The 68th Delusion
Are There Skeletons in Your Basement?
I’m currently returning home from a cruise in the Bahamas, so I am making this a simple newsletter consisting of a free short story. And a reminder that my latest novella, Disco Rice, is out and getting great reviews from readers.
“The unique combination of revulsion and disgust comes across as a kind of mental shock therapy. Permeating all the neural receptors with unusual taste and textures forces the reader to leave all five basic senses at the door. Robert Essig’s sweet smell of success somehow makes the most of grisly situations into fascinating, beautiful and fit for consumption reading material.” - Horror Bookworm Reviews
The following story was originally published in a Post Mortem Press anthology but I cannot, at the time of writing this, remember the name of said anthology and my copy is packed away in a box with my old contributor copies. I hope to someday have a library big enough to display all of my books so I can reference stuff like this easily.
I read through the story and made changes after cringing at how bad parts of it were written. It’s astonishing I sold anything at all back then and fascinating to see how far I’ve come as a writer, which is very apparent when re-reading older stories. I didn’t change anything about the story plot-wise, but I did brush up the grammar and some sentence structure.
Skeletons in the Basement
Slap! A bloody hand hit the window leaving a trail of rotten matter as it slid down the glass. Moaning and groaning, their weak gangrenous carcasses swung limbs at the walls and windows and doors for a weak pane or piece of wood, hopeful to gain entrance. They could smell the living inside.
“They’re here,” Julia said. She was only thirteen, but dealing with the pandemic rather effortlessly. Since her mother left, life had been shadowed in darkness anyway. The concept that the dead could rise and seek out the living for some kind of blasphemous feast seemed absolutely plausible in her fragile world. If mom could leave me, anything can happen. When her father, Mike, lost his shit, she remained calm.
“Damn it,” Mike whispered. He’d become frantic when the initial stories about the dead returning to life hit the news, and even more so when the head of Homeland Security was plastered across every social media platform, television station, and radio frequency pleading to the American people to remain calm and stay indoors. He’d never seen anything bad enough to constitute such a domination of the airwaves. It seemed as if every city in the Union was being quarantined, which meant the USA was in a state of terror, only this time it was at the hands of the walking dead rather than hijacked airplanes or gun violence.
Outside, the undead clamored amongst one another to get a glimpse at the humans in the house, as if the smell of Mike and Julia’s brains emanated from their ears like steamy tendrils from a fresh baked pie. They were weak, but en mass they would take the house and devour Mike and Julia like trapped prey before moving on to the next one.
Mike nervously glanced at the door of the unfinished basement, sweat beading on his brow. He looked old. Never before had Julia noticed her father’s age. Since her mother left she looked up to him as her savior, as a strong man who would be there for her no matter what. But something was off about him now. The profuse sweating, the nervous glances, the general panic that radiated from his being. It wasn’t quite the man she had looked up to, so she decided that she would have to remain calm for both her sake and his. She was older now and they were in this together. If he couldn’t handle himself in the wake of something as frightening and horrid as the dead rising, she would have to be there for him, if for nothing more than to ground him.
Fists pounded windows leaving bloody smears of gore. Cacophonic roars of hunger surrounded the house. Such a horde of mindless beings would no doubt collapse the house like an undead bulldozer with the numbers that were gathering. They had nothing to lose and mush for brains. The fact that they instinctually yearned for living flesh was astonishing enough, and perhaps the most frightening affliction of their reanimated state.
“We can’t get out,” Julia said. “What do we do?”
Mike’s eyes continued with their nervous glances to the basement door.
“Should we go in the basement?” Julia asked, noting not only the concern in her father’s expression, but his incessant glances toward the basement door. She was reluctant to take the lead, but would do so if it came to that.
“No!” Mike spat the word out as if his daughter had suggested opening the door to allow the undead into their home.
Julia saw something beyond mere fear within her father’s eyes.
“We’ll go into the attic,” Mike said.
“But I don’t know if the attic is safe—”
“Safer than the basement.”
