Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 3

by Cheryl Mullenax

  Simone wanted to turn the channel because these public access stations were always infested with half-baked religious fanatics, but she did not. There was something here, something important. The voice told her that in 1913 there appeared a novel by Reginald Pyenick called The Ravening of Outer Slith, which quickly disappeared from bookshelves because of its horrendous nature detailing a fertility cult worshipping a pagan insect deity. It was basically a retelling of the ancient German saga, Das Summen, which was hinted at in the grand, grim witch-book, Unaussprechlichen Kulten, and written about in detail by the deranged Austrian nobleman Jozef Graf Regula in his banned tome, Cultis Vermis … the very volume which detailed the history of the Ghor-Gothra cult and the coming age of the Old Ones. Regula was convicted of witchcraft and sorcery for writing it and was drawn-and-quartered in 1723. No matter, despite the suppressed knowledge of the cult, fragments of knowledge persisted in Verdin’s Unspeakable Survivals and in the poem “Gathering of the Witch Swarm” which was to be found in Azathoth and Other Horrors by Edward Derby. “It was there—prophesy of the ages! Now He comes from the Black Mist to usurp our world and let the others in and we, yes, we, shall tremble in the shadow of the true progenitors of the dark cosmos that shivers in their wake. The 13th Equation is on the lips of the many and soon comes the Communion of Locusts, the buzzing, the buzzing, the buzzing …”

  Simone shut the TV off before she lost what was left of her mind.

  * * *

  She was hallucinating, she was paranoid, she was delirious. And listening to the ravings of mad men was not going to help her.

  Do something! You must do something! The time draws closer! It is now!

  Frustrated, scared, quivering in her own skin, she called good friends—Reese and Carolyn—but they didn’t answer. She called friends she hadn’t seen in months—Frank and Darien and Seth and Marion—nothing. No one was answering their phones. Why was no one answering? Because they’re gathering now in secret places, on hilltops and misty glens and lonesome fields to wait the coming of—

  That was insane.

  Wiping sweat from her face, Simone called her mother. Mom was at the Brighton Coombs Medical Care Facility, a nursing home. Half the time, she did not even recognize her daughter’s voice and when she did, she laid out a heavy guilt trip. You shouldn’t be living in the city alone. Terrible things can happen in those places. Your father would roll over in his grave if he knew. The line was answered and thirty seconds later, her mom was on the phone.

  “Mother … how are you?” Simone said, trying to keep from choking up.

  “Oh, Simone, my darling. I’m fine. How are you? You sound stressed. Are you eating enough? Do you have a boyfriend yet?”

  Jesus.

  “I’m okay. Just lonely.”

  “Ah, loneliness is a way of life as the years pile up.”

  But Simone didn’t want to get into that. “I’d like to come see you.”

  “Oh! That would be just fine. I wish you were here now. We’re all sitting in the sun room, waiting for the big event.”

  Simone felt a cold chill envelope her. “What … what event?”

  Her mother laughed. “Why, the stars will soon align and they will come through. The seas will boil and the sky will crack open. Cthulhu shall rise from the corpse city of R’lyeh and Tsathoggua shall descend on the moon-ladder from the caverns of N’Kai when the planets roll in the heavens and the stars wink out one by one. Those of true faith will be numbered and heretics shall be named … you are not an unbeliever, are you, dear?”

  Sobbing, Simone slammed the phone down. When something furry brushed against her hand, she nearly screamed. But it was only Rocky. It had to be Rocky … then it moved beneath her hand with the undulating motion of an immense worm and now she did scream. She launched herself off the couch as that thing moved around her, making a slobbering, hungry sound.

  She was hallucinating.

  She had to be hallucinating.

  Through the furnace ducts she could hear Josh Ryan saying, “She crawls because she cannot walk, she hears but she cannot see. The sign … she does not bear the sign.”

  Simone pulled herself up the wall, standing on shaking legs. She heard the scratching again … but this time, it was in her own head like claws and blades and nails scraped along the inside of her skull.

