All-Night Terror Read online

  All-Night Terror

  Adam Cesare

  and

  Matt Serafini

  Sinister Grin Press

  MMXVI

  Austin, Texas

  Sinister Grin Press

  Austin, TX

  www.sinistergrinpress.com

  July 2016

  “All-Night Terror” © 2013 Adam Cesare and Matt Serafini

  Revised edition

  “Gore Galore” “Bringing Down the Giants” and “Killing time in the Off-Season” Copyright © 2013 Adam Cesare “Savior Girl In Philly Hell” and “A New Kind of Image” Copyright © 2016 Adam Cesare

  “War of the Cryptid” “Incident at Night” “The Last Remake” Copyright © 2013 Matt Serafini “Appraisal” and “The Executioner’s Wish” Copyright © 2016 Matt Serafini

  All other wraparound content Copyright © 2013 Adam Cesare and Matt Serafini

  Foreword Copyright © 2013 Jeff Strand

  This is a work of Fiction. All characters depicted in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without the publisher’s written consent, except for the purposes of review.

  Cover Art by Jim Agpalza

  Book Design by Scott Carpenter

  Text Design by Travis Tarpley

  Foreword

  by Jeff Strand

  When I was in the fifth grade in the early 1980's, I was a hipster. My mom's softball team was sponsored by Wonder Bread, and so I owned a Wonder Bread ball cap, which I wore all the time. But I didn't wear this cap because of my intense support for the softball team. I wore it because wearing a ball cap with the Wonder Bread logo was astoundingly, blatantly, self-consciously uncool, which made it funny...which in turn made it cool. Nobody ever gave me any crap about the Wonder Bread hat.

  In high school, I became a huge horror movie fan. And when I wore my Freddy Krueger t-shirts and carried around issues of Fangoria, it was with no irony whatsoever. Now, I don't know where or when you went to high school, but if you were the Class of 1989 ("We're so great! We're so fine! We're the class of '89!") at Theodore Roosevelt High School in Kent, Ohio, and you wore a Freddy Krueger t-shirt and carried around Fangoria magazine, you were emphatically not cool.

  I wasn't really bullied in the way that's all over the news today. There were simply kids who were dickheads. And the dickheads were happy to clarify just how uncool I was. Sure, I could have made some changes to my attire and left the supplementary materials at home, but I freaking loved horror movies. And in the formula of my high school existence, Expressing Love For Horror > Desire To Be Cool (And Have Any Possible Chance At Acquiring Girlfriend).

  And so I proudly expressed my love, damn the consequences.

  All-Night Terror comes from a place of love. Adam Cesare and Matt Serafini love the hell out of this stuff, whether it's giant monsters on a destructive rampage, slashers poking bladed weapons into camp counselors, or the shamelessly straightforward splatter of somebody like Herschell Gordon Lewis. They're not trying to be cooler than the material. It's not the mocking kind of love felt by people who proclaim Troll 2 to be the Best Movie Ever. Nope, this is an irony-free, "These movies were awesome!" love that comes through in every page.

  I don't know who wrote which story in this collection. It doesn't matter. Both of these guys are passionate horror fans, and their enthusiasm is infectious. Enjoy!

  Saturday Nightmares

  7:56 p.m.

  Most kids—some of them Danny’s friends—would not have made the same decision, but a Saturday night with his parents out of town meant only one thing: horror movies.

  House parties were high risk and, based on Danny’s limited experience, typically low return. So Danny Chambers had decided to spend this night alone, with a bag of phosphorescent-blue Pop Secret and his dad’s new cable box.

  The house was unusually quiet as Danny descended the carpeted stairs to the finished basement. He could watch the TV down here as loud as he wanted to now.

  Not only were his parents gone, but his sister was staying with her boyfriend this weekend. Tania had been out of high school for three years, and she hadn’t even applied to college; she just slept most of the day away in their parents’ basement. Danny and his friends had taken to calling her The Lurker, destroyer of sleepover parties, because she’d come home drunk and kick them out of the TV room.

  As he reached the bottom step, he took in the gloom of the basement, enjoying the mild creepiness of a familiar surrounding made alien by the darkness. The only two sources of light were the cable box and the streetlight shining through the small basement window.

  The red digital readout on the box told him that there were two minutes remaining until the night’s programming.

  He powered up the TV, dialed in the numbers for the USA Network, and sat down on the floor in front of the couch. The channel played old horror movies, and had since Danny was a kid. But they’d only gotten cable at his house last month, so most of what he’d seen had been while sneaking some unsupervised TV time while over at his buddies’ places.

  Leaning back, crunching popcorn, he felt perfectly at peace with the universe.

  He knew that it was only food coloring, but he couldn’t shake the idea that blue popcorn tasted better than the plain stuff. Maybe it was the fact that alone, when all the popcorn was yours, it tasted fresher, more buttery.

  Pizza-pizza!

  Catching the end of a Little Caesar’s commercial caused the popcorn to turn to salty ashes in his mouth. He wished he had the money to order pizza, but his parents hadn’t given him any. The only things they’d left him with were a refrigerator of tinfoil-covered leftovers and a note with his aunt and uncle’s telephone number. In case of an emergency.

