Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 3

by Cheryl Mullenax

  “Think of him as you eat of me,” the old woman whispers, her eyes still closed tight. “Think of him, and the pain begins to slip away, like braised meat off the bone.”

  The widow grimaces, a trickle of blood leaking from the corner of her mouth as she swallows back a bit of fleshy gristle, the taste of it like tomato skin. She lowers her skull to the old woman’s arm, and bites down again, more.

  This she could do. Yes. She could. Forever, even. Yes.

  ___

  On the seventeenth day, they take of the old man. Of his chalky white skin and sinewy flesh, his tough hide and enlarged veins, a thin cord of muscle snagging in the widow’s teeth before she manages to swallow it down. He doesn’t remain still the way the old woman had, but rather hums and rocks from side to side as the three women feed upon him, their shadows expanding and contracting against the curved walls of the crypt like their own set of dark wounds. “Think of him as you eat of me,” the old man whispers and groans, the scent of sandalwood permeating the musty air. “Think of him. Think of him.”

  And so she does. Of her husband’s coppery thick beard and wire-rim spectacles, his swollen gut that he used to take in his two large hands and cradle as if it were a baby. The old man’s blooded flesh travels fast through her system, and she feels a calm she hasn’t known in memory.

  On the twenty-fourth day, they eat of the young woman. She whimpers as the old woman suckles at her thigh, her little hands pressed over her mouth as if trying to keep something down herself. The widow feels a tremor of unease. But didn’t she see for herself how the young woman had given herself over? Submission is a precept of faith, the old woman had said, what the widow’s own people would call a mitzvah, or even tikkun olam. Think of him, she reminds herself, and crouches beside the old man to taste of the young woman’s bony shoulder, the meat soft beneath its warm baste of blood. Think of him. And she does.

  The thirtieth day arrives. The end of shloshim, the traditional period of mourning, the one her mother had practiced, and her mother’s mother before her. Back from the chokeberry shrubs she walks weaving through the maze of gravestones, the snow reduced to patches, the sun bright overhead with a faint blossoming scent in the air. Spring is on its way to Gravesend Cemetery at last.

  Just as she reaches the turnoff to the crypt, she catches the unmistakable sound of liturgy on the wind, and she slows, a small service taking place on the other side of the road. A Greek one, she believes, the priest droning on in his own devotional recitations, the way her rabbi had in his. A few dozen mourners are arranged around the priest, around the square hole dug into the earth and framed by too-bright astroturf meant to conceal the fresh grave dirt scattered upon the soft ground. None of them see her standing there. Not the priest or the cemetery workers, the mourners or even the dead. She is but a ghost among them, something so raw and terrible the brain stutters upon sight of her, the eye failing to alight before it quickly flits away.

  But then one of them looks up, and she starts: a salt-and-pepper-haired man not terribly much older than herself, but with the prematurely aged face and shocked hollow expression of a widower. His glazed eyes narrow and blink, and they stare at each other, the world falling silent of prayer. I see you, she thinks, and nods slowly before she moves on. I see you. She wonders if he’ll be lucky enough to find his way to the crypt, or if the outside world will force him into its plastic and deadening embrace, all platitudes and hopeful falsities. Sometimes it’s better not to be seen.

  She smells the incense the moment she opens the doors to the crypt, that same perfumy scent that seemed to arise from nowhere each time they took of one another. It was as if the very act had caused some unaccountable pheromone to be secreted from beneath the skin, either the consumer or the consumed. Today, she thinks. It must be the day for me to submit to them, so that their own pain might be eased in turn. Today.

  But when she passes through the narrow antechamber and enters the main room of the crypt, she’s surprised to see the granite slab is already taken. A large figure lies upon it, swathed crown to toe in a tachrichim, which reminds the widow of nothing so much as a last-minute Halloween costume, someone playing at being a ghost.

  The others are gathered around the slab, their eyes upon her, watchful. You see me, she thinks, and steps forward to join them.

