Week 367 (June 21-27) Stories Topic: Into the Unknown

[C. J., Cool yet firm like ice]

You have until the 27th of June to post a story and from the 28th to around the 2nd of July, we’ll vote for which one we thought was best!

Please post directly into the topic and not a link. Please don’t use a story previously used in this group. Only one submission per person is allowed.

Your story should be between 300 and 3,500 words long.

REMEMBER! A short story is not merely a scene. It must have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

This week’s topic is: Into the Unknown

Thanks goes to Garrison for suggesting the topic!

The rules are pretty loose. You could write a story about anything that has to do with the subject/photo but it must relate to the topic somehow.

Most of all have fun!

[Garrison]

I wrote this synopsis back in 2014, a time when they weren't as detailed as they are now. Hopefully, it'll suffice nonetheless. It's a story called "Dayton Spoke Choir" and it goes like this:

CHARACTERS:

1. Laguna Pearman, Charismatic Cult Leader
2. Matt McQueen, Detective
3. Caylee McQueen, Matt’s Daughter

PROMPT CONFORMITY: Matt doesn’t know what to expect when he enters the church, so he’s definitely diving into the unknown.

SYNOPSIS: Matt takes time off work to rescue his kidnapped daughter. He finds her in an abandoned church, but not the way he wants to. Caylee is singing in a brainwashed choir of kidnapped children led by Laguna. Sickened and infuriated at the same time, Matt won’t hold back when he tries to beat the crap out of Laguna.

[Garrison]

AUTHOR: Garrison Kelly
TITLE: Dayton Spoke Choir
GENRE: Horror
WORD COUNT: 1,502
RATING: PG-13 for violence and swearing



The ethereal beauty of the choir’s voices haunted Detective Matt McQueen’s mind like a schizophrenic voice. He felt as though he was being lovingly pulled into the center of this heavenly sound, but kept his pistol drawn knowing this was the calm before the storm. He already ventured into the unknown by looking for clues in this dense forest. Every once and a while a spider would land on him and he’d get chills running down his spine before swatting the arachnids away. Those voices. So innocent. So magnificent. They couldn’t have been older than the single digits. What were small children doing all the way out in this secluded nightmare?

Matt took a massive gulp of saliva and wiped the sweat off of his forehead when he found the source of the voices: a broken down church covered in foliage and insects. Another plunge into the unknown. With every one of Detective McQueen’s steps, the choir grew louder and more haunting. His finger tightly wrapped around the trigger, the cop slowly advanced toward the front entrance, which was guarded with little else than a cracked wooden door barely on its hinges. It wasn’t so much the robust structure that kept city folks away; it was the creepiness of it all.

Matt’s eyebrows furrowed and his goateed mouth curled into a dark frown as he kicked down the front door and stormed in on the church screaming, “Freeze! Paulson City Police!” His all-business attitude softened into creeped out jitters when he saw what was inside. He lowered his weapon and asked, “What the fuck?!” He was careful not to drop the pistol, but with his shaky hands, it almost happened.

The children’s choir’s lovely voices were tainted by blue jumpsuits and putty-faced masks with blood dripping down from their mouth and eye holes. Each and every one of them had puppet strings attached to their ankles and wrists, strings that lifted their arms in conformist salute when prompted by their leader.

“Matthew, Matthew, Matthew! It’s so good to see you again. Perhaps you’d like to sing some hymns with us.” Detective McQueen quickly turned around with his pistol aimed at the source of the creepily sensual voice: Reverend Laguna Pearman. No longer was he the trusted member of the Paulson City religious community. No longer was he a donor to the poor and an educator of children. All that remained of Reverend Pearman was a wicked smile and a black choir robe with his fingers tapping together playfully.

“Laguna…I trusted you!” shrieked Matt before bull rushing the preacher and slamming him against the wooden wall. Even with the barrel of Matt’s pistol planted firmly in his jaw line, Laguna’s smile never faded. “I went to your sermons every Sunday. I let my child around you. And this is what you’ve been doing this whole time?! Where’s Caylee?! She better be in here or I’ll blast your fucking head clean off your shoulders!”

