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[Previous Guest Writer]   Derek M. Fox   [Next Guest Writer]   [Chill Factor Index]

Simon writes:

The name Derek M. Fox shouldn't be an unfamiliar one if you're familiar with the small press. His short stories have been appearing there for some time; they are characterized by tight, well-drawn plots, populated by gritty characters whose dialogue is always authentic. However, Fox has been transferring his talents from short story to novel. His first novel Recluse (1996) was popular enough to demand a reprint within months of publication. The follow-up Demon (Tanjen, 1998) begins graphically with a mutilated World War 2 bomber tearing from the skies like an avenging angel. Or demon. It amply demonstrates Fox's talents in telling a good story, and telling it fast and lean.

Now to 'Widow's Weeds'. This is the kind of story you wish you could read with your hands over your face, peeping through the cracks in your fingers. Like Ravel's Bolero, the music of horror builds relentlessly, until you find yourself holding your breath waiting for that shocking revelation that's just around the next corner.

And before I go, watch out for a Derek M. Fox anthology Treading On The Past due from Enigmatic Press in May 2000.

He was thinking: I walk in like I've always done, and I see that thing lying on top of all the shit Tommy's typed. Man, I don't need it! "Mike, where the hell–?"

"Yo, Chas." Mike eased from between the trees zipping up his fly. "Better. That last beer did it. So, what's up?"

"You'll need more'n a beer when you see what's in there." Charlie's eyes flicked towards a hinge-buckled, front door.

"Where's Tommy?" Mike threshed through tangled weeds and tripped over a piece of board on the lip of a deep hollow. "FUCK!" A dust-forced sneeze sailed into the hot afternoon. "Yo, bless me." Mike paused, curious. "What's that, Chas? Bees swarmin?"

"Flies," said Charlie off-handedly.

"I just zipped 'em up."

"No wonder Mam made me promise to look out for you afore she died. Don't reckon I done bad. Jus' don't you screw up." Charlie grinned. "As for flies, I mean the winged variety. House is full of 'em."

"Well it's hot. They breed like..." Mike smirked. "Hey, Chas, loosen up, you're too tense. If I'm old enough t'drink, then I can take care of myself. So, where's Tom? He said he'd wait."

"Yeah, right, but we're late 'cos o' your addiction to gaming machines. Fixing your bike'd be a better bet, it throws out more pollution than a power station."

"I won ten towards it, so where's the prob?" Mike ran up the porch steps to join his brother. "No sense being miffed 'cos you didn't win."

"Give over." Charlie traced score marks in the door with his fingers, startled when Mike yelled:

"TOMMY, move it, we're late already."

A heavy silence swung in. Mike checked his watch and turned to Charlie. "What is wrong here? It's ten after three. I reckon Tommy's left." He nudged Charlie playfully, then skipped away to avoid a threatening fist. "Hey, Chas" – he sounded hurt – "this isn't you. Last time you belted me was when I was eight and I ran off with your crash hat to play Batman or somethin'. Quit frownin', it makes me nervous."

Irritated, Charlie combed his dark, shoulder length hair with his fingers.

"Come on, man, on'y women have secrets." Mike paced, came back. "Always the same, when things don't go right you sulk, so quit...now! Find Ma Ashby, she'll know where Tom is."

"Don't count on it." Charlie's apologetic look became a substitute for anything verbal.

"Hey, I bet Tom's stoned on Southern Comfort." Mike stepped around Charlie to find his arm gripped.

"Mikey, no."

Their eyes met. "You're not joshin are you Chas?" Mike shrugged him off. "Anyway, Tom's expecting us." He studied his brother. "Say, you look like a butcher's dog who's just lost a bone." He stared at the ruined door. "Jeez, I know the house needs decoratin' but not with a hatchet."

Mike stepped inside, the hall walls raisin-blasted with swarming flies. Mike smelled the smell. "Christ on His cross."

It emanated from the room with the loud, floral wallpaper and bookshelves containing paperbacks and hardbacks written by Thomas E. Ashby.

On the table with its starched white cloth, its bowl of artificial flowers, and Tom's electric typewriter complete with an A4 sheet wafting in the warm air, Mike noticed the Southern Comfort bottle tipped on its side, the cloth stained with spillage. It came a distant second to the hand gripping the bottle, its bloody stump crawling with flies, veins and nerve endings trailing like skeins of multi-coloured wool. The coppery smell of blood forced Mike to taste his beer again. "Charlie. CHARLIE, this...hand...It's wearin' Tommy's ring."

