Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 3

by Cheryl Mullenax

  My former novitiates write me from Barcelona on occasion. Their letters speak mostly of life at the parish, but every so often they pass along word of unexplained deaths along roadways at the parish’s outskirts. They attribute these deaths to wild animals or highwaymen, but I know better. Wild animals lack the intellect and nerve to ambush an entire traveling party and leave no one alive; highwaymen know better than to leave the scene of a crime without first taking whatever loot they can carry.

  Sometimes their letters tell of a strange howl that rises from a throat no one can identify as either man or beast. On clear evenings when the wind blows just right, I can hear them even from as far away as Castile—mournful, hungry cries, that sometimes sound like my name.

  Your daughter must be stopped. She has killed before, and will continue to do so, until she, herself, is killed. I wish you nothing but success in this gruesome business, though I am at a loss for what to do to help you, assuming I could do anything at all. Here, in this monastery, I am useless. When she stood before me, and I hit her as hard as I could with that iron bowl, she did not so much as flinch. It was a blow that would have dashed a man’s brains out. Perhaps one who has already died cannot be made to die again, although, for all our sakes, I pray I am mistaken.

  Godspeed, and may the Lord have mercy on us all.

  Your brother,

  Tomás Martín Maior

  <<====>>

  AUTHOR’S STORY NOTE

  If there’s anything you come to appreciate as you grow old, it’s history. Young folks study it to see where they’re headed (because history repeats, you know); whereas for old folks like me, it’s more a matter of keeping track of where you’ve been. I guess I’m an old soul then, as I’ve always been a history buff, particularly when it comes to medieval Spain. It was a time of religious and political tension the likes of which society today can surely relate to, and it lays the perfect foundation for a historically accurate horror tale.

  The story, Bernadette, for me represents what happens when moral duties clash. When people are willing to circumvent what is right to correct a perceived wrong, sometimes, the solution turns out worse than the problem, as was the case for our protagonist. What I like best about it is that the protagonist wrote this missive in the hopes that his brother has safely returned home to read it. Neither the protagonist nor the audience will ever know if the letter was read, and this adds a certain desperation and gloom to the narrative. In a way, too, the style makes you, the reader, a character in the story—you’re holding the letter outlining the parish priest’s thoughts; how did you come into possession of it?

  All things considered, I hope you enjoyed my story, and had as much fun reading it as I had writing it. Until next time, adios.

  WEST OF MATAMOROS, NORTH OF HELL

  BRIAN HODGE

  From Dark Screams Volume Seven

  Editors: Brian James Freeman & Richard Chizmar

  Hydra/Random House

  It was the photographer’s idea, get some shots of the band in the city before heading west into the countryside. He’d done his homework. Good for him. Good for Olaf the photographer. He’d read up on how one of Mexico’s biggest shrines to Santa Muerte was here in Matamoros. So they might as well take advantage of that, right? The shots they’d already planned for, they wanted afternoon light for those, didn’t want that glaring vernal sun directly overhead. There was time.

  Sofia thought it was cheesy and wasn’t shy about saying so. Sebastián was all for it, but then, he would be. More pictures meant more pictures of him. Enrique didn’t care either way. You choose your battles wisely. No point in getting into one here inside the airport terminal.

  And see? The idea was a done deal anyway. Olaf had run it past the PR guy on their flight down from L.A., so Crispin had arrived pre-sold. Crispin was all about the enthusiasm. That was his job: make cheesy things sound like a good idea. The label must have paid him well for enthusiasm.

  Besides, Crispin reminded them, they had to stay in town long enough to find a carniceria for the pig’s heart. There had to be one close to a Santa Muerte shrine. They practically went together, right?

  Crispin turned to Morgan, who looked all of a hundred pounds, half of it hair and the rest of it camera bags. “Maybe we can put you on that.”

  She looked queasy and stammered something about not speaking the language.

  Olaf wasn’t having it anyway. “If you want an assistant, maybe you should’ve brought your own.”

