Read The Voices in Our Heads Online
Authors: Michael Aronovitz
The Voices in Our Heads
By
MICHAEL ARONOVITZ
Edited By
S.T. Joshi
Foreword
Tamara Thorne
Cover Art
Marius Siergiejew
http://noistromo.com
Graphics
Nathan J.D.L. Rowark
First Edition
Horrified Press
Dedications
To Ken Bingham, my first creative writing teacher.
To S.T. Joshi, my mentor.
To lifelong friends who love short fiction.
©
Horrified Press
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
without written permission from the publisher.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious.
Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
As a rule, I’m not a fan of short stories. They tend to read like vignettes, the characters have little room to grow, and half the time I’m left wondering what the point was. Therefore, when Michael Aronovitz asked me if I’d take a look at a couple of his, I only said yes because I was familiar with
Alice Walks
, his stunningly beautiful and eerie first novel.
I read one story, then two. Then I read all the rest in rapid succession because I simply couldn’t put them down. The stories you now hold in your hand will keep you up at night and give you the creeping willies for years to come. Most of all, they will satisfy you.
Mike’s little fictions read like small novels, not short stories. They are exceptional tales, all replete with rich description and perfect plotting that will get under your skin, then wiggle around and torment you -- and you won’t want any of them to end. His characters are incredibly real - they eat, they sleep, they use the bathroom. Flawed and ultimately human, each character is a small work of art.
Herein are twelve dark tales, themed to the seasons, the months of the year, and divided into four sections - Monsters, Phantoms, Delusions, and Toys. They are flawlessly told in a multitude of voices and styles. Aronovitz is a master of transition, an Olympic athlete somersaulting from a first person present tense tale to a second person past tense narration and everything in between with grace and ease. Like all great storytellers, he is invisible, hidden in description and character, waiting to scare you when you least expect it.
Most of all, Mike’s stories work because he understands that there are always voices in our heads, dark voices, seductive voices, voices telling us that there’s a monster in the closet, or that it might be fun to do something very, very bad. In “The Sculptor,” we ride along in a serial killer’s brain as he enjoys, so enjoys, his work. Certainly, the killer is delusional, but he is also an artist, proud of his product.
“The Puddles” delivers an OCD nightmare, full of phantom smells, sights, and sounds that are terrible and unforgettable. In “The Trickster,” we find out what happens when a well-meaning teacher tries to share his strange toys with a student in need, and in “The Echo,” we discover what it’s like to confront monsters on a highway that never ends.
Mike Aronovitz’s great gift is his ability to see the terror in the ordinary. He notices things we usually ignore, and after reading these stories, you will no doubt find yourself thinking new, dark thoughts about the neighbors, the clerk at the home improvement store, the public restroom at work, and maybe even your old, reliable car. So, turn down the lights and make sure the drapes are tightly closed. Then settle in and dig into a story or two. And when you have read these tales of terror, you can count yourself among those who have discovered a brilliant new author ahead of the crowd.
Tamara Thorne
Author of "Haunted" and "The Sorority"
Table of Contents
The Green-Eyed Breath-Vampire with the Cheap Striped Tuxedo and Monocle Tattoo
The Falcon
April
“Push, Rachel.”
“It hurts so.”
“Push hard, girl, or I’ll slap you again. The chloroform slowed you.”
“It’s out.”
“It’s a boy, God bless.”
“Turn him, Belinda. Hold him in the lamp light.”
“What’s that on his back? Oh God! Oh, my holy God!”
“I’m sewing them shut.”
“You can’t. ’Tain’t natural.”
“What ain’t? You call what’s in there natural?”
“But that’s fishing line, Rachel. He’s two years old.”
“The skin’s tough there ’round the slits. He’ll live.”
“Adam Michael Rothman, you come down off that barrel, now.”
“I’m not standing on a barrel, mother. It’s your eyes tricking you. Come closer.”
“Down, I say, this instant!”
“Why? I like it. And it feels good to get them air once in a while.”
“Someone might see, goddamn you. Through the widow. You’re tossing shadows. And don’t go up to the rafters again, or so help me, I’ll get the short rifle.”
“And aim the barrel at your own son . . .”
“Do you doubt it? I’m sewing you up again. And this time I’m using the steel baling twine. Try and stop me, I’ll knock your skull. You gotta sleep sometime, and chloroform’s got many uses, it does.”
April 1892
On his seventeenth birthday, Adam Michael Rothman set off into the Penn Woods to meet Katie Claypool, because she’d promised to show him her bare legs all the way up to her privates. She was waiting for him in the glen by their sitting stone. A shadow lay across her bosom and her breath was high. The straight black hair she’d been growing since the age of ten was twisted in a long braid down her back.