  It didn’t matter; he had a horror classic to make him forget about his empty belly.

  The intro to USA’s Saturday Nightmares promised more than the program would deliver, but boy did it promise a lot. He always enjoyed seeing Jason’s mask, Reagan’s possessed face, but tonight it was an older, lesser-beloved film. The Pack, starring Joe Don Baker fighting against an island of feral dogs. Danny had seen it before. It was kind of Jaws with pooches.

  Danny’s friends would roll their eyes at any movie made before 1985, but he tried to tell himself that this was actually a blessing. It meant that the movie would not be cut as severely as they usually were. On the other hand, there wasn’t much gore to cut out of The Pack. And no nudity. It was practically a Disney movie.

  He should have had the foresight to check TV Guide to see what was playing. If he’d have known, he could have begged his parents to let him rent a video. His grades weren’t bad; he might have been able to swing it.

  By the second commercial break, Danny decided that the charm of re-watching The Pack was beginning to lose its luster. It wasn’t particularly scary. Danny liked dogs and found himself rooting for the “monsters,” so instead of watching any more, he decided to channel surf.

  On the local station there seemed to be some kind of news bulletin, but Danny switched by it, finding that at the bottom of every network station there was a scroll of area codes, his own among them. He ignored whatever that message was trying to tell him. The real world was usually a bummer: forest fires, flash floods, and missing kids.

  There was nothing that he, a sophomore in high school, could do about these things, so why worry?

  He stopped when he got to the familiar rainbow scramble of the porno stations. There were times when, if you flicked on the channel at just the right moment, the picture was distinguishable. It would be all the wrong colors and proba
bly upside-down, but at least you could tell what was going on. Maybe even be able to count how many unique participants there were.

  Tonight he was having no luck flipping back and forth between the two dirty stations. There was a moment when he caught a nipple, but without context it wasn’t that sexy.

  Above the scrambled stations, before the numbers started over again at two, was the public access station. One time, Danny and his friends had spent an hour placing crank calls to a local home-improvement show. They were spread across four different houses, which meant they could get away with four calls before the station noticed the repeat numbers and stopped putting their calls through. It was great, but it was also the kind of trick you could only play once.

  He decided to give the public access channel a second now. After all, it was his last chance for entertainment before having to go back around to channel surfing programs he’d already given up on.

  The studio camera was slightly Dutch, the frame drooping low enough that you could see the wires covering the floor. Whoever was in charge of this show was off to a rousing start.

  Danny’s finger hovered above the channel-up button, but a loud crack echoed through Danny’s basement, loud enough to distort the studio’s sound equipment. From off camera a man entered the frame. He wore a black suit jacket powdered with dust and had neon-yellow corpse paint on his face and neck, his nose and eyes painted into skeletal holes with black makeup.

  Nice. Danny readied himself for some low-rent spook-show action.

  “Lift up the fucking camera, does it look like I’m playing here?” the man asked, and the camera righted itself, framing him in a comfortable medium-shot.

  Danny lowered his hand and sat, now inches from the TV.

  Bringing up his left hand, the man brought something into the shot that Danny hadn’t noticed before: a pistol.

  “It’s on?” the skeleton man asked to the person behind the camera.

  The frame trembled in response, but Danny couldn’t hear any words.

  “Don’t fucking lie to me.”

  What am I watching?

  As if in response, the darkened basement was illuminated by the familiar red and blue of police lights, headed past Danny’s house at a speed that meant business.

  “Good evening,” the man said, drawing Danny’s attention back. He kept eye contact with the camera while he spoke, addressing his audience, but took a few glances off-screen during his pauses. “Don’t attempt to adjust your set. I am in control.” He paused, lowered the gun out of the frame. “Well, I’m really only in control of this station. You could change it if you wanted to. But you shouldn’t, because I imagine that this is going to be a one-time thing.”

  He dropped the game-show-host act long enough to raise his arm and yell off screen. “You move one more inch toward that door and I’ll put one in her tit, I swear on my mother.

  “My name is Count Mort. I’ve been working at WZLR for fifteen years, and for longer than that I’ve been collecting the weirdest, sickest tapes I could find.” The man who called himself Count Mort paused, took a breath that could have been exhaustion or sadness. “So tonight we’re going to have a little marathon. Coincidentally this will also be my going-away party, because I got fired today. Enjoy the first movie, humble viewer.”

  He tried to break into an operatic laugh, but stopped, the sweat on his forehead smudging the paint, droplets of yellow forming at the bottom of his nose.

  “Roll tape, goddamn it!”

  There was a moment of static and then credits appeared. The video source was old and degraded, clearly taken from film, and played on tape through the public access station’s subpar signal. The man was gone now, and the program was back to the comforts of fiction.

  Danny allowed himself to sit back against the couch, the sick feeling that Count Mort had given him receding. The broadcast had been harrowing, had him thinking that it was some kind of real hostage situation, but then a movie started showing. It was just some kind of pirate late-night video show. The cursing was probably against WZLR’s rules, but nobody besides Danny was watching on a Saturday night, right? So who cared?

