New Fears 2: Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

FISH HOOKS Kit Power

Sarah was buying a coffee in the train station when she first saw the fish hooks.

She was reaching for her change, mind already on the journey and the meetings that would follow it, when she saw the single trickle of blood running down the man’s hand and onto the coins he was holding out to her.

She froze, her own arm extended, fist half opened, and watched as the dark-red fluid rolled over the man’s knuckles before beading on his fingertips. Her mind was blank in that moment—devoid of any sense of place, of self. He’s bleeding, she thought. Just that, as the droplet grew fat and pregnant. Her eyes, moving apparently independently of her brain, tracked up the fingers to the hand holding the money.

There, she saw the two-pronged fish hook.

It was stuck in the back of the man’s hand, piercing the flesh either side of a prominent vein. There was no line or wire on the end of it, but the skin around it was taut, as though the hook were pulling the hand towards her, and she saw—with a cool, detached clarity born of profound shock—that the skin between the hook’s entrance and exit wounds was puckered and open, causing fresh blood to well up in the holes and stream down the pink skin.

She stared at the hook in the man’s hand, thinking nothing at all. The moment stretched and stretched. She wondered vaguely what would happen when it snapped.

The small eternity ended when the man grunted. The skin puckered more widely, the curve of the hook clearly visible beneath his flesh, as his hand moved closer to hers and his fingers opened.

Blood splashed onto her palm; the coins bounced off her hand and fell from her nerveless fingers, scattering across the floor. It sounded like hailstones on canvas.

“Oh, I’m sorry, miss.”

She looked up then—the polite response so ingrained that it operated independently of the sudden roaring blankness in her mind.

It was the man who worked at the drinks counter, who took her order and handed her coffee most mornings. A young guy with a thin goatee, earrings, long black hair in a ponytail, and an easy smile that often reached his eyes.

The hooks were in his face too.

He was frowning with concern as she stared at him. The two hooks in his eyebrows pulled them down, causing the skin beneath to wrinkle. The blood ran from the holes down either side of his nose like red tears. There were hooks in his cheeks too, pulling his mouth down in dismay, leaving running red lines to his chin.

As he opened his mouth to speak, the hooks in his upper and lower lip tugged his mouth open, dribbling blood over his teeth.

The paralysis broke then, and her fist clenched over the coins left in her hand as she turned and ran from the station.

She had a moment of peace outside. The autumn sun was dazzling enough that she couldn’t see clearly. She shut her eyes against the glare, not caring at the crowd jostling around her, past her, into the station. She felt like an island in the middle of a busy stream, and in the moment she embraced her stillness, relishing the feeling.

Then she opened her eyes.

The hooks were everywhere.

She was looking down at the pavement, at the parade of legs in smart trousers and business skirts. The hooks were in thighs, in shins—red blotches on tights, crimson and clotted, like obscene poppies. Everywhere the hooks pulled flesh, stretched skin, dragging people into motion. Glancing up, panic rising, she saw more: a woman’s hand tugged to her face, brushing the hair from her eyes, droplets of blood falling onto her white blouse; a young man, ear buds in, the hooks pulling his eyebrows hard enough to almost tear, blood streaming down his face.

She saw more, and more, her mind a series of impressions of spiked bent metal and open wounds, and always the pulling, the stretching, and the pounding of her heart became a piston beat in her ears, and her mind filled with one thought, one impulse, to be away, and she started to sprint, fleeing blindly across the road, past a blare of horns and a screech of tyres, and up the street.

Eventually the pain in her chest got too much, and Sarah stopped running. She slowed to a walk, and then all but fell onto a bench. Her heart was punching a hard, heavy rhythm, and her lungs burned with each ragged breath. She gingerly stretched her legs out, wincing at the pain the movement caused in her thighs and calves.

She closed her eyes briefly, intending to focus on her breathing, to count, but when she did the image of fish hooks in skin came into her mind. She quickly pulled them open again.

