Spring Horror Collection: Harold
Welcome to the fourth story of the Spring Horror Collection for 2022, where Haunted MTL’s writers craft original tales of terror that’ll grow on you. Check with us all week for new stories.
For more original stories, check out Haunted MTL’s Original Creations.
They called him Harold, a ghost, really, who walked only when it was dark and crisp. The kids, like me, knew he lived by the river, but could never find where exactly he lived. There were some rumors that he was, in fact, a ghost, except for the strange things he’d leave behind, little artifacts of a monster we couldn’t understand.
His face was wrong, that’s what we all knew and agreed upon. However some kids said that he had ripped off his own face and stitched on a new one ever so often. Other kids said that a bear ate it in the night and it never healed up right. KAnd some other kds said that he was actually a demon and that’s just how demons looked. Kids said a lot to fill up the silence of what wasn’t known and what was feared, which happened to be a lot. Each new year was a new cycle of children and, thus, a new cycle of theories.
I was never a brave or outstanding child. I was fast enough for my height, but average all the way around. It wasn’t a shock, though, I came from average people in an average town. But for some reason, I was the only one who actually ever saw Harold, up close and face-to-godawful-face. Even though everyone, including my sisters, will say I’m a bullshitter, I’m not. Actually, I wish I were, but even now, years later, it still follows me on cold, damp nights. I can feel his sunken, white eyes and I wonder…
It’s not exactly an exciting tale. I was walking home from band. I had my trumpet, it was already dark in the early spring night. The path I took only had the moonlight and a pocket flashlight my step-dad gave me for my birthday. I’d love to say that there was suspense, that he was waiting and stalking me, but it wasn’t that. It was a flash out of nowhere. He ran into me, fell right on top of me.
This is the part that’s slow-motion, though, because I can still see and taste everything. Crystal clear. He pushed into me – we fell. The flashlight landed to my side and he was above me. Suddenly, there was something wriggling in my mouth. It tasted-…God, like a toilet, like a rotten bag of Taco Bell after three weeks. I spat it out and couldn’t even scream.
I saw him right there, above me, making some squawking noise in surprise; his mouth was puffy and red, but shrunken back. Some of his jawbone poked out of the red flesh and was as white as the moon. His milky white eyes bulged at me in surprise. But that wasn’t what got me. No.
Part of his face was caved in, stripped of skin, but wet tendons swelled as he groaned in surprise. From the bits of putrified muscles and tendons of his face wriggled fat, bone-white maggots, dripping down like rain. Dropping down onto me and wriggling onto my skin.
I lost my shit. Completely. I kicked and flailed and ran so fast and far, before collapsing and vomiting until I saw stars. My step-dad went out but only found my trumpet and nothing else. I couldn’t even play after that, no matter how hard I was teased.
Now it keeps me up for different reasons. I’m in my last year of residency. Myiasis. That’s the term. It’s rare. It’s painful. It’s a nightmare. Being eaten alive from the inside out; having the maggots incubate and grow inside you, just to have them eat their way through you. Your body breaking down, feeling them literally crawl under your skin…
Harold still keeps me up at night. I wonder how many monsters are created and how many we could save. How many are still suffering, and how many will continue to suffer because of stupid little boys and the tales that they tell…
The gorse bush seemed taken aback. It bristled and exclaimed, “A bush!”
“I am so very sorry, my Lord, I can explain,” the goblin cleric bowed in reverence, eyes glued to the ground. Everything about his body language was submissive and nervous.
“Of all the useless… How is it that I got reincarnated as a bush?!” The shrubbery prickled, growing more and more agitated. “I should have come back as a great King, or an Angel, or a Demon, or a dragon, or something even grander… Hell, I’d have settled for returning as the undead Lich King Tyrant Boss-Man you all came to know and love and revere. But no, that wasn’t in the dice. And now here I am, A Bush!” The spiky leaves trembled and rustled as they spoke, both emphasizing and decrying their verdant stature.
“Well, we were in a rush to revive you, after that run in with the goody-two-shoes 20th level adventurers and the awkward retreat,” the goblin knelt before the bramble-vine. “All of our best clerics, necromancers, and acolytes were tapped for spells or had perished in the great battle. Those of us who got out of the caves were lucky to escape with our lives and make it to this little clearing on the mountainside. And we desperately needed your guidance. We still do…”
“That doesn’t explain why I’m a bush now,” the gorse stretched to its full height, about two-and-a-half feet of thorny rage. “And a Gorse Bush at that! Before too long I’ll have a stand of satyrs piping along with a centaur drum circle, all strumming up some fertility ritual at my feet… er, roots…”
“Well, I’m multi-disciplinary you know.” The goblin spell-caster muttered and meekly shifted to his other foot, bracing for the inevitable, “Sometimes I get the cleric and druid magics confused a little.”
“Confused a little?” the bush growled, “Confused A Little?!” The bush’s rage turned to magic as it burst into flames. “I’m A BUSH!!! That’s not just some modest little cleric-druid spell translation issue!”