Rushing outside Mike almost cannoned into Charlie, who gripped the porch rail as he stared off into the woods surrounding Cragg Lane House.

"Shit, you're doing it again. What–?" Mike hated to antagonise Charlie. A fly settled on his arm, he slapped at it and missed. "Fuck you."

Mike smelled his brother's after-shave, his sweat, but more, he could taste an unease which matched his own.

"I know, it's his friggin dog," Mike ventured. "That's it, Motormouth' and his chainsaw teeth's gone mad."

Charlie never wavered in his stare. "Motormouth died a week ago, Mike."

Mike's spine did the Twist on its own.

"That dog was devoted to Tommy," Charlie said. "Followed him everywhere. Hardly likely to turn on him."

"You never said Motormouth died. I...I know Ma Ashby hated anythin' that belonged to Tommy, but Chas, you never said." Mike assimilated the facts. "Nah, Ma wouldn't kill Motormouth." His guts churned. He blamed the beer. "Ma didn't like him writing his books either, but it didn't stop Tommy, no sir. His earnings have kept her in luxury, you said."

A desultory quite settled to be broken by Mike. "Hey, shouldn't we get the police or somethin'?" He nudged Charlie. "What's in them trees? Quit starin' like that." His thoughts raced, reminded. "Jesus, Chas, I...I went in the trees to– Aw, man, whoever chopped Tommy's hand off could've..."Oh Christ!" Mike felt his guts surge. "Let's leave, Charlie!"

"Better check it out first."

Mike didn't want to hear. "Check it –? How'd I know you'd say that?"

Since he'd been seven, he'd looked up to Chas, the father figure he'd never had. But right now, he knew his brother couldn't be thinking straight. Like, Tommy's hand sat in there, all chewed up, cut up, whatever, so why not just go?

A breeze rustled the leaves, the long grass bent, both startled as it sprung back. "Something's in there." Mike sounded like a choirboy, his mouth as dry as the flowers back there on the table, next to the bottle and the hand wearing Tommy's skull ring with its ruby eyes.

"Chas, we can reach the bikes if we run. Just the other side of...the... trees..." It petered out, the idea fine, but neither moved. Mike's sickly grin had last appeared a month ago when he got the 'flu and tried telling Charlie he felt fine. "No contest, right?" He walked to the end of the porch to glimpse an ancient shed just behind the house. He came back to Charlie, glad of the company. "I need a drink, but not Southern Comfort that's a fact."

"Look." Charlie watched a crow drifting towards the copse, Mike's alarmed cry thrown out as the bird disappeared in a flurry of feathers.

"Mikey, what in f–?" Just what it had been neither of them, even if they could guess, dare add conjecture. Doing that here wasn't good.

"Might've been Tom playin' one of his sick jokes." Mike's agitation grew: he paced some more. "Nah, Tom don't move that fast," he answered himself, "not with that beer belly he's got." He leaned on the rail. "Be safer if they lived nearer town. Too effin quiet here. Anythin' could happen."

"Mike, something has happened." Charlie trembled inside, and knew it was time to stop wet nursing Mike. Kid's twenty for chrissakes. Look to yourself for once. Don't need sermons or suggestions. Just check out the trees.

The bird disappearing like it had threw him. A black bird, a bad omen, that's if he believed Ma Ashby. And she was real strange – strange and demanding. As a kid, he'd see her lank figure cut across the weeds every time he'd called for Tom, wisps of grey-black hair floating over her face, her tight, down-curved sickle mouth scary. She said little, but her mean, flint-eyed look always made him squirm.

"You get in trouble," she'd threaten, "and it'll be countin' time. Motormouth ain't a nice dog." Said way before the huge black hound had gone to the great chomping ground ... wherever that happened to be.

And Tom didn't give a shit: he'd let Ma's ranting stroll in one ear and out the other.

"It's hot," Mike interrupted, "an' I am thirsty. Let's find the kitchen, Ma might be there."

"Mike, she'd've been here shooin' us off by now." Charlie searched the copse for signs. "What's out there?" A simple question, but he really meant: What's out there which came in here and did what it did to Tommy? Can't be Ma. Then there's the shed. He shivered despite the heat.

