PRL Serials

Kyle Bazemore was ordered to complete a physiological evaluation and he received a year of probation.

When he returned home after his initial arrest, he was met by a silent attendant who looked at him earnestly. Kyle had never considered the man’s face, his humanity really, and he was confronted by it in the moment. The man was probably in his fifties and he was graying. The lines in his face accentuated the sadness that he exuded.

“That horse will haunt your every waking moment,” attendant said it like a curse, he rallied all of his spirit to slap Kyle with the reality of the tragedy that he had let occur, that he had taken part in. 

Attendant left the home and never returned. And Kyle now has a horse companion that only he can see. 

Ascension From Orbison’s Neglect

It’s October and Kyle is alone in his house. He has paid the mortgage on his home through the New Year, and he has plenty of things to eat in the large kitchen cabinets; non perishables like spam and potted meat; the remainder of the year will be very sparse. He had forgotten to pay the cable through the end of the year, and he decided not to use the last few hundred in his bank account to pay for it and opted instead to rely on subscription websites for his entertainment, both pornographic and otherwise. He would not host any parties in his home for the next couple months because he could not afford to pay for anyone to clean his house, and he would not do it sufficiently to host a party and then clean up afterwards. His house is not embarrassing, he can keep the five stories, including the attic and basement, clean enough that he doesn’t look like a hoarder or squatter, and he is content to be alone for the months of winter. 

Or normally he would, but the spirit of a horse floats in front of him, still in the grisly state that Kyle and his friends had left him out in the stable with bloody stumps where his hooves should be. He has a deep cut over his left eye where Kyle had thrown and smashed a bottle against his head and he just stares at Kyle with his black eyes. 

1.

Kyle retreats to his basement for video games. A dead horse can’t walk down stairs he reasons, and he tries to get lost in the worlds that his Wii gives him access to. 

The basement is nice, carpeted like the other rooms of his mansion and it is his designated man cave with plush couches and a big screen, even if his entire mansion could be characterized that way. The horse appears next to his TV, like it walks there without ever touching the floor, and Kyle looks back at the long trail of blood down his stairs and across his floor that had dripped from his stumps.

Kyle focuses on killing the undead in his video game, and then he hears Orbison whiny, and his world goes blurry, and when it isn’t anymore, Kyle is in the animated world of his post apocalyptic video game, in what looks to be the remains of his mansion. And then zombies enter the broken down front door; they are axe and machete, attendant, and members of his family. They seize on him, the axe and machete zombies wielding their weapons and attendant out front, the most angry of them all. They are all a grisly, undead sight, but attendant is the most gruesome. He does not have much of the flesh on the lower part of his face and his teeth are ragged and sharp. He leads the chase of Kyle to his backyard where Orbison hobbles on his stumps without his hooves 

“You can just die here,” Orbison says, moving his lips. “I will get my revenge and have a good laugh…” and he breaks into laughter.

Kyle feels the strong, clawing, undead hands of attendant and his family, their biting, and then he startles awake on the couch in his basement. He throws the video game controller in his panic and it smashes into the large screen.

Orbison is still floating there, a puddle of blood underneath him. 

“Fuck you horse!” Kyle yells. “Ghosts aren’t real! None of this is real.” 

He runs to the stairs and slips in the blood all the way up to the ground floor. 

2.

Kyle decided to get a corn maze in the expanse of his backyard in his second year at the mansion. It was fun for the first Halloween party that he had after its installation, but the following year’s party devolved into a frenzy that caused the destruction of parts of the maze that made it much less difficult to complete. 

When he makes it to the ground floor of his mansion, Kyle yells down at Orbison who float walks along behind him, thickening the layer of blood on the stairs. 

Kyle bolts for the backdoor, swings it open and runs out. He sees the horse stable where he had kept and caused the death of Orbison, and then he looks away from it. The damaged corn maze catches his attention, and he runs toward it as the sun sets over the hills in the distance, painting the sky blood orange. He tumbles into the maze, sure that a dead horse can’t navigate a maze. But when Kyle sits up in a row with long stalks of corn as the walls, Orbison floats far away at the end of it, in front of a particularly damaged wall of the maze. He whines up on his hind legs and makes a sound like a yell as blood gushes from his stumps. And then Orbison charges, and though he has no hooves to hit the ground, Kyle hears them pounding the dirt. 

He crawls away as he gets to his feet, and he runs, Orbison biting at his heels. He cuts a sharp corner in the maze as Orbison barrels through the corn walls. He runs and when he looks back, Orbison is still there and this time when he bites, he grabs Kyle by the shirt and tosses him out of the maze and back toward his mansion. When he lands, Orbison is there to grab him with his teeth and toss him closer to the mansion. When he lands just next to his backdoor, he is covered in bites and he is bruised all over. He tries to crawl back inside the mansion, but Orbison appears again, grabs him with his teeth, and tosses Kyle through a second floor window. 

