Amid the Recesses: A Short Story Collection of Fear by J. A. Crook Page A

The cameras
were lowered for some time before being shot up like a gun in a
pistol battle. The red light beamed on and stared with a mechanical
bewilderment.
    The psychiatrist’s mouth
opened and closed in speechlessness.
    “ Is that bed yours, Eddie?”
The cameraman asked.
    Eddie looked back. “Do I
look alright?”
    No one answered. Eddie
stepped toward the bed with his arms swinging dramatically like a
sinister circus ringleader. “I got a problem with collecting
things. A big problem.” He pulled the drapery aside and revealed
six corpses, five of which were those of children, dried and dead,
with leathery skin sunken and rippled at their skeletal faces, with
shrunken, withered eyes that observed the camera crew with macabre
diffidence. An adult female with two absent sockets for eyes and
curled, dried lips smiled in the midst of her post-mortem
companions and completed a sinister family photo-op, devilish and
unnatural.
    The doctor threw her hands
up and rushed out of the room. She shoved away the stunned camera
crew and screamed: “Oh my god! Oh my god!” Her echo faded up the
stairs and through the house.
    Most of the crew fled in her wake. The
cameraman remained. His head leaned out from behind the camera and
studied the figures on the bed with a hung jaw and wide
eyes.
    Eddie gestured to the
figures on the bed. “If you’re goin’ down, you best go lookin’
good, Eddie.” He reached under the stained mattress and pulled out
a revolver.
    The cameraman lowered the
recording camera. “Whoa, whoa, Eddie. Eddie, calm down. Calm down.
No need for any—“
    The cameraman didn’t finish
the statement before Eddie cut him off. “When you finally find
something this precious, it’s just hard to get rid of.” He
shrugged. “You understand, right?” He asked.
    “ Eddie…”
    Eddie put the gun to his
head.
    “ Eddie don’t.”
    “ This is the only way out
from the bottom.”
    “ Eddie!”
    He pulled the trigger. The
judgmental stare camera’s red light lingered with indifference. The
camera whirred and buzzed with excitement.
     
    RETURN TO THE TABLE OF
CONTENTS

 
     
    Memoirs of Jacob Bright, Ten Days
Haunted

    Day 1 - November 22,
1941
     
    It is unusual that I would
sit writing in bleak candlelight, but tonight is the sort of night,
in a town like this, the wintry barren of Barrow, Alaska, when
darkness is all that will rear her head for this community of
wayward settlers, native Inuit, and researching folk as I am. The
sun does not grace us and something understands it... ‘tis why I
write.
    Yesterday began as any
other late November day, as the community hung and limped along, or
so did those that remain during these late months, trying
desperately to conform to the perpetual darkness. Many, for the
bitter cold and lack of sunlight, retreat south, or beyond the
Arctic Circle, to revel in the few short hours when the sun would
peek over the horizon, uninterested with this alien world, bound to
move on below the horizon again like a shy child at its mother’s
skirt. The Inuit, I believe, were more productive than ever, but
remained reclusive to those that challenged the dull expulsion of
light. George Ferrell, the shopkeeper of the midtown general store
would have been one of those omitted from the Inuit’s concern if he
wasn’t the very link that brought their hunt and trade to those
that hadn’t the ability to obtain certain commodities themselves.
For this reason, it is most unfortunate that today, on the
twenty-second of November, in the year nineteen forty-one that
George Ferrell is no more.
    The authorities of the
town, Officer Reinken and Officer Yarborough, reported that George
Ferrell was the victim of a heinous death, which was described as
implicitly as possible to the worried people of Barrow. However,
soon after, all of the gritty detail emerged as result of Jenna
Newstead, the standing authority in everything that is gossip and
verbal trade, and it was first shared with her small