Scary Funny

Noodles was published in 2021 by HellBound Books of Texas. It was my fourth published novel but my first horror – the first of many now. Reviewers have described it as a “graphic, humorous, steampunk horror” story, which is pretty much what I wanted it to be. The story and situations are creepy, grotesque and hopefully scary, while the characters add humour to the horrifying events that unfold in the small town of Larsen Springs over a span of just 24 hours. Here’s a short excerpt…

            

Silence filled the hallway in the hospital like an invisible cloud. Paramedic Joe Beisecker sat in the creaky desk chair of reception and stared at the computer’s screensaver, which showed him an assortment of colorful butterflies flitting around a faux jungle scene. After the noisy confusion this morning with the Bruderheim deaths, the hospital now had the air of a tomb. 

Virtually everyone had gone; Phil and Ian had left in one of the town’s two ambulance rigs to bring in the body of the mail carrier, Bernie, and the remains of what everyone assumed was the Smithson woman. Joe’s partner had taken their own rig back to the garage behind the town hall and Margaret, the hospital receptionist, had nipped out on some errand, asking him to answer any calls for a few minutes. 

To top it off, the sheriff and the two docs had suddenly appeared from downstairs a while ago and hustled themselves out abruptly, with no word as to where they were going. The worried look on the sheriff’s face told Joe it couldn’t be to a good place, though. That left only him and Karen, the day-nurse on duty on the second floor, as the only healthy people in the whole joint.

He sat looking at the screensaver, but his mind was far away. The morning’s events had left him – and almost everybody else around him – numb with shock. It was a small town and everybody knew everybody. It was unbelievable. Three people Joe knew had died. Joe himself had carried Stephanie Bruderheim’s body into his ambulance, and old Enid Smithson had been his sister’s teacher years ago. The rumor was that all that remained of her was a leg and her guts. What the hell was going on today? 

The butterflies flitted jerkily in front of him, the occasional car hissed by the front of the hospital and Joe sat and brooded, waiting for either his partner, Mason Ames, or for Margaret to return. It was enough to drive him running back to the bottle he’d given up eighteen months ago.

Bang, clatter. The sudden noise sounded far away, but echoed along the hallway, startling him. He jerked in the chair and smacked his knee on the desk, banishing the butterflies to the inner realms of the computer and replacing them with the hospital’s homepage. He craned his neck around the corner and looked down the hallway. 

Empty. The noise had sounded farther away than that anyway. It must have been Karen upstairs. He scanned the paper labels next to the buttons on the reception phone and saw the quick-dial for the second-floor nurse’s station. He punched it and waited. 

Karen answered on the first ring, “Yeah Margaret?”

“It isn’t Margaret. It’s Joe Beisecker.”      

“Oh. Hi Joe. What’s up?”

“You tell me. Did you just drop something up there? I heard a crash.”

Silence for a beat, “No. I didn’t. Nothing doing up here. You sure?”

“Yeah.” He frowned into the phone, “It sounded far away, but definitely inside the building.”

“Just hang on. I’ll check on the patients.” The phone knocked in his ear as she set the receiver down on her desk.

He waited for only about half a minute before she came back on, “Both of them are quiet. Mrs. Weatherall said she heard nothing, but she’s deaf anyway, and old Mr. Hawthorne was sleeping, so I guess it wasn’t him.”

Joe chewed on it for a second. The sound was too distant to have come from this floor, so the only place it could have come from, then, was downstairs. As far as he knew, there was no one down there but the bodies of George and Stephanie Bruderheim. It was possible that one of the doctors could have come back in through the rear entrance, but it was just a few yards down the hall behind him and he was sure he’d have heard anyone come through that door.

“….me to come down there?” Karen’s voice intruded.

He shook his head, “No. No, don’t worry about it. It could be one of the docs back downstairs. I’ll go check.”

“Alright,” she sounded doubtful, “But be careful. Could be someone breaking in after drugs or something. If I don’t hear from you in a minute, I’ll call someone.”

“It’ll be okay. Probably something falling over in a closet. I’ll call you in a minute.” 

He settled the phone in its cradle and chewed his lip. It could be one of the docs. He pushed the button for the lab downstairs. Anyone down there would hear the phone from anywhere. Sure enough, even he could hear the ring wafting up from the stairwell at the end of the hall, just on the edge of hearing. He listened for eight rings then hung up. Okay, no one down there, or at least no one who wanted to answer the phone. 

He opened the drawers in the desk one-by-one and rummaged around until he found a hefty flashlight he could use as a weapon if need be. Gripping it firmly, he rose and quietly moved down the hall to the stairway door.

He cracked the stairwell door and listened for a few seconds. Nothing.

He gingerly slipped through the door and let it snick quietly closed behind him. It was only a short two flights down the stairs to the basement level. 

He looked over the banister and could see the landing and the bottom half of the basement stairwell door just underneath his position. There was no one there.

He lightly stepped down the stairs, keeping an eye on the door below him. It was metal, as was the one he came through, with a frosted glass pane in the top half. 