“Daddy, no!” shouted a little girl from the choir, who came flying toward her father on puppet strings before clamping around his legs tightly. “Daddy, please don’t kill him! He’s going to take us to heaven to see God! This is our mission!”

“You heard her, Detective. Caylee is much happier here than she was at home. She’s not your child anymore. She belongs to Jesus Christ now,” said Laguna, still not wiping that smug grin off his slender face.

“Shut up, you snaky piece of shit!” yelled Matt before pistol whipping Laguna’s breakable face repeatedly. Caylee begged and pleaded with her father while pounding on his legs with those tiny child hands. The rest of the choir levitated in on their puppet strings to pull Matt off of their “master”. By the time the detective was being held on the ground, Laguna’s visage was covered in blood and bone splinters.

“My face…my beautiful face…how could you do this to me? How could you do this to the face of God?!” sobbed Laguna as he dropped to his knees clutching his shattered mug. While some children held a struggling Matt to the ground, others circled around Laguna and hugged him tightly while crying drops of pink tears.

“Is this what you call leadership?!” bellowed Matt. “This guy’s not your master! He’s not anyone’s master! He’s a false prophet with a child fetish and he needs to be locked up forever!”

“Don’t talk that way about my new daddy!” shouted Caylee with tears running down her masked face.

Matt’s own eyes were sore and swollen from the sorrow of watching his daughter being ripped away from him by this monster. Detective McQueen’s heart felt like it was being put through a juicer. His stomach felt like he’d taken a liver kick from an MMA champion. “Caylee, please don’t say those things,” begged Matt with all of his soul.

“I hate you, Dad! I hate you! I belong to God now!” shrilled Caylee with her fists at her side.

“Oh, Matthew, don’t you ever get sick of questioning things you don’t understand?” asked the bloodied Laguna Pearman rhetorically. “Don’t you ever get sick of taking my name in vain? You should be. It’s a mortal sin after all. And you know how we punish sinners in my church, don’t you?” That last line was punctuated by Laguna gently rubbing his calloused hand across Caylee’s trembling back.

“Don’t touch my daughter!” roared Matt as he struggled even harder to free himself from the choir’s grips.

Laguna spit out some teeth before he reached down for Matt’s gun (which he dropped on the floor earlier) and pointed the weapon at the wiggly detective. “Looks like your beautiful daughter isn’t the only one who belongs to God now. Rest in peace, Detective McQueen!” Matt wiggled his foot free and kicked Laguna in the ankle, causing his gun blast to accidentally strike one of his pupils in the chest. The false prophet along with his choir watched in horror as the child clutched his wound and bled all over the floor, dying a slow and painful death.

“No…no, no, no! Why, God?! Why would you take this innocent child from me?!” shouted Laguna as he dropped to his knees and shook his fists to the sky. “We’ve done so much for you! We’ve done everything we could to make you happy! Why, my lord! Why?!”

The shocked children’s grips were loosened by this sudden turn of events and Matt shoved them off to earn his freedom. He spear tackled Laguna to the ground and wrestled the gun out of the preacher’s hands. Despite the knee-bending pleas from the choir, Matt unloaded all six rounds into Laguna’s already shattered face, spreading his brains and skull all over the wooden church floor. Caylee shouted, “No!” as she watched the preacher’s blood run down a tiny crack in the floor.

What started out as a kidnapping investigation turned into a full-on massacre for Matt McQueen. His hands trembled as he held his now unloaded gun still in Laguna’s splattered face. The cop slowly climbed to his feet and finally holstered his weapon when the realization set in at what he’d done. Still shaky, yet firm to the core, Matt declared, “Alright, kids. It’s time to go home to your parents. This investigation’s over. Enough with the Halloween bullshit. Take your masks off and load up in the van outside.”

