From The Desk Of Douglas J.Moore
Written On December 31,2014.
Approach my humble abode with haste but not with leisure for a an extended stay .... a dark sojourn from that which hunts you as a game for its' own unsated and some best left unspoken monster like pleasures.......
Enter quickly now! The dark and this fog have formed a unholy alliance ...... against you. Flee quickly from this unholy alliance and seek shelter for your soul on this one single parcel of holy ground, lest ye shall forever endure nightmares both horrible and as yet unheard of by you or your close friends and the people that you do not know.
Nightmares that will result in a unending madness taking root in your mind. Act quickly now! Grant yourself sanctuary here ...
"SKIN MONSTERS" By Horror Author Extreordinare Douglas J. Moore is soon to be published and made available for purchase by you from my active bookstore links that can be found here in 2015.
Here is retelling of what really goes on what you have paid the price of admission and have sat down for a movie and only a eight year old boy knows that something else is in there with them for a different kind of entertainment and snack during the movie ....
It was sometimes felt but never found in the movie houses that the few remaining men, now in their late seventies, had gone to when they were boys and sat down in their seats and watched a newsreel that had been black and white and only slightly different from the one that they saw from the very same seats in the same row just about two full weeks ago.
about what was happening during the war. A war that their country was having with their enemies from foregin lands when the few movie serials that always would follow it were about to come to a halt with a cliffhanger ending that would not be resolved until next week.
They would talk during the few visual reminders playing on the big screen that you get your popcorn, candy or soda before the movie started so they wouldn't miss any action packed moment of the movie from their seats.
Each one of these boys had armed themselves with straws still in the white paper wrapper and spitballs. Yes, spitballs. A full days worth of spitballs. Going to the movies without them was not any fun at all.
A creepy looking man with a explosion of veins on the left side of his face had been sitting in his seat and watching the newsreel about the war. He had told them not to say one word and warned them about how there'd better be no funny business during the movie while it would flicker across the screen.
Like so many older boys at the age twelve, their pest of a younger brother who was nothing more than eight years old had come along with them. The older boys and his friends had
the hoodlum friends that he ran with ... would come to a bad end. the young boy thought and chewed on some five cent candy bar. Just like mom had said they would.
found pleasure in tormenting them by telling them things like "The monsters that you see tonight are real and they eat anything ... anything small and weighing one hundred pounds or less." and "The enemies of our country that appear on that big screen like to shoot at small little pain in the backsides like you." Joe Clarkson,said, greasing his hair with oil and butter because he thought his older brother was right and it would make girls hot for him. "The enemy thinks that shooting worthless little runt things like you will make this a weaker country, too weak to stop the Red Menace from taking over our country. What they don't know is that they are doing us a favor by killing the weak. Yes, that means you and your pansy ass friends who read books and leaving the strong among us behind to wipe our foes right off the face of the planet."
Adele Fleischer was also something that could not be described as a ordinary presense in this town.
Many of the townspeople though she was odd because, rain or shine, she could always be found sitting on a cast iron park bench and reading when not taking small ladylike bites of a sandwich while she was on her lunch break.
It was, the few people inside of this movie theatre had thought, downright spooky to see her away from the rare book room inside of the local library where she would adjust her horn rimmed glasses and glare at you. After you've been subject to her wicked stare, you'd never again return to feeling comfortable in the library if you opened a book cover and it was much too loud for her sensitive ears.
If you tore a page in a library book, and God help you if you did even if it was done by accident, she would leave a unpleasant comment on the pages where she had just finished writing your name in a book with her pork sausage sized fingers.
In that book of hers, she had you declared a unoffically undesirable person and would have you banned permanently from the library once she was the head librarian.
Not even the men and woman who were on the library board, you'd soon discover, would be willing to help you once that had happened to you. They had hired her and they soon had discovered what she really was like and had become afraid of her.
"You little turds better be quiet once the picture starts." The creeping looking man said, looking away from the screen where American troops were onboard a battleship that was under attack.