Charlie ran a hand across the scrubbed pine table top: the same one he and the gang had played Brag and Blackjack on into the early hours. Tommy's dad, Brad, had been around then, a barn-sized guy with horse teeth, head always wreathed in smoke, sucked on a cigar like a kid would a dummy.

"Good bloke," Charlie mused. "Too good for her. Pity he died."

"Who?" Mike placed a glass on the drainer and wiped his mouth on his shirt sleeve.

"Thinkin' aloud. You wouldn't remember anyway. Gotta keep you on the straight and narrow, can't have you endin' up like Tommy." He silently added: Or me.

Mike leaned against the sink, thumbs looped in his jeans pockets, damp shirt open to the waist. He looked relaxed, but Charlie knew different.

"Stinks in here." Mike's nose wrinkled. "Like boiled cabbage." The smell hung just below a throat clogging aroma of fresh air spray. "Should've stayed in the pub." He ran a finger over the grease grimed work surface. "Filthy. Even we aren't this bad. Come on bro', suggest something."

"Didn't used t'be like this." Charlie watched a lone fly scaling a cupboard door, so quiet Charlie was positive he could hear it walking. "Ma was a stickler for keepin' everything neat 'n' tidy."

"Where's the phone?" Mike's question trespassed across the good times.

"In the front room," Charlie said.

"Where the hand is." A statement undercut with mounting fear. Enforced bravado threw out: "What's t'be scared of, Chas? It's only a hand wearin' Tom's ring? Tommy's our mate."

Charlie's glare welded Mike to the sink. "You don't get it, kid, if Tom's hand is the only thing in there, where's the rest of him? Is he alive? Dead? Someplace bleedin' to death? One thing's for sure – we have to find him, so pray he's okay."

"Yeah, right Chas, an' Ma as well." His voice fell. "Hey, y'don't think she did it?"

"I don't give a toss about that high strung bitch." Charlie nursed the hurt she had caused him and Tommy way back when they would rattle her nerves with their games, their noise. The windowless shed out back wasn't the best place to be, then or now. Not nice when Ma locked him and Tommy inside...in the dark.

Forced to wait on her crazy whims, they would scare one another about the thing just beyond where the light didn't reach, the shadowy being which waited its time.

Darkness had shaped the otherwise formless, terrifying creature, and on that day Charlie had crapped his pants. Tom's laughter had scared IT away, leaving them with the stench and embarrassment of Charlie's profound, and very real fear.

When Ma did unlock the door, and they tumbled out, shielding their eyes against the light, she'd be gone. Charlie liked to think it was her shame, that she couldn't face them, but he knew better. Ma Ashby was a mean, sadistic bitch, period. Yet they still stuck to the place. Then. And now.

'Drives her batty us bein' like this,' Tommy had said back then, his own grin worse than hers. Charlie had maybe understood his reasoning, despite any punishment she meted out.

Mike touched him, made him jump, mean thoughts still tumbling. "Whoa, Chas," Mike said, alarmed at Charlie's reaction. " Real uptight you are. What is it?"

"You don't wanna hear."

Mike sulked feeling left out again. He stayed quiet as Charlie eased back the slatted blind to look beyond the fly infested window towards the crumbling, brick built shed.

"Tom could be hiding there," Mike suggested and tugged the back door wider, his trailing shirt grabbed.

"No way, kid," Charlie said, "Tom won't be there, he's...he's scared of the dark." Don't you mean YOU, Chas, baby?

"Tommy, scared? Get real, Chas, pull the other one. Big, macho Tom Ashby? Your reasoning's gone kapput."

Perhaps if they had listened, they might have detected a scrabbling from inside the shed.

Cold sunlight streamed onto cracked linoleum, the place feeling as though it had been set on fast freeze. The stairs angled into a shadowed first floor and Charlie didn't fancy climbing them. "Mike, we don't want nothin' t'do wi' the place, or Ma."

"But we should," Mike suggested, "she might be poorly or somethin'." With one foot on the bottom step, he shouted: "MRS. ASHBY, YOU THERE?"

Glass shattering threw Charlie against the hall wall, just below a faded copy of 'The Monarch of the Glen'.

"What was it?" Mike's question sounded superfluous.