As he alighted on the basement landing, he paused and studied the window for a few breaths, looking for signs of movement, but there were none. He cautiously put a hand on the steel handle of the door and pushed it down.

Poking his head around the edge of the door, he glanced down the hallway. It was relatively short – only about twenty feet or so – and had two doors on each side down its length then the big double doors at the far end that led to the lab and morgue. He could see that the lights were on in that room, but none of the doors along the hallway had glass, so he slid up to them one at a time and tried their handles.

The first two on either side were locked, so he moved on. The second one on the left was open and the handle sunk all the way down when he pressed. He pushed lightly and the door opened a crack. It was dark inside. He slid his arm in and carefully felt around on the wall for a light switch. A sudden glare signalled success and he pushed the door open all the way.

It was a glorified closet. Racks of steel shelving along both sides contained plastic cases and boxes of what he assumed were medical supplies. Not drugs, just surgical equipment, bandages and sundry hospital supplies. He was sure that any drugs would have been secured behind one of the locked doors. He shut out the light and silently closed the door, then moved over to the opposite side and the remaining side door. It was also locked, which left just the big doors at the end. 

He kept to the side of the hallway and moved up to the glass on the right-hand door. Just as he reached it, a muffled thump sounded from inside, followed by a crackling noise, like a potato-chip bag being wadded up. 

The frosting of the glass didn’t let him see in, but he could just make out the shadows of large objects in the room. Dimly, he could discern what looked like the silhouette of someone moving slightly on the right side of the room near the back. A tall, oblong shape was slowly rocking back and forth, or so it appeared. He had to peer very closely at the glass and couldn’t be sure, but it seemed that at least one person was in there.

It could be one of the docs, but surely they would have come in the front entrance of the hospital. Karen and her two patients were on the second floor, so this had to be someone else. His heart had kicked up its pace and there was a slick of sweat on his upper lip. He was not the bravest guy in the world, but if this was a junkie or a perv of some kind, come to jerk-off on the bodies or something, he was damned if he’d let them get away with it. 

He raised the flashlight like a club, but then lowered it slightly. It wouldn’t do to be brandishing a weapon so obviously if it did turn out to be one of the docs – he’d look like a scared fool. He straightened his shoulders and pushed the door open quickly, but as quietly as he could, keeping his eyes on the area with the silhouette.

The door swung open and he took two steps into the room, his mouth open for either an accusation or a greeting, depending on which was needed. 

Neither was required. 

George Bruderheim stood facing him, naked, his chest a raw mass of wet meat, his mouth hanging open, his eyes a blank, piercing blue. The tarp that had covered his body was piled on the floor beside him. 

Joe gawped at him, his own mouth hanging open in a match to George’s. He recovered quickly and asked, disbelievingly, “M-M-Mr. Bruderheim? Is that you?” 

Sudden relief flooded through him. Of course, it was all a mistake. George wasn’t dead. Here he was! Looking a bit…squirmy, but still all right. 

Joe shuffled forward a step then stopped himself. How could this be George Bruderheim? He’d seen George all torn up in his kitchen only an hour ago. And that light in his eyes; it looked like his face was made of cheap plastic with bright blue LEDs set into the sockets. What the hell was this?

Then his gaze traveled down and he noticed that George had three legs, and the third was not of the kind you made jokes about at cocktail parties. He had a slender, black tubular appendage that went from his left side above his hip joint down to the floor. It seemed to be nosing around like an elephant’s trunk and its motion was causing George to wobble slightly back and forth. As Joe looked at it there was a wet ripping sound and another shiny black leg-thing emerged from George’s right side and extended to the floor. He now had four legs.

Joe’s mouth closed and opened again in an attempt to put his horror into words, but only a small “awp” sound came out. 

George, in response, twisted his body around slightly to face Joe directly, his extra legs taking his weight momentarily to allow the shift in posture. The glaring blue-white eyes came to bear on Joe, and George smiled. 

A slushy greeting bubbled out, “Oh. It’s…Joe…Beissseckerrrr…” George’s mouth seemed to have a hard time working, “We haven’t…ssseen you…forrrr sssome…time.” Suddenly his jaw unhinged like a trap door and a mass of gray tentacles, looking like tubeworms, spooled out and hung writhing off his chin. He took a step forward with one of his natural feet and his neck started to bulge alarmingly.

Joe decided he’d had enough. He dropped the flashlight and backed away, bumping into something and sending a clatter of metal instruments to the floor. 

He wrenched his gaze off of George and turned to look frantically for the door, which should have been directly behind him. Instead, he ran into a wall of blackness. A smell like wet wool assailed him. 

He tried to push away, but his hands met an unyielding slick surface. He stopped and looked up…into a nightmare. Something hot and wet wrapped itself around his neck and squeezed hard, then a tremendous force hit him in the chest. 

His breath whooshed out, but not through his mouth; his lungs just deflated like a punctured float toy. 

As the light dimmed around him, Joe thought he saw his own heart being pulled out by a black cable.

I hope you enjoyed this short excerpt from Noodles. You can find the book at:

hellboundbookspublishing.com

or at my own author page:

amazon.com/author/jaygould