Twisted Roads – Twisted Horror Stories by Matthew Tonks

A Curve Is Still a Straight Line

A short horror by Matthew Tonks

A man’s love twists into something monstrous, where obsession is mistaken for devotion and the blade becomes the only truth left. In the dirt and in the dark, what’s buried isn’t always dead—and what rises doesn’t always learn.

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She squeezes her fist tightly as her jaw clenches, and a single tear slips down her cheek.

With a tremble, her body shakes, and she drops to her knees. Her soiled nightie, torn and bloody, hangs loosely from her near-naked frame.

His smile widens as his head tilts to the side, and he crouches before her. The bloody knife rests in his grasp. A thick river of crimson drips from the blade’s tip and sinks slowly into the dirt below. His filthy fingers drag strands of hair from her face, and the grin crawling across his lips splits wider than it should.

“Don’t worry—you’ll be with him soon. And all this,” he says as he looks up into the sky, taking a deep breath in.

“It has a reason for everything. The ending never dictates the aftermath. Everything—everyone, space and time, and the things in between—they all get new beginnings. Even me.”

He brings his gaze back to her. His grin now wilts into a fragile smile etched across dry, cracked lips.

He scratches the rash on his cheek with nails digging deep.

He grimaces as bloody pus leaks from his face. He pulls his hand away and stares at his fingernails, laughing softly.

“I wonder if they’ll think I struggled with someone? If I wasn’t the killer, and they start chasing down the DNA that’s underneath my fingernails, I wonder what story that will bring with it?” he says as he looks up at her.

Another tear slips down her cheek.

“W-Why?” her trembling voice asks.

His grin twists once more, and he grabs her by the back of the head and brings hers to his.

“Because you’re mine, not his, not theirs, not anyone else’s—mine. You always have been, and you always will be,” he says with a cruel laugh as he thrusts the blade into her stomach. “The curve of a blade is just a straight line aching for your soul.”

She gasps, spitting a veil of red across his face.

He blinks, grimaces, and wipes his face with the back of his hand—clutching her throat with the other.

She convulses—choking, clawing, kicking—her every breath desperate. He stares into her defiant eyes as a sea of red surges from her stomach and spills into the dirt beneath them.

Finally, her gaze falls still, and her body goes silent.

He takes a stuttered breath and lets her drop to the ground.

He swallows and looks back to the sky, shaking his head as tears cascade down his cheeks.

He staggers to his feet and grabs her clumsily by the leg, then drags her to the shallow hole dug in the earth a few feet away.

His gaze meets the dead eyes of his boy who stares up silently from the hole. He takes a breath before tossing her body in over their child.

With trembling fingers, he pulls a half-smoked cigarette from behind his ear.

He grips it between his teeth. Then—without warning—a light flares to life, and its flame licks the cigarette’s blackened end. An elegantly dressed man with a whisper-thin moustache stands in its glow. Smoke curls from the seams of his coat, and a second mouth—stitched shut—grins across his neck, whispering words through unmoving lips.

He takes a long, exhausted drag, then closes his eyes and climbs into the hole, lying down beside his wife and child.

Another trembling breath.

A final drag of the cigarette.

And with a torturous curl of his lips, he slices the blade across his throat.

Cheers. Cries. Light. Dark. Blinds open—then close. Voices. A heartbeat. A river of red.

Then nothing.

Silence.

He takes what he thinks is a breath as a match strikes the floor, and the devilish imp stands before him once more—smiling like a circus clown. But this time, the stitches sew the other mouth shut. Rows of teeth crowd its rotten gums, and a tongue snakes out—thick, globulous strands of saliva dripping like venom.

The match burns out, and he giggles—dragging another one to life. This time, it ignites inches from the man’s face. He giggles again.

“Maybe this time, you’ll follow the straight line and not the curve,” he snarls as the light flickers out and the world is washed away in a violent sea of red.

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💬 Did this one echo?
Tell me—before it forgets your name.

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Written by Matthew Tonks
→ Read more nightmares at mtonks.com

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