Chattering in The Hallway: A Horror Anthology

Chattering in The Hallway: A Horror Anthology

By Wentz Hesselman

Copyright 2021 Wentz Hesselman

Smashwords Edition

Table of Contents

i Foreword

1 The Scarecrow’s Mausoleum

2 I Haunted a Cult That Sacrificed Me

3 The Courtesan’s Blade

4 You Don’t Like Me

5 Uncle Ron’s Funeral

6 Blacky

7 Blood on The Ice

8 My Little Pwny

9 Diet Jello

10 Reptile

FOREWORD

Some anthologies happen on purpose. This one happened on accident. I looked at my hard drive one day and I realized that I had enough stories to make a book. In a world where 7,000 words are marketed as a complete book, I decided that 36,000 words were book-worthy enough. I had planned to write an anthology one day and POOF, there it was, hiding in plain sight.

There is some humor here. Dark humor, but humor nonetheless. And there are some installments that aim to be downright unnerving. I’ll let you decide which is which.

My earliest childhood memories are nightmares that I had in my crib. I have no explanation for the vivid horrors I experienced at such an early age. Whatever network of gears in my brain made those nightmares, it now generates these stories so that you may mess your diaper along with me.

Enjoy.

~ Wentz Hesselman

THE SCARECROW'S MAUSOLEUM

Gabriel Larson walked up to Colby Pittman on the playground at recess and kicked him square in the nuts. The heavyset, bug-eyed redhead crumpled to the ground. Then Gabriel kicked him in the stomach with the force of a raging bull. Nobody stopped him. Everyone just sort of watched. Everyone except one of the supervisors. She had old lady hands and batwing arms, but she was strong.

The two boys were promptly dragged to the principal’s office. Mr. Ford’s thick beard couldn’t hide the fact that he was frowning. He looked at them over the top of his thick-rimmed glasses and waited for some kind of explanation.

Well, Mr. Larson? he pushed.

Gabriel dropped the note on Mr. Ford’s desk.

It says it’s from my sister. But it’s his handwriting.

Mr. Ford heaved a sigh at the note and read it aloud, stumbling over the horrible penmanship:

"Dear Gabriel, my Big Brother,

I am in Hell. It is very hot here. It hurts so much. I must have been a very bad little slut to end up in Hell. You’ll be here soon too, and you’ll deserve it.

Love,

Your dead retarded sister,

Hayleigh Larson."

Mr. Ford pinched the bridge of his eyebrows.

And you surmise that this was written by Mr. Pittman here?

My sister never talked that stupid, Gabriel said. He felt an unusual mixture of laughter, anger, and grief whirling up into his head and pushing forth tears.

You can’t prove it, Colby said.

I really shouldn’t say this, but I’ve seen Mr. Pittman’s handwriting enough to know that this is probably his. But that doesn’t justify what you’ve done to him today. He has bruised ribs.

That’s what he gets for making fun of my sister.

He held up a hand before continuing.

Yes, his behavior was abhorrent. But so was yours, Mr. Larson.

Yeah? Well, at least he gets to live. My sister doesn’t!

Mr. Ford regarded the youth like he was unsure if he should reprimand him or apologize.

He then folded his glasses and set them on his desk without a click. He buried his face in his palms and massaged his forehead with his fingertips.

"When I was eleven, like you, I lost my grandfather. I know that’s not the same as losing a sister, but hear me out. When word got around at school, the worst of the worst wouldn’t let me live in peace. Kids that I didn’t even know the names of were hounding me over my grandfather’s death.

They didn’t know me either, and they especially didn’t know my grandfather, and there they were…making fun of him. Of me. It was incredible.

Those kids didn’t end up being the criminals and thugs I thought they would. They just went on to join the rank-and-file adults that are running the world.

I don’t mean to make light of your feelings, but the simple truth is that people are horrible from the moment they’re born, and they don’t get any better. If you go around kicking in the ribs of everyone that demonstrates how horrible they are, then you’ll have a fight on your hands every ten minutes."

So are you going to do anything about him or not? Gabriel said evenly.

Mr. Ford threw Colby a look. I’ll talk to him. I advise you to stay away from him.

Gabriel left the principal’s office feeling the same way he always had. Empty-handed and disappointed. It made the weight of his sister’s memory heavier.

Gabe-will? Gabe-will? she’d say in that annoying, raspy little voice of hers. The kid just couldn’t take a hint that she was pesky as hell. All that annoyance he had felt turned to guilt when he couldn’t spend another second with her. He’d never hear that little voice again.