Always folks had regarded them as Charlie the Brave, and Mikey, the Kid, and they respected the way 'elder' looked after 'younger'. Where Charlie was lean, with a hatchet kind of face, Mike had a cuddly attribute, his open smile a come-on to the females in the area. Yet even when it came to skirt, Mike remained cautious, something else he'd learned from Charlie. 'Suss 'em out', Charlie had told him, so it seemed right to suss this out, too.

Cautiously, Mike approached the lounge door and peeked through the space between it and the jamb. He saw bookshelves, the corner of the table, and on the floor a smashed Southern Comfort bottle. "Charlie..."

Charlie said, "I know."

"But a dead hand can't let go of a bottle." Mike's heart rattled like his Suzuki's loose baffles. "I mean rigor-whatsit must've set in." His jaw dropped. "Ma must've prised it off him and then dropped it."

"Listen, clothhead –" Charlie felt his bolts loosening by the second, "–if it was Ma we would've seen her come down the hallway."

"Not when we were lookin' through the back window we wouldn't." That sounded reasonable so Mike continued, "Gotta be her," and pushed the door with his foot.

"MIKE, DON'T." Charlie walked through treacle to reach Mike, too late to stop the door slamming shut.

"CHARLIEEEEEEE." Mike's cry dusted the hall walls even through the closed room door. The flies swarmed and settled again. Mike pounded the wood – just as Charlie's fists had thumped the shed door years ago, and Tommy had laughed his silly head off.

Charlie called out,"Cool it," perhaps because his own guts reminded him of when the thing had touched him... in the dark.

But why today? They'd only called to collect Tom, ride into town, check out the skirt, have a few drinks... So why today?

Outside, the shed door creaked. And the dip in the ground where Mike had tripped, had grown bigger. A poker burned sign buried in the grass read:

"Charlie –" Mike's voice trembled through the closed door, "–Tom's hand isn't on the table no more."

"What's in there?" Charlie disliked the question, the very same one he'd asked Tom just before Ma had locked them in the shed that first time. He hadn't let on he was scared, and when Tom had said it was an old coal shed before they'd had the gas installed, Charlie had shrugged and said, 'What's t'be scared of then?'

"Mike," Charlie placed his hands flat against the door's old wood, feeling his brother's fear. Just as Tommy had felt his. "Mike, check the phone. I'll get this door open." Charlie sweated. "Wood's warped some, I can't... lift...it."

"Isn't no phone. Chas, please...get me out. It's the flies. Piss off you lousy – "CHARLIE! SMASH THE FRIGGIN' THING IN!"

Nobody around to smash the door for you, Chas.

A huge metal planter complete with wilted plant stood on its own rust spot. Charlie hooked his arms around it. "Quit whining, Mike. Stand well back."

About to hurl it at the lounge door, Charlie paused, the planter poised. Something had hit the front door – hard. Charlie dropped the planter, soil and dead leaves scattered across the lino.

"CHAS?" Mike shouted.

Grabbing the front door's sticky handle, Charlie tugged open the door, not stopping to think who had closed it, if that were possible in the state they had seen it. A dead, nearly featherless rook's eyes glared at him, the porch boards stained with blood – the same tacky blood on Charlie's fingers. Charlie went ape, he hurled the planter at the lounge door, the wood splintered, cracked. "AGAIN, MIKE. STAND CLEAR."

The lock flew off and Charlie kicked aside the dented planter, and door. "Mike, let's go. Tommy can go suck." And so can the thing in the shed.

What is today? This bothered Charlie as he moved cautiously into the sullen, quiet room to find Mike gone.

Furniture had been shifted, Tom's fly-blown hand was over by the bookcase, buried under several tumbled books.

"The hell with Tom and his gory stories. Mike, stop clowning." Charlie saw the smashed window, a chair lying on the weed suffocated border outside. Beyond it, amongst the taller weeds and grass, the hole got bigger. Around back the shed door eased a little more: a screw popped from the top hinge.

Charlie called for Mike through the shattered window: a breeze combed the grass. "Probably fetchin' his bike." Chas prayed he'd hear the sound of loose baffles.

He inspected the hand. "That ring's too big." He poked at it, the hand turning palm up, the fingers noticeably longer, thinner. His eyes roamed, his fear gasket shot to hell. The walls pulsated, the drone grew worse.

At the table, Charlie straightened the sheet of A4 in the typewriter and read:"'The Shed' by Thomas E. Ashby'."