  He read the credits, didn’t recognize any names, but he felt his heartbeat slow to normal levels.

  Danny was now safe in the clutches of film.

  Bringing Down the Giants

  The creature before him was a heavy mass of teeth, fur, and anger. For the first time in his life, Brut knew that he’d made a mistake and had taken on quarry too big to fell on his own.

  The boys had come along on this hunt, though, and he had been trying to show off for them. He’d commanded them to keep their distance and watch. He explained to them, in their own language, that it would be dangerous for them to help him and even more dangerous to disobey him.

  Lank and gray, the creature rose up on its hind feet and showed Brut its white underbelly. It stood almost double Brut’s height. Brut could feel his children’s eyes on him, knew that he was being watched, marveled at, feared for. This was the moment when the kill must come, or it would not come at all.

  Brut lashed out with his spear, but the animal was too tall and too fast. It caught him by the shoulder, the rough pads of its fingers tugging against Brut’s long hair while four claws, each the length of Brut’s outstretched hand, buried themselves into the meat of his back. Brut let one hand off his weapon and released a quick punch to the creature’s snout.

  Chittering low in its throat, the white-gray shape dragged Brut off his feet and buried its long front teeth in his forearm. The pain was there in a quick burst and then gone, his senses overloaded by having his arm completely pierced by the enormous incisors. He listened as the bones of his arm snapped.

  In the distance, he could hear his boys cry out. They were well behaved and honor-bound, though, and would not approach. That they were safe was a small consolation to Brut as he faced death.

  With the last of his strength he buried the spear in the creature’s neck, its long yellow teeth parting from his flesh to let loose a cry of anguish.

  With their blood mingling and the light fading in the forest around them, Brut wanted to cry out for his boys to stay away, that even mortally wounded the animal was still dangerous, but his wounds were too deep, his body too weak.

  The last thing Brut observed in this world was a tremor spreading across the forest floor, shaking his body, the dying beast twitching beside him. Then, a shadow swept over him, belonging to a giant big enough to block out the sun.

  ***

  The woods behind Susan’s new house were amazing. Moving so far away from the city had been a little scary and she’d miss all of her friends at Brookline Elementary, but maybe exploring these woods had the power to make it better.

  Her mother had torn a white trash bag into two long strips and tied them around branches a few yards apart, making an invisible fence that ran through the forest. She wasn’t supposed to go beyond the two white flags. Susan toed this line and then looked back. It was still easy to see the second-floor windows of the new house, so just a little further couldn’t hurt.

  She took a tentative step and then another, her disobedience getting easier with every stride, until she wasn’t even thinking about what her mother would think or do to punish her—if she’d do anything. Daddy had been the disciplinarian, but Daddy didn’t live with them in the new house.

  The woods were so much different than the park Susan was used to. The ground was uneven with roots and brush, and the trees were close enough together that she could only see swatches of the blue sky above.

  She could sense that life was all around her, even though most of it seemed to be hiding. She lifted up bits of wood and squealed with delight as bugs and grubs scurried away from the light. Susan whirled toward every snapped twig, hoping to see a deer like Bambi, but always disappointed when she couldn’t spot the source of the sound.

  Susan hadn’t encountered anything larger than a sparrow before she came upon the squirrel.

>   The poor thing was dead, but that wasn’t the worst part. Susan looked at the body, at the blood, and frowned. Someone had stabbed the animal in the neck and left it here to die. Back home in Boston, the boys in the neighborhood had talked about doing similar things, but she’d never actually seen them set a cat on fire or catch a squirrel in a rattrap.

  Real death was new and scary.

  Susan started to cry as she imagined bigger boys hanging out in her secret woods. The place didn’t feel special anymore, she hadn’t found it first.

  A thin trail of blood led away from the squirrel, and Susan followed it with her eyes. Under the shade of a nearby fern, she found the murder weapon.

  It was the ugliest action figure she’d ever seen.

  The small caveman monster was outfitted with a tiny cloth sash and a small, sharp stick and covered in a soft layer of brown fur. Susan didn’t know what TV show the character was from.

  She picked him up and, unlike most action figures, found that he was soft to the touch, his arms and legs slumping against her fingers. The monster was made not of rigid plastic but of some kind of rubber.

  “Why did you kill Mr. Squirrel?” Susan asked, knowing full well that the toy had been the instrument of the animal’s destruction, not the murderer.

  There was more rustling nearby, and Susan scanned the bushes for signs of life. Nothing. Clouds must have begun to move in, because the woods seemed to darken, like blinds closing on the outside world. Suddenly Susan did not feel welcome in the woods, or alone. The boys who had killed that squirrel were watching her, she knew it.

  “You’re all bullies and I’m telling,” she screamed in the direction of the noises. There was no reply. She held up the caveman, his head lolling as she did.

  “I’m taking this with me,” she said. “You want him back; you’re going to have to talk to my mom.”