"You, Mister Collins and these boys must learn to be quiet here as well. Think of this theatre as if it was a extended part of my ... the library." Adele said, sounding more like a witch as she turned around in her seat to face them.
"Crazy book worm." The creepy looking man grumbled, looking back at the screen. "Her home life and I don't want to knows what the hell that must be like, must be really off the deep end."
"How to be quiet, might just save your life one day." Adele Fleischer said in a very deep voice with a heavy German accent. "Maybe even tonight. "A forbidden presence, a dark creature is what it is. Horrible things that had been done by this monsterous creature in the past ... in the dark ... could happen again in the here and now. You little noise making strudels need to be quiet. You don't want to draw the attention of ... it ... do you, boys?"
Author's Note: I hope you liked this excerpt from "The Picture Starts As 6:15 And Again At 8:15 P.M. No Refunds After the First Fifteen Minutes." It is only one of the short works of fiction that I am working on right now. DJM
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My first thoughts about achieving some attention for "Skin Monsters" has centered around finding out if the small town newspapers (local and ones outside of this state) have a book review section to review my book (and if they don't) then get interviewed about it by a local reporter for that paper.
But then I started to think about what would be the best way to find the smaller newspapers that doesn't get the rack space that are gobbled up by tabloid newspapers with headlines about which singer is in rehab for drug use where you shop for food or in your local (sometimes chain owned) convience store that sells you everything from apples to ... well something with a letter Z at the start of it ... I just can't think of anything that begins with a Z for the moment.
So it was back to sitting in front of my computer and firing up my cable modem to start a search for a list of small town newspapers who would have space to fill and want to use that space in their newspaper for a article (and claim the bragging rights to say that they were the first to review my book and interview me)about a local author giving a copy of his book to the local library or helping some program that helps those who are learning how to read for the first time as a adult.
(Note: now that may sound self serving and even arrogant to you, and I suppose that from most point of views it is, but there is no such thing as a free lunch and if I can help others to learn how to read and open up their lives to many interesting things to be found in other books and in "Skin Monsters" by helping out a program that does this for those who are trying to read what we take for granted and gain a small amount of attention for "Skin Monsters" then go ahead tar and feather me if you are without sin and can cast the first stone.)
With my computer on and the default home page filling the monitor, now was the time to search for a list of small town newspapers. After fifteen to twenty-five minutes of searching for small town newspapers on three different each engines and another ten minutes or so of visiting each site and making sure all of the links are actually connected and working.
Here are three of the websites that I think are most useful.
http://www.abyznewslinks.com/unite.htm
http://www.50states.com/news/
http://www.jpl.org/div/news/browse/US/
With http://www.abyznewslinks.com/unite.htm typed into my address bar and one quick click later, I found
But if you have not reached that point yet, here are some good alternatives. TBC (FREE NSPAPERS)
The desk where I have been hard at work on this issue, choosing to give a severed thumbs up or a severed thumbs down as to what will be making the final cut
[With very little ink ... or blood ... getting spilled on my floor.] and be included in this, the very first issue of this newsletter, and all of the other issues that will follow it. It does not matter what road you have taken to arrive here,you are now here and I will be going to great lengths - some might say I have gone too far, but I don't agree with them - to provide you with information on a wide range of subjects and when I've come back from looking into some of the darker nooks and crannies of the internet, I will have something dark and interesting for you to read and even play with.
So as I bring this introductary preamble to a very welcome close[Hold out your hand and keep it still if you are one of the people who are happy now that I am almost done with this section of this newsletter while I remember in who ... I mean where I left my meat cleaver :->] I hope you will be hanging around for a very long time ... I'll even supply the noose that the hangman, I mean the Subscription Office wants to use to keep our first batch of readers and rope in some new readers as well.
The rope is always ... free of charge ... of course.
Have a bloody good time and remember ... like the song says ... you can check out ... but you can never leave.