  So. These three in from L.A. Plus the crate they’d shipped along in cargo. Plus Enrique and Sebastián and Sofia, fresh off their puddle-jumper flight up from Mexico City. Twenty minutes later, all of them were packed into their driver’s SUV. This was how it was going to be for the rest of a very long day. At least it was a long SUV.

  Crispin sat up front, taking the only other bucket seat for himself so he could play captain, give the orders. After a few moments of idling beside the curb as their driver scrolled his phone, Crispin slapped his fingertips on the back of the man’s headrest, bap-bap-bap-bap-bap. “Come on, let’s get rolling. We’re not paying you to check Twitter.”

  “Yeah you are,” Enrique said. “Back home, all you got to check is traffic reports. Where we are now, before you go anywhere it’s a good idea to check that you’re not gonna be heading into somebody’s shootout.”

  “I’m sorry, señor,” the driver said. “He is correct.”

  Sofia perked up from the very back. “Crossfires don’t ask to see your passport.”

  Hector, that was their driver’s name. A middle-aged guy, big thick moustache, and you could just tell, this spotless SUV meant everything to him. It wasn’t all that long ago Enrique would’ve laughed at the idea of a guy like Hector, where Hector found his pride. And had, probably more times than he wanted to admit. It took awhile to grow up and find the respect again. The man was somebody’s father.

  Hector spent a few more moments on his phone, then looked up happy and put the SUV in gear. They were rolling.

  Next to Enrique, Morgan was still looking queasy, but in a whole new way, like she didn’t know what she was doing here and was two seconds from jumping out and running back into the terminal. They’d ended up seated together in the middle because he was so big and she was so small, so they evened out. And what was wrong with this Olaf guy, anyhow, he does his homework but doesn’t bother telling her what to expect.

  “It’s okay. We’ll be okay.” Enrique leaned in close, kept his voice to a soothing murmur. “Just a little precaution, that’s all. Nothing bad is gonna happen.”

  She took a deep breath and smiled at him. Tried to, at least.

  “And remember this: Tiene usted un corazón de cerdo?” he told her. “That’s how you ask for a pig’s heart. Just in case.”

  * * *

  Growing up, Enrique knew who Santa Muerte was. No secret about her. She was around. You just didn’t see much of her, not then. She was a back room kind of saint, for the kind of altars you never got to see as a kid, because they were private, kept by people who fucking meant business.

  Now, though? Now you didn’t have to look hard at all to find her. Santa Muerte was everywhere, never more so than during the last decade, ever since the cartel wars erupted into a never-ending series of bloodbaths and massacres. Saint Death, Holy Death, had really come into her own.

  In hindsight, it seemed inevitable. There were things you took for granted as a kid that took being an adult to see how strange they really were. That, and being lucky enough to gain perspective, to see past your own borders. And he had. Enrique had seen enough of the world to know now. The band had given him that much. Every tour made it that much clearer:

  Here at home, people found death a lot more interesting than life.

  Santa Muerte—she might look different in a hundred details, but was always the same simple figure: a skull in a dress, a skeleton where a woman used to be. She might look like a nun. She might look like bride. She might look no differe
nt from Santa Maria, except for that face of bone. Sometimes she might be holding a scythe. Always, she held your fate.

  Here in the southside neighborhood in the Colonia Buenavista, Enrique knew they were getting close without anybody having to say a thing. It was the population explosion on the other side of the SUV. People on their own. Families. Mothers and fathers carrying sleepy babies, crying toddlers, to introduce them to the Saint of Death. The slow-goers made it up the street on their knees, not because they had to, but to show humility and devotion. They brought offerings. They brought photos and needs. They brought sorrows no one would ever hear about except the saint.

  It wasn’t a proper sanctuary, not like a church or a mission. The shrines never were. It just happened, grew up here like a tree from a seed. Some family starts it in their home, puts up the saint in their front window, and that’s all it takes. They built it, and people came. Eventually they moved the saint farther inside, where there was more room, once their shrine took on a life of its own.

