by Andy Farrant
1,600 Words | Original Illustration by Bratcave Studio
Competition: Killer Shorts Season 6 2024, Short Story (Prose) Category, 1st Place Winner
Ben angled the mirror so that he couldn’t see It, and adjusted his tie.
He studied his face. It looked nothing like the face in the poster on the dressing room’s wall advertising tonight’s show. That face was smiling warmly against a backdrop of vivid blue sky, with white clouds parting to reveal sunbeams shining down from the heavens.
Ben rarely smiled these days, unless he was on stage.
“The world’s greatest psychic medium!” the poster announced. “Join Ben Alexander in the Hotline to Heaven Tour. Extra dates added due to overwhelming demand”.
It had moved again, and was starting to get louder, so Ben walked across the tastefully furnished room to the mini fridge and took out a glass bottle of expensive water. He wasn’t thirsty, but it gave him something to focus on.
He shot another glance across the room and decided that actually, he’d be fine waiting in the corridor.
#
Ben paced the corridor, glancing occasionally at the monitor mounted high on the wall, on which he could see the support act, a local guy called Phil that the venue had recommended.
It was in black and white and there was no sound, but Phil was holding a woman’s hand, and she was visibly sobbing. Ben could tell from their body language that Phil was doing a good job and was making a mental note to compliment him after the show when a sudden frantic banging on the inside of his dressing room door caused him to flinch and drop his bottle of water, which shattered on the concrete floor of the access corridor.
Ben decided he would just wait in the wings until it was time to go on.
#
“Death isn’t the end”, Ben said, as he looked out across the audience. The seats were all occupied. Almost everyone was holding a souvenir programme and most of them were wearing t-shirts bearing the same image of Ben as the poster in the dressing room.
Everyone had a drink. Ben remembered he was getting a cut of the bar, fixed his gaze on a point in the middle distance, and continued.
“People think of love as a feeling. As an emotion. But I know that love is an energy. It has weight. It has matter. It does matter.” he said, spreading his arms wide. At this, an appreciative murmur ran through the audience.
Ben took the opportunity to glance at the wings. It had followed him, and he could already see more of Them, gathering in his peripheral vision.
“And just because a person is gone, it doesn’t mean that that energy is gone too!” Ben continued, perhaps a little louder than he had intended. The audience was hushed now, hanging on his every word.
“That energy can’t be destroyed.” he went on. “And that love, that energy, is what allows those who have passed on to get in contact with us. To pass on messages to those who were the most important to them in life.”
Ben forced himself to look at the shape he knew was closest to him and pushed down the wave of panic that suddenly washed over him.
“Someone’s here.” he told the audience. A chorus of excited murmurs swept through the crowd. “I’ll see if I can get a name”.
Dragging his gaze back to the shape, Ben tried his best not to look directly at It. “JUDITH” shrieked the figure, through a mouthful of bees.
“There’s a Judith”, said Ben. “Does anyone have a Judith?” He forced himself to imagine the figure not twisted into the horrible shape it currently was, and picked out a few details.
“Older lady… dark hair…” he glanced at the hand, which had fallen off and was on the floor between them, inching its way towards Ben like a wounded spider. “Wearing a lovely gold ring with a green stone”.
A woman in the crowd gasped and stood up. “That’s my…” she stopped and composed herself, before continuing. “That’s my grandmother. How could you- the ring…”
The woman was starting to cry, but she was smiling as well. The crowd were whispering excitedly to themselves.
Ben couldn’t really hear them, because at this point, the shrieking of the figure had become close to deafening. He gave the hand a surreptitious kick and it flew off into the front row, where it landed in the lap of a man currently occupied with a bag of popcorn. He didn’t notice.
“HELL IS REAL AND IT’S ALL THERE IS!” screamed the shape. “YOU HAVE TO WARN HER AND HAROLD AND THE KIDS! EVEN THE CATS! THEY HAVE TO-” the sentence was cut short as the figure burst into oily black flames.
Dragging his eyes away from the carnage, Ben turned back to the woman in the audience.
“Judith’s saying you don’t need to worry about her, she’s doing just fine”, he said. “She’s sending love to… I’m getting… Harold? And the kids?”
