Canine Confession

It is time for me to confess. 

For six long years I have lived here, and the people around me have thought me mad from the moment I arrived, kicking and screaming at the silent community. Oh, it was true. I was quite crazy. 

I am here because I refused to confess those seventy two months ago. I refused to tell them what they thought was the correct version of reality, the one to which they adhered to. But theirs is wrong. There is no place for giants who stalk the streets at night, no place for snake-faced temptresses who wait as you stare beyond the mirror. They call it fantasy and insanity. But there are none so blind as those who will not see. 

It will not be long now until the blind are forced to open their eyes to the reality which is so apparent to me that it will blind them again, fearfulness etched, burned onto the gel of their eyeballs. He comes for them, and he brings the truth with him.

Rather, I will reveal it. It’s not as if I have a choice. 

It was seven years ago I first heard him, panting and scratching at the dirt. He was bigger than any other I had ever seen, and his own eyes glinted with malice. I knew he was there for me. It sounds funny, doesn't it? A dog who’s out to get you? But I knew that he knew what I was doing. It was right there in the mud by his maw. I picked it up, stuffed it into my pocket, and rushed back to my house. My wife seemed no more dangerously enlightened, so I regained my composure and climbed upstairs. Pulling open my wardrobe, I took it from my pocket and shoved it at the back. My wife would never find it; never find out about her. I checked my shoulder for long blonde hairs - that’s how they always find out in the movies - then brushed my own brown mop. 

That was the first time I saw it, but it was not the last. 

The next week, it brought more to the same place. Every morning when I left for work it was waiting there with another symbol of my wavering loyalty. One day it was a perfume bottle she’d used while I watched, the next day the dog’s fur was soaking wet and the tangy sharp scent of a mix of sweat and spit floated on the air. 

I knew it had to go. Either I would crack, or it had to. 

That night I sat on the sofa while my wife slept alone, my eyes staring at the rubbish which I flicked through and my mind whirring, anxious to come up with a solution. It came to me quickly. How do you put down strays? You poison them. Fast, painless, effective. 

The next morning I walked past the dog quickly. For once it seemed to not relish its job, and was content with watching me squirm as I passed it. On the way home from work I took a detour to a gardening centre. I picked up poison meant for killing moles, supposedly more humane than the traps. I only hoped it acted fast. 

I went to the store beside this one and picked up a small carton of dog food. 

I picked up the poison the next morning. It was a weekend but that meant nothing to this dog who tortured me. I looked at the time - one in the afternoon! I had overslept. I immediately panicked. I tucked the poison into my pocket and dashed outside. My suspicions were confirmed and my heart sank. I swear I felt it hit my kidneys. The dog was gone. 

I should have been celebrating, but I knew the truth. My wife went for a jog on Saturdays at eleven o’ clock. I was too late. 

I found her in the lounge, sobbing quietly to herself. She clutched a piece of paper tightly in her hands. I gently pried it from her hands and turned it over. It was a photo, one of the ones she had taken on her phone. 

The other she. 

I said nothing. What could have corrected it? She knew everything now, everything that was of importance, and we were finished. Over. Done. 

“I’ll get you a drink.” I said softly, and padded away to the kitchen. I poured a glass of wine for her, then heard a tap at the window. There he stood. Watching me. Judging me. Pressuring me to end it all. How could I live with myself now? It would have been better if I had confessed my guilt earlier, so much earlier.

I took the sachet from my pocket and tore off the top. My hand shook as I tipped it in until all the powder had left the packet. I stirred the drink until there was no powder left. 

I took it back to her. She drank deeply, barely stirring from where she sat curled up. An hour later, even the tiniest of twitches were gone. I called an ambulance. 

The next three months are a dream to me. I remember the sirens, the banging at the door, the bang of the door hitting the doormat, the yells and the questioning. I remember the inquest and the trial, though they are like a haze. I remember coming here, where I have been ever since. I am not surprised they put me here. I would have done in their case. The blind will never believe anything they cannot see for themselves, which is to say, everything. After all, who would believe the story of a behemoth of a dog who forces you to drown in your guilt?

For just over a week shy of two thousand and two hundred days I have refused to confess. Now, with a nurse who wields a tape recorder beside me, this is my confession. 

For six years I have had blissful silence. Now, in the back of my mind, I can hear him. The hound is coming again. No walls can keep him out. No prison, no ward is too secure. The blind do not notice what they cannot see slipping past. 

