Standing in his living room, he remembered her now.
He stood, TV remote in hand and watched her lights go out. Again.
The image zoomed back and the scene blurred and swirled around as the lens pointed at the ceiling. Byron screamed in the background at the actor. The actor was hyperventilating, and crying, and then he threw up inside his mask. Ignacio recalled the competing smells of vomit and the woman’s piss on the bed, and felt his own stomach churn. A minute later, the file ended and the TV screen returned to the menu.
The shoot wasn’t supposed to go that way, but the girl was wasted and so was the other actor and she fought back a little too hard and that pissed him off and before anyone intervened she’d been … wasted.
They’d made an accidental snuff film.
They dressed the girl and dumped her body off a cliff into the ocean and went back to making low budget porn like nothing had happened. No one came looking for her because she was no one and only the three of them knew she’d ever been hired in the first place—and only Byron ever knew her name. Ignacio watched the local news for a solid year with his breath held for the first ten minutes of every broadcast. And then it really was like she never existed. Because she didn’t anymore. The TV went dark and the scene began to replay. Ignacio pushed STOP on the remote and nothing happened. He did it again, and again, each time the scene continued to play out until her face filled the sixty-inch screen, and the scene paused. He threw the remote at his TV, and it bounced off, clattering in pieces to the floor, batteries rolling away under his futon. Despite the spider web cracks in the screen he could still see her face and on top of that, his reflection—watching himself watch her die … again.
“You can’t come back,” he said to the image on the screen. Not after what we did to you.
He unplugged the television and the broken screen went dark. He stumbled into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of scotch down from the top of the refrigerator. He poured the amber liquid into a juice glass from beside the sink and quickly gulped it down. The whisky burned his throat and his stomach threatened rebellion. He answered the threat with another stinging blast of whisky straight from the bottle.
It’s a gag. They are messing with me, doing some elaborate set up. Fake scar, fake guts, fake bitch. Fake!
A loud thump at the front door echoed through his apartment. Ignacio dropped his glass. It shattered and whiskey spread under his feet. He stood still, waiting for another knock.
None came.
He crept to the door, and peered through the fisheye peephole into the hallway on the other side of the door. It was empty but for a DV camera on a tripod.
My camera.
The red light lit up, recording.
His guts seized. He put his hands on the door to reassure himself that the barrier between him and the camera eye was solid, not an illusion. He checked the deadbolt again. Still locked. He let out a small breath of relief. It wasn’t opening unless he opened it, and there was no way he was unlocking this door, not even to try to reclaim his camera.
A voice from over his shoulder whispered, “Action.”
He fought to undo the lock.
<<====>>
AUTHOR’S STORY NOTE
I wrote the first draft of Reprising Her Role back in 2010. I’d taken a horror writing workshop at Grub Street in Boston and wrote the story as a part of that class. It was half as long then as it is now, but the basic structure was the same: a gormless cinematographer who took part in a snuff film in the past, recognizes something familiar about the actress in his latest project. Of the two stories I wrote there, I sold one, titled Nullification, to Sex and Murder Magazine (my very first story sale ever), and submitted Reprising Her Role at the same time to Necrotic Tissue. Sex and Murder snapped up Nullification and printed it. (For their next issue, they added a disclaimer they never had before to the front of the mag, and then promptly closed up shop.) In the mean time, the editors at Necrotic Tissue got back to me about Reprising Her Role saying that they’d love to buy the story, but their most recent issue was going to be their final issue. I resubmitted the story to another small magazine called Grave Demand, and the editor there loved it and wanted to buy it. But before we could sign a contract, he too closed his magazine. Though I am not superstitious, I put the story in a drawer, unpublished, thinking I had done enough damage with it.
Flash forward to 2017, and Jack Bantry got in touch with me asking if I had a story I might be willing to submit to him for the next issue of Splatterpunk. I didn’t have anything appropriate for his magazine at that moment, but I assured him I could come up with something. And like the woman at the center of Reprising Her Role, the story came back, looking for me. I rewrote it from the first page to last, doubling the length and sanding off all the rough edges of my nascent style from seven years ago, and sent it to him, along with a warning: this story kills publishers. He liked it enough to risk the future of Splatterpunk by putting it in Issue 8. Fortunately, with two short anthologies from Jack since then and a short film adaptation of the story, titled -REPRISE-, by Killing Joke Films, the woman seems to be satisfied and I am done snuffing small presses with her.
Or am I?
THE WATCHER
DOUGLAS FORD
From Infernal Ink Magazine Vol. 6, Issue 1
Editor: Hydra M. Star
My failure to notice things in those days made me easy prey. I barely noticed the invasion of Iraq for one thing, and while my fellow students protested and fretted over how much a gallon of gas would cost, I spent my energy trying to keep Abby Sinclair from breaking up with me. If I could just keep the relationship intact through college, I thought, we would celebrate our graduation with a short engagement followed by a modestly sized wedding. Never mind the heated arguments, more and more frequent now, nor the obvious anxiety she had about introducing me to her parents, the source of her tuition and the weekly partying she could never afford otherwise. Her father, it turned out, would not approve of my brown skin, a prejudice she didn’t reveal at first. It must have embarrassed her, I suppose, so she tried to hide it. But I put things together over time by decoding code words like “conservative” and “traditional.”
