The fabric of his trousers made a whisking sound as he knelt to peer under the bed. His bland-handsome face was a pale splotch swimming in darkness. His head looked strangely over-rounded, misshapen as though he wore a fitted lumpy hat.
“There you are,” he said. “That’s a first.”
Trapped. Winnie felt trapped, without enough room for her lungs to expand, to breathe the dust-choked air. Cold wood floorboards pressed hard against her naked spine. She felt flushed all over, simultaneous ice and heat, fear and the flight urge competing, suffocating her, adding to the confusion of what the hell was happening.
He reached under the bed as though to drag her out and she squirmed out the other side, not even enough room to roll, her skin scraping along the dust-gritted floor. It was a relief to stand. The relief hit her like a betrayal, a false promise of improved circumstances. Nothing was improved.
Peter straightened to regard her from across the rumpled bed. He stood between Winnie and the door. Her brain raced, sketching a hasty plan, something to do with leaping onto the bed, launching past him in the darkness, dashing down the hall, running naked out into the night toward the vague safety of away. She and Peter were the sole residents of this particular cul-de-sac, but the builder had never gotten around to connecting streetlights, so perhaps the cover of darkness would help her. Could she make it to the next cluster of occupied homes some distance down the main road, naked and barefoot? Buying her very own house had seemed a dream-come-true at the time, getting in at the ground floor, so to speak, with a developer desperate to sell units in an unestablished neighborhood at the ass-end of town. But then she’d gotten Liz, and a small but nice house near enough to the woods that they saw deer in the evenings, more birds than they could count … even a persistent coyote, leggy and lonesome and—she’d observed with a tinge of guilt—clearly displaced by the suburban encroachment on his natural habitat. No noisy neighbors to shatter the peace out here; only one quiet, corporate-drone sort of guy, Peter, who kept to himself, rarely spoke, never brought home friends. Mostly he seemed to hole up in his garage and fiddle with expensive tools, inscrutably tinkering on unrecognizable projects like any number of random suburban yuppie-type dudes. Winnie and Liz had tried to create a circle of friendly proximity and always waved, said hello when appropriate, were careful to respect the neat hedgerow dividing their pie-wedge yards, but privately referred to him as Khakipants.
The windowsill Winnie had backed up against dug into the flesh of her upper thigh. More half-baked plans and thoughts scrambled for attention in her brain (open window, tear through screen? fall from second storey? survive fall?) when Peter stepped back and flipped the overhead light switch.
Blinking against the sharp stab of sudden brightness, Winnie said, “Peter, I don’t know what you’re doing here but you have to leave now. I’ve already called 911.” She hadn’t. Shit, shit, she hadn’t. Everything was happening so fast. She fumbled with her phone—unlock! unlock!—and wildly started thumbing for the keypad.
Her vision had adjusted quickly enough that she saw him shrug. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’ll finish up and travel back before they get here. I’d wanted to try this tonight, you know, for strangling …” Tangled in the fingers of his left hand was a loop of strong soft cord, an unmistakable garrote which he crumpled in his fist and shoved in his pocket. “… But I always bring a gun just in case.”
Her lips barely compressed into the first letter of his name before he raised the gun he held and shot her twice in the center of the chest.
Flat on her back in the gap between bed and wall, Winnie watched the ceiling turning red—or was something in her eyes? Her chest felt heavy, as though her heart had turned to lead and now weighed her down, pressing her to the hard wood floor. She dimly understood the wet gurgling as herself, sucking breath through the mess of her shredded lungs. All thoughts of rescue, of Liz, of rage, even of fear left Winnie’s brain like air from a burst balloon. The sole remaining thing, the one thought burning away all the rest in the final moment, was why?
“Peter, why?” The words wheezed from her, bubbling and nearly unrecognizable even to her own ears. He walked around the end of the bed to stand over her, to lean down with a look of polite inquiry on his innocuous, unremarkable features.
“To test my chronofluxic resonator.” He tapped the thin plastic shell of the small helmet he wore, laced with braided wires visibly embedded with dozens of old-fashioned computer chips. “I needed to do something irrevocable. Something, you know, important. Something the world would notice. Had to make sure everything worked before I take it public. That was why, the first time.”