3.

Kyle crashes onto the second floor of the mansion, at the end of a long hallway. There are four large guest rooms on the second floor and there is a large wrap around balcony, like a fancy hotel, that looks onto the first floor foyer. Kyle stumbles to his feet and into the closest room that has a bed and nightstand beside it, but the room has no decoration. He crashes onto the bed and stares up at the ceiling on his back, breathing heavily.

Good thing dead horses can’t climb stairs, Kyle thinks and closes his eyes tightly, refusing to open them because the ghost horse had always appeared after he tried to apply any logic to his situation. 

On the black behind his eyelids, Kyle saw a scene materialize, himself with his family at his parent’s home in the central part of West Ladoga. Both his parents were getting older when he won the lottery, and they had both lived successful lives and provided for their children, including Kyle up to the day that he found out he won. They were happy for him, his older brother who had a wife and a few kids was not. He thought it just like Kyle to find the easiest way to become the richest man in town. Kyle’s brother worked hard to carry on his father’s construction business after the old man retired, and even though he was fairly successful, it was a full time job and real stress. Kyle had coasted by on his parents generosity since he graduated from high school. He claimed that he wanted to be a rapper and he even convinced his parents that paying for him to go to music festivals was supporting his dreams, but Kyle never really believed himself capable of stardom, or so his actions dictated because he never seemed to give it genuine effort.

When he won the lottery, Kyle was happy to rub it in his older brother’s face, and he was happy that he would never have to listen to his parents speak to him earnestly about providing for himself ever again. In fact, he used the win as an excuse to never see any of them again. They didn’t need his riches, and they never seemed to like him anyway. 

With his eyes closed, the scene of his last interaction with his parents played out, but there was a steady drizzle of what seemed to be blood over Kyle as he gloated and screamed about all the things he would have and not share with any of them. Orbison hovered over him and the blood rained down from the viscera of four stumps. 

Kyle wakes up on the bed with a start. He is soaked in blood, as is the bed that he is on. Orbison floats above him, dripping blood just like he had in the dream.

Kyle stumbles out of the bed and he makes his way out of the room and to the stairs that lead up to the third floor. He slips and falls on the hardwood and his mind is numb. He doesn’t understand what is happening to him, but he has to go up, he has to lose the ghost horse. 

4.

Surely a dead horse can’t climb another flight of stairs, Kyle thinks when he makes it to the third floor. It is mostly entertainment on this floor. He has two big living rooms, one is a home theater and the other is a sitting room with a piano that is never used and speakers that he can connect electronics to. There is also a music studio that takes up half the floor space of the third floor, and Kyle goes there instinctively. 

He has recorded a lot of songs in the studio, but he is too afraid to let anyone else hear them. When other people use his studio, they make him feel inferior and though there are plenty of people in Ladoga who would pay good money for access to the equipment he has, Kyle is not inclined to let people use it. 

It is dark inside when he stumbles into it and he locks the door behind him. He regrets it as soon as he does it because he sees Orbison behind the mic, no doubt dripping a puddle of blood in his booth. He whines into the mic, and Kyle hears sharp feedback that pierces his ears like ice picks. He puts his hands to his ears to cover them and he feels blood at each. He struggles to unlock the door, the blood on his fingers making it slippery and the deafening feedback making him delirious. 

Finally he manages to open the door and when he falls out of the darkness and the sound onto the floor, the sound stops. 

5.

As Kyle makes his way to the attic, he is resigned to what comes next. Orbison actually leads him up a skinny staircase and Kyle follows along grimly behind the horse, gripping the railing because blood is now pouring from the horse’s stumps and down the stairs like a slow moving stream. 

Even with all of his money, Kyle knew that he was nothing, and he would never be anything to the people of Ladoga other than the lotto winner who maimed a horse. That wasn’t a life worth living.

The attic is like a rec room, complete with pool and ping pong tables, a fancy chess set and checker board. There is also a vending machine that dispenses cold cans of beer for free, and a bar that when it is fully stocked makes the vending machine redundant, though the bar is rarely fully stocked. 

Kyle slow walks to the huge glass doors that opened onto a balcony while Orbison looks on with his black eyes and bleeds profusely onto the floor. When Kyle pushes through the doors and onto the balcony, he feels the crisp fall breeze on his cheeks. He looks back at Orbison who is suddenly very pale and boney, like the effects of the blood loss are finally starting to take their toll. 

The hose whinnies, and then Kyle steps from the balcony, onto his roof, and then he dives head first to the ground, landing on the large brick stairs that lead up to his front door.