  “Go on,” the old man says, and chins toward the head of the shrouded figure. Who else has joined us, then? It never occurred to her before that there would ever be five of them. The widow leans over, and begins to unwrap the dressing.

  Even before she has the linen undone, she knows. But still she must see to be sure. She pulls down the folds of the shroud to find his coppery red hair, and only a bit more, only a bit, his skin a dead and dark shade of charcoal around the sunken pits of black and unidentifiable matter where her husband’s eyes once were, but no longer are. She finds she cannot breathe.

  “You must take of him.” The old woman’s voice is like a rock hurled against the widow’s breast. “To be bound to him forever. The way you’ve been bound to us.”

  “This is the night feast,” the old man says, “the feast of last partings. The final sacrament of the oldest funerary rites, passed down but occulted from one culture to the next. We have set the table in the sacred space, so that you too might become a part of greater things. This is our gift to you, in the manner we have been gifted by others.”

  “No.” The widow pulls the cloth back over her husband’s too-bright hair. “No. I won’t do it. Not to him.” She looks to the young woman, who only bows her head, whether in prayer or shame it’s unclear.

  “There must be a feast,” the old woman says. “And there must be one tonight.” The kindness gone from her wizened face, she rears up from the floor and takes hold of the shroud in two clawlike hands and begins to tug it away. The widow pulls her husband toward herself, and the old woman pulls him back, the corpse rocking between them as if undecided.

  She finally reaches over the slab and shoves the old woman, who stumbles against the wall of the crypt, toppling a shelf of candles, the shroud still grasped in one fist. The uncovered body goes with her. It tumbles from the back of the slab, only the briefest glimpse of its hideous decomposition as it falls mercifully into the shadows with a dull thunk.

  The widow hurries toward the doors. The old man and young woman are soon upon her, however, dragging her back by her hair and wrestling her toward the slab as they pull away her long coat, her own shroud of winter these past thirty days. The old man thrusts her down onto the cold granite, her head slamming against it so hard she blacks out.

  But not for long enough. She awakens moments later to a nighttime sea of imagined stars, dancing about her mind. There is a disturbing sensation of icy breath across her naked belly, followed by an acute stabbing upon her inner thigh, where they’re already beginning to take.

  “Move over, move over,” the old man mutters in the near dark. The three are backlit now, the candlelight and shadow a long distant dream; everything looks darker from the slab.

  “Give it here,” the old woman says. “You’re not doing it right!” The woman takes the widow’s hand, sinks her sharp teeth into the soft white flesh of her arm and the widow cries out, the worst pain she’s ever learned. No, not the worst: even this blinding curtain of agony pales next to that phone call, a month gone. It’s still not enough. So that’s what she thinks of, the phone call that ended her old life. That and the back of her husband’s freckled and sunburnt neck, his wavy red hair as he runs laughing from her and down to the sea on some past and distant shore. Sand whips all around them as she hurries and fails to keep pace, his sunhatted daughter trailing behind them both, a bright yellow bucket dragged in her wake.

  The old woman grunts as she chaws her way up the bloodied and spasming arm, and the widow’s own mouth goes agape. She forces herself back to the greater pain, her loss a worried scab that’s been prized open anew. They take of her, and they think of lost loves, and it should be eno
ugh for them all. She will survive this.

  Think of him.

  “Help me! Help!” she screams, and the old man hurries to mount her, bends leering over her and lowers his skull in an open-mouthed kiss. He finds her tongue and fastens his brittle teeth to it, blood spattering his glasses and rushing down both their throats as he silences her. Her tongue severed now, the old man turns his head to spit it slippery and wet against the curved wall of the crypt. The old woman scrambles after it, a starved dog after a scrap of meat, the widow gurgling in protestation as she continues to drink of her own blood. Now she knows why the young woman never speaks.

  Help me!

  She screams in silence, as they continue to devour her.

  Think of him.

  A distant shore, a laugh. It should be enough.

  His face!

  She sees him, again.

  His face!

  At last, she smiles.