The ceiling was all red now. Peter’s face, hovering above, was washed in pink. Her chest hurt, but not so bad as it had a few moments earlier. She tried to speak but the words ended as a ragged cough. She tried again. Again Peter leaned over to hear her, tilting his head with that same impersonal politeness one might use with an elderly stranger.
“How … many?” Winnie burbled. Warm trails ran from the corners of her mouth. “How many times?”
Peter smiled. It was the first recognizable emotion to come into his face, reach all the way to his eyes. He nudged the end of the gun gently against her left temple.
“This is number twelve,” he said, and pulled the trigger.
Winnie raised herself on one elbow and squinted in the direction of her bedroom doorway. Groggy, mind thick with sleep, she reached for her phone lying on what used to be Liz’s nightstand. 2:20 a.m. A nice solid number, but way too early to wake up.
She’d been dreaming Liz was trying to tell her some urgent thing, trying to wake her, though it wasn’t Liz but her mother, and then it wasn’t her mother but her eighth-grade French teacher. Rise and shine, lazybones, her mother had chimed in that maternal singsong she’d often used to get Winnie ready for school; Attention, mademoiselle! Madame Giroux had snapped; Wake up, Winnie! Liz had shouted. Wake the fuck up!
Winnie rolled out of bed, shoved her feet into her slippers. She was awake, she might as well use the bathroom; it was one of her mother’s dearest and most firmly held beliefs that the font of all nightmares was a sleeper’s need to urinate.
With one hand she grabbed her garish pink and purple chrysanthemum kimono off its hook by the door, shrugging into it more from habit than anything else. She was about to step into the hall when something made her freeze. Not a sound, not a movement—a disturbance in the silence? Winnie pressed back against the wall behind the door and strained to listen to the inky nighttime darkness. Her heart thudded against the flat square face of the phone she still clutched, now in one fist, pressed hard against her chest as she listened to the quiet.
The unmistakable sound of someone walking up the stairs. Not Liz, who’d moved back east, leaving Winnie heartbroken and three thousand miles away. Not her mother, whose arthritis these days prevented her from driving, much less from tackling even the most forgiving staircase without a fistful of painkillers. No one else came to Winnie’s mind as anyone who might have any claim to be in her home in the middle of the night. So when the intruder—taller than she was, a masculine frame—stepped into the open doorway, Winnie slammed the door into him with as much force as she could.
The door ricocheted off the collision with his solid body with more force than Winnie had anticipated, slamming her back against the wall. The intruder staggered to his feet and lunged, striking wildly in her direction with something sharp enough to slice the loose fabric off her kimono sleeve at the first pass. The second pass missed her face by an inch, notching her earlobe, and the third bit deep into the flesh of her left forearm, bared of its sleeve, before tugging free.
A bellow of rage erupted from deep in Winnie’s chest as though it had amassed and been waiting, surprising her, infusing her with unexpected strength as she tackled him. They fell into the hallway, she landing heavily on top. His surprised grunt was enough for her to recognize her neighbor Peter.
“Stop!” h
e cried. “You’ll damage my prototype!”
Hot blood rained from her sliced ear down as she raised her right fist and let it fall onto his face. Her injured arm pressed against his throat. Her thumb, sticky-slick, slid across the screen of the phone still clutched in her left hand, activating the torch function. Hard white light flooded his face, blinding them both. In the afterimage snapshot fused to her retinas she saw why he hadn’t dislodged her immediately: he was trying to protect some strange hat he wore made of plastic and braided wire, twisting to keep her blows from striking it.
She ground her injured arm harder against his throat, wishing she’d paid closer attention to that stupid Wreal Wrestling reality show Liz liked—would he really pass out this way? She bellowed again, bearing down, fist tight over the illuminated phone. Red drops and smears looked like fake blood under the harsh mechanical light, like stage blood, like gory theater.