With their puppet strings loosened and their heads hung low, the children, Caylee included, removed their putty-faced masks. When they lifted their heads again, Matt’s newfound resolve shattered into trembling fear. Their faces were even bloodier than Laguna’s was. Their frowns were contorted beyond their natural limits. Some of their teeth and eyes were missing. They even had abscesses that peeled off parts of their faces to reveal their teeth.

“Sorry, Daddy. We warned you!” whispered Caylee. The choir formed a circle around the shivering Matt before jumping on him and chewing at his flesh. The detective’s screams were muffled by the blood pouring out of the hole in his throat. His eyeballs squished and squashed inside the maulers of the deformed children. His blood was slobbered up off the ground and his flesh was ripped and shredded. The final munch came when the evilly smiling Caylee devoured her father’s exposed heart like it was a juicy steak. All that remained of the detective were his bones and small pieces of slashed skin.

As the children lapped down the final pools of blood and chewed the last of their meals like animals, one of them asked, “Hey, Caylee! What should we do with Master Pearman’s body?”

The little brat’s grin never washed away from her bloody face when she said, “We’ve already had our supper for the evening….but we haven’t had dessert yet! Come on, everybody! Sing with me!”

As the choir carried the lifeless body of Laguna Pearman away from the church, they sang in their most innocent voices, “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!”

[Edward]

Title : Quickstep
Author : Edward Davies
Word Count : 1322
Rating : PG13

It was a Thursday, and Marlon Kingsley hadn’t been to work since the previous Friday. His stomach had been in knots ever since he’d attempted to cook himself a meal on Saturday night, a meal that was definitely not the colour it was supposed to be when it had finished sizzling in the wok. Nevertheless he’d eaten it, and his bathroom had suffered the brunt of his mistake.

It all started because his girlfriend, Sharmaine Martell, had gone out for the evening. Normally she’d cook all the meals – not because of, you know, sexism or anything, but because Marlon simply couldn’t cook – but on this one occasion she hadn’t had time to prepare anything. So, rather than taking the ten minute walk to KFC, he’d braved entering the kitchen. Ever since he’d bounced between the bedroom and the toilet, neither of which, had they been sentient in any way, would have been particularly happy to see him.

Sharmaine walked into the bedroom, having already prepared herself for another day at the office, and glared at Marlon, one hand firmly on her hip while the other held her handbag in place.

“Are you seriously still not going into work?” she asked, “They’ll ask you for a doctor’s note if you keep calling in sick.”

“But I am sick!” Marlon complained, “You’ve seen the bathroom. I can’t handle a day at work with my stomach the way it is.”

“Well, you need to do something,” Sharmaine insisted, “you can’t just lie in bed for the rest of your life drinking Gaviscon and eating Imodium. You need some fresh air or something to clear yourself out.”

“I’ve already been clearing myself out,” Marlon groaned, “but there always seems to be a little more left when I’m done. I’ve really managed to improve my quickstep from this nightmare!”

Sharmaine flared her nostrils with distaste, “Well, just get yourself feeling better by the time I get back from work,” she said, “you’re not taking tomorrow off as well.”

“Fine, whatever,” Marlon rolled his eyes in a childish manner, lowering himself in the bed, “have a good day at work.”

“And you enjoy yourself sleeping all day,” Sharmaine replied, leaving the bedroom. Marlon heard the front door close, then lifted the bed covers over his head, trying to block out the daylight that the curtains couldn’t quite contain.

As he lay there, blankets over his head, eyes slowly drifting closed, he saw a light peeking through the bottom of his covers.

“Oh know,” he mumbled to himself, “the sheets must have come untucked.”

Not wanting to cope with the idea that daylight might penetrate the bed covers and assault his ability to sleep, Marlon crawled under the covers, moving towards the light with the plan to tuck the sheets back in from inside the bed. Never an easy task, but Marlon thought it was preferable to getting out of bed and contending with the freezing cold floors.

He crawled the length of the bed, the covers getting tangled in his pyjamas, the light appearing to get brighter until it was almost blinding. Part of him though that Sharmaine had placed a lamp or a torch at the end of the bed to torture him, but even that wouldn’t explain how bright the light was. Squinting tightly, Marlon pushed his way through the bottom of the bed covers, hoping to extinguish the light so he could get some sleep.