  Scritch, scratch, SCRIIIIIIITCH, SCRAAAAAATCH.

  The apartment was filled with a hot slaughterhouse stench of viscera, cold meat, and buckets of drainage. She could hear the buzzing of flies, what seemed hundreds if not thousands of them. And the scratching. It was very, very loud now, like giant buzzsaws in the walls and echoing through her brain.

  The barrier was coming apart.

  Shifting, tearing, fragmenting, realigning itself. She pressed a hand against the wall and felt a huge jagged crack open up beneath her fingertips. She touched something that pulsed within it—something busy and squirming like grave worms wriggling in some peristaltic nest. The buzzing was so loud now she could no longer think. Insects filled the room. They crawled over her arms and up the back of her neck. They tangled in her hair and lighted off her face, sucking the salt from her lips.

  She stumbled from the living room and into the hallway as that great furry worm searched for her. Things touched her. They might have been hands, but they were puffy and soft with decay. Worming feelers came from the walls and embraced her, squirming over her face to touch her and know her as she had done so many times with so many others. A mammoth rugose trunk brushed her arm and her fingers slid through a heaving mass of spiky fur. She pulled away, trying to find the wall and succeeding only in finding a wet pelt hanging there that she knew instinctively belonged to Rocky. Her screams could barely be heard over the constant sawing, scratching noise and something like a great tolling bell.

  Sobbing and shuddering, she fell to the floor and her knees sank into the floorboards as if they were nothing but warm, malleable putty. This was not her apartment; this was the known universe gutted and turned inside out, merging with another anti-world. She heard the roaring of monstrous locomotive mouths blowing burning clouds of irradiated steam. They shrilled like air raid sirens as the barrier weakened and the bleeding wound of this world split its seams and the nuclear blizzard of the void rushed in to fill its spaces. Her fingers touched snaking loops of crystalline flesh and things like hundreds of desiccated moths and mummified corpse flies rained down over her head. There was a stink like hot neon, shadows falling over her whose touch burned like acid. The elder sign, child, you must make the elder sign, reveal the Sign of Kish. Yes, yes, she knew it but did not know it as the air reverberated around her with a scraping, dusty cackling.

  Though she could not see, she was granted a vision of the world to come. It filled her brain in waves of charnel imagery that made her scream, made blood run from her nose and her eyes roll back white in her head. Yes, the world was a tomb blown by the hissing radioactive secretions of the Old Ones who walked where man once walked, the skeletons of heretics crunching beneath their stride. The blood of innocents filled the gutters and putrefied bodies swollen to green carrion decayed to pools of slime. The world was a slag heap, a smoldering pyre of bones, and no stars shone above, only an immense multi-dimensional blackness that would have burned the eyes of men from their sockets if they were to look upon it.

  Then the vision was gone.

  But she could still see.

  The crack in the wall was an immense fissure in the world, splitting open reality as she knew it … and through the gaping chasm, through some freakish curvature of time and space, she saw strobing, polychromatic images of a misty, distorted realm and some chitinous, and truly monstrous form striding in her direction with countless marching legs. Something that was first the size of a truck, then a house, then what seemed a two-story building. She heard the nightmarish whirring and buzzing of its colossal membranous wings. It looked almost like some grotesque mantis with a jagged, incandescent exoskeleton. It was filling
the fissure. Not only filling it, but widening it, its droning mouthparts and needlelike mandibles unstitching the seams of creation.

  AL-AZIF, AL-AZIF, AL-AZIF, she could hear voices crying.

  Hysterical and completely demented, she tried to escape it but one of the insect’s vibrating skeletal limbs reached out for her and she was stuck to it like flypaper. Then it had her, flying off through trans-galactic gulfs, through shrieking vortexual holes in the time/space continuum.

  She was dropped.

