Piercing the Darkness: A Charity Horror Anthology for the Children's Literacy Initiative

by Joe R. Lansdale

  When he spun back around, the were-priest, cowl unfurling behind him like a supervillain’s cape, was leaping upon him.

  The knife slipped between the roaring creature’s wide-open jaw, entering the soft, red flesh of the palate, the force of the beast’s lunge and Will’s thrust pushing the silver, blood and gristle-flecked blade up and through the side of the long muzzle. Will yanked with all his might and tore the weapon loose, the incredibly (preternaturally?) sharp edge cutting through bone and tooth, fur and skin.

  The were-priest howled in agony.

  Will’s next thrust entered the were-priest’s eye, aiming for the brain.

  The creature began fluxing back and forth between inbred behemoth and outright monster, between mutant redneck and its wolfbear form, snarling wheezily all the while through its terrible oral wound.

  Big and Ugly raged, pulling with all his otherworldly might to free himself from the boney cross.

  Will twisted the knife once it was deep in the were-priest’s head.

  Gore spurted in spastic eruptions of yellow, gray, white and red fluids.

  The beast flailed at him, but the claws were receding, becoming more and more human, and Will only suffered minor scrapes and scratches before the were-thing was, at last, dead.

  He turned toward Ol’ Big and Ugly just in time to see the devil, now bigger and fleshier than ever, rip its arms free. The behemoth had to crouch in the basement, looming over Will, wicked claws scraping the ceiling in approximation of that victory fist-pump Will had seen him perform as Samantha hit the caltrops on the road.

  There was evil glee in those burning, hurtful eyes and B&U roared directly in Will’s face, simply for the effect, to emphasize that he was now the default victor, that Will was too late despite all his efforts.

  “You’re not yet fully formed!” Will yelled back in its face. “And I’m alive. So I win!”

  The demon’s skin, this close, smelled like death.

  Its skin. Not fully formed.

  Like death.

  It needed dead, prepared skins.

  Acting on impulse, Will leapt at the creature, embracing a thin point around its stomach where he could just clasp his hands behind its spine.

  “Absorb me, you bastard!” he yelled. “Absorb me!”

  Ol’ Big and Ugly was a skeletal key, yes, but he was also now partially a portal to an insane world infernal entities were intent upon unleashing on our plane of existence.

  The portal was not yet completely open, not enough to release anything, but Will found his way in through a crack.

  On the other side of the psychic door was what Will could best describe, in human terms—though there were really no words, no language for it—as an infinite desert plain. There were stars, but they were so, so distant and few.

  A thousand unreal entities, all of them insane, whining, whooping, howling, waiting for the portal to be fully opened for them, swirled in the air above, tense, watching, snarling prayers and praise for Ol’ Big and Ugly, their champion.

  Here, in this place, Will found himself a knight, all his armor gone. He was wearing little more than a loincloth, his body broken and bloodied beyond all the injuries he’d suffered back in Cyrus Holler.

  He leaned on his sword, could barely stand.

  His sword?

  Yes, it was an elongated broadsword version of Ol’ Big and Ugly’s knife.

  It was as if there were a weight on him, an unbearable, crushing load, its mass in the very pain of his countless wounds.

  And Big and Ugly was even bigger here, at least three or four times Will’s size.

  Oh great, Will thought. Brilliant move, coming here.

  Wherever here was.

  The hulking monstrosity, all bone and deathly flesh, was already advancing.

  Will tried to lift his sword. He got it off the ground but just barely.

  He was so weary. So much pain. He had been carrying this body for so long, through so many journeys. He’d screwed up so many times along the way, taken so many wrong paths...

  Will wanted to lift the sword high over his head and smite the charging, ogreish giant, but he only managed to lift it halfheartedly to waist level.

  He slashed at the thing as it came.

  Way too early.

  The sword, a weight heavier than that of his wounds, slung ineffectually through the air well in advance of Ol’ Big and Ugly’s stampede, the monster clopping him upside the head, more stars appearing in Will’s head than there appeared to be in the skies of this universe.