As he did so, he found himself falling through the sheets and down a grassy hilltop, rolling end over end as he fell until he finally reached the halfway point, where a bush abruptly halted his progress.

“What the heck?” Marlon cursed, shaking his head and brushing the grass off his pyjama bottoms, “Why am I outside?”

He looked back up the hill, trying to see if he could see his bed anywhere up there, but there was nothing. So Marlon clambered to his feet and, as he stood, he couldn’t help noticing that the pain in his stomach had subsided. What’s more, he didn’t feel like going to the toilet anymore.

“Well, that’s one bit of good news,” he mumbled to himself, “but now I need to figure out where the hell I am.”

Marlon began walking further down the hill, eventually reaching the bottom where he found a winding road that led to a small cottage in the distance. Curiosity getting the better of him, Marlon headed towards the building and knocked on the door.

He waited for a number of minutes, for some reason feeling quite patient about being left on the doorstep, then suddenly the door swung inwards and a squat man in a large brown coat stood before him. He eyed Marlon up and down;

“I’m not interested,” he concluded, and motioned to close the door.

“No wait,” Marlon thrust his foot into the doorframe, preventing it from closing, “I need your help.”

The man stared at him, “I already said,” he grunted, “not interested.”

“But I’m lost,” Marlon wailed.

“Still not interested,” the man said, trying to close the door with Marlon’s foot still blocking his way.

Marlon smiled winningly, “I have money…”

“Well why didn’t you say so?” said the man, suddenly sounding interested, “Please, come on in.”

Marlon entered the small building, lowering his head so he could get through the door. He looked around at the tatty room, for the house was basically only one room with a curtain in one corner he assumed hid the bedroom area from view. He then turned to face the man, who was watching him expectantly.

“Well?” the man said.

“Well what?” Marlon asked.

“Where’s my money?”

“Oh,” Marlon smiled weakly, “I don’t actually have it on me…”

“So you lied?” the man growled.

“Not exactly, it’s just that my money is at home and I need to get there so I can give it to you.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.” Marlon nodded.

“Well, what do you need to know?” the man asked.

“First of all, where is this place?” Marlon asked.

“This place,” the man smiled, “is a hallucination.”

“A what?” Marlon frowned.

“A hallucination,” the man repeated, “because of all tummy tablets and pooh juice you’ve been taking.”

“It’s the other way round, actually.” Marlon corrected the man

“What?”

“It’s pooh tablets and tummy medicine,” Marlon said, “but anyway, what do you mean hallucination?”

“You really thought there was a vast hill at the bottom of your bed, and that a little man in a furry brown coat lived there?”

Marlon shrugged, “I don’t know.”

“Listen buddy, the only thing around here that’s furry and brown is your bum, so wake up before you completely ruin your bedding.”

Marlon didn’t understand what was going on until he heard a faint voice calling to him:

“Marlon! Marlon! Wake up!”

Marlon’s eyes refocused and he found himself lying on the floor with Sharmaine standing over him.

“What happened?” he asked.

“You were lying on the floor,” Sharmaine explained, looking scared, “and I couldn’t wake you up.”

“It must have been the medicine,” Marlon said, “it made me have the strangest dream, like I was travelling into an unknown land.”

“Well don’t scare me like that again,” Sharmaine said, storming out of the room, “and it’s almost six o’clock, so I’ll get the dinner on.”

Marlon picked himself up off the ground, dusting down his pyjama trousers which had gotten dirty in his fall out of the bed. He looked at the dirt and dust as it landed on the floor, and he couldn’t help thinking that some of the dirt looked like blades of grass…

There was suddenly a loud knock at the door, which made Marlon jump.

“I’ll get it,” Marlon shouted to Sharmaine, and he shambled to the door, opening it to see the little man stood there in his fluffy brown coat. He leered up at Marlon, smiling evily;

“Where’s my money?” he asked.