It wasn’t certain that she was dead, but when a child has been missing for so many months and there’s been no sighting, no word, no evidence of her anywhere, what were they supposed to think? She was just gone.

That night he lay in bed staring up into the darkness, thinking of her. She was never absent, just present in degrees.

Gabe-will? Gabe-will? her voice ricocheted inside his skull.

And then he heard her voice right next to his ear. His body reacted with a violent jerk. His eyes flew open. He heard little footsteps pad across his bedroom floor and out the door. He chased the sound. He’d know it anywhere. The sound of Hayleigh’s bare feet smacking the wood floor. It just had to be her.

Hayleigh! he cried out. The footsteps wouldn’t relent. The front door opened and shut half a second before he reached it. He yanked it open and flew out into the cool November night, shouting at that point.

"Hayleigh! Hayleigh!"

He heard lights flick on upstairs. Mom and Dad came down to check on him. They were caught off guard by their son’s wild eyes and his conviction that he had been visited by their missing child. But their confusion and surprise spiraled down into annoyance. They urged him back to bed, as if all the traumatic memories would lay down and go to sleep with him.

He went back to bed, but his stare was as intense as ever. It was when he rolled over onto his side and tucked his hand under his pillow that he found it.

It was a letter.

Dear Gabriel,

This is your sister Hayleigh. Please come pick me up at the corn maze we were at where I bumped my head, remember? I love you very much, and we don’t have much time.

Please hurry.

Love,

Hayleigh

Enclosed was a hand-drawn map that was done in crayon on lined notebook paper. He knew which corn maze she was talking about. They hadn’t been there for nearly two years. It was just down the country road from where they lived. Their house sat on the edge of town. If you walked five minutes one way, you were in civilization. If you walked five minutes in the other direction, you were surrounded by farmland.

It was the tail end of November; the fields were bare and desolate.

He wasn’t willing to fully believe that he had just received a letter from his sister. But he knew those footsteps.

And if that was really her, why didn’t she stay in the house? Why did he have to go get her? His rational side was working overtime to make sense of it all, but none of that work touched the deep down, intuitive part of him, that just knew that Hayleigh had reached out to him from beyond some veil she couldn’t completely pierce.

Gabriel didn’t say much to anyone until the weekend when he made a decision.

* * * * * *

He hoped that he would fall asleep and default on his plans to go looking for a corn maze that had probably been mowed down with the rest of the fields, but sleep fled him. When two in the morning rolled around and his eyes hadn’t grown an ounce heavier, he put on his clothes and he went out the front door as silently as a shadow cast by the moon. It was a full moon, and it rode high. The surrounding fields had scattered stalks of corn that gleamed like broken bones in the cold light.

He wasn’t sure what he would find. Surely the maze had been mown down in the harvest. But no, it was still there. The tall, dense and matured corn stalks that formed its walls were untouched.

He rubbed his eyes, expecting the fog of his breath in the crisp air to wash away the sight of the maze, but there it was, visible and tangible.

A girl sat at a worn picnic table that was set up as an admissions desk. Hand-painted signs announced prices for exciting fall-themed trinkets and goodies, even though the table was completely bare. The girl’s pale skin was made even more pale by the moonlight, and her eyes and hair and lips were very dark by contrast. She wore a metal band shirt with wide-legged black denims.

She looked up to see Gabriel, and she didn’t seem surprised. She also didn’t appear to care.

Hey, he said.

You want to go through the maze? she snapped.

Well, I got a letter that told me to come here to meet my sister. She’s been missing for months, and everyone thinks she’s dead and I…

Do you want to go through the maze, yes or no?

Yes.

Okay. That’ll be three dollars.

I don’t have any money.

Fine. Give me your hand.

Gabriel hesitated a moment before trusting the girl with one of his hands. He was quite the fair-skinned youth himself, but her own hands were much whiter. Porcelain, even.

She tied a hemp wristband around his wrist that felt rather snug and a bit prickly. He furrowed his eyebrows and began to itch at it. There was no sympathy in the girl’s gaze.

"You’ll need to put at least three drops in the bowl next to the arch. She pointed to a great arch constructed of hay bales that curved overhead in a majestic feat of rural engineering.

Three drops of what? he asked.

She just stared at him. He shook his head and approached the arch. Shriveled pumpkins and gourds of mottled, faded colors sat atop its curve. They weren’t carved into jack-o-lanterns, and yet somehow their withering surfaces still formed vague visages that stared at Gabriel, and this made