Her other fist fell again toward his baffling headwear. He managed to deflect the blow while keeping grip on his bloodstained knife, a wicked dagger-point item she imagined was designed to gut deer like those for which she and Liz used to leave buckets of water in the yard on hot summer days. The skin over Winnie’s knuckles parted as she was forced to make a glancing punch at his jaw rather than in the middle of his face where she’d aimed. The strap holding his helmet snapped. The contraption skittered across the wood floor.
With renewed vigor he threw Winnie off. Her phone went flying from her hand, its blinding light spinning crazily down the hall, throwing shadows, making everything dance in the strobe effect. Peter scrambled to retrieve his helmet. Fueled by an engulfing rage beyond her surface understanding, Winnie lunged after him. Some internal scale tipped inside her, stuttered into being like a flame ignited by flint. Not even the urge to run could overpower her urge to stop him from doing it again.
Even as she swiped at him, missed, hooked her fingers in his jacket pocket instead, the query scampered across Winnie’s forebrain: again? Stop him from doing what, again?
A loud ripping came as Peter’s pocket tore free, spilling its contents into her hand.
The gun was cold. Winnie had never held a gun, never pointed one, never wanted to.
In the faint electroluminescent wash from the phone down the hall, Winnie struggled to her feet. The metal of the gun was so cold it burned her fingers. She watched Peter retrieve his helmet, clamp it with one hand down over his short blond hair—pink hair at his temple, with her blood smeared across. There was nothing in the expression of his face she could recognize.
“How did you know I was coming? Was it the chronometric reverb?” he said, not to her so much as to himself, musing aloud.
Winnie was shaking. She gripped the gun in both fists, pointing it at him, hoping she held it properly, wondering how to retrieve her phone and dial 911 without letting him overpower her, wondering if she could last long enough for help to arrive without passing out from the pain in her arm, her hand, the side of her head, the dozen other shallow cuts leaking her blood and turning the wood floor sticky. Her teeth chattered so hard, it was a struggle to force words out: “What have you done to me?”
He glanced up as though startled to see her standing there. He made a dismissive gesture. “There was a small possibility repeated actions would set up a kind of pre-verberation. A precursive echo, if you like.” His fingers fiddled with the braided wires dangling from his headwear, trying to press them up back under the plastic, twiddling things back into place. “Don’t worry. I’ll tinker a little more, find a different chronometral fold to access. I’ll adjust the parameters and you won’t know a thing next time.”
“Next time?”
She recognized something suffuse his expression then. It wasn’t guilt, exactly. Closer to a rueful admission of weakness.
“Unforeseen variable—I didn’t know I’d like it so much,” he said. At her blank stare he added the words her mind filled in, words she’d dismissed in some last ditch effort to keep any semblance of feeling sane. “I didn’t know I’d like it so much, killing someone. You. Killing you. Over and over, every way I can think of. Night after night.”
The sheepish look on his face shifted to triumph as his fingers found the right wire, shoved the right chip back into its slot. The contraption on his head flickered, humming with power, coming alive. Two blue lights blinked at Winnie like two mischievous eyes, sparkling and mirthful. Next time, they seemed to promise. See you next time.
He surprised her, leaping, slamming into her chest so the gun was crushed between them. She’d forgotten the red-slick knife still in the grip of his off-hand, the hand not clamped over the crazy helmet. She felt the blade where he held it to her ribs, pushing aside the open kimono, but her attention kept riveted on the mocking blue lights blinking, turning his pinkened hair purple as they made ready to engage at his command. Next time, they winked at Winnie: next time.
As his blade parted the flesh between her ribs she twisted. Her arm sprang free of their slick and awkward embrace. The arm with the hand holding the gun.
His knife pressed deeper. Winnie’s skin parted like ripe cheese. The helmet lights blinked faster. Peter began to feel less substantial in her grip. In a moment she would be dead with his knife in her heart and he, if she understood him, if she believed him, would be gone. The lights would win, would see her next time.
Reverberation from the gunshot tore through her injured arm. The knife slipped from her chest with a sickening glide, then thudded onto the bloody floor with a wet plop. Peter sagged against her, thickening, growing heavier and more substantial as he fell. Winnie staggered backward under his weight, aiming at the winking lights again, firing again. She had to silence those mocking blue lights for good, disable them and never let them return. That Peter’s head happened to be underneath them was, it felt in the moment, of only distant concern.
