Adult Education

A horror story previously published in The Butterfly Effect – An Anthology of Broken Wings (ed. Angel Krause, Lauren Carter).

Adult Education

Alison’s hand moved in circles, dragging the mouse pointer back and forth across the list of available courses. The Adult Education centre provided a diverse range of options, and Alison could not decide where her interests lay. Her friend Sarah had suggested a course might be an ideal distraction from her current situation: recently divorced and coming to terms with life alone.

“You’ve got to forget about Stuart, he’s the one who cheated on you, and you’re the one hiding away, it’s time to get out. Bastard. Calls himself a Christian!”, she had said, gesturing at the chaos of Alison’s flat.

But Alison had not forgotten about Stuart.

The list of courses danced in front of her, some fading into irrelevance, others jostling for position in her mind, slowly coalescing into a solid decision, with its associated consequences. Although possessed of huge variety, each decision did share two factors. The first was a latent psychosis, now triggering in Alison’s brain, undiagnosed, untreated, but soon to be unleashed. The second was Stuart himself, the target of her vastly disproportionate vengeance.

Cookery 101

“Are you all right?” asked Julie. Stuart started, as if from a dream, but with eyes open and fixed on the serving door of the restaurant they were seated in.

“I thought I saw…”, he started but tailed off and smiled again at Julie. “Sorry. How was the meeting?” He ran his hand through his thinning grey hair.

“Boring as usual, Clare wouldn’t stop going on about her holiday, nothing got decided. What about you?”

“The bank? It’s all arranged, the mortgage is just in my name now. Alison’s had her share.”

Julie replied softly, below the quiet murmurs of the other diners.

“You’ve been more than generous to her. I mean, how long were you married, two years, if that?”

A waiter arrived and set down their meals: a mushroom risotto for Stuart and a seafood carbonara for Julie. After the waiter had peppered their food and retreated to the serving door Stuart started to eat.

“She’s not doing so well, apparently”, he said. Julie scoffed.

“Hardly your fault. She needs to sort herself out.”

“Maybe… I..”

“Stuart..? What’s the matter?”

Stuart stared back at Julie. “My stomach..” he began, then moaned.

He tried to stand, coughed, then started to choke.  The waiter returned looking concerned and shouted for a carafe of water. “Sir?” he asked as Stuart sank back on his chair.

Stuart continued to stare at Julie, blindly now, blood flowing from the corners of his eyes. His intestines were twisting, feeling as if they were rising up through his body, an agony he could not have imagined just minutes before. He could barely breath, his windpipe felt swollen, crushed and burned as if filled with quicklime as the toxic sludge from his stomach crept, oozed, back to his mouth, corroding and devouring as it went. As he arched his back in excruciating pain, the waiting staff tried to hold him back on the chair. Helplessly he slid from it, hitting the floor. Diners screamed at the sight, backing away, Julie stood aghast and shouted his name. His chest was a patchwork of livid purple blotches, and as Julie watched the blotches started fizzing, red sizzling sores began sloughing down, into sinkholes of fleshy, bloody pulp.

As Stuart gurgled and choked his last futile breath, the last diners fled, their phones out, recording and uploading. The staff mostly stood and waited, impotent, or called emergency services. Except for Alison, who left her post in the kitchen and slipped quietly away.

Engineering 101

Stuart awoke, screaming, finally able to burst his lungs open, scrabbled to his feet and ripped his jacket and shirt open, grasping at his chest. There was no mark. No agonising twist of his guts, no blood on his face, and he could see where he was. He was in his garage, standing beside his Tesla, in the house over which he now had full possession. The garage light was on, and the car was charging.

“What the fuck” he said to himself, as he checked himself over for injuries, for a bump on the head, for any explanation. He grabbed his phone from his inside jacket pocket and called Julie.

“Julie, what happened at the restaurant?” he asked, agitatedly. “What do you mean?”

He checked his phone again for the date.

“Tomorrow… but we were just there.”

He sat on a plastic stool at the side of the garage and rubbed his face, his head, confused and lost.

“No… I must have fallen asleep. I’m ok. I’ll speak to you tomorrow. I need a walk I think and then I’ll get some sleep. Goodnight. Love you.”

He put the phone back into his jacket and picked up the garage remote on the side. He decided to turn the light off first, to avoid disturbing the neighbours, or having to speak to them, then pressed the button to open the garage door.

As the door slid upwards the steel cable pulling it became taught, and an additional cable attached to it also moved. Once both cables had become taut the door stopped moving, now roughly horizontal and at Stuart’s height.

He saw the attached cable strung from the door to the back of the garage, connected there to a ratchet. A motor continued to work at the back of the garage pulling the cable tighter, placing fantastic pressure on the cables and their attachment to the door.

Stuart had never really examined the door mechanism but clearly something was wrong here. As the motor strained noisily, he started to move towards the door to examine it, at which point the whirring ended. A second mechanism attached to the roof of the garage came into action and dropped the door vertically a couple of inches. Instantaneously the cable on the door decoupled.

Stuart had no time to react. The entire garage door, the base of which had been finely honed to a lethal bladed edge, flew towards the back of the garage, above the bonnet of the Tesla, into the face of a wide-eyed Stuart, crushing his nose and severing the top of his head at that height. The top half of his skull, still containing his wide, astonished eyes, flew with the door to the back of the garage and smashed into the brickwork. The rest of Stuart’s head and body stood motionless for a second, as if considering going on the brisk walk he had promised himself, before collapsing.