Doug
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To put a lot of your minds at ease, there will only be a limited number of this newsletter that you will be told about this year. Now you might be asking yourself "Why will you be releasing such a small number of new versions of this online newsletter? |
 The woman in a sharp white and heavily starched uniform wore a pair of matching white stockings that started below her knees and ended in a pair of matching white shoes. The old style uniform made her look like she had just stepped out from the black and white photographs in some old and out of date textbook on nursing that was in a bookbag that was at the bottom of somebody's school locker. There was a stench coming from it. No one would ever be able to say for sure what it was. But that did not stop any of the hospital employees from having a opinion about it. More than just a few of them had been describing it as a brimstone like smell and it was a sure sign that the devil or at least one of his minions had been here in the past month and would soon be back as they met with other members of a fringe religious group that only had a handful of members now but soon would number in the thousands; Others, who had thought of themselves as qualified experts in the supernatural because they had watched far too many horror movies and had too many beers while watching them, had described the smell as belonging to something that clawed its'way out of a coffin and dug its'way up to the grass filled surface of a graveyard and was now looking for human flesh to fulfill the hunger pangs that tormented it. "I have to tell you the name of who it will be tonight." the old nurse said, the skin around her fingers were dry and on the verge of crumbling into dust and exposing bones and veins that were no longer filling up with blood. "You must know who it is and what room this person is in if we are to pick up right where we left off when I last approached you during your last shift at the hospital in New Mexico and set things right for them." The old nurse saw and did not pay any attention to her distorted reflection in the cracked and dark glass that was part of the television set that had been hanging from the wall. The strange overlapping of voices were suddenly everywhere and so was the steady clicking sound. Provide it with no attention, do not make the same error twice. She is trying to distract me with the voices again, The old nurse thought. But this time, using the remote control tied to the hospital bed will neither divert my attention from the task at hand and nor will it allow her to elude me once again. She looked down at her fingers, knowing the pain had returned and was not - this time - a sign that she was not only becoming old; it was a sign that she was already dead and buried below the earth ... earth that was not disturbed except for the tombstone marker that had been place there and bore her name and the date of her death. "When are you going to leave me alone?" The young nurse cried out. "I have work that needs to be done. Each time I leave one town, cross as many state lines as I can before I move into a new town and start a new job there ... you are already there ... waiting for me. Why do you do that? Why? Why can't you just leave me alone, all I want to do is be a nurse to the sick and to the patients who are expected to die." The old nurse felt the pain in her hip and stopped at the side of the hospital bed. "You have known the answer to that question for a very long time, you cannot deny this. But if you must hear it again, I won't be able to stop making my presence felt and you are the reason why this must be. It is because you do more than just be a nurse to the sick and the patients who are expected to die." The old nurse looked into her eyes. She was hoping to find any clue ... and faint glimmer of what she was ... demon or a human. If she was a demon, why had she not started to make a sport of taunting them in the last hours that they had before the end of life? This was not the actions of any demon that she knew about. Demons, and yes she knew more than just a few of them, always took great pleasure in using the skills it honed in torturing the soon to be dead; then taking pleasure in the kill of a fresh soul; And if there was no demon driving her to carry out these acts, what was she then? What was the horrible experience that happened in her childhood? How did it cause her to hunt them and how did she find them with so little effort? Was it some lost primative gut check, dormant in most humans, that was a leftover from our neandthal ancestors who hunted prey to survive on a hostile earth and was something that she found a way to use, in a new way, to find the ones who were about to die and change not only the when and how they would enter the afterlife but what they would find waiting for them once they arrived there. "I - I provide them with comfort," She heard her voice become shrill and more than just a little desperate. " Something that modern medicene does not provide. Instead it keeps people alive by using machines to fill their lungs with air for them, using them to keep their hearts beating and uses them to act as kidneys. It is wrong to use machines for this purpose once they have ceased to emit any signs of higher brain function." "You do no such thing," The old nurse said. "What you are doing is interfering with the natural order of things and keeping them away from