I wrote this short story from a short screenplay I wrote while studying at film school - probably in my second year when I was 20. It’s a horror story! Enjoy.
Content warning: Blood & gore, violence, child in harms’ way, swearing.
Night Terrors
By Gary Lonesborough
It was hard to pull his body through the shrubs and broken sticks when my hands were all slippery with his blood. I generally washed and dried them after draining the bodies, but I forgot that day. Something was building inside me that had been building for months, and it was becoming too dreadful in my stomach, and I was unable to focus, so I could have been accused of getting sloppy when I missed his spine on my first stab that day. Usually I had no care for the victims, but I felt a strange reluctance when I saw him with his urn and watched him expel the ashes into the lake. Someone he loved, probably, expelled to a place that meant something for him, for them. And then he was stabbed and dead there, within minutes of emptying that urn.
His legs slipped from my grip and I nearly fell forward onto my face, so fuck it, I thought. I set him alight there in the forest, where the trees were near and catching ablaze, but I made sure no forest fire began.
When he was just smoking ash on the ground, I loaded the jugs of his blood into the cart. Well, they weren’t so much as jugs, but empty orange juice containers, and the cart was not so much a cart, but a child’s pulling wagon, my little brother Danny’s pulling wagon to be exact. He used it to carry the sand, which he only dumped back into the sandpit. I thought of him at home with them, my mother and father, who I’d struggled to love. The sun was setting, they would be waking soon. All of that was for them. All the people I’d killed, the wandering explorers who ventured off for a bushwalk to become just bloodless ash. There weren’t always explorers though, sometimes I had to go into to town and wear my tight shirts and miniskirts, to lure those old men with unloved stubble and beer-breaths and unhappy wives and children hoping they would not come home drunk that night. I thanked god I was not cursed with the curse of my parents.
When the sun was gone, I had made it midway from the back fence of the paddock, across the long grains that paved the way to my house. I saw the lights come on in the lounge room. They were awake. They were hungry.
As I dragged the wagon inside the front door, I could hear my mother singing her lullaby in the lounge. She cradled Danny in her lap as his legs dangled over her knees and he looked so terrified below her white face. She pushed him away when she could see the red glistening from the wagon. My father was just sitting there in his rocking chair smoking his cigarette until he saw the red too. He rushed to me, dropped the cigarette on the carpet. I picked it up as he carried the wagon past me and to the coffee table which was stained in black.
“Get us the washed glasses in the kitchen,” my mother muttered, her bloodshot eyes looking up at me as she began to slump to the ground beside the coffee table. I took Danny’s hand and guided him to the hallway. I put him in his room and on his bed.
“Sleepy time,” I whispered. It was tolling on me, putting him to sleep not knowing whether my parents still had the strength to fight their cravings and not eat him, or me, and that one of us would have to live in that house without the other. Danny just looked at me with those sad eyes of his. I’d never wanted to hear him speak words more than I did at that moment, when I realised how exhausted I was, and how it felt like every night something bad was going to happen. Danny was a mute. He never had a first word. He was shorter than most five-year-old’s should have been at his age, but he was my brother. I didn’t care that he couldn’t speak, because he could hear, and he his eyes told me everything I needed to know.
After I tucked Danny into bed, I made my way to the kitchen. As I picked up the washed wine glasses, I could hear the stereo in the lounge room begin to blare Charlie Pride. It was one of those nights. Usually after I delivered their breakfast, they would go for a night walk and find their own food to last them, but sometimes they would have breakfast and sing and have sex in the lounge room. They would stay there for hours and hours and lay on the floor. Then they would talk about eating Danny, and how it wouldn’t matter because he was a few screws loose anyways. And I would have to barricade us in his room when they’d run out of blood because they were too high from the blood to realise they were trying to break those walls down to eat their own son.
I could feel them becoming weaker over the last few months, that their thirst was growing stronger and insatiable, and they were becoming slaves to it. I worried that it wouldn’t matter who’s blood they drank, so long as it was blood.
I laid beside Danny and watched they sky grow darker and the moon grow brighter, serenaded by the repeated loop of Charlie Pride’s greatest hits. I could hear them singing, falling on the floor, shouting at each other. I would stay awake all night, but that night I was exhausted. When my eyes grew heavy, my thoughts turned to the man I murdered earlier that day. I remembered hearing his sniffles as he watched the ashes of his loved one become one with the water after he’d emptied the urn into the lake. I remembered not caring that he was a man who had a life, who had loved and lost, and was fulfilling some spoken or unspoken promise he’d made to someone or no one. I remembered lunging my knife into his back, and I remembered the sound of his gasp as his body winced. I remembered he stepped forward and stumbled then tried to run away when he saw me there, but he fell back. I remembered moving quick at him and launching my knife into his left eye. And I remembered the cry he let out, that he continued letting out, when I pulled the knife from his bludgeoned eyeball and glided it across his throat. I remembered how he reached for his throat and rolled onto his stomach. I remembered how he tried to slither away before I had another go at his spine. I got it that time. I remembered how his whole body became still and I began to drain the blood from his neck into the jugs. I wondered if anyone knew he was going there to that lake, if anyone would come looking for him. I wondered if they’d find the ashes I’d left in the forest, the ashes that were all that was left of him.