  <<====>>

  AUTHOR’S STORY NOTE

  Over the same weekend, my great-aunt and great-uncle (my grandmother’s sister and her brother-in-law) died two days apart from each other. Due to the close timing, as well as various mourning customs, our family had two separate viewings, two separate burials, and two separate wakes, all at the same locations but spread over the course of a week. This occurred amidst a frigid and epic blizzard that blanketed New York and the cemetery, complicating everything from the service to the actual burial arrangements; we could barely make it to the gravesite. Needless to say, death and snow both weighed heavily on my mind.

  I’m also a big fan of Mahalia Jackson, and one day I had her song “In the Upper Room” in my head, which I’ve loved since high school. It struck me that I actually didn’t know what the upper room referred to, so I looked it up and discovered it’s the room where the Last Supper took place. Another name for the upper room is the cenacle, and a secondary meaning of cenacle is a small group or clique. The dual meaning of this word, coupled with the aforementioned personal background, provided me with the main ingredients for my less-than-wholesome stew.

  THE MAW

  NATHAN BALLINGRUD

  From Dark Cities

  Editor: Christopher Golden

  Titan Books

  1.

  Mix was about ready to ditch the weird old bastard already. Too slow, too clumsy, too loud. Not even a block into Hollow City and already they’d captured the attention of one of the wagoneers, and in her experience you could almost clap your hands in front of their faces and they wouldn’t know it. Experience, though; that was the key word. She had it and he didn’t, and it was probably going to get him killed. But she’d be goddamned if she’d let it get her killed too.

  She pulled him into an alcove and they waited quietly until the thing had passed.

  “You need to rest?” she said.

  “No I don’t need to rest,” he snapped. “Keep going.”

  Mix was seventeen years old, and anybody on the far side of fifty seemed inexcusably ancient to her, but she reckoned this man to be pretty old even by those standards. He was spry enough to walk through streets cluttered with the detritus and the debris of long abandonment without too much difficulty, but she could see the strain in his face, the sheen of sweat on his forehead. And a respectable pace for an old man was still just a fraction of the speed she preferred to move while in Hollow City. She’d been stupid to take his money, but she’d always been a stupid girl. Just ask anybody.

  They turned a corner and the last checkpoint, a little wooden shack with a lantern gleaming in a window, disappeared from view. It might as well have been a hundred miles away. The buildings hulked into the cloudy sky around them, windows shattered and bellied with darkness. The doors of little shops gaped like open mouths. Glass pebbled the sidewalk. Rags of newspapers, torn and scattered clothing, and tangles of bloody meat lay strewn across the pavement. Cars lined the sidewalks in their final repose. Life still prospered here, to be sure: rats, roaches, feral cats and dogs; she’d even seen a mother bear and her train of cubs once, moving through the ruined neighborhood like a fragment of a better dream. The place seethed with it. But there weren’t any people anymore. At least, not the way she used to think of people.

  “Dear God,” the man said, and she stopped. He shuffled into the middle of the street, shoulders slouched, his face slack as a dead man’s. His eyes roved over the place, taking it all in. He looked frail, and lonely, and scared; which, she supposed, is exactly what he was. Despite herself, she felt a twinge of sympathy for him. She followed him, took his elbow, and pulled him back into the relative shadow of the sidewalk.

  “Hard to believe this is all just a few blocks away from where you live, huh?”

  He swallowed, nodded.

  “But listen to me, okay? You gotta listen to me, and do what I say. No walking out in the middle of the street. We stay quiet, we keep moving, we don’t draw attention. Don’t think I won’t leave your ass if you get us in trouble. Do you understand me?”

  He disengaged his elbow from her hand. At least he had the decency to look embarrassed. “Sorry,” he said. “This is just my first time seeing it since I left. At the time it was just, it was … it was just chaos. Everything was so confused.”

  “Yeah, I get it.” She didn’t want to hear his story. Everybody had one. Tragedy gets boring after a while.