Dull, determined thumps sounded on the shed door. Charlie came into the hallway. Through the kitchen window he was convinced he saw, heard, the shed door creak slowly open. He didn't wait to see what came out, knowing that this was the story he and Tommy had made up.

"Mikey's out there." Fear dried Charlie's mouth. But for Mike, not himself. He wouldn't let Mike down. Now he knew...KNEW what today was, and what the story was.

Today, by the date, was the day Charlie and Tommy had written about in their heads. Today seventeen years ago when they had imagined the thing in the shed. About how IT had escaped and got Ma?

"No..."Charlie gnawed his lip, anxiety a silent partner. "Imagination." But could he accept it? Then again, today, yesterday was the very same day Thomas E. Ashby had decided he wanted to be a horror writer when he grew up. He'd done it, too. But at what cost?

"Oh, man–" Charlie sank into a chair which smelled of age, its upholstery threadbare, a torn, faded olive green fringe brushing an equally worn carpet.

"I thought that story up," Charlie admitted. "I told it to Tom." He bunched his fists. "God, how I hated that woman." His sigh lingered as he realised, "There's on'y me can end it."

He'd known all along whose hand it had been. "And she'll be stinking mad now."

The weeds threshed and Charlie realised Mike had left the back door wide. Through it, he heard the whisper of a dress, saw lank hair which trailed across a pallid, predatory face, her clothes spilling soil as she came on...

Trouble is, Charlie realised, there were no more doors to lock.

Up the steps, onto the porch, each footfall the slow, solemn beat of a drum, she came with her sickle mouth, one hand nursing the bloody stump of the other, the stink of fire-cauterized flesh tainting the air, and Charlie's nostrils.

The poker-burned sign tumbled into the hole she had struggled from. Charlie shredded the dried flower arrangement, scared to know what was in the shed if it wasn't Ma.

Motormouth? "Dead!" The dog's name hummed like the flies. "Or...?" Charlie daren't think of what he and Tommy conjured that day, what they had made up. "Sweet Christ." He gripped the table, wanting to curl up beneath it and stay there. You gotta finish the story, Chas. I mean really finish it. Only you got the last line.

SHED. The word grimaced. "What did we say in there? How can it end? Tom's the writer, not me. I just...made it up. Gave. Him. The. Idea."

Charlie glared at the typewriter hoping sheer willpower might make it work by itself. No such luck. He punched the keys, his fingers slowly and gradually finding a rhythm, words making an impression, some mis-spelt, but who cared as long as he long as he finished it...

'The thing crawled from the shed and throo the grass toward the figger standin in the kitchin. She turned, not able to gess were the sounds was comin from. Then she seen it, and screemed as IT came at er in its madness...'

Charlie, suddenly aware, jumped up from the table, the chair toppling in his haste to slam and hold what was left of the lounge door: screams from the hallway bulged it, and his mind. Dull thuds, and one long, wild keening cry for help – like him and Tommy had screamed that day – overcome by the savage vengeance of....

Stillness – a nothing in the now of time, a place given over to reckless, childhood thought.

Charlie eased the door a fraction (like Ma had that day) to peer into a bloody hallway

(dark shed) at what was left of a hated woman,(a scared kid) and stared straight into the beast's gore spattered face.

Thomas E. Ashby, horror writer, grinned. "Gotta know how it feels to make it authentic. See, I have this idea... Like you told it years ago. Make IT live. If it lives, it's believable, Charlie. Readers' like that. But Ma didn't deserve to live. An' you know something, she wouldn't fucking die, not even when I chopped her hand off. Or when I buried her. Always put me down, but I made sure she wouldn't stop me this time." A bloodied axe clattered on the linoleum.

Charlie felt glad of the quiet. He would find Mike and they'd leave. Simple. Just all one big sick joke. Ma was gone, and Charlie felt relieved.

He looked at Tom's vacant grin, aware it was foolish to even ask. He pushed past and looked towards the shed and its closed door. "But it was open..."

From inside the shed's dark confines wild, terrified cries issued. Charlie recognised them. Hadn't he nursed that kid for a lot of years, looked out for him? Why had the idiot gone to hide there of all places? And just what...WHAT WAS MIKEY SEEING IN THERE?

It went deathly quiet. Heady on blood, the flies headed for the cracks in the shed walls...