Ashes

ASHES

A Story Collection

By Scott Nicholson

Published by Haunted Computer Productions

www.hauntedcomputer.com

Copyright 2008 Scott Nicholson

Print edition “Scattered Ashes” published by
Dark Regions Press

This is a work of fiction. All people,
incidents, and places are solely the products of the author’s
imagination. Please do not copy or illegally share this book, and
instead encourage your friends to buy a copy for themselves, and I
promise to keep the price low. Thank you and I hope you enjoy the
book. The writer begins the journey, but the reader completes it .
. . .

OTHER BOOKS BY SCOTT NICHOLSON

The Skull Ring

The Red Church

They Hunger

The First

Burial to Follow

Flowers

The Harvest

The Manor

The Home

The Farm

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Horror Of It All by
Jonathan Maberry

1. Timing Chains Of The Heart

2. Dog Person

3. The October Girls

4. Murdermouth

5. The Endless Bivouac

6. Sung Li

7. Silver Run

8. In The Family

9. The Night Is An Ally

10. Work In Progress

11. She Climbs A Winding Stair

12. Watermelon

13. The Meek

14. The Weight of Silence

15. The Hounds of Love

16. You’ll Never Walk Alone

17. Penance

18. Scarecrow Boy

19. Last Writes

20. Sewing Circle

The Horror Of It All

By Jonathan Maberry

Horror is a scary word.

Especially to people in the horror
industry.

To readers, it’s a great word –full of dark
promise and wicked delights. To the largest of the mainstream
publishers and most chain bookstores, “horror” is a bad, bad word.
Horror books don’t sell. You hear that all the time. Horror is just
gore and exploitation. You hear that, too.

Often it’s true. Except when it’s not.

Here’s the thing. Once upon
a time “horror” was a nice word that was used to embrace a broad
genre of spooky tales ranging from classic ghost stories to
vampires to all sorts of creatures that go bump in the nighttime of
our imagination. Horror tales didn’t have to be supernatural; of
course, Edgar Allan Poe proved that with his psychological
thrillers that gouged barbs into our paranoia and private fears.
Horror could overlap with other genre–science fiction (you want to
tell me
Alien
wasn’t
a horror flick?)
,
speculative fiction (Richard Matheson’s 1954 classic
novel
I Am Legend,
nicely bridged the gap between “what if?” and “what the hell’s
that!”), mystery (Robert Bloch nailed that one with
Psycho)
, fantasy
(Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos), Fantastique Populaire (Alexandre
Dumas brought werewolves into the modern age of fiction with his
1848 story
Le Meneur de Loups
(The Leader Of Wolves), comedy (start with
Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein,
keep going through
Young
Frankenstein
and put the pedal all the way
down with
Shaun of the
Dead
), and even social commentary
(
Night, Dawn
and
Day of the Dead
).

Horror has been the
framework and vehicle for centuries of great storytelling.
Millennia, if you factor in the ancient myths of dragons, Cyclops,
revenants, ghouls, mummies, and other beasts going all the way back
to
The Epic of Gilgamesh
–the oldest surviving piece of writing, which is rife with
monsters.

So why is it a bad word?

The short answer is
“marketing.” In 1978
Halloween
hit movie houses like a
bloody tsunami. Eerie, unnerving, horrific, terrifying.
Halloween
was everything
good horror should be. And it
was
a horror film. Michael Myers was an
unkillable embodiment of evil. Good job John Carpenter. If there
had been no sequels and if a lot of folks hadn’t taken an
incidental aspect of the movie and build an entire genre on it, the
word ‘horror’ might still be safe for polite conversation within
the publishing world. But a lot of folks in Hollywood who are not
and never have been aficionados of horror or even
readers
of horror, went on
to focus on the big fricking knife that Michael Myers carried and
the plot device of his killing several people in inventive ways.
The weapon and the method are not core to the story. The
unstoppable nature of evil and the struggle between overwhelming
threat and the natural impulse to survive
are
what the movie was all about. Those
are tropes of the horror genre. But Hollywood can never be accused
grasping the subtleties of theme and structure; hence the Slasher
movie genre was born.

Most of the Slasher flicks–and the natural
off-shoots, the Slasher novels—were, as I said, not written by
horror writers. They are pre-packaged tripe whose purpose is to
tantalize with young flesh and then indulge in ultraviolence that
has no thematic value and no artistic flair. They’re mind candy of
the least nutritious kind.

The Slasher films collided
with another horror sub-genre –the Serial Killer film. There are
good and even great novels and movies about serial killers.
Bloch’s
Psycho,
Thomas Harris’
Red Dragon
and
Silence of the
Lambs
, Jack Ketchum’s
Off Season
are examples for the
sub-genre in print; the film versions of most of these are
terrific, and there are horrifying entries like
Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer.
But the genre was truly born out of films like
Last House on the Left
and
The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre
, and despite their huge fan
followings, neither is a horror film.
Chainsaw
is probably the more debatable
of the two since there are real moments of tension; but it’s been
spoiled by sequels and remakes that are so overtly exploitive that
many viewers have stepped back from the genre in
disgust.

In the late 90s and early
21
^st
Century, we saw the rise of yet another genre that polluted
the word horror: torture porn. Films like
Hostel, Saw
and their many imitators
are shock cinema. They’re disturbing to be sure, but perspective
makes true horror aficionados wonder at just what is attracting the
audiences. The films are sexist and misogynistic in the extreme.
The torture seems to be the point of the film rather than an
element of a larger and more genuinely frightening tale. The
technique appears to be shock rather than suspense.

