Good evening, kids. It’s your old buddy DS. I hope you’re having a positively ghastly Halloween. In honor of this occasion DSHorrorshow.com presents a special tale of the macabre entitled:
I Wish You Were Dead
By Dan Stein

          For as far back as Monty could remember he’d hated his Aunt Hilde. She was overbearing, foul tempered, and just an all around vile and disgusting woman. When he was eight his father had died and ever since he’d had to endure her constant berating and nitpicking. She had moved in with him and his mother to ‘help out’. Since then she had taken over the household and decided that Monty was her personal slave. His mother was no help. She just sat on her ass all day, collecting welfare and getting fat.

          Monty was fourteen now; for six long years he’d had to put up with Aunt Hilde’s insane demands. Now, to make matters worse, Aunt Hilde was bedridden and terminally ill. Monty had thought that having her hidden away on the second floor of his mother’s modest house would have given him some relief. Instead, it had been decided that he would have to take care of her. He would have to feed her, change her bedpan, and everything else associated with her illness because Aunt Hilde wouldn’t accept help from a ‘dadburned’ nurse, as she called them.

          It was late on a Monday the day Monty’s dream came true and Aunt Hilde died. Monty was home alone, working in the kitchen to prepare a special paste that was all Aunt Hilde could eat. His mother was out on a ‘date’ with yet another deadbeat biker. Monty was wondering if he would have to put up with the sound of them having drunken sex in the room next to his all night. All in all, Monty was hating life in general.

          “Why does this shit happen to me?” he quietly muttered to himself, stirring the ingredients of Aunt Hilde’s paste in a mixing bowl on the green laminate counter. His only respite from his overbearing aunt and his dirtbag mother was school, which wasn’t much of a rest at all. Monty was small for fourteen, wore glasses, and actually participated in class. Of course that led to him being shunned by most of the other students. Just today, he’d been beaten up twice by two stupid jocks from the football team. He gingerly touched his black eye, glad the jerks had at least taken his glasses off before they’d started pummeling him. His mother hadn’t even noticed the bruises. She’d started drinking early in preparation for her date.

          It was all getting to be too much for Monty. He felt stretched too thin, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually laughed at something. And now, now he had to play nursemaid for Aunt Hilde all damn night. Could it get any worse?

          “Monty?!” Aunt Hilde’s voice, strong for a dying woman, came from upstairs. “Where’s my dinner, you ungrateful dadburned brat?!” Dadburn was Aunt Hilde’s favorite ‘swear’ and Monty hated it. He hated it almost as much as he hated her.

          “It’s just about done!” Monty called back, trying to hide the testiness in his voice. He knew if she caught on to that she would give him a tongue lashing for a good half hour.

          “Hurry the heck up! I’m starving!” Aunt Hilde screeched.

          “Yes, ma’am!” Monty replied demurely. “I wish you were dead,” he muttered to himself.

          A storm broke outside, violent and sudden. Lightning crashed and hard rain pelted the windows. It startled Monty a little bit, but he wasn’t prone to superstition and other nonsense of that sort. Still, he thought, it is kind of weird it started right after I said that. But Monty put it from his mind and returned to dwelling on how much he hated his life.

          I could just forget to change her IV, he thought to himself. It would be so easy and she’d be dead by morning. He often thought about how easy it would be to kill his invalid Aunt, but he never seriously considered it. It was nothing more than a fleeting fantasy he knew he would never indulge. Still, it was nice to think about.

          Monty finished making the paste and went upstairs to Aunt Hilde’s room.

          He opened the door and repressed a shudder of revulsion as he looked at her lying in the unkempt bed, bathed in sweat, pimply and sallow faced. She was under covers that, though washed daily by Monty, were always filthy. She turned her eyes, almost yellow now from the jaundice, toward him. “About time you ungrateful little thing.”

          “I’m sorry, Aunt Hilde,” Monty said and dropped his eyes to the floor. He didn’t offer an excuse; that would only spur Aunt Hilde on to chewing him out some more. He went to her bedside and knelt down, plunging the spoon he’d brought with him into the bowl holding her paste.

          The monitoring equipment littered around the otherwise bare room beeped steadily as Monty spoon fed his Aunt the sickening, puke-looking concoction. She slurped at it greedily, her appetite not diminished from the sickness that ravaged her. Bits of it drooled out of her mouth, splattering her pillow and covering her long gray-brown hair. She never noticed and after a few minutes she looked like a baby after a particularly messy meal. God, you’re disgusting, Monty wanted to say, but held his tongue. I wish you were dead, he thought again. And again, lighting suddenly crashed and a blinding flash filled the room. Then all went black.

          Monty blinked, thinking he had been blinded, or worse, killed. “What happened?” he whispered, surprised he could hear after the humongous crash. Then he answered himself, lightning had hit the house. The power was out. And that meant…

          “Montyyyy,” Aunt Hilde wheezed, the machines keeping her alive no longer supporting her failing lungs. “Turn on the generator.”          The generator, Monty thought. Of course, it was under the bed. It was supposed to come on if there was a power outage, but for some reason it had failed. I’ll just crawl under there, he started, but then paused his thoughts. “Why?” he said to himself. Why should he? She was a terrible woman that tortured him. Why not just let nature take its course? No one would ever know. He could just say he’d been asleep when it happened. That there was no way he could have known Aunt Hilde was dying in the other room. This was his opportunity to be rid of her once and for all. Monty made up his mind. “No, Aunt Hilde,” he said to the darkness where he thought she was. “I won’t do it. You’re a twisted old hag and I hate you. You deserve to die.”

          Only Aunt Hilde’s labored wheezing answered him. Monty smiled to himself, proud that he’d stood up to her finally. Then something in the dark grabbed him and he could feel Aunt Hilde’s foul-smelling breathe on his face. “You do it,” she wheezed. “You do it or I’ll choke the life out of you with the last of my strength. I’ll do it, you awful little thing! I’ll kill you! I’ll strangle you!”

          Monty panicked. “Get away!” he screamed and pushed her weak hands away violently. He thought he heard a crack, and Aunt Hilde wailed weakly. Did I just break her arm? Monty wondered to himself. He fell backwards over something on the floor as he stepped away from Aunt Hilde’s bed. His heart was racing, and he found tears were welling up in his eyes for some reason. What was he doing? This was wrong. He was murdering her! “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t.” I can’t what? he thought. I can’t let her die? I can’t save her? I can’t take control of myself? I can’t do a lot of fucking things!

          “Monty,” Aunt Hilde wheezed in the dark again. A bolt of lightning hit outside, illuminating the room for the briefest of seconds. Aunt Hilde had somehow found the strength to sit up in bed. She was staring right at Monty, her yellowy eyes barely visible between the hanging, rank hair in her face. She was holding her broken arm with her good limb and she was smiling. Smiling widely, exposing the rotting, cavity ridden remnants of her teeth. “I brought the storm, Monty,” she said after it had again grown dark. What the fu..? Monty had just enough time to think, and then a rattling wheeze went from Aunt Hilde. It was followed by a second or two of silence and then a loud thud as Aunt Hilde’s body fell over forward onto the floor in front of Monty.

          Lightning crashed again, and Monty saw the back of Aunt Hilde’s hand mere inches away from his foot, as though with her dying breath she had tried to grab him. To get him, somehow. “Jesus,” Monty whispered, finding he’d been holding his breath. “Jesus Christ.” His heart was beating too fast now, enough to really scare him. He was freaking out. Calm down, he thought. It’s over. She’s dead. She’s dead. “She’s dead,” he said woodenly. “She’s dead,” he repeated, the words sounding strange in his ears. “She’s fucking dead!” And this time he laughed, a high, hysterical sound. “The bitch is fucking dead!” He hollered in elation. He found that he was smiling, feeling genuinely happy for the first time in too long. My God I have to pee, he thought suddenly, laughing even harder at that.

          And from right next to his left ear he heard, much stronger than in her dying days, Aunt Hilde’s voice say, “Monty. I brought the storm. I brought it for you.” And then she cackled liked some crazed witch out of a crappy horror movie. Monty ran forward towards where he remembered the door being, feeling a warm wetness running down his legs.

          He smacked face first into the wall, knocking himself down. The door was not there. “No,” he said. “No!” It has to be here, he thought. It has to. Where is it? He groped along the wall, ignoring the pain in his face and hoping to clasp the metal knob of the door.

          “It’s not there, Monty,” his Aunt’s voice came from just next to his right ear this time. “I brought the storm and it brought us away from there.”

          “Get away,” Monty found he was crying. “Get away from me, you sick bitch!” He swung his fist around wildly, hoping to catch Aunt Hilde in the face but striking nothing. Aunt Hilde just cackled in the darkness. I’m sorry, Monty thought. I’m sorry for what I did. Just let me out! “Let me out!”

          “I can’t, Monty,” Aunt Hilde said, this time from just in front of him, but still he couldn’t see anything in the pitch black. “I need you. I need you to take care of me. For all eternity you will take care of me.”

          “No!” Monty cried, no longer trying to fight back. No longer trying to find a way out of the blackness. Just sitting and weeping with his eyes shut tight against the tears. “No, I just wanted to have a normal life. I just wanted to be free. I didn’t want you to die! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

          “Monty,” Aunt Hilde said softly from just in front of him. He felt her hand on his chin tilting it upward. Monty shuddered at her touch. “Open your eyes.” Reluctantly, Monty did so.

          Lightning crashed once again, illuminating what was clearly no longer the room he had let Aunt Hilde die in. It went on for seconds; long enough for him to take in the true horror of his surroundings.

          It was still a room, of a sort, but it held no doors and only one blackened, barred window that looked more like the leather of a bat’s wing than glass. The walls were fleshy things with tiny creatures squirming in them that resembled maggots with the heads of goats. The ceiling bore bristles and it took Monty a moment to realize that is was not a ceiling at, but a series of diseased looking caterpillars struggling against a web. Occasionally, one of them would fall to the floor and splatter in a shower of blood and bristle. The floor, strangely, was tile but it was the hue of blood and vomit, a profane exaggeration of an old time mental ward. And just under the window was Aunt Hilde’s bed and the machines that had kept her alive for the last few months. They remained unchanged, and somehow that was the most horrible thing of all to Monty. It promised just what Aunt Hilde had said, service.

          Aunt Hilde herself was rotting, too quickly for it to be natural, parts of her fell off and then grew back instantaneously. Ants the size of his hand crawled on and within her rotting flesh. Her eyes were fully yellow now. Her hands and feet ended in bone, the meat there for some reason not returning. The lightning stopped and the room went black again.

          “Why?” Monty cried. This can’t be real. This can’t be real. He kept thinking it, but he knew the truth.

          “Because,” Aunt Hilde said, “This is what happens to ungrateful, little things. Now help me to the goldurned bed, pick those things up off the floor and make me my paste. It may take eons for me to recover from this one.”

          “Eons,” Monty said. Slowly, he realized that the torture he’d endured for the last few years had been nothing. Now he was trapped in this Hell with Aunt Hilde forever. Forever her servant. Forever feeding her and cleaning her and changing her bedpan. Forever.

          Monty screamed as the last vestiges of his humanity left his being. I’m sorry, was the last coherent thought he had. Around him, lightning crashed and Aunt Hilde cackled.