She let his body slide to the floor. Gripping the gun in numb hands she fired another shot into the sputtering blue lights, then dropped to her knees and smashed them with the bloody butt of the pistol, again and again, until she was absolutely sure she wouldn’t have to do this again next time.
<<====>>
AUTHOR’S STORY NOTE
My dad’s a folklore scholar and musician, so I grew up with an appreciation for oral tradition and a certain mode of storytelling, where repetition and musicality are central to the plot, character, or mood of a piece. As a child I was particularly attracted to murder ballads, death ballads, these little personal histories of tragedy, struggle, and loss recounted as sweeping sagas. My dad studied a lot of arcane and lesser known stuff, but in more popular culture—think certain songs sung by Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, Tom Waits, The Decemberists—anything that draws on that ancient tradition of telling a narrative of woe and strife, murder and heartbreak, repeating a refrain to frame a story you don’t soon forget. I think this influences a lot of my work in any genre or form, though “Redux” distills it to its simplest state, while twisting a couple of the traditional tropes sideways.
OUT HUNTING FOR TEETH
WILLIAM GRABOWSKI
Published as an ebook short story by Oblivion Press
______
“That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.”—Friedrich Nietzsche
These weren’t like the old days, Jerfastilhak mused. No. In this black age nothing like that peace could be found. They had pain-birds now, killing-birds. Great screaming, swooping demons that raked the sky and shat fire—rattled the bones brittling across the cave’s floor.
These death-birds were not all they had.
One bright morning, while gathering food for himself and his lover, Moazirith, Jerfastilhak had idled a few moments sprawled among yellow bursts of primrose. A cool, flowered breeze washed over the hill. Suddenly the sky caught fire; a second sun rose and blossomed into a blazing mushroom. The earth shuddered, then rumbled as if about to open and swallow its children.
The flash blinded Jerfastilhak—wild te
rror surged through him.
When sight and stability returned he saw a horror …
Below the hill on which he stood, far away from the yellow flowers, the colony of the ugly-ones burned. From this vantage point Jerfastilhak was spared nothing, could see the colony lay flat, twisted, and unrecognizable, save for one tall structure near the river.
Scattered fires raged. Cries of the maimed, the dying, could be heard, borne upon the burning wind.
At that moment two wishes choked Jerfastilhak’s heart: I wish these visions, these sounds, did not exist … and I wish to forget them.
Moazirith, upon hearing the tale of annihilation from her lover, sank into sorrow.
Nothing Jerfastilhak did could lift from her this dark veil.
The crushing of rodents went unnoticed.
Seven carapace-cracking dives from the tallest cliff barely took her attention off the lazy arc of a falling leaf.
Levitating Moazirith into the air merely lulled her into fitful slumber.
She hardly paid his antics any attention, not even when Jefastilhak raised a pincer, punched into his abdomen and drizzled the molten gold that pulsed inside over a scuttling hermit crab.
So profound was Moazirith’s anguish she refused even to wear the gilded gift around her neck, despite the considerable difficulty Jerfastilhak endured trapping the squid—hostile and slippery—whose entrails he braided into a string for the plated crab.
Was there no way to cheer her? Had Jerfastilhak’s news of the devastation been solely responsible for his lover’s distress? Leaving Moazirith cloaked in sorrow, he went searching for some remedy that might restore her.
Sad and alone, Ushiro Funikoshi climbed the steep trail that cut through the land above his secluded cottage in Kamuri-Yama. Ushiro had fled the bleak horrors of war and spent each morning running toward the sky in green silence, exhaling the stink of his past. In these hills, along this twisting, secret path, he hoped to sweeten the bitterness poisoning his heart; fill the void in his days once occupied by his father. Tadashi Funikoshi, strong as the bamboo and pine around the family home, had given himself to the Rising Sun as a pilot in the suicide-force know as the Divine Wind. He died the “noble” kamikaze death. Ha! What was noble about it? Kamikaze: “Divine wind” indeed!
Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 2 Page 12