“You mean he’s not going to like imagining what his virgin white daughter does with someone who looks like me,” I said during what became our penultimate break-up argument. This one happened on a weekend trip to Daytona Beach, a tense trip that finally came to a head in a crowded bar.
“Don’t—” she started to say, but I’d have none of it.
“I get it. Daddy wants to keep you to himself.” And then I said something my parents taught me never to say. Jake, no matter what kind of stupid shit white people say about black people, never let the same kind of foolishness come out of your mouth. But still, I said it. I said, “I get how white people are. Only way to keep it pure is to keep in the family.”
That did it. We broke up for good.
After that, I could no longer count us a couple. It felt as if I had just pulled away the last fatal brick, and I could only watch helplessly as the entire tower collapsed. Saying little else, I left her in the bar where we had gathered with her friends, and knowing that I couldn’t go back to the hotel room, I walked to the beach, thinking I would sleep near the water and take a bus back to campus in the morning. I had enough to drink that I felt drunk, and the way the moonlight rippled on the waves brought forth a rush of nausea. I sat down in the sand, my back to the lights of a hotel, and waited for the feeling to pass.
That’s when the veteran came up to me.
I didn’t see him until he appeared just a few feet away. “Hey bro, drink a beer with me,” he said. He carried a six-pack, and despite the humidity, he wore a green army jacket. Normally, I wouldn’t accept alcohol from a white stranger who crawled unbidden out of the darkness. All those survival warnings from my parents no longer mattered that night. Let him kill me, I thought. So full of self loathing, I just didn’t care.
I took the
beer he offered and sipped it. It was warm. He opened one for himself and sat down in the sand near me.
“Just got back from the war,” he said.
I had no reply, but the beer obligated me to say something.
“How was it?” I said.
“It was alright. Fucking nuts.” As I struggled to untangle that contradiction, he went on. “Saw a woman giving birth in the street, right there during the Battle of Fallujah. Can you believe that shit?”
I took a sip from the bottle and said that no, I couldn’t.
He said, “Things blowing up, and she was just lying there in the street, her legs spread open, screaming and shit.” He paused to finish his beer in a single mighty chug. “I was running, but I had to stop because I couldn’t believe it. You could see a head trying to come out and everything.”
“Good thing you didn’t get blown up,” I said.
“Oh, I didn’t but Gary Puett, that was another story. Gary was my buddy. I got my head together and started moving, but Gary, he was running behind me. He stopped where I stopped just a second before, his face all concerned and shit. ‘We gotta keep going, come on,’ I yelled to him, but he just stopped dead in his tracks, there with dirt flying up and shit. ‘We gotta do something,’ he yelled back, but I kept waving him on.”
He took out another beer, twisted the top off, and chugged half of it. Then he looked at me. Suddenly, he thrust out his hand with his elbow cocked high. “Name’s Dave, by the way.”
I extended my hand, and he clasped it with his fingers up, not down, as if to say we were bros. His grip briefly cut off the blood in my hand. I told him my name.
“Good to know you, Jake,” he said.
“So what happened to your friend?”
“You mean Gary? Shit.” He sipped from his bottle and drew his knees up. “What do you think happened?” He reached inside his pocket and drew forth something red and compact—a pocket knife, I realized. He set the bottle down and began playing with it, opening and closing the blades inside.
The knife distracted me, sure, but now I wanted to hear the rest of the story.
“Did the woman make it out ok? Her baby?”
“No, she didn’t make it out ok. Gary was my buddy. Did I tell you that? I went to his wedding. I was his best man. You want to know what old Gary did? He squatted down there in the middle of that exploding street and took out his knife. I’m not talking about a pig-sticker like this one. I’m talking about a real government-issue knife. I stood there trying to get him to run, but he just yelled, ‘I gotta save the baby!’ Don’t ask me what gave him the idea. I mean, that motherfucker was no doctor. But know what he did? He took that knife and stuck it into that lady’s stomach and started carving away, her screaming the whole time in Arabic, and before I knew it, he held it up in the air by the leg, like he’d just caught a grouper or something. The baby was covered in blood, but crying. That’s when the mortar hit.” Another chug from the bottle finished that one, and he tossed it toward the surf. “A big ole flame swallowed the three of them up. The woman died, probably because of Gary’s nonexistent surgical skills. Holding the baby up saved that arm, at least. The rest of them—his other arm, his legs, everything else, blown off. The crazy thing is that his skin and the baby’s—” Here, he made a gesture I didn’t understand. “Like, fused together.” He looked at me. “What do you think of that?”
I tried to return his gaze, but I had to turn away. The water looked black.
“It’s fucked up,” I said.
Then he said the thing that put me on edge. That has me on edge even today.
“I could cut you. Right now.”
In the dark, the knife waited for me like the tip of a spider’s leg. He said this as if he had to struggle to hold himself back.
