Kiddy Horror

On 4/7/2008 I'd the idea of taking a writing-style like Clark Ashton's, in which monsters are made more dreadful by pseudo-biblical phrasing and the interjection of words like "dread", and applying it to a less sinister, familiar instead of weird, story. The hated doctor's office of childhood.



Medicine makes man's body an object
-a tool to clean 'til (polished) it sparkles.
Examiners mangle privacy with fingers that wander on bodies, pinching flesh to observe without sentiment, like an executioner or mortician.
Objections are opinions to be swerved
for mortals come by their volition
to rooms so sterile skin rankles
in their atmosphere of white-clod sects.
Whether conscious, sick, dead, healthy, or unconscious the bodies are regarded the same.
Hypocrites cleanly kill the unborn with well-worn implements, clinical in their appraisal of murder-gained wealth, bills blood-splotched and splatter-stained, Hippocratic Oaths
profaned. -Hail Hospitals



A little girl, Ashley, lay on her stomach in her living room, somewhat of a tomboy, she played with cars. Drags races were the day's fantasy and the red car kept winning. Her mother's shadow fell over her before a word was uttered, portentous.
"Honey, get ready we're going somewhere".
"Where mommy?"
"It's a surprise."
Ashley missed the malice in her smile, the meaning hidden, her lips spread like a she-wolf's snarl, baring gory fangs.
"Alright."
Oblivious, Ashley ran off to prepare herself for departure. She tamed shoelaces while her mother fetched her purse. Together, hand-in-hand, they walked to the car. Its' engine rumbled, a primal animal hiding behind the curb, patiently awaiting prey -tender and young- to devour. Vestiges of forewarning lingered out-of-view of Ashley's mental perception; she hopped in the car. Its door slammed. The metallic clash was final, like the sealing of a vault where embalmed bodies would be stored, withering with inhuman slowness. Her mother strapped her to the seat she was in, tightening black bands across her chest and stomach, so she struggled to move. Their house receded in the distance, feelings of comfort and trust diminishing with its faces of brick and mortar.
How long she was strapped in the car she could not say. Hours? Days? Time lost its meaning as they traveled past blurred landscapes, beneath an immobile sun. The number of questions, each a version of "where are we going and when will we get there" Ashley asked were beyond count. Her captor revealed none of what lay in store. Ashley looked through the window at a dimension that knew movement but no constant form: shapes shifted from one to another in a blend of color she couldn't cleave between the details of. A deep sense of unease, nauseous, sunk into Ashley. She felt the wrongness of the place she beheld. She had seen what should not be seen. Only the abyssal darkness of closed eyes were a comfort. With her head diverted from that dread portal she discovered gum stuck to the floor -so close to her bare ankles. Disgusting! Icky! Eons beyond her ilk had seen that filth harden from its first gummy incarnation. Lint had built about the pink brainlike mass, a festering mold which transmitted through eyes the sensation of dirtiness to skin. Ashley could bare the silence no more. It gnawed at her, clasping at her breaths, grabbing the sounds she made from the air so they couldn't escape or return as echos. The radio crackled and cackled in gibbering tongues incomprehensible to man. A cacophony strange and terrible came from its ancient, broken frame. No longer could Ashley stand the sound, like the half-molded words of a larynx scarred by abuse. She pressed the ebony device again and took relief in the suffocating, faceless silence.
They pulled up to a cyclopean building, reared above the level any family could need, a structure capable of devouring Ashley's own home, its geometry was alien, at the pinnacle it flattened in blasphemy against all triangular roofs. Ashley shuddered. What madness gripped her she could not say but she was silent as a dog with led from bark removing surgery as her mother hand-led her to the doors. Those doors, some foul sorcery bewitched them so they parted, twin panels, at their approach, as if invisible hands held the door for them in anticipation. Hingeless, they exhaled as they slid -a mockery of human doors. Ashley was chilled by a gust of cold air against her neck. From pseudo-gill gashes above the door streamed winds from lands too cold for life. Ashley cowered against her mother's arm, partialy hid behind her hips and legs, from spectres, empty of human joy, droll and drained in expression, their garb an eye-searing white. When her mommy told her to continue, pulling her along, Ashley noticed how harsh her dress felt beneath her tense fingers. A single door of solid metal, hingeless like those at this place's mouth, opened in front of the wall Ashley and her mommy had reached, as if an invisible will, watching with calculated malevolence, opened a path before them. Inside, an old priest spoke of his dark lord Flure from an eldritch chair and Ashley's mother completed his cultish invocation. A red ring, as of fire, appeared in the wall and with a chime carried from the Halls of the Dead, their small room closed. Ashley felt her stomach's nervousness, a weight pressing down, and feared her doom.
The room smelled tainted. Human scents had been burned from it, scoured away by some agent nature had never known. Many children were called for and led (whether weeping, fighting, or screaming) through the doorways tot he unknown, past the aged and many-wrinkled guardian, never to return. Ashley was broken from fearful thoughts by the sound of her name. She fled but a large hand halted her escape. Why her mother had betrayed her Ashley could never say. She was lost among the white rooms, each identical and indistinguishable from the last, they stretched out innumerably, even had Ashley run for the hallway she would not know in what direction lay escape or if there even was an exit from the hall, it could extend forever in an eternal cycle.
"Doctor" performed unspeakable tests upon Ashley. All along her mother had served this insane priest and now they prepared her as a sacrifice to some god of the nether, forgotten by mankind save in the most emotive nightmares, yet remembered by older things which worshiped these demonic lords in days of old and await in slumber for darker times return. Tearful Ashley ignored the proffered poison-food. A final meal, sweet and indulgent beyond all others, brightly colored, was offered repeatedly. Finally her mother took it for her. Doctor closed the shadowy drawers he had received that jezebel sucker from. Her soul shattered, Ashley tasted the food. She could not taste through its glamor, she was convinced dum-dum was deliciously sweey. Enraptured, Ashley licked at the crystalline sugar like a girl hypnotized, time lost to her as she savored its intoxicating essence.
"Ow. I cut my tongue."
"Sometimes you catch a hard candy edge. Be careful."
"Thanks doctor."
The mother and daughter left. Doctor Stechi opened the lollipop drawer and made sure he still had enough razors.