the ones whose task it is to claim them. A task that they have been assigned to do by the creator when this creation of his was reaching the termination date that had been set for it. It has been this way far longer than the total number of years that all of your past lives have added up to and the way you have upset the applecart will no longer be allowed to continue." "Them." The young nurse said, pointing her finger around the room. "And where are these angels of mercy or grim reapers as some call them, why do they send you ... their lap dog to tell me these things? Such powerful beings such as they are ... cannot to be stopped by the likes of me, can they? Or are they not as powerful as we are told?" They stood on different sides of the hospital bed, the patient on it was a fat and balding man with a long series of scars that began at his neck and ended behind the knee of his right leg and who did not know his time was almost at a end, and studied each other and hoped to find a fault that could be used to bring about the downfall of the other one who was here to carry out the assigned task that they knew that had to complete. "You meddle with the work of beings." The old nurse said, looking at the flesh peeling away from her fingers. "That are far beyond our understanding." "You no longer seem up to the task that they burdened you with. It is my guess that your masters are neither wise nor as knowlegable as you have been led to believe. Why else would they make such a poor choice in sending you to stop me?" "I have never questioned them. What they have assigned me to do, in their eyes, has always been something that I could accomplish." The old nurse felt a sudden chill; then a a quick burst of intense heat. Then nothing. The room had been returned to room temperature. This is something that I have experienced only one other time, she thought, a queasy feeling had started to rise from her bowels. I was under the tutelage of a mentor in the ways of all things dead at that time and she asked me to describe what I'd just felt. I told her that the cold and heat had just met in a ongoing struggle and were parted again by that which keeps them apart. My mentor seemed please and informed me that such a event happened very rarely and to be aware of it while still only a novice bodes well for your future and curses it at the same time and indeed a door had been opened and two ancient and opposing forces met and were seperated by that which controls their actions. Blood, from then thin lines in her forehead, spilled out in rivulets and she wiped them away and began to notice that the hospital medical equipment that monitored brain activity, the heart rate and how much pure oxygen was getting pumped into the lungs had been flucating wildely in the last few minutes. Pain had continued to reach deep into the bones of her legs and, already having established a foothold in her arms and fingers and crushing a tiny fragment of bone and then moving over to and crushing another tiny part of the same bone in the same finger as part of a process that would take hours to crush a single finger and days to cripple a single hand, her feet.That is what one of the creatures or beings, as she called them, had wanted. A distraction. That is what they want and that is what they have caused and I don't know why I did not see this before now, she thought, looking at how distorted her finger had become and how her legs were starting to look like rotted corpse flesh. The medical equipment that was designed to monitor vital signs of a patient had gone flatline for minutes at a time and then would - without any sound medical reason - soar beyond what was considered the norm for a patient so close to death and would set off a host of loud beeps and ringing sounds.It was a clever notion, but now that they have this distraction and she has lost her focus for the moment ... what are they going to do? The old nurse paid no attention to the growing din of beeps and shrill ringing sounds and did nothing but look past the bed and watch her. The medical equipment had started to catch fire from the inside, and touching it was a good way to get third degree burns. It could not be shut down. Each made a different sizzling sounds. Then came the popping noises.They all joined the ringing sounds as they continued to increase in pitch and volume. The young nurse held her hands over her ears and then across her eyes as fire exploded from the back of the heart monitor on a pole with wheels, not noticing that the portable heart monitor - taped to the chest of the man in the bed - sending a signal to the one she was shielding her eyes from and to the nurses at their station at the end of the hall, had caught fire and was turning his flesh dark black and burning the patient to death. "What's wrong?" The old nurse asked, knowing that she would be crossing a thin veil that kept this world from the one that was not new to her. "You wanted to kill this patient. That is taking place by hands other than your own. Why do you look so strange? This is what you wanted. You wanted to kill them all, sending them to a fate that was different from the one chosen for them. Now some other creature with the same desire and is stealing your thunder by starting to kill him before you. Why are not doing anything? Have you lost your taste for the kill? Could you be upset that you have been bested by that which likes to take pleasure in the kill even more than you do? What are you waiting for, are you going to take part in this kill or let some upstart hellbound menace make you look foolish and weak?"18 "My hands," The young nurse screamed. " third degree burns from the flames have withered them. That will not stop me from from ripping the life out of this scorched corpse."19 The old nurse,20 |