  Hector wheeled as close as he could, then cut over to the side of the street and shut down. He stayed with the SUV while the rest of them went ahead, stepping out into the clamor, the laughter and the tears and the numb despair of people who didn’t know where else to turn.

  Along the way, Crispin bought a bouquet of droopy flowers from a kid on the street. “Why not?” he said, and waggled them at Enrique and Sofia and Sebastián, petals sifting to the street. “Maybe we can get her to bless this next album.”

  Sofia perked up again. She was like that—you never knew when she was tuned in and listening. Looked hard and wiry and ready for combat, muscles like taut cables, drummer’s muscles, her thoughts a thousand miles away, yet she was onto you. She shouldered past to squeeze up close to this PR guy who was always coming off like the band’s biggest fan, like he’d never heard genius until he heard Los Hijos del Infierno.

  “Don’t joke,” Sofia told him. “I know you’re only joking, but don’t, okay? You stop a minute and think what it takes to push people, good people, everyday people, to revere what’s inside there. It makes sense the narcos would pray to her, sacrifice to her. She’s made for men like that. But these folk? Jesus and Mother Mary … people still believe, they’ve just given up. Jesus and Mary don’t deliver anymore. Or they can’t. Or maybe they stopped listening. But Santa Muerte does. She’s the one who listens now. She’s the one who loves them. She’s the one they look to for healing. So remember where you are and think what it’s taken to do that to them.”

  Crispin was a clean-cut Anglo who looked beyond shame, but he wasn’t above looking chastened. Good to see.

  Did these people in the street know who they were? Many looked, some stared. A few, maybe, might have recognized them. The six of them weren’t your average half-dozen people out here, that much was blatant. Three gringos and three Mexicans, but even as locals, more or less, he and Sebastián and Sofia stood out. The black clothes and boots, the hair. No other guys out here had a need for eye makeup. Sebastián drew the stares most of all, the way a front man should—a head taller than most, crazy thin, with a spiked black leather pauldron belted over his left shoulder, like a gladiator on his way into the arena.

  Equals, though, in spite of it all. Death turned everybody into equals.

  The closer they got to the pink shrine house, the more crowded it got. After a minute of conferring with Olaf, Crispin squeezed his way inside and found the owners, used the power of dollars to get them to close off the inside for a private audience. After passing through a couple of arched doorways, the walls close and the ceiling low, they had the place to themselves.

  Santa Muerte came in all sizes, and this one was as big as a live woman—on her pedestal, even a little bigger than that. She wore pale patterned robes, purple and white, with a sky blue cowl over her head. A wreath of dried-out flowers circled her brow. Her scythe was enormous, the blade oversized and stylized, six inches wide in the middle, curving over her head from outside one shoulder to past the other. It was way bigger than anything you’d want to swing in the fields, with a smaller skull mounted where it angled away from the wooden shaft.

  Her teeth were white and even, her eyes a pair of empty voids.

  She swam in wavering shadows, lit by a forest of candles. The rest was like every shrine he’d ever seen, gaudy and colorful and beautiful and sad. Flowers, from fresh to withered, lay everywhere, more bouquets than they had vases. A plate of tortillas sat at the bottom hem of her robes. Petitioners’ notes were pinned to her robes. Pictures were taped to the walls, propped against the candle jars, stacked on tables—the sick and the dying, the dead and the missing, and somewhere in between them, the lost. Those who were simply lost.

  Morgan was on it, in her element now, setting up a tiny, stubby-legged tripod with the efficiency of a soldier field-stripping a rifle—a tabletop tripod, but down on the floor. She set out a couple of Nikons, then unfolded a pair of circular reflectors, one silver and the other gold, and put them off to one side, and then went scurrying about with a light meter.

