Half-Minute Horrors Read online

  “I know,” Hank said before attacking.

  SARAH WEEKS

  One of a Kind

  When I felt the first tug, I knew I had something big on the line.

  “Ka-ching!” I thought.

  People pay big bucks for fresh tuna, and big bucks was exactly what I needed. I’d spent a wad on Gloria’s engagement ring—way more than I could afford—but love makes a man do crazy things sometimes.

  “One of a kind,” the guy at the jewelry store had told me when he showed me the diamond ring.

  “Perfect,” I said, “’cause that’s what my Gloria is. One of a kind.”

  It took me a good half hour to reel in the fish. It put up quite a fight. But when it finally broke the surface of the water, my heart sank.

  “Mako,” I said when I saw the gray fin.

  Shark meat wouldn’t bring in nearly as much as tuna, but I pulled the fish into the boat anyway. After stomping on the head a couple of times with my boot heel to stun it, I took a knife and starting at the throat, sliced downward, opening up the gut. The usual fish heads and stomach juice spilled out onto the deck, but then something sparkled and caught my eye. There amid the slimy stomach contents lay a hand, a woman’s left hand, and on the second finger was a ring. It was one of a kind.

  GLORIA WHELAN

  A Walk Too Far

  I had walked too far, ending up in a neighborhood of homes with a deserted look. The streetlights came on, and I hurried from one pale pool of light to the next, searching for something familiar.

  At last, admitting I was lost, I approached a house where the flick of a curtain suggested it was occupied. Hoping for directions, I knocked at the door.

  The man who answered my knock appeared strangely pleased to see me, as though he had been waiting for me, or someone like me, to appear. He ushered me into a darkened room.

  “So then no one knows you are here,” the man said.

  I heard a key turn in a lock.

  HOLLY BLACK

  A Very Short Story

  Zoe sits on the bed, with her mother at the foot. The overhead light is on, flooding most of the room, although shadows still creep up the walls at the edges.

  “Sit with me until I fall asleep,” Zoe says.

  There is a party going on downstairs. Zoe’s mother hesitates. She can hear the clink of glasses, the bursts of low laughter. She’s restless, longing to be down there, but Zoe will just sit alone in her brightly lit bed and wait for her mother to come back and finish the ritual. Zoe won’t sleep otherwise.

  “Okay,” Zoe’s mother says. “Get under the covers.”

  Zoe snuggles down under them. “Tell me why vampires can’t get me.”

  “Vampires can’t come in unless they’re invited,” Zoe’s mother says, as she always does.

  “What about werewolves?”

  Zoe’s mother makes a show of looking through the curtains. “No full moon tonight.”

  Zoe’s eyes drift closed, but she’s far from sleeping. She has a new question, one she’s just thought up. “What about ghosts?”

  Her mother pauses, looking down at her hands. Finally she answers. “Ghosts don’t want to hurt anyone. If they hurt you, they do it by accident.”

  “What if they hurt me by accident then?” Zoe says, looking up at her mother.

  “They can only hurt the living,” says Zoe’s mother, her voice soft.

  “Oh,” says Zoe.

  After a few moments, Zoe is asleep. Zoe’s mother leans down to kiss her good night, but it’s like kissing smoke.

  FAYE KELLERMAN

  Deep Six

  When I started to say something witty, Babe interrupted. “We’re not interested, Tubby. The only reason we’re here is because you have the pool.”

  She swung her magnificent waist-length blond hair in my face.

  “You should wear a bathing cap, you know.”

  She laughed. “Yeah, I could also be a dork like you, Tubbs.”

  “My name is Tabitha,” I said under my breath. I ran my hand through the warm eddies of the Jacuzzi. I wasn’t fat. I was Rubenesque. It’s just that morons like Babe were anorexic.

  I hated her. She tortured me whenever she had an audience—which was all the time. The only reason I put up with her was because everywhere she went, she brought all the good-looking boys.

  “Jacuzzi, anyone?” Babe asked as she stepped into the whirling water. “Get out of the way, Tubbs. We need the space.”

  “No problem.”

  My hand went to the safety cap of the intake valve, and I slowly loosened it until it dropped to the floor. It took only a few seconds for Babe’s hair to catch, her pouty lips forming an “O,” her eyes wide-open as she was sucked underwater. Everyone started to scream, but I was somewhere else.

  Serves her right. She should have worn a bathing cap.

  LISA BROWN

  The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James

  A Novel as Told by Lisa Brown in Fewer than 30 Seconds

  PSEUDONYMOUS BOSCH

  The Attack of the Flying Mustaches

  They descended on the boys of St. S—’s in a dark cloud, swarming like locusts. Up close, they were terrifying. Quivering, bristling animals without eyes or ears. Each mustache hair seemed to move by itself, a teeny tiny tentacle with a mind of its own. Some landed on the boys’ backs or chests. Some between the boys’ eyebrows. But most found their targets under the boys’ noses. There they dug in like so many flying leeches, irritating the boys’ nostrils and feeding off the boys’ blood and snot. They did not leave until years later, when they were gray and crusty and the boys were dead.