  She fell headlong through a dimensional whirlpooling funnel of matter where slinking geometric shapes hopped and squirmed and then—

  Her sight was stripped of meat, her soul a sinewy thing desperate for survival in some godless chaos. She crawled, slinked, crept through the bubbling brown mud and pitted marrow of some new, phantasmal unreality. Hungry insectile mouths suckled her, licking sweet drops of red milk, glutting themselves on what she had left. All around her, unseen, but felt, were crawling things and throbbing things and sinuous forms, mewling with hunger. She crept forward, razored webs snapping, cobweb clusters of meaty eggs dripping their sap upon her. She was trapped in the soft machinery of something alive, some cyclopean abomination, a gigantic creeping biological mass born in the night-black pits of some malefic anti-universe. She was crawling over its rotten fish-smelling jellied flesh, sliding through its oily pelt, a speck of animate dust on a loathsome unimaginable life form that dwarfed her world and filled the sky with coiling black tendrils that she could not see but could feel crowding her mind and poisoning the blood of the cosmos.

  She was not alone.

  Just one of many colonial parasites that crawled through the mire of the beast’s life-jelly, swam its brine and foul secretions and oozing sap, her atoms flying apart in a storm of anti-matter and energized particles.

  And then—

  And then, it ended. A rehearsal, perhaps, for what was yet to come. She lay on the living room floor, drooling and gibbering, numb and mindless, giggling in her delirium. She wished only for night to come when prophecy would be realized and the stars would be right. There was a knob on her forehead, the bud of an optic stem that would let her see the time of the separating and the time of the joining, the rending and the sowing, the communion of this world and the next, as the Old Ones inherited the Earth and the Great Father Insect left his ethereal mansion of cosmic depravity with a swarm of luminous insects and took to the skies on membranous wings.

  As spasms knifed her brain in white-hot shards, the stem pulsated and pushed free, opening like a hothouse orchid so it could show her what was coming: that holiest of nights when the world of men became a graveyard and the cities, tombs.

  FOREIGN BODIES

  ADAM HOWE

  From Chopping Block Party: An Anthology of Suburban Terror

  Editors: Brendan Deneen & David G. Barnett

  Necro Publications

  I flew in on the red eye, arriving at dawn at the address in the burbs that the panicked voice on the phone had given me. Climbing from my hire car, with the satchel containing my tools of the trade, I crept up the concrete walk to the door of #141, and rang the buzzer. A man’s shrill voice called my name faintly from somewhere inside. With a glance at the neighbors’ places, satisfying myself no early bird snoopers were watching from the windows, I went into the hall.

  It was quiet; in the movies, they called this kinda quiet, too quiet. The hell was everybody? This was supposed to be a family home. According to my intel, my client had been staying here with his son since he checked out of rehab.

  “Buddy?” My voice echoed in the stillness of the house.

  “Up—upstairs …” The voice cracked with fatigue.

  I padded upstairs to the landing, put my palm to the door of the master bedroom, steeling myself for whatever I might find on the other side.

  In my line of work, about the only thing you can count on, it’s never pretty.

  Pushing the door open, I entered the shadowy bedroom, blindly treading on a rubber cock that stiffened beneath my shoe with an angry squeak and scared the bejesus out of me. The dildo was just one of an orgy of sex toys erupting from the open suitcase at the foot of the bed, and scattered across the carpeted floor.

  The client was sprawled facedown on the bed. I’d never seen the old man without his rug before. The toupee was curled on the pillow beside him like a glossy chestnut-brown lapdog. Without his hairpiece, the wizened old man looked like the lovechild of Don Rickles and Zelda from the Poltergeist movies. He was otherwise naked, too, which was bad news for a lot of reasons, not least his shabby shape, and coarse pelt of back hair. In a pitiful attempt to preserve his last shred of dignity, he’d swaddled a silk tiger print robe around his lower back and upper thighs. Sadly, this only drew more attention to the cardboard postal tube jutting up like a periscope from between his bare buttocks.