  Hollow City was not a city at all, but a series of city blocks that used to be part of the Fleming and South Kensington neighborhoods, and had acquired its own peculiar identity over the last few months. Its informal name came from its emptiness: each building a shell, scoured of life, whether through evacuation or the attentions of the surgeons. The atmosphere had long turned an ashy gray, as though under perpetual cloud cover, even around the city beyond the afflicted neighborhood. Lamps burned all the time, but not in here. Electricity had been cut off weeks ago. Nevertheless, light still swelled from isolated pockets, as though furnaces were being stoked to facilitate some awful labor transpiring beyond the sight of the surrounding populace.

  “There’s things coming up that’re gonna be hard to see,” she said. “You ready for that?”

  The old man looked disgusted. “I don’t need to be lectured on what’s hard to see by a child,” he said. “You have no idea what I’ve seen.”

  “Yeah, well, whatever. Just don’t freak out. And hustle it up.”

  Mix did not want to be here after the sun went down. She figured they had five good hours. Plenty of time for the old bastard to find who he was looking for, or—more likely—realize there was no one left to find.

  They continued along the sidewalk, walking quickly but quietly. The rhythmic squeaking of unoiled wheels came from around a corner ahead, accompanied by the sound of several small voices holding a single high note in unison, like a miniature boys’ choir. Mix put out her hand to stop him. He must not have been paying attention, because he walked right into it before stuttering to a halt. She felt the thinness of his chest, the sparrow-like brittleness of his bones. Guilt welled up from some long buried spring in her gut: she had no business bringing him here on his stupid errand. It was doomed, and he was doomed right along with it. She should have told him no. There were other ways to make money. Another client would have come along eventually. Except that fewer and fewer people were paying to be escorted through Hollow City, and those that were tended to be adrenaline junkies, who were likely to get you killed, or—worse—religious nuts and artists, who felt entitled to bear witness to what was happening here due to some perceived calling. It was a species of narcissism that offended her on an obscure, inarticulate level. A few weeks ago she had guided a poet out to the center of the place and almost slipped away while he scribbled furiously, self-importantly, in his notebook. The temptation was stronger than she would have believed possible; she’d fantasized about how long she’d hear him calling out for her before the surgeons stopped his tongue for good, or turned it to other purposes.

  She didn’t leave the poet, but she
learned that there was an animal living inside her, something that celebrated when nature did its work upon the weak. She came to value that animal. She knew it would keep her alive.

  This sudden guilt, then, was both unexpected and unwelcome. She set her jaw and waited for it to subside.

  The prow of a wheelbarrow emerged from beyond the corner of the building, followed by its laden body, the wooden wheels turning in slow, wobbling rotations. The barrow was filled with the grey, hacked torsos of children, some sprouting both arms, most with less, but all still wearing their heads, eyes rolled back to reveal the whites with little exploded capillaries standing in bright contrast to the gray pallor, each mouth rounded into an ellipse from which emitted that single, perfect note, as heartbreakingly beautiful as anything heard in one of God’s cathedrals. Then the wagoneer hoved into view, its naked body blackened and wasted, comprised of just enough gristle and bone to render it ambulatory. The skin on its face was shrunken around its skull, and a withered crown of long black hair rustled like straw in the breeze. It turned its head, and for the second time that day they found themselves speared into place by a wagoneer’s stare. This one actually stopped its movement and leaned closer, as if committing their faces to memory, or transferring the sight of them via some infernal channel to a more distant intelligence, which might answer their intrusion with punishment.

  Her gaze still fixed on the wagoneer, Mix reached behind and grabbed the old man’s wrist. “We have to run,” she said.

  2.

  The dog was gone. Carlos realized it at once, and a gravity took him, a feeling of aging so suddenly and so completely that he half expected to die right there. He looked at the kitchen floor and wondered if he would hurt himself in the fall. Instead, he pulled a chair from the kitchen table and collapsed into it, settling his head onto the table, his arms dangling at his sides. A great sadness moved inside him, turning in his chest, too big to be voiced. It threatened to break him in half.