But before they could make it to the attic there was a noise from behind the basement door. It was but a mere scratching, as if there was an animal down there alerting Mike and Julia of its presence.
“What was that?” asked Julia, panicked. She had been trying to remain cool, but things were escalating faster than she could handle.
“Nothing.” Mike shuddered. “Let’s go into the attic. It’s safe up there.”
The windows were taking a beating as the zombie hoards pounded a monotonous rhythm with rotten fists, something preternatural driving them forth. A voodoo beat accompanied by the moans of the hungry dead.
“But there’s something in there.” Julia walked toward the basement door using extreme caution as if the door would burst open revealing something hideous.
“No,” her father pleaded. “Not the basement!”
He ran after her, ready to pull her away from the door, but youthful ignorance opened it. Julia gasped taking a step back, hands over her mouth in attempt to stifle a scream that threw the zombies into frenzy.
She looked to her father in horror. Though the animated corpse standing at the threshold was indistinguishably decomposed—the flesh jellied and slimy, caked with dirt—she recognized the tattered dress. It was her mother’s dress, the dress she was wearing the last time Julia had seen her. The dress she described to the police—Mike had insisted that his wife left for another man but Julia couldn’t fathom her mother leaving her like that and equally insisted that they make a police report.
She looked at the zombie again, her eyes averting to the basement beyond, the unfinished floor of dirt disrupted after her mother’s escape from an early grave.
“You . . .” was all Julia could say through hyperventilation as she now understood what her father had done. It was all a lie. His story about her mother leaving was a lie. The stories about her infidelity, a lie. Lies. Lies.
LIES!
As Julia ran into the kitchen, Mike tried to grab her, pleading with her as if murder could be excused. She had thought he was the strong one. She had thought he lived in a world of hurt and sorrow, shielding his emotions for her sake.
All bullshit.
Julia grabbed a large knife from the butcher’s block on the kitchen counter. She turned facing her father, eyes ablaze. She was panicked, adrenalin coursing through her body in waves.
“Whoa!” Mike put his hands out in surrender. “Think about what you’re doing.”
“Think about what I’m doing? What about you!”
The sound of one of the windows cracking issued just before it shattered, causing Julia to yelp. They would be inside in no time, but Julia found herself betrayed and doomed. Her yelp was a functionary reaction to the glass breaking rather than fear of the undead. At this point they seemed like a blessing.
“Just give me the knife, Julia.”
“What, so you can murder me too?”
“Julia, just—”
The scream was horrendous as Julia drew the knife across her own throat, blood soaking her clothes in a rush of crimson, her body falling to the floor as death stole over her. It was extreme, especially in the presence of her father, but, in that moment, she wanted it that way. She wanted him to lose everything for what he had done, to suffer in the wake of her demise, for she knew that he loved her, no matter what kind of monster he was.
Mike was left shocked by his daughter’s abrupt suicide. The constant sounds remained of the dead trying to gain entrance, and . . . There was a sound from within the house.
Mike had forgotten about his wife.
She’s loose in the house!
Cold hands grabbed the back of his neck. He struggled with her, but she was impervious to pain. During the struggle he saw his daughter’s eyes open through the deathly calm her body had been overcome with.
Mike’s putrid wife and blood-drenched daughter were on him. He couldn’t break free as they sank their teeth into his flesh, liberating chunks of meat as they devouring him.
The hordes finally gained entrance and feasted on what was left of Mike’s remains before heading into the night en mass, stronger by two.
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Here’s another push for Disco Rice. It’s a lot different than the story you read here in my newsletter. Just look at her reactionary expressions! It is indeed a nasty piece of work and intended for those who are fans of horror on the extreme side of the spectrum. That’s what this little book is. It’s what it had to be. The next one I put out will not be extreme at all. So, if Disco Rice isn’t your cup of tea, I hope you will remember that The Traveling Movie Show is a horror book for any fan of chilling, spooky stories. Look for it in the coming months.
I'm not a big fan of Zombies in general but I did enjoy your story.
Great short! Thanks for sharing it!