She took in the park around her. The spring sunlight played through the leaves of the tree whose branches overhung the bench, dappling her skin with spots of light and shade. A cool breeze set those spots dancing over her and the tarmac of the footpath in front of her. Further away, the path sloped down through the middle of the grass, towards the edge of the park. She could just make out the shape of the archway above the train station entrance, and suddenly the cool breeze made her shudder violently. Her jaw began to judder, her teeth clattering together, goosebumps rippling under her cardigan. She let the shakes come, hugging herself and tilting her face up, looking through the branches and leaves into the lush blue sky.

Time passed. The shakes tapered off gradually, resolving into a tremble in her hands. She closed them into fists, gently, looking at the unmarked skin, wondering. Watching the trembles stutter and finally stop. She closed her eyes, and this time there was only blessed darkness. She took a deep breath, slowly pulling in air from her diaphragm, feeling her lungs swell. Held it. Exhaled.

Then she opened her eyes. Turned her fists over.

“Okay, here we go.”

Unaware that she’d spoken out loud, she opened her left fist.

In the centre of her palm was a dark, almost black stain, tapering to a smear of red. Blood, from the coins.

“Okay, well… okay,” she said.

Then she started to cry.

She walked home. All six miles. There was a bus that went straight to her door, but the thought repelled her. She briefly considered phoning a cab, but couldn’t face the idea of being in an enclosed space, especially if the driver…

So she walked, head down, eyes fixed on her feet, following the path through the park, back to the streets. There were other people, but she refused to look up, knowing what she would see. Even then, just looking at the ground, she knew. The dark splotches on the pavement were everywhere, some baked black in the warm light, others fresh red.

She passed several people. She didn’t look up once.

She let herself into her house, shut the door behind her, and slid down it, curling into a ball. She held her head and stared at the bristles on the door mat.

Sometime later the phone rang, and she gingerly rose to her feet, wincing anew as her leg muscles protested. She let the phone ring—work probably, wondering where the hell she’d got to—and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. She took it to the living room and sat on the sofa, sipping it and wondering what to do next.

When she got to the bottom of the cup, she still didn’t have any answers. So she went into the spare room, made the bed up, and climbed into it.

The knocking woke her.

“Love?”

Tim’s voice was muffled by the door, but even so she could hear the note of concern. By common consent the spare room was reserved for when one or the other was ill, or had got in too late and was courting a hangover. They had learned early on that unbroken sleep was a must have for both of them, and acted accordingly. They’d barely had a disagreement since introducing the policy.

“Don’t come in!” An image sprung to her mind—of Tim’s face, pierced by thin metal hooks, pulling his features into what she sometimes laughingly called his “concerned face”, the wounds bleeding… she thought if she saw that she might not come back to herself.

“Okay, love. What’s wrong?”

She felt a laugh threatening to bubble up in her throat, and she clenched her jaw hard until the feeling subsided.

“Not sure. Some kind of… bug. Came on very sudden. At the station.”

“So you didn’t make it in?”

“Nah, had to come home.”

“God, I’m sorry. You throwing up?”

“No, I’m… no.”

“Okay. Well, can I get you anything?”

“No, love, I just really need to rest up, okay?”

“Sure, no problem. I love you. Text me if you need anything.”

She smiled at that, briefly.

“I will. Love you.”

She heard him take a step, pause, then head back downstairs. Shortly after, the sound of the television came through the floorboards, loud, then muted to a mumble.

Sarah dug out her phone. At some point, either on the walk home or after she’d had her tea, she’d set it on silent. The conversation with Tim made her think of it. Six missed calls, over a dozen texts; all from work. Shit.

She replied to the last text from her boss, not bothering to read the message.

Sorry. Really unwell. Running a fever, totally out of it. Unlikely to be in for the rest of the week. She hit send. It was after 7 pm, but the reply came back within a minute. Get well soon. If you’re going to be off more than 4 days, you’ll need a doctor’s note.