The survival lessons of my parents come back to me in such moments, moments that force me to concede my stubborn belief that I lived in a world different from theirs. I did what they taught me to do. I smiled. “You don’t want to cut me,” I said. “I’m a nice guy.”
We listened to the breaking waves as he seemed to consider my words.
“Yeah,” he said, finally, “you seem like a nice guy. I won’t cut you. Instead, I’m going to introduce you to someone. Someone fine. You like white girls?”
Trying not to think of Abby Sinclair, I said that I did.
He gestured to the hotel behind us, on the ground floor was a bar bright with lights and music. “She’s in there. Hot as shit. She likes coloreds, too. Come on.”
If the beer hadn’t dulled my senses by then, I might have thought of a graceful way to avoid his company. Plus, fear of the knife made me more agreeable than sensible. Seeing the way he moved his crooked and gangly legs, I thought again of a spider, but as I walked next to him, I warmed to the idea of a girl’s company. I didn’t relish the thought of loneliness, and besides, a quick hook-up would help me forget Abby Sinclair and her racist father. The fact that my new friend referred to “coloreds,” a term that would have enraged my parents, just meant he was a simpleton who hadn’t been taught properly. The woman he promised to show me would erase all infractions. I genuinely believed this.
And at first, she did, with her skirt, her cleavage, even the slight space gap between her front two teeth. With a bumbling excitement that made him seem less dangerous, Dave the Veteran introduced me to her, and he surprised me by remembering my name. I learned her name—Brenda—and as she shook my hand, she raised her eyebrows and made sidewise glances at Dave to indicate she understood how crazy he was and that she would save me from him.
Somehow, she distracted him away from our conversation, at one point speaking to him out of earshot and apparently sending him off for some meaningless task. At one point, I glimpsed him talking to someone who looked like the manager, and it looked like an angry conversation. Knowing him well enough already, I assumed that he’d done something to get himself into trouble—probably taking his knife out again.
Because of Brenda, I didn’t care what happened to him. She extended our handshake longer than necessary and touched me often. I tried not to stare at the way her breasts challenged the capacity of her shirt, squeezing together at the top to create a round, pale cleavage. I failed however, and she noticed.
“I just got a boob job,” she said, as if to offer an invitation to look without embarrassment. I did so, quickly, and looked up to meet her smiling eyes. “What do you think?”
“They look very nice,” I said.
“They feel real, too. Go on, touch them.” I hesitated. I gazed around the bar, looking especially for Dave and his knife, but he’d disappeared, probably thrown out for some kind of misconduct. “Go on,” she said. So I did, in drunken defiance of Abby Sinclair who no longer wanted me, not to mention my parents who constantly tried to protect me from a world they claimed would never accept me. I touched this strange woman’s augmented breasts and felt their hardness, putting forth every effort not to look aroused or astonished, pretending that I had enough experience and knowledge that I could give her an expert opinion. I squinted one eye and furrowed my brow, causing her to laugh.
“They’re nice,” I said, although they had none of the softness found on Abby Sinclair’s smaller chest, the only other breasts I had ever touched.
“Nice? Just nice?”
“Ok, spectacular,” I said.
“So you say, so you say. I was thinking of letting you get a better look, but now, I don’t know.” She laughed, and once again I observed the gap in her front teeth. I wanted to kiss her very much. It made no sense that I had touched her breasts and not even kissed her yet. And I very much wanted to do so. “I had a top notch doctor,” she said. “The kind my husband would’ve called military pay-grade, and trust me, he’d know. So you’re damn right—they’re fucking spectacular.”
Husband. Thanks to my beer buzz, this information dampened my confidence just slightly, but enough to keep me from registering her verb tense.
“I think I recogni
ze you,” she said. “Are you on Adult Finder?”
“No,” I said. “Are you?”
“Yep, I can give you contact info if you want. You could look me up. I’m under couples.”
“You mentioned your husband. Is he—”
“Dead?” She laughed. “No, in fact, he’s here. Don’t worry though. We have an open relationship. You sure I don’t know you?”
“Pretty sure.” I struggled for a moment to think of something to add. “I wish I knew you better,” I finally said.
“Well, come up then.” She hooked her arm in mine, and she led me to the hotel’s elevator. “I guess you just look like a lot of guys I’ve fucked.” My groin stirred when she said that. “You’re just my type.”
“And what would that type be?”
Her eyes half closed, she licked her lips and brought her mouth close to mine. We began kissing as the elevator arrived. Her tongue probed my mouth as I felt the car begin to ascend, and I looked up, concerned because neither one of us had pressed the floor button. At that moment, I saw him.
Dave. He leaned against the wall of the elevator next to the panel of buttons. Watching.
“Don’t mind me,” he said.
“Dave doesn’t like my boob job,” Brenda said.
“I never said that. Just said you didn’t need it.”
Brenda kept her arms around me as if sensing my need to back away. I tried to keep Dave in my line of vision, not liking how he managed to slip aboard the elevator without me noticing. His eyes stayed fixed on Brenda. “I didn’t know she was your wife,” I said.
Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 3 Page 23
