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    Six!
    Six!
    Six!
    Ebook102 pages1 hour

    Six!

    By Mark Cassell

    ()

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    About this ebook

    From Mark Cassell, author of the Shadow Fabric mythos, comes SIX!
    Featuring a variety of dark tales, from the sinister to the outright terrifying, this unique collection is a must for horror readers everywhere.
    Includes the stories Skin, All in the Eyes, In Loving Memory, The Space Between Spaces, On Set With North, and Don't Swear in Mum's House.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRed Cape Publishing
    Release dateFeb 7, 2022
    ISBN9798201613853
    Six!

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      Book preview

      Six! - Mark Cassell

      SIX!

      By

      Mark Cassell

      DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

      Copyright © 2021 Red Cape Publishing & Mark Cassell

      All rights reserved.

      Cover Design by Red Cape Graphic Design

      Www.redcapepublishing.com/red-cape-graphic-design

      Skin, first published in Dark Places, Evil Faces Volume 2, 2018

      All in the Eyes, first published in Trapped Within, 2017

      In Loving Memory, first published in Sparks, 2017

      The Space Between Spaces, first published in The Many Deaths of Edgar Allan Poe, 2020

      On Set With North, first published in The Best of Indie Horror, 2020

      Don't Swear in Mum's House, first published in Corona-Nation Street, 2020

      For Helen, who's always been partner to the madness.

      Skin

      Gloria hasn't seen her husband in days. Something she's used to. Returning home with fingers stretched by grocery bags, she knows where he is. Where he always is. Unless she ever drags herself away from the house, every breakfast, lunch, and dinner, she spends alone. All the while he does his thing in the basement. When he'd first mentioned he wanted to build a laboratory down there, she thought he was joking ... Now, their marriage is the joke. You'd think she'd leave him, but she hasn't. Not yet. There's always tomorrow. Whatever dreamy-eyed dumbass said absence makes the heart grow stronger, needs to be shot.

      The back door closes, shutting off the sunshine and the smell of pine needles from a garden that will never see children play. She walks into the kitchen and--

      A scream echoes from his laboratory.

      Despite everything, she's not heartless, and so her imagination runs as fast as her legs. Behind her, she hears the groceries shift and a jar roll across the linoleum. Glass cracks.

      Richard! she shouts and charges into the hallway. Facing the basement door, heart in throat, she places a hand to the rough wood. Richard?

      Silence from the other side.

      Perhaps the scream had been from out in the street. Someone else, something else. Car tyres maybe? Again, she shouts his name. And again, only silence.

      Gouges scar the doorframe from when he'd carried a particularly bulky machine down into his domain. Five years ago ...

      It's fine, he said as he had struggled down the stairs. I can manage.

      The sunlight behind her reflected from the machine's casing to highlight the company logo of where he worked: two thin Cs slightly tilted, the last containing a blue bolt of lightning. CellCore.

      She stepped aside, feeling useless.

      Partially wrapped around his arm, coiled hoses and cables scraped brickwork. Watching his gradual descent, her hand rested on her stomach; the bump of a child that was never to be born. Richard's white smock flapped around his jeans as he reached the bottom and rounded the corner. The smell of damp wafted upwards. She allowed the door to swing closed, cutting off the sound of his shuffling footfalls.

      Back then she couldn't have known he'd spend more time down there than with her.

      And once they had lost the baby, they'd lost each other.

      Now, another scream drills into her brain.

      She glares at the keycode mechanism and with rigid fingers, stabs the buttons. Her birth date, no. His birth date? No. Their anniversary – ha! – no. Every attempt ends with an angry beep and pulsing red light. Whatever the hell the code, it remains yet another thing on Richard's secrecy list.

      She bangs on the door.

      Thumpthumpthump.

      It sounds dead in the hallway. A flat echo, ugly as the wood that faces her.

      * * *

      The axe drops to the floor in a nest of splintered wood.

      Gloria's arms throb and her head pounds. Yet her heart feels light. Is there even excitement racing though her veins right now? In breaking through the door, the barrier, perhaps this is euphoria.

      There have been no more screams.

      She pushes the door and the frame splits further. An extra shove and it swings inward to strike the brickwork. She enters and the smell of disinfectant stings her nostrils, not of damp as she remembers. A sliver of wood catches her sweater but she ignores it.

      Below her, a darkness fills the basement as though the wooden steps descend into black water.

      Her mouth is so damn dry. Richard?

      The occasional creak accompanies her down into a cold silence.

      At the bottom, she hits the light switch and the glare of a bare bulb makes her squint. She turns a corner and the basement spreads out before her. Two workbenches line one wall, both littered with apparatus and equipment she's never before seen. A glass-fronted cabinet like a microwave oven sits crooked beside a row of beakers that are clamped and connected by rubber tubes, one of which snakes into the socket of a smaller, cone-shaped machine. On its grubby casing there's a label written in Richard's manic uppercase and obscures the CellCore logo: SKIN. Papers and notes cover the benches, several pinned to a wall-mounted board. Mostly scribbled notes, some diagrams, plus a number of printed paragraphs. There's a dog-eared sheet which features a sketch of the human body, arms and legs wide, with a grid drawn over it.

      To her, nothing here makes any sense.

      Who the hell had screamed?

      When they first viewed their new home, she'd been impressed with the size of the house let alone the basement. At the time, she knew her husband may bring home his work, and in the years that followed, far too often he'd shut himself in his lab. Once, he brought home his work colleague: Philip McAllister, a man who went by the name of Mac.

      Eventually this man added to their problems in a number of ways.

      She slows, her eyes darting left and right.

      The only machine she recognises is the one he'd carried down the stairs a lifetime ago. It now crouches in the corner with panels dented as though someone had repeatedly kicked it. Thick dust covers the hood. A hose coils from it and loops to connect with other machines she doesn't recognise, each one sporting that CC logo. When Mac snatched the promotion from Richard's more-than-capable hands, she knew that her husband had begun stealing the equipment. That was the beginning of the end of everything.

      Standing in the centre of the basement, her pulse quickens.

      Beneath the workbench and nudged against a five-litre bottle of bleach, is a swivel chair. She pictures Richard sitting there hunched over a notepad frantically scribbling. But he isn't. Instead, there's a tattoo gun on the seat. The cord snakes its way across the uneven floor, its plug upturned beside an ink bottle. The cap hadn't been replaced properly and a black pool surrounds it. Several crumpled tissues lay scattered nearby, each smeared black and red.

      Although stolen, the CellCore machines being here she can understand – even though she has no idea what any are for – but what's he doing with a tattoo gun?

      A glance beside her reveals the door leading to another part of the basement she's forgotten. Nothing special, the once-white panels

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