This is my confession. By giving up my last vestiges of secrecy and guilt, perhaps he will spare me. 

The dog whispers into my very soul with his footsteps, and I shiver to my very core. He is coming. 

Bunny Man

(This is a rewrite of the original urban legend, taking the basic ideas and writing it as I felt was interesting and scary)

It was out in the country, when it was first built. The staff were afraid the busy traffic and fumes of London might frighten their patients into doing things they might later regret.

So it was built way out in the country, with no cars, lorries or buses to disturb them. It was peaceful, quiet. The only thing that could be heard at night was the soft hooting of owls and the squeaky cry of foxes.

Perhaps, it was also to stop the public being unnerved. After all, who would really enjoy living next door to an asylum for the mentally impaired?

The official reason it was moved was because the area was getting full. Many had migrated from the city to the fresh air and cool breeze of the country. It made them feel young again, there was room for their children to run around and play. There was no longer any space for the asylum, and the peace had been disturbed. It was only a slight change in noise, but the staff worried it might be too much for some of the more temperamental inmates. Inmates, guests, patients – they never called them prisoners, lunatics, murderers, but the simple fact was that a large amount of them were all three.

That was the official reason, but the real one? Living so close to a mental institution unnerved many new residents. The thought of murderers and crazies locked up so close to them was too much. Maybe it was that they’d seen too many horror movies; who knows? All that is known is that the residents gathered quietly. One by one, they added their name to a petition.

It was shown to the staff, and they accepted. They would relocate shortly, and they did so.

Nobody was prepared for what happened next. Was it fate? Chance? Or just plain bad luck?

Everything had been prepared, the new buildings, the food and water supplies, everything that was needed.

On the day of the move, all the inmates were traveling together in one large bus. In hindsight, it wasn’t such a good idea to have them all in the same vehicle, but the staff of the asylum thought it would work out well. They had restraints on the most violent of people, and hypodermic syringes and straitjackets were nearby in case of problems.

The first problem came before they even set off. The driver had suffered from a cardiac arrest out of nowhere. It was a common thing in his family, but the asylum workers had neglected to check.

A replacement was swiftly found, and the journey was begun.

If the company had forgotten to check the previous driver’s background, they certainly had no time to check the new one.

The long, three hour journey was uneventful more the most part. Slowly evening cast its spell over all the passengers, and, unfortunately the driver as well. He veered off course, drifting from the road. Nobody was in a state to wake him.

They were all awoken by the sickening crunch as the bus smashed into a train. The bus had gone so far off the road it had driven onto train tracks. The train hadn’t spotted them until it was too late.

Many of the patients died that day, unable to protect themselves due to being restrained or asleep. Not all of them succumbed to the eternal embrace of death, though. A few escaped into the area nearby, and managed to stay hidden.

The bodies of all the dead were collected and buried, given a brief funeral. The staff enlisted the help of the local police to search the area, to find the missing inmates. They were a danger to both themselves and the people around them. They had to be recaptured – they would have used the word retrieved – before they could do any harm.

One by one, bodies started turning up. They had died of starvation and dehydration, mostly, but at least two corpses bore faint teeth marks. It was as if they had been chewed. What they found most disturbing was that the teeth marks were, without a doubt, human.

After a while, only one patient was left. All the others had been recovered, some dead, some alive. One remained alive, dead, nobody knew. He was in the nearby area and, if the police hadn’t even glimpsed him by now, was probably still alive and hiding. How could one man, not right in the head or particularly strong at that, hide from them for so long? Morale was not high in the police force.

Then something changed the neighborhood's lives forever.

In trees around the area, the limp bodies of dead rabbits hung from branches, their carcasses cleanly, neatly skinned and half eaten. Hundreds of them turned up, more each day. Nobody was ever seen hanging them, nor carrying rabbits. There was one suspect for the man or woman who had held the knife as they slit the stomach of the rabbit, to hang it by its entrails from the trees.

The escaped prisoner.

The final man who had escaped from the asylum, who had lived so long in the wild – now they knew what his diet consisted of. Hundreds of half eaten wild rabbits.

Many children and adults had nightmares of the grotesque bundles, hanging from the trees, swinging gently in the wind. To this day, some are haunted by the memory.

