Funk-N-Fiction

We always look forward to seeing what comes from the mind of Eric R Asher for these annual flash fiction stories. Once again, he gives us something appropriately creepy for the season!!

Abandoned Memories
Eric R. Asher

There was a time before the dark. Some remembered it well. When children dared their friends to sneak into the rotting theater in the woods on Halloween night. But some had forgotten what came with the dark. They forgot what waited in the shadows.

“He’s going to chicken out.” The zombie sighed and sifted through her bucket, tearing into a bag of candy corn with her teeth.

“Shut up, Chris.”

Chris narrowed her eyes and continued munching on candy corn. “This was your idea, Derek. Every year you swear you’re going to go into the old theater, and every year you don’t.”

“It’s not like you did either!” Derek adjusted the fabric skull mask pulled tight over his face beneath his hood. He eyed the candy corn. “Psychopath.”

“Come on, we’re all going in.” Their third, Matt, a tall, muscular nerd dressed as Voltron’s black lion pilot, led the way. He ignored the No Trespassing signs outside the wooded ruins of the abandoned theater. It was the same way he ignored their DM’s warnings at last week’s Dungeons and Dragons game and nearly got everyone killed.

Chris sighed and followed Matt down the cracked pavement of the overgrown street. None of the kids in the neighborhood knew exactly what had happened there. Every person had a different story, from a flood to an infestation and even a poison called dioxin. Whatever the case was, the partially collapsed brick buildings that flanked the dilapidated theater seethed with ghost stories.

Rusted gates blocked the entrance, but the chain had been cut long ago. The pitted iron resisted, but their barbarian was just as stubborn in the real world. Matt forced the gate open with a shriek of metal.

Derek shouldered his way past and forged ahead, only hesitating for a moment as a few more steps took him to the front door. The low hoot of an owl echoed nearby, vibrating the air as a cold breeze clawed at them.

He glanced back at the other two. “Come on, if we hurry, we can still hit a few more houses before they stop handing out candy.”

Chris shoved her empty wrapper into her bucket. The place may have been covered in graffiti and litter, but she never felt right leaving trash lying around.

The lobby was nothing like the modern theaters in town. Here, a wide entryway sprawled to either side. A cavernous space that should have felt anything but claustrophobic, but Chris still shivered as if they’d descended into a muddy cave.

“You proved yourself,” Matt said. “Let’s get out of here. It might not be haunted, but this place is going to collapse on someone.” He didn’t take his eyes off the dim stars visible through the holey roof above.

“Hell no.” Derek stomped forward as he pulled a flashlight from under his cloak. “I’m doing this, and you’re never giving me crap about being a coward again. And I’ll fireball your ass into oblivion next week.”

Chris grinned at Matt and they followed Derek through the collapsed door ahead.

A beam of light ignited when Derek turned on his flashlight. The theater itself might have been larger than the lobby, but the shadows closed in on them. A low creaking groan followed their every step.

Something moved on the stage, and Derek’s light flashed toward it, leaving the rotted velvet seats around them in darkness.

“What was that?” he asked.

Chris’s heart hammered in her chest. “Let’s get out of here. It was just another owl, I’m sure.” But she wasn’t sure. She’d caught a glimpse of something in the beam of light. A pitch-black form that swallowed every speck of luminescence.

Derek marched forward.

“Dude, no,” Matt hissed and reached for their friend, but Derek pulled away, hurrying down the aisle.

Chris exchanged a glance with him, and they followed. Derek had already climbed the stairs to the stage before they reached it, leaving the aisle nearly invisible at their feet. Chris turned her own flashlight on and started up the right-hand stairs, while Matt went left.

“What is—”

“The price must be paid.”

It was the last thing Derek said before wood cracked and something growled.

“Derek!” Matt screamed as their friend vanished beneath the stage, Derek’s flashlight cutting off instantly.

“Something grabbed him!” Chris ran across the bowing stage, thinking more of her friend than the unsettling sensation of spongy wood under her feet.

A terrible shriek echoed up from the shadows before something cracked, followed by a raw scream. A grating horror that made her skin crawl.

“Chris, stop!”

She slid forward half a step, catching sight of Matt on the opposite side of the stage, his arm outstretched as he pointed at the shadows.

A dagger-like set of obsidian claws sank into the stage around the hole Derek had disappeared through, blood pooling where the points met wood. But it wasn’t the claws that had ensnared Chris’s gaze. It was the dim red eyes rising in darkness. A darkness broken only by the gash of gleaming teeth.

“Run!” Chris screamed and launched herself off the stage, landing badly as she slammed into the front row of seats.

Matt stepped toward the shadow, then ran flat out, hurling himself from the stage before finally catching up to Chris as she stumbled out the theater door.

She spared a glance back as they sprinted toward the edge of the woods. Red eyes waited in the doorway, a limp form hanging from one hand. But it wasn’t only one pair of eyes. More had appeared in the windows, the fluttering of tattered drapes now something far more menacing as whatever those damned creatures were stared out at them.

“Don’t look back!” Chris cried out and sprinted as hard as she could.

They never returned to the abandoned theater, but its legend grew. A stain on reality that would live on through stories and darkness for untold years to come.

But Chris and Matt would always wonder what happened to Derek, because his body never rose from the darkness of that cursed ruin.

CONTEST: Eric will be giveing away a paperback copy of the standard edition of The Theme Park at the End of the World to one lucky winner! (I’ve read it, it’s awesome!) To enter follow Eric on Instagram and then add “IG – Done” to your comment about his story, here.
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