Sarah lobbed the phone to the end of the bed with an almost silent snarl, then pulled the duvet around her. Snuggling into the warmth and comfort, she slipped into an uneasy, restless sleep.

That had been Monday. Now it was Friday, and nothing had changed.

Sarah had quickly fallen into a new routine. It consisted of feigning sleep until Tim left in the morning, then shuffling down to the living room to eat and drink tea. On the first morning, she’d tried watching the television, only to turn it off in horror after a few seconds, the mutilated faces and hands of the breakfast TV hosts and the blood-soaked sofas repelling her.

The cartoon channels seemed safer initially, but after the first advert featuring a young girl with blood-soaked hooks in her cheeks came on, the TV stayed off.

Instead, she read. Not the magazines she’d previously devoured—the bleeding faces of the smiling models on the covers turned her stomach—but books. They became an escape, a window back into a world she’d known, lived in, understood.

Whatever was going on was still going on. Even with her isolation and media avoidance, the clues were all over the house—literally. Every morning there were fresh drops of blood in the sink, on the bathroom floor, the kettle. She could track Tim’s movements by the red dots on the floor and smears on surfaces, like some grisly dance-step diagram. Each day, after getting up, she spent the best part of an hour cleaning the surfaces and floors, trying not to think about what she was doing and why.

Managing Tim through the door was increasingly hard. She’d claimed fever for forty-eight hours, until he started sounding scared, threatening to call an ambulance. Wednesday night, he’d begged to be let in to see her, wept when she’d denied him access. It had been a horrible scene, but she’d promised him that she loved him and that she needed the space and that she wasn’t seriously hurt, just ill, and eventually he’d left her alone. She texted him more after that, to let him know she still cared— and, most importantly, to keep him away from her.

On Thursday morning her door handle was caked with dried blood, his palm print stark on the white plastic, and she’d done some weeping of her own.

And now it was Friday. And she had to leave the house.

She’d arranged the doctor’s appointment the previous day, having promised Tim she’d do so. She had to, anyway. Work would need a sick note, or they’d stop her pay—she’d seen it happen before, it was the kind of thing the firm was really strict on. Of course, she wasn’t running the fever she’d been feigning for the last week. But: “There is something wrong with me,” she said ruefully to the empty house.

She spent most of the cab ride to the surgery with her eyes closed behind her dark glasses, trying to shut out her brief glimpse of the driver’s wounded face and hands, attempting instead to rehearse what she was going to say to the doctor. She’d been working on the problem since she’d made the appointment yesterday morning. It would have to be mental health, obviously; there simply weren’t any physical symptoms. That worried her. Officially the firm was as supportive around mental health issues as other illnesses, but in practice she suspected that kind of sick note—especially one with the dread word “stress” anywhere near it—would probably put a damper on any further career progression.

The sound of her own laugh surprised her, her underused vocal cords producing a noise somewhere between a cough and a bark. Her concerns about retaining her job, when she could not bring herself to leave the house without battling waves of panic, seemed pitiful, bleakly comic.

The realisation hit her then, in the back of the cab, the conclusion she’d avoided all week as she devoured paperback after paperback and slept too long and wiped drops of blood from door handles, sinks and floors, absorbed in her new normal.

There was no going back to work.

She tried to picture it, tried to imagine the office, her colleagues; faces torn, bleeding, the thin sharp metal pulling, twisting…

Her sob did not sound much different to her laugh.

She let the cabbie keep the change from the tenner—anything to avoid more bloody coins in her hand. There was a self-service check-in system at the waiting room (good), but it was a touchscreen (bad). She used a paper napkin she’d found in her coat pocket to wipe the surface before using it, but even so, a thin film of rusty brown coated the screen and stuck to her fingertips. She went straight to the bathroom after signing herself in to wash her hands, but there was blood, dried and fresh, on the taps, in the sink basin, and all over the door handles.

She rinsed her hands, pulling her sleeve over her fingers to operate the sink, and again to pull the door open to leave. Back in the foyer, she glanced through the glass into the waiting room proper.

