as he spoke for he knew the magic of the house.

It was a place of ingenious, malefic design. Built to confound and confuse, of the many many walls in the many many rooms, so many were not walls at all but hidden doors. And in those many many rooms were many many doors that were not, in fact, doors at all, but walls. To find the way out she needed to locate the walls that weren’t walls and the doors that weren’t doors, and thereby know the secret architecture of the house to be free.

But every wall that was a door she discovered just led her further in, and the doors that were truly doors also tricked her into becoming more and more entangled in the infernal labyrinth of the house.

Meanwhile the evil magician learned the girl’s beloved was coming to the house to brave the citadel and bring her out. While the magician doubted the boy could find his way in any easier than his special creature could find her way out he was not open to taking chances. So he waited for his approach in the forest and when he was within sight he drew a single arrow to a single magic bow, and shot him quick through the heart, killing him in an instant.

But the evil magician had miscalculated, too proud and conceited in his game. For what he had not reckoned on was the boy would then be a ghost. And ghosts can enter houses through any wall or door. Even more than that, they can see the workings of a magical house with an expert eye. So the boy’s ghost entered the house, found his love  and led her out, finally to her freedom.

They say the magician died of a broken heart, but in your narrator’s humble view this would have required a heart in the first place. No, dear reader, I think he just withdrew into his magical citadel in his misery and anger and it swallowed him up instead, a hungry house needing to be satiated.

And he was never seen again.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2016

Posted in Horror Flash Fiction | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Flash fiction – Devil

Posted on July 4, 2016 by Helen
Image credit: S Sokolov/Shutterstock.com

Image credit: S Sokolov/Shutterstock.com

The devil lives here. All the older inhabitants of our little town say so. They say on winter nights you might catch his shadow in the moonlight as he stands at his window, looking out.

Many years ago, they say, he came to this town, with all his wickedness and schemes. Many fell to his temptations before he was captured in this haunted dwelling, just on the edges of the town. They will not tell you how he was captured, or how many sacrificed themselves to weave the web. They only say he is there, to this day, looking out.

They tell all the children of the town, when they are old enough to understand,  to make certain none will linger close to his home, see him, speak with him, give him the time of day. Should anyone converse for too long the spell may break and he may be free.

I saw him once, on a particularly moonlit night. I was drunk, and galavanting out in the outer reaches of town, looking for such adventure as never finds its way to these quiet, pious parts. And I admit I was tempted. Tempted to speak, to draw him out, even to set him free. The devil in this town again might wake it up, give it colour.

What are we, after all, without our shadows? How can even light be light without the dark as contrast? And I am young, and eager for life in all its forms.

So the devil lives here, they tell me, and I am not afraid. I fear more days upon days of nothingness – of piety and cloying goodness. I want to embrace everything. And so I plan to leave this place, and they must let me go.

They must let me go, even if they do not know, do not understand. Because if they don’t, I’ve seen him, the devil in his woven web. And so either I will be free, or he will be.

Either way, I will embrace life. I will.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2016

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(Flash Fiction) Release No 6

Posted on June 28, 2016 by Helen

 

Image credit: Nomad_Soul/Shutterstock.com

Image credit: Nomad_Soul/Shutterstock.com

Report Brief: Release No. 6

Background

Release 6 of the upgraded human consciousness went online on February 6 2018. Key upgrades included a failsafe protocol to avoid the disastrous carnage triggered by miss firing synapses in Release No 5. It is expected that the upgrades may slow cognitive functioning in the creative and artistic realms, but given the extent of damage generating from those societal sectors in the last release this may be considered an important cautionary advantage.

Discussion

The history of online consciousness has been complex and at times divisive. Early releases were resisted by large sections of the populace, leading to eventual need for marshall law and compulsory connections. Opinion is divided on whether this was too soon and pre-emptive and whether there was something in the original corporeal consciousness of the ‘resistors’ that was incompatible with the software.

Releases 1 through to 3  had a higher than expected mortality and insanity rate, as a possible direct consequence of such factors. The greater majority of resistant hosts have now been eradicated through their own carnage, bloodshed or despair, and so it is anticipated the protocols will be accepted more successfully in future upgrades.

It is acknowledged that Release 5 had unintended consequences which the research had not identified. It is also acknowledged that the speed of upgrade was significantly to blame, and the market forces and choices of the former CEO contributed to a rushed and dangerous release schedule.

On the positive side, however,  the depopulation agenda required for worldly sustainability was ironically furthered by the very glitch that vexed Release 5. Like the earlier releases it is considered that any remaining incompatibility issues with the remaining populace were largely eradicated by the genocide that Release 5 triggered. As such the host environment for Release 6 is considered more viable than the earlier releases.

Future Plans

Release 6 allows for greater telepathic integration and increased surveillance activities for governmental behavioural monitoring. Release 7 is already in preproduction and will increase this connectivity to the point that actual behavioural modification will be possible.

By Release 8 we are confident that the ultimate goal of a single world mind and spiritual consciousness is still completely achievable.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2016

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(Flash Fiction) Ghost

Posted on June 21, 2016 by Helen
Image credit: Hyena Reality/Shutterstock.com

Image credit: Hyena Reality/Shutterstock.com

This hospital has a ghost. Sadly the children here, being the most open, the most psychically acute, tend to see it the most. But on the other hand, they are young, and usually recover from both their bodily ills and the spiritual scarring of seeing the deathly ghost mask hovering above them. For the most part, though it makes them cry, and tell each other stories in its wake, it passes them by, on its grim procession to the elderly, the weak, the dying.

Nurses on late night shifts sometimes speak of seeing it, a floating skull, hovering from room to room as though seeking eternal company. These revelations are whispered things, for to speak more openly would be to risk losing their jobs. But to not speak of it, conversely, would be to hold the secret alone and wonder at one’s sanity. If they must be mad, let it be a shared madness, they seem to agree. It is a way to cope with the late shift if nothing else.

My mother said she saw it in the nights that preceded her passing. It chilled me to hear of it, but she was oddly calm.

“It looks so grim,” she said. “But it is but a skull, which is what we all have here, within, under the skin. It is not so fierce when you see it like that.”

I find that comforting now that she is gone. Hospitals now represent death to me,  and this one with its ghost more so than most. Still I like to think the skull is not always the same, not always the same person. How would we know, after all, with only the skull to see?

I like to think that if one day I die here, it will be my mother’s skull coming to me in those last nights, floating above my bed. Reminding me, reminding me, we are all really the same under the skin, and it is safe to travel home with her, after all.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2016

Posted in Horror Flash Fiction | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments