Christopher Leppek - Abattoir

The whispers of a young boy. He told her the stories; put pictures in her mind. He had pleaded for her help. He had made her feel his fear.

She remembered all of this.

And she understood. She knew why those people did what they did. She knew why they died and went crazy. She knew why that animal attacked.

She knew about the fear. She had felt it. She had faced it. She was facing it still.

The car pulled into the empty parking lot in front of the Exeter, and they walked together, silently, to the front door.

Su Ling turned to Anna, brushing the hair from her face.

“What’s wrong honey? Are you okay?”

For a moment, Anna hesitated at the threshold. She looked up at the towering building. its massive round clock that always reminded her of a face, and felt something —a blur of someone running, the barest hint of a smell, a soft sound that an animal might have made, the silence of a stopped clock.

The girl smiled. “I’m fine, Mommy,” she said, and walked inside.

Behind the Exeter, the winter sun set at last, sinking into the horizon in a final blaze of blood red light.

Emanuel Isler, who graduated from Loyola/Marymount University with a degree in film and television, is a former literary agent who sold his first screenplay to Columbia Pictures at the age of 21. He currently works in corporate communications and public relations and has written several screenplays.

Christopher Leppek, a US Navy veteran who studied writing at the University of Denver, has been a journalist for most of his life, working as a reporter and editor for the Intermountain Jewish Newsin Denver and freelancing for such newspapers as the New York Timesand Rocky Mountain News. He is the author of the Sherlock Holmes pastiche novel The Surrogate Assassin , which received honors from Amazon.com.

Leppek/Isler have been writing horror fiction for more than 25 years. Their first short story, “The Eyes of Karma,” written on a whim, was published, which encouraged them to keep going. Another early short story, “The Master of Fear,” won honors in a ghost story contest sponsored by Oxford University Press and judged by Stephen King.

Their debut novel, Chaosicon , was published in hardcover in 2001 to positive reviews. Their more recent work has appeared in Dark Moon Digestand in Dark Moon’s Ghosts and Vampires anthologies.

The collaborators, who credit their visual writing style to old horror films by Universal, Hammer and Alfred Hitchcock, both reside with their families in Denver.

The authors’ website and blog is www.bloodontherainbow.com.

DARK MOON BOOKS

an imprint of Stony Meadow Publishing

Largo, Florida

www.DarkMoonBooks.com

ABATTOIR

Copyright © Christopher Leppek and Emanuel Isler 2012

Cover art © Dark Moon Books 2012

All Rights Reserved

First edition published in May, 2012

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012938243

ISBN-13: 978-0-9850290-7-4

Printed in the United States of America

The stories included in this publication are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.