Vicinity E-Book

Justin Kennedy

• Herausgeber: Cactus House Recording
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 97

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

A collection of surreal cyclical horror short stories, comprising the first collection from author Justin Kennedy. Currently, Justin lives in Campbell, CA and works at a law firm. Much of the subject matter in this collection was inspired from real events and real nightmares.

Leseprobe

VICINITY

Short Stories by Justin Kennedy

Vicinity

Justin Kennedy

© 2021 Justin Kennedy / Cactus House Recording

All rights reserved.

Author: Justin Kennedy

Contact: [email protected]

Cactus House Recording

21639 Almaden Road

San Jose, CA USA 95120

No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, electronic or otherwise, by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The Assignment

Mustaches

Lackluster Part 1

Hanna

Government Work

Lackluster Part 2

The Shopping Cart

Friday Night

Lackluster Part 3

The Man in the Apartment

Neighborhood

Lackluster Part 4

Thing

The Assignment

It’s starting to get late. The air seems cooler downstairs and the stillness in the basement is more prominent. The only thing I can hear for sure is a gentle hum coming from outside which I imagine is the sound of various insects inviting the evening.

There is a closet on the far side of the room that I currently have my back to. Every so often, I’ll turn around on the stool I’m sitting on and consider the grains in the wood of the closet door. After several times of staring around to look at them, I begin to wonder if they’ve shifted slightly. When I fixate on the door for a while, the grains appear to rotate somewhat, but then I’ll refocus my eyes and the illusion will stop.

The floor is made up of crude wooden floorboards. When I get up from my stool and walk around to pursue a thought, the sound of my shoes slowly tapping on the surface of the floor creates a nice enough ambience that allows me to feel more comfortable.

Every time I return to the table and adjust my weight on the stool, I look over the schematic I’m working on. The lamp on my desk is sufficient for me to see the entire thing, and with a few adjustments, I’m able to work continuously with motions over the paper, my pencil running next to straight edges and adding more dimensions to the space. This assignment is nearly completed.

I’m not aware of the time. I close my eyes and hear a noise inside the room with me. It sounds like a pencil tracing a line over a piece of paper, and yet I know I’m not the one making the noise because my hands aren’t even on the desk. When I open my eyes, I look down at the schematic and see nothing has changed from before.

I turn around and look at the closet door. The lamp on my desk casts just enough luminescence for me to trace the grains. I decide to take a break and I get up holding my pencil in my drafting hand. I walk over to the door and sit down on the floor in front of it cross-legged. I run the graphite edge of the pencil right over the grain of the wood and let the grain carry my hand as if I’m on a track. Slowly, inching downwards towards the floor, I’m listening to the sound I’m making on the door, and I start to close my eyes again as if in thought.

I’m stalled over a snag and so I pull back and keep my eyes closed for the moment. The sound of a different pencil tracing over a piece of paper is back. I open my eyes and it’s gone. I close them again, still facing the door and there it is once more, slowly along a straight edge. I strain my ears to see if I can hear somebody sitting in my stool-our backs would be turned to each other if there were somebody there. There is a creak, as if somebody is shifting their weight.

I quickly open my eyes and spin around to see everything is normal as from before. I’m trying to see if anything has changed, perhaps the lamp was moved to cast a better reflection in consideration of the shifting dynamic of light entering in through the closed glass window above the desk. But I can’t tell for sure.

It might be opportune for me to say something out loud. And so, I break the stillness in the air with a general greeting that goes unanswered. I get up and walk back to the stool and look hard at the piece of paper I’ve been spending the last three hours on. God knows if perhaps the last line in a series of many patterns is one centimeter, even a millimeter, off from before. I realize I missed a step and begin to get preoccupied over the fact that I wasn’t taking accurate measurements and that I’d have to trace back and define them again.

I set to it with annoyance, now taking the gentle time to ignore misgivings of thought and space to again allow the assignment to be completed. I line up every unit and detail and once I’ve traced back the last adjustment, I sigh with relief. Only the sigh seems to last longer than the amount of time I’ve devoted to using my vocal chords on it. As if there could have been a further miscalculation that I made.

With closed eyes, again I keep my hands by the desk and allow myself to sigh once more-elongated and firm. A full breath of noise. When I know for sure that I am no longer performing the sound myself, I can hear it from across the room continuing.

“Who’s in the closet!?” I ask and spin around on the stool to stare wide-eyed ahead. The grains on the door are exactly how they were before-I made no change when I traced my pencil over them, and I of course hadn’t meant to.

The room is silent except for the insects outside once more. I cross over to the closet and put my ear up to the wood to see if I can hear the sigh again. There’s nothing coming from within. I wonder if everything would be satisfactory and normal if I finished up with this closet door open. That way, I’d be certain that I’d have no more distractions for what would choose to unsettle me from a vantage that’s no longer hidden?

So I place my hand on the brass doorknob and turn it to the right. The door has been shut for a while and it groans against the frame, wood scraping on wood that cuts through the room and scares away colonies of insects who had previously enjoyed the peaceful area outside of the building.

I think about the fact that in the five months I’ve lived here, I’ve never even opened this door before. In fact, this was the first time I had spent any good length of time down in the basement to begin with. I’m expecting rodents inside this closet that I’ve never seen the inside of, maybe a bigger animal that could have traveled through the vents of my house to an area that was warm and inviting. But what I open the door to is the same room that I opened it from, only the dimensions are mirrored and I’m staring ahead at an empty desk with a lamp and a piece of paper on it next to a pencil tilted slightly to the paper.

That is fortunate. I walk through the door and close it behind me. Everything appears just as I had left it in the last room, only of course in reverse. I cross the room and sit down at the stool to see quite charmingly that the schematic I had worked on previously was now simply reversed. It wouldn’t be too difficult to pick this up and of course, I definitely would gain perspective on the assignment as a whole by working on it from here.

My eyes are closed and I’m sighing again with the pencil in my hand hovering just slightly in the air. As soon as I put it down, I hear the doorknob on the door to the other room turning and the wood scraping over itself again.

Mustaches

When they first began to prepare for the opening of the new Japanese-American Fusion Restaurant in our town, the owner and building contractors saw no indication of anything peculiar. The space itself was added on to a building on the corner of a fairly busy intersection that itself was only known for the expensive hotel that international businessmen typically stayed at.

The restaurant they were opening was going to offer comfort curry dishes-katsu with creamy curry over noodles as well as traditional spaghetti-based dishes. They believed that the new place, which they were going to lovingly call ‘Curry Hut,’ would attract local families as well as travelers who were staying just several hundred feet away at the hotel. The menu was modest yet varied enough and the owner, Dr. Paul Li, who had decided to retire his medical practice in his old age and focus on providing joy through hot dishes to people, was sure that Curry Hut would draw in plenty of them.

Dr. Li hired on a full kitchen staff and made sure that plenty of cooking instruments were not only stocked but conveniently placed in sensical locations throughout the kitchen. Some of the staff he had hired had over fifteen years of prior cooking experience, specifically experience cooking Japanese Curry-based dishes. Dr. Li chose a jovial and friendly hostess for Curry Hut whom he was sure would charm his patrons, just as she had charmed him with her personality when they spoke at the adjacent bakery next door. In addition, he added on an impressively multi-cultural staff, all of whom showed general excitement and positivity.

The entire process of preparing the restaurant took around five months. Chairs and tables were acquired from an overstock warehouse that offered tremendously reasonable deals on their furniture. Colorful tablecloths were obtained, and chair seats were covered in plastic to preserve their sanctity and with the intent of making the dining experience that much more wonderful.

Curry Hut advertised their grand opening, which was to be set on the second Friday of April, as a celebration to welcome the warmer weather that was beginning to creep into the homes of the townsfolk. Upon opening their local periodicals, patrons and matrons of households would take pens and circle the announcement to provide emphasis on the occasion. Some even went so far as to cut the ad straight out of the paper with a pair of scissors and then place the same cutting up on their refrigerators. Small indiscriminate magnets held them in place and those that would engage in this particular activity would take the care to ensure that no part of the advertisement was covered up by the magnet they were using.

People called ahead to make reservations. Dr. Li was a well-put together older gentleman who enjoyed the company of almost everyone he came across, save for a few undesirables that anyone would agree didn’t deserve such affection for reason of their wanton and unruly behavior. He sat at his desk the night before the opening in his office at Curry Hut greeting every single individual who called in to make a reservation. He single-handedly input their names into the event-planning software application that he had installed on his computer and beamed as they lined up in an orderly manner.