I woke to terrifying silence. No Charlie Pride. No Danny snoring beside me. I was on the floor in Danny’s bedroom. My hands were tied tight behind my back and my ankles were bound together. Light spilled onto the bed, light from the hallway which shined from the busted open door which was clinging so meekly to its hinges.
“Danny,” I shouted, and my shouts echoed back at me from the empty ceiling. Then, my mother’s lullaby. I could hear it. I rolled onto my stomach and tried to rip my hands free, but the sharpness of the rope began to cut me.
“I can smell you,” I heard, my father’s voice, deep and monotonous. I could feel the blood seeping from the scratch of my skin against the rope. I rolled over and over and over to the doorway. I shuffled onto my knees and crawled on my elbows and knees to the hallway.
My mother still sang her lullaby. I could hear Danny whimpering. I crawled to the lounge room and edged my head around the corner.
“Stop!”
“Shh,” my mother hissed, “we woke him when we accidentally broke the door. He needs to go back to sleep.”
She continued her lullaby. I couldn’t bear it. I knew when she finished her song and he closed his eyes that he would never open them again.
“Take me instead,” I interrupted. “Just leave Danny. Let him go!”
My mother just laughed. They’d finished all their blood, all that I could get from that grieving man. They needed more. I saw my father holding his hammer with tears in his eyes.
“He won’t feel anything,” he whispered. “Don’t worry, it’ll be like a dream.”
I shouted once more: “Just kill me!”
“You’re too important,” my mother snapped. “He can’t do what you do.”
She held his head against her breast as he began to cry. “He’s no use to anyone.”
“He is to me,” I cried, “he’s everything to me!”
I watched the single tear leave my mother’s eye as she began to sing her lullaby again. My father wiped the tears from his eyes as he gripped my elbows and began to drag me back. My face grazed the carpet as I was dragged around the corner and there was no more Danny to see, only the peeling white wallpaper. My father’s grip was so tight as he dragged me into my bedroom and dropped me onto my bed.
“He won’t feel anything,” he whispered again as he stood at the doorway. He closed the door and I heard him lock it with his keys. I began to scream as loud as I could. Focus on my scream, I thought. I hoped he would hear me, listen to me to stop him from listening to the lullaby. I screamed until my throat was dry and I was hoarse and there was no more sound left in my body.
Then I screamed louder and louder, until the strength ripped the rope from my hands and my feet. And I flew from the bed to the door and busted the wooded wall open like a bomb. And my father charged me in the hallway but I ripped his arm from his body and punched his face to a splatter on the floor. And I ripped Danny from my mother’s grip and threw her into the roof, so she could sing no more lullaby. When she hit the carpet and looked up at me with her red eyes, I grabbed her hair and pulled her scalp from her skull and screamed at her as loud as I could until I realised she was dead.
I could hear Danny crying behind me when I cooled and was no longer scorching hot. That’s when the tears came to my face and I realised what I had just done, what Danny had just seen me do. He hid behind the arm rest of my father’s rocking chair, watching me. I dropped to my knees as the pure exhaustion overcame me. I closed my eyes and I could have slept if not for Danny taking my arm. He lifted it and lowered it over himself as he laid beside me with his back against my chest. I could hear his heartbeat as it raced. It took forever, but his heart began to slow, and I could feel his breaths steadying. I just wanted him to say something, say he forgave me, anything at all, but when he didn’t, I knew I wasn’t resting beside a great talker, or a debater, or a radio show host, I was resting beside my brother. My brother needed me.
Danny helped me set fire to the curtains and the blankets. I carried him outside before it was too late. We sat in the grain and watched the house burn down, and Danny fell asleep in my lap. Soon after, I fell asleep too. I dreamed about Danny, about my brother. I dreamed one day he would thank me for saving him and allowing him to grow old as he visits me in some nursing home on the other side of the country.
Danny woke me in the morning. I nearly jumped up in horror, worried my parents had survived. Danny looked scared. His eyes were wide. He pointed down. The skin on my leg was growing red and burning as the morning sun kissed it. I had awoken it: the curse of my parents.
The end.