The Twenty-Second Delusion

Infected Voices #7, 2023 events, and a free short story!

Is it spring, because it sure feels like it in east Tennessee. Bullfrogs are belching out a chorus at the little pond across the street, crickets are chirping, even the wasps came out for a day or two.

And yet I hear it’s snowing in the mountains east of San Diego, near where I used to live.

I think the groundhog was full of shit.

Welcome to Confusions, Delusions, and Formidable impressions!

News

Part seven of my Infected Voices Godless series dropped the other day with a story called “B is for Brains”.

It's so hard to keep up with the current trends in this new undead world. One week it's cool to go natural and stink to high heaven, the next it's all heavy perfumes and loads of makeup to look "alive". It's hard to know what to do and how to make it in this new world, especially when you're the only living being and everyone around you, everyone you ride the trolley with, everyone you work with, would eat you as soon as find out you've got a beating heart!

You can grab signed copies of many of my books for sale in my online bookstore ressighorror.bigcartel.com. Broth House, Death Obsessed, Follow the Maggot Wagon, Mojave Mud Caves, The Circus Oasis, and more! All orders come with a bookmark and a sticker (I’ll add more for bigger orders).

Broth House has been doing very well, and I want to thank everyone who has read it for leaving reviews all over social media and on Amazon and Goodreads. Those reviews help spread the word, and so far they have all been good. I’m sure there’s a nasty review just around the corner…

Recent Reads from Hell

I just finished The Forgotten by Tamara Thorne. Excellent read. This was my second Thorne book and will not be my last. It was a refreshingly different take on ghosts, and it even tied into her debut novel Haunted, which was the other one I read (it’s absolutely amazing).

I’m starting Walkers by Graham Masterton and still working on Dreadful Tales by Richard Laymon.

2023 Event Schedule

I can’t remember if I posted this in the last newsletter, but here is my 2023 event schedule so far. I’m excited about every one of these events and so looking forward to selling books, meeting people, and hanging with my writer pals.

Scares That Care AuthorCon: March 31 - April 2 in Williamsburg, VA
I have a reading on Saturday April 1st at 6:15 PM.

FrankenCon 2023: June 9 and 10 in Knoxville, TN
I’m tabling with Chuck Buda.

CreepyCon: August 25 - 37 in Knoxville, TN
I’m tabling with Chuck Buda again this year.

Smokey Mountain Terror Con: September 9 and 10 in Pidgeon Forge
I’m tabling with Chuck Buda.

ChapterCon: October 7 in Dalton, GA
I’m tabling with (you guessed it) Chuck Buda.

Story Time!

Here’s a story for you. It’s been a while since I posted one. This has not been published before. It was inspired by a dream and someone I used to work for, though I exaggerated his elements. He was a nice guy . . . but had a habit of lying. I tried selling this story back when I wrote it in 2014, but no one bit. It’s kind of weird, but I kind of like it.

“Dig It, Liar”

My boss has this terrible habit of lying. You could call him a pathological liar, but I don’t get the “logical” part. To me there isn’t a damn thing logical about living in the throes of constant and consistent lying, but for Geoff it’s a way of life.

Thing about lying is that you end up digging holes. You lie to one person about missing a meeting because of a lie you told someone else and soon enough you can’t remember whom you lied about what to. Make a mistake and you start back peddling and then you throw on a few more fibs, a little white lie, and then a big honker.

Like yesterday. 

Geoff isn’t a bad guy, not in the sense that he would harm anyone or beats his wife or anything like that. It’s just this lying thing. Gets the better of him, and sometimes I get drawn into the mix by proxy. Little things like: “If the customer asks, you were sick yesterday.”

Oh, really?

In the flooring business you have new customers all the time, and since you’re working in the customer’s home, there’s a certain amount of mutual respect and trust at play.

Yesterday Geoff tells Gina, a woman whose living room and kitchen we’re laying tile in, that he can’t make it in because he’s sick. Gives her the sob story, the fake congested voice and even throws in a sneeze for good measure. Gina’s sympathetic about the whole thing. She doesn’t know Geoff on a personal level, doesn’t know he’s perfected the act of calling in sick. Had been doing it since he was a little boy. He tells her that I’ll be there for the day prepping the floors.