“Do you want to play Fox and Geese, Adam? Hide and Seek?”
“You wouldn’t hide from me.”
“I might very well at that.” She raised her chin. “I’ve just had my bath, and I’m not wearing any undergarments. If you don’t believe me, you’ll have to go exploring up my tea dress.” When he didn’t answer, she pursed her lips. She webbed her fingers down curtsey style in front of her waist, turned her head slightly, and looked up through her bangs and lashes. “But you’ll have to catch me first, Adam Rothman.”
She was off then, running into the dark wood, Adam close behind her. At the peak of the first rise a fallen oak blocked the path, and she angled off right, down the knoll through the wild grass, and then she darted across the creek, toes dancing along the dark, polished stones. Adam splashed ungraciously across, followed her up the short craggy incline, and gained ground along the long floor of pine needles. He reached for her once, grazing the fabric of one sheer, puffy sleeve, and she zigzagged off into the shadows.
“Not so easy for you, boy,” she cried over her shoulder.
“You’re a damned gazelle,” Adam panted. Her laughter painted the darkness in a splash of ice chips and tinsel, and she made for the footbridge, dodging between a pair of birches too tight for Adam to follow her through. By the time he’d skirted to the left and hurdled a thicket, she had made it to the high clearing at the back edge of what had been the property of some rich wholesale grocer a century before. There was a flat square rough with briar where a stable once stood and the petrified remains of a hitching post. In the background was the carriage house, all rubble but for the northwest corner, still standing tall like some ancient monolith at the edge of the wood’s darkest border. The moon came through the tangled nest of overhead branches in slants and splinters, and she was waiting there for him, leaning against the old stone well covered at the bottom with moss, and ivy, and vine.
“Want to make a wish, Adam?”
He approached heavily and kissed her. It wasn’t the first time, but it was certainly the most urgent. His hands were on her waist, and she’d indeed shed her underclothes, for he could feel her beneath as if touching her through the thinnest of silks, and when he fondled her breasts she moved his hands southward where he could get up and under the hem. Then he kneeled, the April dampness soaking through the knees of his trousers, and he was kissing the outside of one sturdy thigh, and then the warmer insides of both, and he caught her fragrance, and buried himself there, making her bite off a screech that led to a husky moaning in the thick of her throat. He wasn’t sure if it was all right to kiss her lips afterwards, but she was on to other business, and his sack coat was pulled off him, laid out in folds behind her to make a buffer against the coarse surface of the well. His trousers were at his ankles.
“Where?” he begged.
“Right there, that’s it.”
“But Katie—”
“You’ve got to push, Adam. It won’t hurt me too bad, and I know you want to.”
“Like that?”
“Hard, Adam. No . . . oh, yes! Mighty Christ!”
“Should I stop?”
“God, no. Get through with it, rough if you need to, just finish.”
After it was done they held each other for a moment, heads to shoulders, and he took her face in his hands and kissed her lips and told her that he loved her. She kissed his forehead and said it in return, and then she felt it move. The thing in his back, and she groped a bit to the left and found its twin.
Her hands went up to her mouth, yet she didn’t scream, and when he went to take her hands in his to make the prayer shape, she let him.
“I’m different,” he said, “and all the time I’ve known you I wanted to tell you. Mother sewed them in when I was little, and she thinks the skin grew over them like scars.” Hair fell across his eyes and he shook it away. “But there ain’t no skin covering. I have slits, roughened around the edges, and what’s inside I’ve trained myself to hold there. But when I get excited, and I mean
really
excited . . .” He stopped. Couldn’t go on.
“They move,” she finished for him. She unbuttoned his shirt. Slid it off. And then he let them come free.
There was a wet suckling sound, steam coming up, and they rose from behind him, dark and oily, and he made them spread and made them work, and he rose off the ground before her.
When he descended, he let her touch them. They swore they would love each other forever.
What they didn’t see was the figure hiding behind the remains of the northwest corner of the carriage house, breath making a thin vapor upon the air, half-lidded eyes staring through a pair of octagonal nose-pinch glasses with no sides to them.
“Where you been?” Papa said. He was at the table, papers before him. Light from the oil lamp played off his thick face, the soot of the iron works cleaned from around his eyes, nose, and mouth, the rest of him dark as the corner shadows. Katie put her hands behind her back, stuck out her bottom lip, and blew upward to fluff the hair from her forehead.
“I was in the wood,” she said. Papa took off his cap and rested it on his knee.
“You’re not to go in there. Nor the train station. We discussed this.” He rubbed his nose with calloused hands, clean at the knuckles, filthy beneath the nails. “And you’re not completely dressed.”