This was bad enough for the terrified residents who lived nearby. Some children were afraid to go to school, scared the man would attack them. Seeing the freshly killed rabbits each day, blood dripping, the marks of human teeth on the flesh – it is a surprise that more of them did not completely break down. The adults tried to stay strong for their sons and daughters, but inside they were at breaking point. They barely withstood the rabbit incidents, and what came next made them snap.

A man in the local town, who went by the name Marcus Green, had disappeared. He was a painter, a rover, he never stayed in one place for too long. He would be away from the city for months at a time, to return with beautiful, breathtaking paintings and sketches of the far away rocks and mountains and the white foam of the sea as it lashed against the white chalk cliffs.

Nobody had given much thought to his absence. His presence was much more shocking.

It was in the early morning one day, the sky a dull grey and the wind cold but not as bitter as it had been for some time, it was on this winter day that they found him.

He was found under a bridge. He was hanging upside down from a tree that grew outside, and had poked a limb under the bridge. His weight was spread against three branches, to prevent them from snapping. His face was the only part of him that could be identified as human. The rest of his body was mangled – in fact, it was skinned. A heap of rotting flesh at the base of the tree confirmed this.

On Marcus’ face was a look of terror. They had only this to guess what had happened to him, and one other thing.

The human tooth marks on his broken neck.

The press went wild when they discovered it. They interviewed the police and anyone who would give a statement. Fact or lies, it was material for them. The papers ran countless stories on the escaped convict. They named him the Bunny Man, after the vile disposal of his food, rabbits, and they also claimed the bridge had been called the Bunny Man Bridge in ancient times. Who was anyone to question it? People were either too excited with the news, or too terrified, to even think about whether any embroidering of the truth was going on.

Blame was laid on the shoulders of the asylum staff. There were cries of court, but it never came to fruition. They may never have been officially punished for their blunder, but the press openly shamed and mocked them in every single issue they published that included an article on the now-famous Bunny Man.

Time went by and the rabbit corpses showed no sign of disappearing. If they were taken down, removed, new ones would be hung up in their place by the time the week was over. It could mean only one thing. The killer was still alive and still at large.

Eventually, the national panic and publicity ran out. The rabbits did not.

The town lived in terror for another six months, before another fact was revealed that brought newspapers back into business with the Bunny Man convict.

There was a headline that ran “Bunny Man still at large – but is he the Easter Bunny?” This, among others, exploited a small fact that had inadvertently been dropped by one of the asylum’s former staff. Most of them had left to work elsewhere, unnerved by their experiences and ridiculed by the press. One had been tracked down, and gave a short interview.

The simple fact was that the murderer, who was named as Mr. Harvey Douglas, had been placed in the asylum for killing his entire family, wife and three children, on Easter Sunday. He was not mentally stable, so had been spared the normal prison sentence for a life behind bars with padded walls.

The media seized this fact, and ran so many articles of the links between Douglas and the Easter Bunny that many families in the town complained it was scaring their children and themselves.

The stories slowly stopped, as other readers grew bored of reading the same story time and time again.

Suddenly, three weeks later, they ran a dramatic headline – the notorious Bunny Man was dead!

This time, it was for real.

The police had tracked him to a train station. They had been about to catch him as he turned and saw them. He was wearing the skins of countless rabbits, sewn together with their sinews to create a grotesque cloak.

He smiled and waved as the early morning train smashed into him, ending him forever.

It was only later that the police realized something was odd with the train.

It was the same one that had killed his fellow inmates.

Snuff

Helen Smith was in an Internet café, waiting for her appointment.

She was an actor, not the best, not Hollywood level, although she firmly believed she could reach it. She was twenty, with the rest of her life still ahead of her.

It was 2 o’ clock. Her informal meeting was due to begin in ten minutes. She was still nervous.

Mainly Helen did action films, as well as quite a few fantasy ones, but this new one was different. This new film that was coming up, currently called My Life Underground, was meant to be a revolutionary take on the life of a thief in the United Kingdom, in Victorian times, with special, never before seen special effects. Of course they would need lots of special effects; they always did these days.

She bought herself another coffee and waited.

The thump of a bag on the table startled her. She looked up to see a young man, about twenty seven, near her own age. He was smiling, but it did not reach his cold grey eyes.

“Hello,” The man began. “I presume you are Helen Smith. I am sorry if I frightened you.”

“Not at all.” Helen took a deep breath.