Good horror is built on suspense. Shock has
it moments, but it isn’t, and should never be, the defining
characteristic of the genre.

Here’s the bottom line. Slasher, Serial
Killer and Torture flicks have all been marketed as “horror.” Go to
Blockbuster or check Netflix…that’s where they are.

Discerning audiences, those
who enjoy the suspense and subtlety of true horror storytelling
were repelled, and they also moved away from
all
horror because to modern audiences
horror equals graphic and relentless violence.

Horror took it in the back.

It doesn’t help that many of the most popular
authors of horror novels–folks like Stephen King, Dean Koontz,
Robert McCammon, Peter Straub—don’t consider themselves to be
horror authors. They prefer to be known as authors of “suspense” or
“thrillers” or other more marketable genre labels,

I can’t blame them. My own horror novels, the
Pine Deep Trilogy (Ghost Road Blues, Dead Man’s Song and Bad Moon
Rising) were released as “supernatural thrillers.” One of my best
friends, L. A. Banks sees her vampire and werewolf novels published
as “paranormal romances.” The list goes on.

So, is horror dead?

Nope.

The book you’re holding is proof of that.

Some writers have managed to hold the line
against the propagandized war against “horror.” Scott Nicholson’s
been at the forefront of that phalanx for years. He writes horror
novels. He writes horror short stories. He writes horror. Make no
mistake.

Sure, Scott can spin a
mystery or a thriller with the best of them. He’s a true writer and
true writers can write in any damn genre they pick. But what sets
Scott’s horror fiction apar –or, perhaps, raises it as an
example—is that it
is
horror. It’s subtle, layered, textured, suspenseful and pretty
goddamn scary. There are shocks, sure; but you won’t find one cheap
shot in this whole collection. There’s blood, too–Scott’s not
afraid of getting his hands dirty when it comes to violence.But
those are elements he selects with care from a large toolbox of
delicate instruments. Like all
true
horror writers, Scott is a
craftsman who knows how to build a story on character and plot
nuance, and then tweak this and twist that so that the story begins
to quietly sink its claws into the reader.

Scattered Ashes
is a wonderfully creepy, powerful and inventive
collection of horror tales that will open doors in your mind –to
let things out, and to let things in.

This is a book of horror tales from someone
who understands–and loves—the genre. A lot of folks joke about
having to leave the lights on when they read horror. Go ahead, try
it. It won’t help. This is a different kind of darkness: older,
more devious, and if you’re reading this then the darkness was
already there inside you, waiting for a nightmare wizard to set it
free.

—
Jonathan Maberry

Multiple Bram Stoker
Award-winning author of
PATIENT ZERO. THE
DRAGON FACTORY
and
ZOMBIE CSU;
and co-creator/consulting
producer for
On The Slab
(ABC Disney)

TIMING CHAINS OF THE HEART

Leather on leather, glove on shift ball, the
faint smell of oil in the air. Wide-tread rubber clinging
desperately to asphalt, a ton-and-a-half of steel-and-chrome stud
machine that could grab and growl in five gears, not counting
reverse. It was great to be alive.

J.D. Jolley peered at the strip of black
ribbon that rolled out in front of his headlights. The ribbon
disappeared into the larger strip of night. Night hid the rest of
the world, and that was fine with J.D. The world was nothing but
litter along the highway, as far as he was concerned.

He pumped the accelerator once, then again,
steadily, listening to the thrush of exhaust. A lot of muscle
drivers stomped, but J.D. never stomped. You had to treat a '69
Camaro like a lady. With tenderness, compassion, lots of foreplay
if you wanted a smooth ride.

"You're purring like a kitten in a kettle
tonight, Cammie," J.D. said, patting the dashboard. "Warm as a
manifold cover and wet as a water pump. What say we get it on?"

The moon was out, weakly grinning down on his
left shoulder through the clouds. No matter how far he drove, the
moon never seemed to move. It was one of those things about the
world that J.D. accepted without a second thought. Hell, that was
up there in the sky, and the moon didn't have a damned inch of
asphalt. Maybe if those pencil-necked engineers ever came up with
solo rockets, he'd take another study of the heavens. But until
then, the sky was nothing but wind resistance.

He hung his arm out the window. A good little
back-breeze played against his elbow. Ought to add a couple of
miles per hour. He was shooting for one-forty tonight.

This was his favorite stretch of road, a nice
straight three miles of open country. The local cops never
patrolled out here for the simple reason that the only traffic was
farm tractors and cattle trucks and the occasional riding lawn
mower. The few farmhouses in the area were back from the highway,
buffered by wide green and brown fields lined with barbed wire.
Nobody to bother but the big-eyed cows, and they were practically
kneeling in awe.

J.D. pressed the clutch and slid the Camaro
into first gear. He clenched his left hand on the steering wheel. A
lot of muscle guys had those faggy vinyl wraps on their steering
wheels, but J.D. liked the natural factory feel. Same way with his
women.

The back seat practically needed
reconditioning, he'd worked the shock absorbers so much. A '69
Camaro drew the babes. They couldn't resist the sleek curves and
classic lines, not to mention the throbbing under the hood. True,
it was a lower class of women, but hell, one was pretty much the
same as another when their legs were splayed out the back
window.