  On the nightstand was an empty bottle of Jack, and a small mound of coke that’d probably been bigger when he’d called me for help; a tub of lube and a vial of amyl nitrate, which explained the wince-worthy depth of the tube in his ass, if not the tube itself; plus a framed photo portrait of his son, daughter-in-law, and six-year old granddaughter. The family seemed to be grinning in unanimous approval.

  Perched on a chair in the corner of the room was Scamp McRascal.

  Wearing shitkicker dungarees and clodhoppers, with his fire-engine-red thatch of hair, jug ears, freckled face, the puppet looked like the bastard offspring of Howdy Doody and Chucky from the Child’s Play movies. Grinning his famous gap-toothed grin, Scamp sat watching the scene on the bed like a cheerily cuckolded husband jacking off while some gigolo bones his old lady.

  On the side table was a wire cage for a small animal. The cage was bedded with sawdust and a nest of shredded tissue paper. It had a running wheel, water dispenser, a little bowl filled with nuts, and a gnawed toilet paper tube, almost like a scale model of the postal tube jutting from my client’s ass. Attached to the front of the cage was a child’s lovingly hand-painted sign. The sign said, GERRY. The R’s were written backwards; either the kid was Russian, or it was a damning indictment of the education system. Then I suddenly realized—

  There was no sign of Gerry inside the cage.

  My heart started hammering and I broke into a cold sweat.

  This was worse than I’d feared.

  * * *

  There comes a time in every puppeteer’s career, all those years with his hand up inside a puppet, he starts to wonder—how would it feel, the shoe was on the other foot?

  So to speak.

  For beloved children’s entertainer Buddy Mortimer aka Uncle Buddy aka Mr. Family Entertainment, it started with small items, at first. For years the cast and crew of Scamp McRascal’s Playhouse had innocently believed Uncle Buddy was a closet kleptomaniac, and a glutton when it came to certain phallic foodstuffs from craft services—whole carrots, cucumbers, and kielbasas. Forgivable sins for a star of his magnitude. Easily swept under the rug. Visitors to the set were discreetly warned to keep any pocket-sized valuables on their person, lest they vanish around Buddy. What no one suspected, least of all the parents of the children of America, who for thirty years of Saturday mornings, had entrusted their brats to Uncle Buddy and his puppet, Scamp McRascal, was that Mr. Family Entertainment was caching an Aladdin’s cave of contraband up his keister.

  Six months ago, Buddy had been outed when airport security detained him with what appeared to be an improvised explosive device in his colon. A tense cavity search—bomb squad, dogs, Short Circuit-style robot, the works—followed by a painful, and humiliating extraction, revealed the ‘IED’ to be nothing more harmful than a ladies’ wristwatch.

  But the damage it did to Buddy’s career was quite explosive.

  The watch was linked back to a pro named Ramona, nee Ramon, a she-he who specialized in fisting. Ramona’s current whereabouts were unknown. She’d missed out on cashing in her fifteen minutes of fame, perhaps living the high life on the hush
money Buddy paid her. But according to Ramona’s pimp, who sold his story to the scandal rags, she had last been employed in the service of ‘Uncle’ Buddy Mortimer. It was never established if Buddy was unaware the watch had disengaged in his ass, or if he’d been sporting it there as a perverse trophy.

  In the aftermath of the airport bust, not to mention the Ramona/Ramon revelations, Buddy’s career as a children’s entertainer was over; he’d burned down Scamp McRascal’s Playhouse. But despite the scandal, even now, he played his cards right and a comeback of sorts was still a possibility. Why the hell not? We forgave Pee Wee Herman. Eventually.

  The past six months, Buddy had been rehabbing for pick-an-addiction, hiding out from the tabloids until the shitstorm blew over and the muckrakers found their next piñata. Now he was out, supposedly cured, sin-free and sorry as hell, eager to start his dishonor lap of the talk shows. He’d turn on the waterworks, feed ‘em the whole ‘tears of a clown’ bit, and most important of all, plug his upcoming autobiography.

  All he had to do was stay out of trouble.

  That’s where I came in.