I went to Gina’s house and worked all day pulling up the existing carpet and linoleum and scraping the sub floor. Gina left me alone for the most part, but she was in the kitchen for maybe a half an hour to make herself some lunch. 

That’s when her phone rang.

It was Geoff, and then again it wasn’t Geoff. At least, he hadn’t meant to call her. He’d butt-dialed her from the bar, which was evident from the music and collective voices that came out of her cell phone. Gina put it on speaker. The look in her eyes said that she wanted me to hear.

Geoff was not only a liar, but a drunk to boot.

I was formulating a story (or perhaps a lie) to explain the barroom ambiance that was emanating from her phone when Geoff’s voice piped in. I could tell he’d had a few to drink already.

“I’m playing hooky,” he said and laughed. “Naw, dumb bitch has no idea. I’ll be there tomorrow. ‘Sides, Jimmy’s preppin’ the place out. Long as someone’s there she ain’t gonna give a shit.”

Gina’s jaw dropped.

I was petrified. Turns out I didn’t need to be pulled into this lie after all. Geoff dug himself a great big goddamned hole.

I continued to work as if I hadn’t heard anything. I half expected Gina to ask me to leave, but she didn’t say a word. I watched her from the corner of my eye, expecting to be excoriated for Geoff’s lie. Then she did something strange. Opened up a cabinet in the kitchen and rifled through what appeared to be a spice rack, grabbing a variety of oddly shaped glass bottles with corks plugging the necks. Bottles gathered and clinking in her arms, she shuffled off to another room in the house. 

I never saw her again.

I decided not to tell Geoff what had happened. I figured I would keep out of it and let Gina confront him. He could figure out how to get his ass out of the hole himself.

The following day I was fifteen minutes late, which was no big deal. Geoff was pretty lax when it came to punctuality. Came with his natural tendency to arrive late to just about everything including work. When I got to Gina’s house Geoff’s truck was in the driveway, which was kind of surprising considering he’d been drinking since noon the day before. Must have turned in early.

Gina’s car was gone, but I knocked on the door anyway. When no one answered, I let myself in, assuming that Geoff hadn’t heard me. The house was quiet. The voices of Geoff’s favorite radio morning show didn’t greet me as I expected. No sounds of his tools or even footsteps echoing in the living room.

I called his name, but he didn’t respond. I noticed that one of the French doors that led from the living room to the backyard was open, and that’s when I heard the sound of something thwacking the ground and a strangled grunt coming from just outside the open door.

Geoff was on his hands and knees, face flat on the ground. I rushed to help him but before I got there he lifted his head and I was taken aback, stopped dead in my tracks. He pulled his head from a small, crude hole in the ground. There was something terribly wrong with his face, more specifically his nose. It was elongated like a fleshy beak. 

Geoff whimpered. 

I asked, “Are you all right?” 

His head slowly turned to face me, eyes wide around a triangular cone of flesh protruding from his face. His hands grabbed the absurd nose and yanked in rough strokes as if trying to pull it off of his face, but all he seemed to be doing was stretching it out all dripping with viscous ropes of snot and blood. The look he gave me was somewhere south of sanity.

I was about to ask what I could do to help, but the words wouldn’t come to me. I just stood there stunned as he returned his madcap gaze to the hole and slammed his face down so swiftly that I gasped. He lifted his head again and yanked on the fleshy beak, slathering it with a pumice of snot and dirt before slamming his face into the hole once again. His nose bled, his skin was ripping from the ferocious manner in which he thrust his head down, using the massive thing jetting out of his face to dig the hole deeper as if using the cartilage as a tool.

That was all I could take.

I ran.

I jumped into my car, took off and didn’t look back. I tried calling Geoff, but he never answered his phone. He ended up a missing persons case, but I knew the truth. He finally dug a hole deeper than he could get himself out of.

The End

Closing Words

Did you like the story? Let me know. Or don’t. It’s your prerogative. If you’re planning on attending any of the aforementioned events I’m tabling at this year, please stop by and say hello. I hope you enjoyed the newsletter! Find me on social media, mostly Facebook under my name and TikTok under @robertessigshorror. I’m also on Twitter and Instagram, but rarely use those platforms.

Until next time…