It was a charnel house. There were maybe fifteen people in there, mostly old, but a few her age, and a couple of young mothers with toddlers. The blood was everywhere—on the chairs, soaking into the clothes. It darkened the carpeted floor, the blackened trail of footprints reminding her of dirty melting snow. She felt a strange sensation in her head, behind her eyes, as though the world she was seeing was flattening, becoming distant. It was disorientating, but not entirely unpleasant. The distance allowed her to watch without flinching as the hooks tugged, flexed, moving a hand over a mouth here, crossing a leg there. She wondered if this glassy bubble she was in would hold, allow her to rejoin the world somehow, live with this new reality. She suspected not. It felt both insubstantial and brittle.

Still, for now, she watched. And because she watched, she finally saw the toddler. It was a boy, to judge by the haircut and clothing, and it was playing near another child, moving coloured wooden squares from one end of a wire path to another. The other child was older, and Sarah could see the hooks in the back of its hands as it ran a toy car back and forth across the floor.

But the first child, the one playing with the blocks, had no hooks at all.

She stared at the child, without thought, mesmerised by its undamaged skin.

“Sarah Meld to Room Seven, Room Seven for Sarah Meld, thank you.”

Sarah blinked, attempted to swallow, but produced only a dry click. The announcement from inside the waiting room had been muffled but clear enough. She pulled open the door (the habit of using the sleeve of her coat to cover her hand already almost instinctive) and stalked through the room and into the corridor that held the doctors’ offices.

The corridor was in some ways the worst part so far; the harshness of the overhead strip lights gave the bloody tracks on the linoleum a garish glare, especially where the darker puddles had been smeared by a dragged foot. She walked as close to the wall as she could, carefully placing each footstep as clear of the blood as possible, like a child solemnly avoiding the cracks in the pavement.

The door to Room Seven stood open.

The doctor was in profile as Sarah entered, but even a quick glance showed the redness and telltale flashes of metal in his face and hands. Blood pattered on the keyboard and corner desk as he typed into his computer. She got an impression of blue eyes under bushy salt-and-pepper brows and a bald head, wrinkles and laugh lines, a long clean-shaven jawline.

“Sarah, is it? Come and take a seat.” His Welsh accent was soft, his voice smooth and kind. The chair he indicated was against the wall next to his desk. She would be facing his direction, but not directly opposite him. She sat hesitantly, making sure her long coat covered the bloodstains on the seat. More blood was pooled at her feet, so she stared straight ahead, at the wall above the examination couch in the corner. She hoped the sunglasses would hide the fact that she wasn’t looking at him.

“So, I understand you’ve been poorly—running a temperature, headaches, that kind of thing. Can you tell me how you’re feeling now?”

She was relieved to find the rehearsed words came to her lips easily enough, as she stared at the wall.

“I wasn’t honest with my work about what’s been wrong with me.”

“I see.”

The silence sat, punctuated by a slow, quiet dripping. She quickly started talking, raising her voice slightly to smother the sound. “I’ve been feeling afraid. Afraid to leave the house. To talk to anyone.”

“Can you remember when you first started feeling like this?”

“Monday.”

“Did anything happen on Monday that made you feel this way?”

She felt her voice catch in her throat, the prepared lines momentarily refusing to come. “It… I… no. I was just…” The hooked, bleeding hand holding her money flashed into her mind, and she swallowed. “…I was just getting coffee. At the station.”

He shifted in his seat, and through her peripheral vision she could see he was now looking straight at her. She continued to stare at the wall.

“At the station?”

“Train station. I was on my way to work.”

“I see. And has the feeling been constant, or does it come and go?”

“Constant. I mean, if I read it’s not so bad. But even watching telly, I can’t… I get scared.” She’d thought about it carefully. Stay close to the truth. As close as she could without sounding crazy.

The doctor leaned forward, and all of a sudden the dripping became a steady patter, and she looked before she could help herself. The hooks in his face were making the skin bulge out, in his brows, his cheeks. The blood was running down his face in a small stream, almost flowing off his chin onto the floor.