  NADIA AGUIAR

  Takowanda

  When Sam and his father moved alone to remote Takowanda Island, hundreds of miles from anywhere, Sam found that there were hardly any children there. Left to amuse himself, he wandered the empty beach and the garden, at the end of which was the biggest tree he had ever seen. Its branches were too deep and too thick with leaves to see very far inside it, and its top was often lost in the clouds. The great, noisy, oil-colored Takowanda birds with their watchful eyes and razor-sharp half-moon beaks lived in it.

  “Don’t go near that tree,” the fat-armed lady with the wide-set eyes who came to cook for them told Sam. “You know what Takowanda means? It means devil. D-E-V-I-L. Those is the devil’s birds.”

  “Silly local superstition. Pay it no mind,” said Sam’s father later. The birds watched them. Takowanda, Takowanda, Takowanda, they sang.

  On a sweltering, airless summer afternoon Sam was alone in the backyard when he heard children’s laughter. He ran to the end of the garden, but the dirt track that ran past the house was empty. He heard the laughter again, and he peered into the thick green tree, but there was no one.

  “Hello!” he called. Nothing. “Hello!”

  His heart sank—he had been so happy at the thought of finding someone his own age. But there it was again—someone was laughing! Sam realized the sound was coming from above him, high in the branches of the great tree. He looked up, but the leaves were too thick to see through. What he did see, though, were almost perfect hand- and footholds carved into the trunk. Sam began to climb. He went higher and higher, following the laughter. He looked down once, and the earth was far below. But he kept going, up, up, up through the lofty green heights, into the moss and shadow of the dark world inside the tree. He was deep within it when he caught sight of something that made him freeze—a single child’s shoe, dangling from a branch just above him, its laces tangled, its leather old and cracked. In a sudden cold rush, Sam saw what had been around him all along: small children’s skeletons, hanging from the crooks of branches, bones picked clean, held together only with scraps of faded clothes—and all around them the heavy black bodies of hundreds of roosting Takowanda birds, motionless and silent.

  One of the birds opened its razor-sharp beak, and once again Sam heard the child’s laugh. Then the whole flock opened their beaks to chant. Takowanda, Takowanda, T
akowanda, they began softly, their voices rising as they crept down the branches toward him.

  All around the island and out across the ocean echoed the strident, victorious cry:

  Takowanda, Takowanda, Takowanda!

  SIENNA MERCER

  Heart Stopper

  My camp counselor sniffled. “My grams always said that if you fall into freezing cold water, your heart will stop.” She peered down at the dark water.

  “It was so terrible,” her voice whispered.

  The two of us stood on the dock, huddled together for warmth in our doubled-up socks. It was the first time I’d been this close to the water since Sherri died. It had been two days, and the same odd, wintry chill still hadn’t lifted from the lake.

  I put my head on my counselor’s shoulder. She’d been the person closest to the accident when it happened.

  “You should have heard her scream,” my counselor said, her chest heaving. I shivered. We’d all heard it up on Girls’ Camp, but I didn’t want to correct her. I’d thought it was the strangled howl of an animal being attacked.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I said, trying to comfort her.

  My counselor didn’t say anything. Finally I lifted my head, and I saw that she was grinning.

  My mouth flew open, and she shoved me off the dock with her palms wide-open.

  JACK GANTOS

  Up to My Elbow

  I had done some bad things but went to bed without regrets, and that night I thought the welt on the palm of my hand was a bug bite and so I scratched it, but the next morning it had grown red and puffy and cracked open like tiny lips, and when I grabbed my school backpack it hurt, but it was a hurt that was like wanting to cry when someone is cruel to you. I pulled a glove down over my hand and suddenly shuddered from the panicked feeling in my chest as if being locked in a closet. I yanked the glove off and took a deep breath. What is going on? I asked myself. I twisted the doorknob to leave the house but instead dropped to my knees with overwhelming shame. “Oh my God,” I wailed, “what have I done?” I looked into my stinging hand, and the little lips were whispering, “What you feel is now who you are. Get used to it.” What else could I do? The choice was clear. I ran up to the kitchen for a knife.

  STEPHEN MARCHE

  Four Gleams in the Moonlight

  The first gleam was the deer’s eye as I swerved to avoid it, crashing my car into the ditch. The deer fled like a shadow.

  The second gleam was the light from the house across the field, in the first thick part of the woods, which I headed for, in search of a telephone.

  I knocked. I could see a lovely table set for two in the kitchen through the window. A man with a crooked smile opened the door (his bright, crooked teeth were the third gleam). He ushered me in with a sweep of his hand.

  Then everything went black.

  When I awoke, I was lying on the kitchen table set for two. The moonlight streamed through the window like a scarf, but I couldn’t see a thing. I couldn’t move my hands or feet.

  A blade flashed: the fourth gleam in the moonlight.

  BRAD MELTZER

  The Goblin Book

  On his deathbed, my grandfather gave me The Goblin Book.

  “It’ll work for you,” he whispered. “It will.”

  Don’t worry. I was confused too. I didn’t like creepy old grandfathers who talked in riddles. It was annoying.