  Will’s body clattered to the ground.

  He wasn’t sure he could get up.

  The pain was…just more pain.

  Pain itself was nothing; pain was his old, old friend.

  It was the weight of the pain that kept him from standing.

  What weight, god damn it? He was wearing rags, was barely dressed!

  The laughter bellowing forth from the skeletal colossus sent ripples of rage through Will.

  It was a gleeful evil, a celebration of hate. The weird spirits swirling all around joined in with their own malicious mirth, sending shivers of dread and regret through Will’s soul.

  Wait.

  Regret?

  This was the sort of regret a ghost carried, slogging around the afterlife, miserable with the weight of the life it’s left.

  Was this place anything more than just another, strange, outré, distant Ghost World?

  The rules were different here—they always were in the Ghost World—but there were always rules.

  Regret. Regret was part of the weight, here, in this place.

  That was a rule.

  And Ol’ Big and Ugly didn’t know regret. Not in the least.

  These hooting imps and phantoms, they didn’t know regret, either.

  Will stood.

  Big and Ugly leapt, shaking the ground, and roared in Will’s face, just as he had in the basement, the bellow of a smug conqueror claiming his prize.

  Will lifted his sword, amazed to find he could lift it not only past his shoulders, but over his head.

  For now, quite suddenly, Will found that he himself was transforming, transmogrifying into a full-blown demon.

  Big and Ugly, all the whirling non-corporeal beings prattling and babbling their insensate, chortling harangues against sanity and order, were the utter embodiments of evil, hatred, corruption, malevolence, wickedness.

  But, Will realized, as he found his demon self and allowed it to gain flesh, as he gathered all the guilt in his soul and let it heal his wounds and gather bulk on his body—something he knew was only possible here, in this realm—big evil was actually small. He had won against the infernal book by retreating into innocence. But that would not be allowed, here on this plane. Not part of the rules here. Here you fought evil with evil, hatred with hatred, anger with anger. Demons, monsters, hellspawn like Ol’ Big and Ugly, they were an easy sort of evil. They were overt, obvious. Uncomplicated sin incarnate. They were spiritual simpletons.

  Will, on the other hand, found himself gathering every one of his smallest sins unto himself, layering it upon his body here in this extra dimensional Ghost World like the multiple skeins of an onion, his bulk growing exponentially as his body grew, as his height unfurled, as he soon towered over Ol’ Big and Ugly.

  Small evils are the hardest to combat, the hardest to beat. The human soul could combat the urge to kill, the thrill of rape, the thirst for instant revenge. We choke these down, do not act on them. But what built grotesque layers on the soul were the petty insults executed, the small hurts dealt out to loved ones—Samantha, all their paltry, vicious arguments—the snide comments uttered out of earshot, the noble gestures not taken, the “professional” posturings, all the lies and subterfuge perpetrated in pursuit of legal tender, the small, lazy oversights that weren’t oversights at all.

  Ol’ Big and Ugly was but a gnat to Will now, cowering far below.

  And he smote his enemy down into an unrecognizable pu
lp, demons mourning and lamenting, screaming and reeling away in the wake of Will Castleton’s wrath as he stepped back through the fading crack between this reality and that.

  ««—»»

  “Will?” Samantha said as he used the three-skulled key to unlock her chains.

  “Suppose God were hanging out at your house,” Will said to her.

  Ol’ Big and Ugly lay as an unrecognizable white, veiny heap of pulp on the other side of the room.

  “Will, you’re not making sense.”

  “Would you treat your kids or spouse or friends or parents differently?”

  “Will, I don’t understand.”

  “Suppose God were in the car with you. Would you say what you say to other drivers?”

  “Jesus, Will! What the hell! Just let me out!”

  “Jesus?” Will said. “Suppose Jesus were on a walk with you downtown. Would we—you and I, that is, on a stroll in downtown Chicago with Jesus, not far from our apartment, not far at all—ignore the homeless person the way we do when we don’t expressly feel God with us?”