Her jaw clenched against a sob. Trying to look away, but unable to, her eyes darted from wound to wound.

“Sarah, I have to…” The smaller hooks pulled and twisted his lips, and as his mouth opened there was a flash of silver behind his teeth, tugging at his tongue, and the shock of it was powerful enough that she lost most of what he’d said, the words senseless syllables which fell around her, empty noise.

“...glasses off, please?”

Numbly, trembling, she folded the glasses and placed them in her lap, keeping her eyes on them. She couldn’t look back into that kindly, ruined face. She could not.

“Sarah, are you feeling scared now?”

“Yes. Yes, very.”

“Is it… Would you prefer to see a woman doctor?”

“No. It wouldn’t make any difference.”

“Okay, Sarah.”

He went on with the questions. How well was she sleeping, on a scale of one to five? How anxious was she? Was work especially stressful? How were her relationships? Had she ever had anxiety or depression before? She answered them all carefully, quietly, staring at her sunglasses and trying to ignore the dripping sounds.

At length the doctor sighed, and his chair creaked as he moved away from his desk, closer to her.

“Sarah, I can tell this is making you feel very uncomfortable, and I’m sorry about that. Can you tell me why you think it is that you’ve suddenly started feeling like this, this past week? What is it about being around other people that makes you anxious?”

Drip. Drip. Drip.

“…hooks.”

She couldn’t help it. The sound put the image in her head. Sharp, thin hooks piercing skin. It was all she could see.

She heard him shift in his chair.

“Hooks?”

Drip, drip, drip.

“Sarah…”

Drip.

“Nothing you tell me in here has to go any further if…”

Drip.

“…you want it to. It’s called…”

Drip.

“…confidentiality. You really can tell me…”

Drip.

“I see hooks. Fish hooks. In people’s skin.” The words came out in a monotone. She stared at her glasses, willing her mouth to stop, but it didn’t. “In hands. Legs. Faces. I see them pulling. Every time someone moves, I see a hook in them pulling them, making them move. Everyone. Even the people on the TV. I see blood everywhere. I can’t stop seeing it. It’s horrible. I can’t stand to look at anyone, be around anyone.” She took another breath, to say more, and then realised there was nothing more to say, and let it out in a long, shaky sigh.

“I see.” The doctor spoke gently, kindly. Sarah could feel herself trembling, but the sensation was distant, indifferent. Dislocated. “Is that why you won’t look at me? You can see hooks in me?”

“Yes, in…” She thought of the child in the waiting room, then dismissed the image. “…everyone.”

“But not in yourself.”

It wasn’t a question. She felt a hollowness in her stomach.

“No, I… no.”

“Well, that must be horrible. I hope I don’t sound patronising, but I think you’re very brave to tell me about this. You must have been petrified, this last week.”

She nodded, as the hollowness in her stomach spread to her legs and chest, bringing a numbness that was chilling, yet also vaguely comforting.

“Luckily…” He opened a drawer in his desk, and took out a small plastic container. “…we’ve got just the ticket here. We’ll have you right as rain in no time.”

She watched his bloody hand open the box and saw the set of silvery hooks twinkling on a bed of cotton wool. She felt the numbness creep into her mind, filling up behind her eyes. Her scalp prickled.

“It’ll only take a few minutes, and then it’ll all be over. I promise.” The doctor took her right hand, and she felt it move, something attached but distant. The warmth of his touch felt insubstantial. A single tear welled up in her eye. She blinked and barely felt it roll down her cheek.

“Just a small pinch…” He slid the hook into the back of her hand. There was a momentary tug, the welling of blood, and then the hook and wound both vanished.

The doctor held up his own right hand, and she saw his hook had vanished too.

His ruined face wrenched into a smile. “See?”

She nodded.

“Ready for the next one?”

She gave no reply, only offered her right hand and turned her head away.

The pinch of the second hook was even fainter than the first.