The woman in the audience smiled and nodded through a mask of tears.
“And she says she misses the cats! Isn’t that nice?” Ben continued.
A warm chuckle rippled through the room and the standing woman sobbed out a laugh, as she wiped the tears from her eyes.
Ben glanced back at the figure. Her skin was now bubbling, and the words had become agonised wails as the eyeballs boiled out of her head and her limbs wrenched and cracked into awful, impossible shapes.
“Judith’s leaving us now,” Ben said, quickly, “but know that she’s watching over you. The love is still strong from Judith, everyone”.
The crowd broke into applause and the woman sat down, smiling and crying, her friends leaning in excitedly to talk to her. Ben retched. No one noticed.
#
Ben could barely remember life before this. He’d had a job, he’d had friends.
But one day it started.
It had made his old job impossible, and he discovered the professional drawback to his new skill was that no one wanted to go to see a medium who told them that their dearly departed loved ones were suffering in unimaginable agony.
But once he started telling people, against the very obvious evidence to the contrary, that their loved ones were doing fine in the great beyond, the audiences started growing.
Now Ben had three sold out tours under his belt, a best selling book and two television shows in the works.
Ben was doing fine. Ben was a success who had it under control. Ben took a card out of the box on stage and read the name on it.
“Ok, we’ve got Louis. I’m going to try and get in contact with Louis”. An excited gasp went up from a man in row three.
“Come on up and join me… David.” Ben said, reading the other name on the card.
The man bounded up onto the stage to a round of applause from the audience. He looked happy and nervous. He was standing in what was left of Judith. Ben tried not to think about it.
“Thanks for joining us tonight” said Ben, failing to not think about it.
“My pleasure Ben”, replied David. His hands were visibly trembling with excitement. “Can I just say what an honor it is to be up here with you. I really think what you do is-”
David was still talking but Ben wasn’t listening. They were really crowding the edges of the stage now. Actually talking to one of Them always attracted more, and there were plenty in tonight, all jostling for position, trying to catch his attention.
At the mention of the name Louis, however, one had forced its way to the front of the group and was now lurching across the stage towards them.
“Now, Louis… younger man, am I right? Long hair?” Ben said, describing what were undoubtedly the least remarkable features of the thing moving towards them.
“Yes!” replied David. “He sadly passed away after an-
“Accident on his bike?” said Ben, looking at the handlebars protruding from Louis’s shattered ribcage.
“How… how did you-” said David. Several people in the crowd gasped.
“Louis is here with us now, David, and I can tell that he misses you very much.” said Ben. This much was obvious, from the fact that the figure that had been Louis was sobbing and clawing pitifully at the totally oblivious David.
“Louis, I want to ask you-” Ben started, but was interrupted when burning chains shot out of the ground, wrapped around Louis’s wailing form, and then tightened, instantly slicing him into hundreds of flaming pieces.
This happened sometimes. You just had to improvise.
“He says not to feel sad, because he died doing what he loved. And he was never happier than when he was out riding that old blue bike!” Ben continued, remembering the color of the handlebars sticking out of Luis’s ruined chest, and trying not to remember everything else that had happened in the last forty-five seconds.
“Thank you so much” said David, through a mask of tears. “What you do is so important”.
Ben stared straight ahead. He knew they were all even closer now. He swore he could feel them brushing at his legs, cold, grasping hands pawing at his arms, brittle fingers closing around his throat.
“Do we have a Helen in tonight?” he asked the crowd, with a brilliant smile.
About the Author
Andy Farrant’s Substack | Instagram | X | Youtube | IMDb
Andy Farrant is one of the founders and faces of the wildly popular videogame YouTube channels Outside Xbox and Outside Xtra, which boast millions of subscribers and close to 2 billion views. Always looking for new challenges, he’s turning his wild imagination and love of comedy and horror into stories that make you laugh as much as they make you scream. Andy was a top ten finalist in last year’s Killer Shorts contest with his short story ‘lofi beats to kill to’, and can also be found telling stories and creating fictional worlds in front of and behind the DM’s screen as part of the UK’s biggest tabletop gaming group Oxventure.