  “Why are you asking me this?”

  Will blinked. Once. Twice. He made a sound that might have been a laugh, but it was totally without mirth. “I don’t know. Jesus. Are you okay?”

  Samantha started crying, clasped at Will’s clothes, kissed him endlessly.

  He drew her close to him, held her, kissed back.

  ««—»»

  “What did they argue about on the way up here? Were they in human form or…”

  “I don’t know. I was barely conscious. It was like a dream. A horrible dream. I remember huge shapes, guttural voices. I remember thinking I should get away, barely aware enough to crawl. I didn’t get far before the bigger one had me again and took me downstairs.”

  ««—»»

  Will found several five-gallon containers of gasoline in the garage. He no longer had the heart for exploring the extraneous hallways of the place. He took the old, mint-condition comics, laid some of them on top of the old radio, others on top of the old television.

  He stood there in the damned living room, full of toppled skulls, the nude were-creature, now just a mongoloid-looking nude human, already entering rigor mortis.

  Every wound he had experienced that night sat like a stone, a weight deep inside his body—no. He couldn’t think of it that way.

  He spread the gasoline on top of the comics, retrieved a candle from the basement. Lit the house as they left it.

  If the conflagration started a forest fire, fuck it.

  ««—»»

  They stood, silent, and watched it burn.

  The woods did not catch fire. It was as if the house and lawn were a small, contained reality unto itself, the surrounding vegetation immune to the flames consuming the offensive property.

  ««—»»

  They said nothing in particular to each other, waiting an hour or more, holding each other by the roadside, neither strong enough to attempt the walk to the nearest town before the first vehicle came along.

  The guy’s name was Earl. He was a skinny kid in black skinny jeans and a black wifebeater, drove a big, gleaming, night-black Ford F150, had been on his way back home from work at Angelo “Havoc”’s Garage in Easy Corner, the next town down the holler.

  “Have a little trouble, looks like?” he asked.

  “Yeah, just a little,” Will said, pointing at the spot where the Jeep had gone off the road. “Happened during the storm. We both got beat up pretty good, but we’re alive.”

  “Damn,” Earl said. “And just right here, too. Fuckenstance, that.”

  “A fucken-what?”

  “Term me and a few homies use. A weird co-inky-dink, like.”

  “Oh, what sort of coincidence?”

  “Well, if I’m right—and I think I am—that holler, one that starts right behind you, I don’t think you wanna know too much about it.”

  “You don’t say,” Samantha said.

  “Damn straight,” Earl said. He got out a smoke, lit it, burnt a good suck of it, spoke. “Place back there, burned down back in the Thirties, Forties, something like that. They found a fuckload of weird shit in the remains, scared enough of the populace to make it a local legend, yo.”

  “The Thirties or Forties,” Will said.

  “Yeah, ancient Kentucky secret.” Earl sucking on his cig, blowing a couple smoke rings. “Good and covered up, back in the day, what I hear. All sorts of atrocities—whatever awful haint you want, if you can imagine it, someone says it was there, back in them woods. Bullshit, right? Listen, I’ll give you a ride back to Easy Corner, get you set up. Glad you folks’re alive in the first place, a crash like that in that rager of a bruhaha we had last night, thunder and lightnin’ like you would not believe...Doubt more than me and maybe three other fellers drive down this stretch on a good day, if that. Lucky it’s even paved. Cyrus Holler, they call it.”

  — | — | —

  COOKED

  JONATHAN MABERRY

  -1-

  Billy Sparrow was high.

  Almost high.

  The ‘almost’ part was a bitch. It was a heartbreak.

  He needed to get high enough to fly away, like Cooter promised they could do.

  But he wasn’t high enough for that.

  For Billy the high used to start before he even clicked his lighter to smoke the ice. Meth was always like that, you even think about it you get a tingle in the balls and a flutter behind the eyes. High before you’re high, that’s what Cooter used to say.

  Cooter used say a lot of stuff.

  Cooter was pretty funny. He had Billy laughing the first time they smoked meth. Called it methandfriendofmine. That was funny.