  But he explained how it worked. How a reader—usually a smart one—would be holding a book, lost in a story. And then the book would feel odd in the reader’s hands.

  The book would feel heavy, then lighter, then heavy again.

  And then the reader would have the oddest feeling of all: that inescapable feeling that someone was watching them.

  It was true, of course. That was the gift of The Goblin Book. With it, I could find any reader . . . and watch them through their book.

  The best part?

  I can see you right now.

  I can.

  No, you think to yourself.

  But I can. And I’ll see you again tonight.

  LANE SMITH

  Worms

  CAROL GORMAN

  The Dare

  “I dare you,” Jack said. “Knock on the door and ask for a drink.”

  Tommy touched his red cap with a shaky hand, climbed the rotted porch steps, and knocked.

  The door creaked open and Tommy stepped inside. Through the lighted window, Jack saw him sit on the couch.

  “He never came out,” Jack told his dad later as they approached the dark house.

  “The place has been abandoned for years,” his dad said. “See?”

  They climbed the steps and pushed open the front door. Their flashlight lit only cobwebs in the empty room.

  “Must’ve been some other house,” his dad said. “He’ll be home soon.” They closed the door behind them.

  Neither saw the red cap lying in the dusty corner.

  DAVID RICH

  The Ballad of John Grepsy

  Oh campers, young and tender,

  In tents and cabins sleeping,

  While you sleep out in the deep woods,

  Something’s out there creeping.

  You hear the wind a-howling

  Like spirits lost and lonely

  And angry ghosts, whose whispers boast,

  “I’m coming for you only.”

  You’re on the land

  That once was mine.

  There’s only you to blame.

  My blade is keen, my spirits mean—

  John Grepsy is my name.

  My name is John Grepsy, John Grepsy, John Grepsy.

  Remember this name all your life.

  Remember with fright that on some overnight

  I’ll be there with my sharp hunting knife.

  So when the moon’s in shadows

  Long after night descends,

  My curse comes quick when fog is thick,

  When dark with darkness blends.

  Remember me, John Grepsy,

  As you’re lying in your bed.

  While you sleep, that’s when I’ll creep,

  And then you’ll all be dead.

  JENNY NIMMO

  Soup

  I wish someone had warned me about Alice’s soup.

  I’ll never get rid of these horns now.

  Baaa!

  MARGARET ATWOOD

  The Creeping Hand

  The hand crept up the cellar stairs. It was shriveled and dirty, and its fingernails were long.

  It scuttled along the dark hallway. At the closed door it sniffed with its fingertips, then jumped up like a giant spider, grabbed the doorknob, and turned.

  Inside the room it found a sock. Then a shoe. And then—another hand, hanging down from the bed. A young hand, a hand that it could kidnap and take away down to the cellar.

  But this hand was attached to an arm.

  Something could be done about that.

  MARIKO TAMAKI

  Wet Sand, Little Teeth

  The hole was about four feet deep and three feet wide. And mostly, you know, it was just a hole this girl Jenny from three cottages over found.

  Jenny said she saw someone digging the hole, although she didn’t know why someone would, like, create this big hole, then just leave it there. I’d never seen anyone walking around with a shovel, but Jenny said she saw a guy. In some ways, the hole appeared almost as mysteriously as Jenny, who just sort of showed up on our porch one day, looking for snacks and someone to play with.

  “Wow, that kid sure is little for someone who eats so much,” my dad used to say. “She looks like a lemur.”

  Mom said to ignore Dad. “It’s good she finally gets someone her age up here after all her wishing.”

  It may seem strange, but playing in the hole with Jenny was really fun. Jenny had a million games that involved a hole in the sand.

  The hole itself was kind of cool. Every day, Jenny and I found some new weird thing pushed into the sand in the bottom.
One time it was this pile of teeth Jenny said were “small white stones” (but they were pointy). Once it was a chewed-up flip-flop.

  We would play there, together, all day, until about the time when it started getting dark. As soon as there was a hint of not sunshine anymore, Jenny would always find some reason to get out of the hole, typically by demanding that it was time to go get a Popsicle at my place.

  “You can’t stay here. . . . I mean, we can’t stay in here,” she’d always insist. “Get out of the hole.”

  Jenny was a bit bossy.

  I don’t exactly remember all the things that happened on that day in August. At some point, Jenny and I were fighting about something, by which I mean that Jenny probably wanted something and I wouldn’t give it to her.

  That evening, when the sun started to set, Jenny jumped out of the hole and said I should stay.

  “Stay,” she whispered as she crawled out. “Go ahead.”

  At first, nothing happened. Then the dark started spreading over the sand and sank into the hole.

  That’s when I felt it. Something touching me. Like a finger. At first I thought it was a sand toad.

  “Uh, Jenny?”

  Then there was a sound, like a swallow in reverse. Gravelly. Then it grabbed me, grabbed my feet, something with strong scratchy hands.

  I kicked one foot free. Tried to reach out to Jenny, but she was walking away.

  I watched her disappear, watched her feet as I grabbed for the edge of the hole, which I couldn’t really grab because it was sand.