“As you probably already know, I wish to cast you in the role of Miss Edwards in the upcoming film My Life Underground. Let me fill you in on the film.”

He opened his bag and pulled out a thick wad of papers. He began to read aloud.

“Miss Araminta Edwards. Set in Victorian times, she has lost her family after trying to marry a working class boy, and her family turn her out. She goes on the run, stealing what she can. Can she escape the police and marry her true love?”

He shuffled the papers.

“So, you see, it’s a historical tragedy. I forget to mention; as in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, both of the lovebirds die in the end. Are you still up for this?”

Helen nodded her head.

“Good.” The first glint of a real smile came into his face, and touched his eyes. What was slightly creepy was that it had an almost predatory look. He extracted a contract from the mass of papers. “Please sign here. You know the formalities.”

She did not bother to read it through; there were over fifty pages and besides, most films were exactly the same. Benefits, pay, stunt obligations, accident insurance and the like.

“Now you are not a new actress; you’ve starred in a few films. When this film is over you’ll have amassed quite a paycheck. Who would you have it go to?”

“I’m sorry, did I hear you correctly?”

His grin showed his white teeth. “Oh yes. It was all in the contract.”

Helen began to panic.

“What was?”

“You should have read it through. Section 27 subsection 8 clearly states that this film is what is known as a video nasty, meaning that it contains real, strong violence. In this case, we have your character Araminta dying after talking to one of the policemen. We have very good video editing, don’t worry.”

“But-“Helen spluttered. She stopped dead.

She saw a light flickering under his jacket, a red, flashing light.

The light of a video recorder.

House In The Woods

Do you remember that house in the woods? That one you were too scared to go into?

That day you were out playing among the trees, happily dancing about and laughing. You delved deeper and deeper into the wood, believing the trees were benevolent, might protect you.

Have you ever been more wrong?

I wonder if you’ve ever told anyone what you found that day.

The house in the woods.

It must have been beautiful once, a grand, great mansion. By the time you found it, the wilderness of the forest had overrun it again. All that was left was crumbing stone, breaking down, covering dark hallways and damp corridors.

Faint traces of gold paint was the scent that inspired you to begin your hunt, small, worn patches of glittering colour. What were you expecting? Treasure?

How fast your heart must have beat as you passed the leering gargoyles that hung from the roof, old and decrepit. Terrifying to a poor young child such as yourself.

The candle you brought only made things worse, the small light throwing shadowy objects into grotesquely distorted monsters.

On you tiptoed, through the house. Through the house in the woods.

I still wonder if you dare to tell anyone the tale of what awaited you up the stairs. As you drew your candle closer to the door and found the star etched on the old wood, did your heart flutter?

When you pushed open the creaking door and found it there, did you scream?

If nobody is around to hear a child in a forest scream, do they make a sound?

It hung from ropes, strings, from all corners of the room.

Like something from a horror movie, its entrails spilling from its slashed body and the old blood dried on the wooden plank floor.

You never did tell anyone what you saw.

Hearing a noise, you turned, only to find the door locked. No windows in this room either.

Slowly your body responded, screaming out for sustenance. No amount of shouting and banging the door would get attention. Only I could hear you, watching from the other side of the door. Smiling.

A starving man will turn aside from whatever values he holds dear, if he will otherwise die.

The body that hung in the centre of the room frightened you at first. Soon you began to think of it not as a source of terror, but a source of food.

They say that a man who eats the flesh of his own kind will be cursed by the gods to be eternally hungry, ever eating yet never full. Their thin form is terrifying, with bones protruding almost through the skin. This is called a Wendigo. Have you ever heard this legend?

The food ran out, of course. Meat does not last forever. They eventually found your body, in the old house in the woods. Can you imagine their shock and terror when they found the door, locked from the outside? With no key to be found.

Tearful days and sorrowful nights passed. They buried you in a graveyard, with a beautiful angel statue over your coffin. Much good that would do you, lying in the dirt, worms eating your flesh.

But that will all change now. Six months it’s been, but it feels so much longer. It’s night. I crouch beside your freshly dug grave.

I whisper to you.

“Time to get up, child.”

Rise again, child.

A Wendigo will howl tonight, its terrible hunger fuelling its anger. They say they first go for those it knew in life.

It’s been six months, six long, lonely months.

Will your dear parents still recognise you?