 Now ... right in front of me, she thought, turning around to make sure that nobody was about to come in through that door and ruin her little party. Is a ghostlike and disfigured image in the glass pane ... in the door of this hospital room. It is the face given to me in what would turn out to be the last operation done on me by this butcher ... a little creep who is not even fit to be cutting meat in a butcher shop. He did nothing to undo the damage that had been done to my face in the car accident that happened when I was fifteen. Fifteen and in the back seat doing ... what the not so pretty girl does to keep a boyfriend from dumping her and going out with the girl that all the guys in high school ... even the plain and downright ugly ones who had no chance at nailing her but dreamed about it and got hard and then limp in the showers ... well we all know what they wanted to do with her ... don't we. My old scars now looked even worse and the new ones would have won the envy of the guys who did the zombie faces in a living dead movie that was made by some guy named George and was playing every night, at midnight, at the movie house where guys took their dates to scare them so bad that they didn't even notice that their boobs were getting squeezed. "I won't read them," he cried, his own hand making a doomed attempt at getting the stronger nurse to loosen the grip she had on the iv tube that fed the medicene into his arm. She looked at his weak hands, one on the white hospital linen and the other failing to reach her and falling to the side of the bed. It made a soft sound and dangled there as if it were a puppet with its strings suddenly cut.It was a suddenly clear, to her, what medical condition had led his nearest family member to have him transported to this living assisted facility that he had called "a waiting room for the soon to be dead." For the first time, in a very long time ... she smiled and thought years according to the last person who saw her do it the first time but not this time and it was this time that the thought of that look on her face had convinced him is was time to retire and get in his own words "the hell away from here.", she had smiled. "My, my. Life does has its twists and turns," She continued to smile, feeling unused muscles get more than a bit sore as she used them." And here I thought that the big guy upstairs and no sense of humor." He lifted his head off of the pillow. The strain of holding it up, to look at her and see if he knew who had entered his room, was centered at the back of his neck. It was a pain that he had been trying to build up a tolarance for, without the nurses and his physical therapist knowing about what he was doing. In the charts they were both keeping on me, he thought, they would have called this a self destructive act and would have made the reccommendation that I be given a stronger sedative or have my head held down by restraints for my own good before they came to the conclusion that I needed to be observed by the body that had been sent down by the psych ward..The creases in his forehead deepened. Sweat dripped into them and he desperately wanted to be able to raise his arm and grab a tissue from the stack of tissues that had been left for him. "I won't look at anything you want me to read," He said, the pain in his neck caused him to drop his head back on the pillow. "And that is what makes this so darkly funny," She laughed, staring at him." You can't lift or hold anything. You have Parkensons" "This is what you wrote in your private records," The nurse said, fighting the urge to claw the right side of her face. "In the three days that have past since the corrective surgery was done on her face, the right side of it has not shown any noticable signs of improvement and, in fact, it has worsened to the point that, as the doctor of record who did all three of the failed observations to improve her appearance at her request, I feel duty bound to tell her that unreversable paralysis can be the only suspected outcome of a fourth operation." |
Arthur Crandell did, and most of the people that he extended a helping hand to had said that what other people had said about him was true, have the face of a angel and laughed - so very often at the rubes in the quiet back rooms that were off limits to the family and friends of the bereaved - about how they all believed that because he had the face of a angel...that he was a angel and said "This face of mine is nothing but a guaranteed cash cow in the funeral business and all I have to do is look like I am sympathetic to their loss and they are opening up their wallets and spending much of their life savings on putting a slab of meat in the ground." He had become very good at using it, at just the right moment. A gentle nod and then the gentle touch of his hand - the same hand that had slapped a few working girls that he paid for only when he went out of town and he followed the advice of his father who told him that you set up the suckers and take everything the have, and make them smile as you fleece them and never crap in your own plate - was all it took to win the rubes over. |