The goblin shrunk from the blaze, “But my Lord, you are a mighty bush. The greatest bush, really terrific… The gorsiest, bushiest bush in all of shrub-dom… Other bushes? Losers! We all agree, your Lordship.” The trembling goblin horde in the scrubland shadows at the edge of the small clearing nodded emphatically in response, fearing their bushy leader’s wrath. And rightfully so…
A tongue of flame erupted like a lightning bolt from the gorse and zapped the goblin cleric-druid where he stood, leaving nothing but a smattering of ashes drifting towards the ground. The flame erupted through the goblin horde in a huge explosion that engulfed everything in its wake, leaving a circle of scorched earth covered in a fine layer of sooty ash, smelling a bit like cordite.
The bush sighed and took note of its surroundings, sulking. It waited for some would-be adventurer to wander up the mountainside to find it there, where they could revel in its awkward awesomeness. Seasons came and went, and time seemed to stand still for nigh eternity as the gorse bush seethed beneath its crown of thorny brambles. Perhaps it should have convinced the goblin cleric to transplant it to a more trafficked location first.
If you enjoyed that bit of snarky fantasy, check out Ppppffffttt my previous Poised Potion Poison Potential story.
And feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or on her writing, fine art, and conceptual projects websites.
You’ve almost made it to the end of the finger spiders here at Haunted MTL! Because I made A LOT of unfulfilled requests for a spider out of fingers, I will continue this snarky little AI art series with NightCafe and Canva through the month of September… In case you missed out, here are the other parts of this series:
Images: Overall design aesthetic of fashion / design advertising spread in muted tones with four AI art rendered images of spiders, built spiders, and spiders on hands, with any given number of legs on spiders and fingers on hands as you’d expect from AI interfacing at this time. Prompts used from top left to lower right include: hand that is a spider; spider legs as fingers; fingers becoming spider; spider all fingers.
Text reads: Creepy Crawlies Finger Spiders Keep Trying! Yeah, I’m sure you don’t remember being bitten. Because of the ways they warp time and space, and the natural chemical reactions involved, the AI art generated finger spiders’ bite isn’t typically felt. They are still attached to you, feeding… You have to get them off… Keep trying!
Images: Overall design aesthetic of fashion / design advertising spread in muted tones with four AI art rendered images of spiders, built spiders, and spiders on hands, with any given number of legs on spiders and fingers on hands as you’d expect from AI interfacing at this time. Prompts used from top left to lower right include: spider leg fingers; spider made out of hand fingers; hand spider picking banjo; fingers as spider playing banjo.
Text reads: Creepy Crawlies Finger Spiders That’s All Folks! Well, I guess that’s that then. It’s been nice knowing you. Enjoy your new form. Nothing left for it but to play the banjo…
All of the AI art images used in this series were generated on Thursday, June 13, 2024. If you want to see more freaky spiderness in art here on Haunted MTL, check out Bitten and Soul Catcher. More AI art graphic narratives from Jennifer Weigel have explored Little Red Riding Hood and Into the Deep Woods. Oh, and the Tiny Brain Computers exploration. To see more such devolutions into AI generated art, check out the Will the Real Jennifer Weigel Please Stand Up? blog.
We just can’t get enough of spiders here on Nightmarish Nature… so here are some more creepy spider facts for you to consider, outside of the giants, eating and mating habits, and wasp predation as previously mentioned in this series. Plus the finger spiders have taken over the whole of the month of September, so strap in because they’re here too – no goofy drawings this month just more terror unleashed in the form of AI art, courtesy of NightCafe.
Spiders Are Baby Mama Machines!
Spiders can lay hundreds and thousands of eggs in their egg sacs at a time. And when they hatch, all those tiny baby spiders can balloon, flying to new homes on airborne strands of silk as if raining from the sky… So if you suffer from trypophobia and are weirded out by large quantities of clustered small and tiny objects (especially when they are alive and moving) you may want to steer clear of these little bug bombs.
Spiders Are Athletic Archdukes!
Jumping spiders can leap as far as 40 times their body length. And wolf spiders can run up to 2 feet per second. In movement, spiders have four feet on the ground and four in the air at all times. And they have six knees on each leg for a total of 48 knees – that’s a lot of potential kneecapping, I’d try to take them down a different way if I were you…
Other Interesting Factoids
Spiders are on every continent except Antarctica and there are over 40,000 identified species of them. All spiders produce silk for all that they don’t all make webs, since some prefer to live on the move or ambush from hidey holes. There is a known species of herbivorous spider, the Bagheera Kiplingi, but most are carnivorous or omnivorous. And the longest lived spiders can survive for 40+ years.
If you’ve enjoyed this segment of Nightmarish Nature, feel free to check out some previous here:
J.M. Faulkner
March 25, 2022 at 3:45 am
Googled Myiasis… I have to say… yikes
Jennifer Weigel
March 28, 2022 at 10:05 am
Wonderfully creepy. My friend’s cat once had a maggot burrow into her after she was chasing a rabbit down its hole. Apparently they congregate at the entrances to the burrows. It was a kind of nightmare all its own having to get it removed and then treating her against possible infection. Also the wasps that lay their eggs on spiders so that the young eat the spider from within saving vital organs for last weird me out. These things are not entirely as uncommon as some might wish.