  He and Cooter would smoke so much they’d get pipe-drunk and then everything was funny. Peeling wallpaper was funny. A cockroach swimming in his cereal bowl was funny. Even watching Carla, that scratchity-ann crank hoe, pick at her blisters was funny.

  That was a long time ago.

  The anticipation wasn’t the same.

  The high wasn’t the high anymore.

  Now, when Billy popped a lighter under the quartz all he felt was bad stuff. His stomach was full of bees and there were thorns in his head. Even when he sucked in that first lungful and the world fell off its hinges. That used to be epic. That used to be the fucking it.

  Now it was like opening a door into a haunted house.

  Cooter was in that haunted house, too.

  Sitting there, grinning at him with crooked teeth surrounded by charred skin, staring with eyeballs that had been boiled white in the fire.

  If Billy smoked too long he could see Cooter die all over again. It was like a big DVR playing the scene over and over again in his head. Surround-sound and everything. No amount of smoke could bury that, and the deeper into the high Billy went to hide from it, the clearer the picture got.

  -2-

  They’d come in a couple of Escalades. Farelli and his posse of six wiseguy wannabes from Newark, rolling up to Cooter’s little place on DeFrane Street. White boys dressed like they thought the Sopranos was on the Fashion Channel. Pointy shoes and tight pants and shirts open to show Neanderthal hair on their chests. Acting tough, hoping to be noticed by guys who are tough. Talking trash.

  Carrying baseball bats and gas in red plastic cans.

  Billy was in the attic, huddled over the last fumes in a pipe. He heard the shouts, but at first that didn’t mean shit to him. You get high, you hear stuff. Some highs are good, some highs blow. People steal shit from each other. There are fights. It’s no big deal.

  But then the shouts turned to screams.

  Screams weren’t part of it. Meth doesn’t take you down that avenue. Billy staggered to his feet and looked down the attic stairs. There was no doors anywhere. Billy remembered he and Cooter taking them off, but he couldn’t remember what that had been about.

  The screams were loud enough to poke holes in the envelope of his high.

  He crep
t down to the second floor and leaned over the banister.

  There they were.

  The dickheads from Seventh Avenue. Farelli’s thugs were like a pack of dogs. Billy lost count of the number of times they beat him up. Rubbed his face in dogshit. Kicked him in the balls. Always laughing about it. Always grabbing their own nuts and yelling “Eat me!” every time they saw Cooter. Always calling Cooter faggot or nigger or other shit.

  Worse than a pack of dogs, Billy thought. Dogs won’t fuck with you for no reason.

  Billy Sparrow didn’t hate very many things, but he hated Farelli and his crew.

  Farelli lived in the house with all those statues of the Virgin Mary on their lawn. The virgin and a bunch of dumb-ass plastic pink flamingos.

  Billy had a vague memory of him and Cooter stealing some of them the other night. Or was it last night? What the fuck did they do with them?

  They stole all sorts of shit. Flamingos, those goofy little lawn gnomes, a statue of a black guy dressed like a jockey. That one really pissed Cooter off. Billy didn’t know why. Sure, Cooter was black but he wasn’t a jockey. But it pissed Cooter off, and when Cooter gets pissed he gets funny.

  Billy remembered what they’d done with the stuff they stole. The gnomes and flamingos were all on the front lawn here, with the Virgin Mary and the lawn jockey snuggled down in the crab grass together. Cooter couldn’t take their clothes off—they were statues, after all—but the way he laid them down said it all. With the gnomes and pink birds watching. It was fucking hilarious.

  Afterward, when they were about to get high, Cooter said that he’d have to move that shit before his uncle saw it. Uncle Conch Boukman was a hard-headed, short-tempered old man who moved to New Jersey after his village in Haiti was destroyed in that earthquake. Cooter was his only relative, but to Billy they were so different that it was hard to tell that there was any connection.

  But Uncle Conch brought a little money with him, and he paid the mortgage off on Cooter’s pad.