The sound of the door embedding itself partly into the back wall of the garage, then falling forwards onto the Tesla, certainly disturbed the neighbours, although not as much as the other contents of the garage.

Joinery 101

He did not awake with a scream this time, instead he was bleary, too exhausted now to consider pretending he was asleep. He was no longer under any illusions. Instead he raised his head and looked about himself.

Now he screamed or tried to, through a gag. Stuart was in the disused back room of the local church hall, his church, and although the candlelight provided him was dim, he could see the remains of old Easter and Harvest displays.

He had worked on some of those displays himself, the Easter baskets, the palm crosses stored to be used for Ash Wednesday next year, and the wooden cross he now adorned. His arms were roped to the crosspiece, and his legs were tightly bound to the vertical beam. The intended occupant of the cross was discarded in a corner of the storage room, his face directed towards Stuart, an accusatory stare, or perhaps mocking.

As he gasped for air Stuart desperately pushed upwards on the vertical beam with his feet, to enable his chest to expand and provide him with oxygen, finding himself in almost a kneeling position on the cross.

A sudden movement in front of Stuart as a figure in black ran forward from the shadows, wielding a sledgehammer, smashing it full force onto his left leg and shattering his tibia and fibula at one go, turning to do the same to the right leg, rendering both legs useless and putting Stuart in literally excruciating pain. His body slumped, briefly rendered senseless by the agony the sledgehammer had inflicted, and a slow reduction in the oxygen he could inhale began.

Stuart asphyxiated, slowly, agonisingly, his world and vision reducing to a blood-tinged blur, his consciousness slipping into meaningless fits of fear and confusion.

Electrical Repairs 101

Despite all this, Stuart awoke, yet again, fully aware of all that had passed, sobbing, terrified, helpless. On awaking, he was rewarded by sense memories of every nerve scraped by bone, every organ slit apart, every second of paralysing fear from his previous deaths.

Some of the deaths were short, some seemed to take aeons, some might be described as almost merciful, others would render any right-minded person nauseous. They were all experienced by Stuart, in unique and exquisitely tortured detail.

In this one he was held down on a metal table, electrodes ending in needles driven into the corners of his eyes, a giggle from the cowled individual flicking the switch, enough to boil Stuart’s eyes, to melt them, sometimes to explode them, but never enough to quite kill him, because the sightless Stuarts had to experience, to fully endure, the needles in every other sensitive part of his meaningless flesh.

Physics 101

Alison enjoyed the physics course enormously, although she never quite followed what the tutor was gabbling about when their flights of fancy took over. Tonight they were discussing the possibility of alternative universes, multiple universes in which every possible outcome might be lived out. They explored the idea of travelling between such dimensions, and of course it was probably impossible.

“Every possible universe contains another you, who lives a very different life because of a tiny difference somewhere in the past”, the tutor expounded, “of course, in most of those universes you are dead. There is a theory that maybe when you die in one universe, you are then born into another, that maybe all of those ‘you’ are in fact the same being. Of course, you have no knowledge of any of the others”.

“Do you think it’s possible some people might remember being a different person, from a different universe? There are some people who remember past lives..”

A short and slightly tetchy argument then arose about whether the idea of past lives and reincarnation was in fact possible or nonsense, but the tutor brought it back round a few minutes later.

“Who knows? Perhaps there might be someone, who could experience their life in another universe, who could remember being themselves in another ‘timeline’. What a fantastic experience that could be, imagine the infinity of different worlds they would explore, and how much they could learn!”

For a while, Alison was intrigued by the ideas the tutor had raised. By an hour later though, her enthusiasm had transferred to the locked cabinet behind the tutor, with its Corrosive Liquids warning, as it always did.

Gardening 101

Occasionally Stuart had a little time, always only a little time, to actually think, to consider what he might do. So little time and yet an eternity, the irony escaping him. The horror, the agony and torture always began instantly on awakening, and Stuart was aware that his sanity might slip, that he might miss an opportunity to free himself and turn the tables. Stuart had never seen the face of his tormentor, although deep down he knew who it was, even now he could barely believe it.

Underground this time, a cellar, gagged as always, on a bed of soil, the figure who held him captive watered him, even fed him a mushy pulp, baby food. Of course there was pain, bamboo shoots, tapered to a vicious point, inserted in his back beneath him, and growing, growing fast, electric shoots of pain as each point of the bamboo splintered his nerves, forced itself through flesh, slit through muscle, growing fast, but not fast enough to render a quick death, it would be days before Stuart saw the points of the plant break the surface of his chest, and his captor knew enough to avoid his heart and lungs. Stuart would see the bamboo above his face before, perhaps, a blade would end his life.

Eventually there had to be a mistake, he thought, clinging to a last vestige of hope, a mistake that would let him crawl away, stand, fight back somehow. Surely he still mattered in some way, something he did would count.

But it didn’t really matter what Stuart did. On the decision tree that Stuart shared with the infinite Alisons, the decision he had made to betray her had set him on an unequivocal path. Every possible chaotic outcome sat purely in her hands now, a power she didn’t even know she possessed, as across a sea of realities a universe of Stuarts faced the outcome and agony of Her control over them, each Stuart being queued to experience both the infinity of outcomes available and being each of the Stuarts in turn. As an Alison currently studying Mathematics would soon find, in her reading of Cantor, this made Stuart’s punishment not only infinite, but uncountably infinite.