  Olaf moved the three of them around, had them hunker and squat while he sprawled in the floor with his camera mounted on the pygmy tripod, the lens angled at them, shooting up from below. You could see his bald spot from here, a circular patch the size of a drink coaster missing from his white-blond hair.

  He sounded happy with what he was seeing.

  He’d positioned Sofia in the middle, the way photographers often did. Balance, Olaf was probably after, but there was something else he may not have been consciously aware of. The way Sofia looked, her features were a hybrid of the polarities on either side of her. In Sebastián, what you saw was a fine-boned European strain, the face of a Spanish conquistador. In Enrique, the broad peasant face and long, coarse hair of what the conquerors had found waiting for them, like he’d stepped out of some arid canyon that time forgot.

  You looked at their faces and saw the whole of Mexico’s history in them.

  And now, behind them, Santa Muerte looming over them all.

  * * *

  A couple hours later and one pig’s heart heavier, the SUV rolled west out of Matamoros, through that zone where the city frayed apart and unraveled into the countryside, a stark land seared by the sun and sprinkled with small farms, small ranches, tiny hovels. Twenty miles into it, Hector hooked a right onto a dirt road and headed north, until they were only a mile or so from the river. One mile away, Texas, but still, a whole other world.

  Hooray for GPS. It wasn’t like there were signs pointing the way here.

  They stretched their legs again across the scrubby, hardscrabble ground and listened to Crispin be confused.

  “There’s nothing here,” he said. “I thought there’d at least be some buildings left.”

  “Not for a long time,” Sebastián told him. “After the investigation, the police brought in some curanderos to cleanse the spirit of the place, then burned everything.”

  “Then what’s the point, may I ask? For all that’s going to show in the photos, you could shoot them literally anywhere.”

  “Because the point is here. Here is the point.” Bas sidled up to him and threw an arm around Crispin’s shoulders, a rare moment of salesmanship for him instead of flat-out telling how it’s going to be. “You can’t cleanse away something like what happened here. You can’t get it all. You don’t feel it? You will. It’ll come through.” He patted Crispin on the back. “The fans, it’ll mean something to them. They’ll appreciate the effort. This place called to us. We heard it loud and clear, and we had to answer.”

  “What’s this we shit?” Sofia muttered, only loud enough for Enrique to hear.

  She was right. This was totally a Sebastián thing. Not a bad idea, necessarily, as image went, because image mattered, but still … this was kind of out there even for Bas.

  “Half the songs on this next album are about here, and what came out of here. What they did here opened the gates to Hell and the gates never sh
ut. If you don’t get that, you don’t get us.” Sebastián, closing the deal with their alleged number one fan. “Where else could we shoot?”

  Rancho Santa Elena, this place had been called, back when it was somewhere that somebody wanted to live. A generation ago it was the headquarters of a family business moving marijuana from the south up into the States. Different era, same old shit. Problems with the DEA, problems with rivals. They’d hooked up with this good-looking Cuban guy out of Florida who was making his own religion—part voodoo, part Santeria, part Palo Mayombe, and the rest, his own sick craziness. An isolated spot like this, with an outbuilding to repurpose as a temple, nobody close enough to hear the screams, human sacrifice seemed a reasonable price to pay for keeping their traffic routes safe. Eleven shallow graves’ worth. Body parts for their cauldron, necklaces out of bones. There was power in it. It made you bulletproof. Made you invisible.

  And nobody knew, nobody cared, until the Cuban decided he needed the blood of a young gringo who would die screaming. So they nabbed a college boy down on spring break, he and his buddies coming over the border for a change of scenery after they got tired of things on South Padre Island. Poor guy went off for a piss and never came back. They gave him twelve or so really bad hours before they got down to the serious business and took off the top of his head with a machete to get at his brain.

  Enrique had to get a little older to learn the less obvious lesson: where he and his parents and sisters and everyone he knew ranked in the North American scheme of things. If it had been another dead Mexican, those people would’ve kept getting away with it. You want to wreck your shit, kill a gringo. That’s when people start noticing.