Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 2

by Wrath James White

  “He can reach right through your heart and touch the ones you love.”

  He got up and walked out the door, leaving the TV on, heading for the stairs. His car was parked three blocks away, and by the time he reached the street he was running.

  Opening night at Rockaway High, and the audience had been promised “something unique.” So far, The Father of Destiny had delivered. There’d been laughs, shrieks, cheers, a few indignant walkouts (the better to weed out the lames), but Ms. Ortega, watching from the balcony, hadn’t counted a single yawn. The scene where Oedipus rescued his mother from the house of the dead—by weighing his heart against a feather and matching wits with a baboon—had been a great sell, really drawing them in. They had that blissfully mesmerized look that audiences get when a show really starts to score. Their eyes were drinking in the story, primed for the big showdown with Laius on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It was like bringing a dream to life, cast in living flesh, and for once she had no regrets about her career. At least a small part of her wanted to track down Joey Church at the after-party and jump his precocious bones.

  If Joey, brooding in the darkness backstage in full Sphinx regalia, looked like death, it might be assumed he was getting into character.

  It was just Joey and Allison now. The rest of the spare cast had been drafted into one of the armies. She wore a shimmering gown of blue gossamer and pearls, selected to make her eyes pop in the black light. It gave her a fierce, numinous beauty. She was pacing the wing, pricking her thumbs with her fingernails and mouthing her lines. Joey’s eyes followed her, the only part of him that moved.

  “Where is my mother? Summon her!”

  Fox’s command from the stage meant her big scene with him and Laius was coming up. Suddenly she ran to where Joey was standing and hooked him round the neck. She nuzzled his shoulder, mindful of his makeup, and whispered, “I love you, Joe. Thanks for being so cool, brother.” She started to go for her entrance, but his hand shot out and caught her wrist. “Eh? Joey, wha—”

  “Don’t go out there,” he hissed, his eyed brimming with sudden intensity.

  “What, what are you—”

  “Please, Allie! The play, it—it—it’s bad! Th-there are secret lines my father wrote … Allie, it doesn’t end how you think it does!”

  “Hey. HEY! Joey, let … GO!”

  “Please, don’t go. I can’t stop it if you do! I love you Allie, please, we can go, we can leave right now and be together, we can—”

  “Hey … Crazy fucker, let go!”

  His grip faltered and she snatched her hand back. For a moment she saw the deep pain in his eyes, but only for a moment, before it hardened into a flat, nothing gaze. A dead gaze. She shrank from it and practically ran for the light of the stage and Fox’s outstretched hand.

  The scene unfolded with crackling aplomb. Allie was rattled at first, but managed to find her stride within a few lines. Once or twice she glanced back at the wing and thought she saw her brother back there—his eyes at least, glimmering in the shadows. The battle raged around her and she was Jacosta again, her passions torn between her husband and her son, and anxious moreover for that part of her that defied them both, the secret, smuggled heart of a woman. And then it was over. Laius lay dead. Oedipus Fox, victorious, drew her close and kissed her in front of gods and men and left her breathless and dazed. The drums and the metal horns sounded and the theater went dark. All eyes looked to the wing. Allie Jocasta looked.

  And her mind broke in two.

  For what now took the stage, with heavy thump and shuffling drag, aglow and ghastly in the cold blue light? What taxidermist’s nightmare, what unnatural abuse of form, what desecration of life, what dread ancient now cast its shadow on the audience and fixed them in their screaming shock? What now addressed the bloodless face of the king with a voice that blew the speakers out and sent a wave of despairing groans through the onlookers?

  “Speak!”

  “D-Daughter of Orthus,” sputtered the king, helpless to stop the words from forming, “Father … t-take us … m-make us … marry us!”

  “Answer my riddle.”

  The eyes of the king refused, pleaded, begged to be reprieved, but he had no power to refuse what was written, and trembling he replied, “Ask.”

  “What is my name?”

  “Your name …” whispered the un-made king, tears streaming down his face, “is Death.”

  “No. I am one who dreams a million leagues below death. Death is only the beginning. You will see. I will show you. You are mine!” It reached for them, took hold of them, and they screamed louder than all the rest, if not as long.

  Walter got out in front of Rockaway High auditorium, leaving his car to idle in the street. People in disheveled eveningwear were trickling out of the entrance like poisoned bees from a rock. They tripped over their own feet, searched the ground with blasted vacuity, or tilted strange grins to the starless sky. One dusky woman in voluminous skirts looked up at Walter as he hurried past, her scooped-out eye-sockets weeping blood. He fought his way through the door, down the dark hallway full of gibbering, reeling, reaching forms, and threw open the auditorium doors. The air was thick, syrupy with death, full of mutters and groans and half-articulate lamentations. What remained of the audience rolled and swayed in the murk of the reflected stage lights. A man traced invisible signs in the air, a woman clawed at her naked breasts while a mass of tentacles wriggled from her mouth, a teenage girl held up a toddler with a broken neck like an offering … All of these were but shadows, poor stewards to the towering horror of the stage.

  “Joseph!” he screamed over the woeful din. “Son!”

  It heard. It looked up from its abominable labors and turned its gore-slathered face to him. It pawed the ruined bodies. “Father!” it said in a voice dredged from the gutters of Hell. “Behold your work!”

  “No, no, no—” chanted Walter, the last and only word he would ever know or speak again. “No, no, no—”

  “Father, I am born!”

  “No …”

  “Sehk noth l’tak’gn!”

  “No …”

  “Behold your son!”

  <<====>>

  AUTHOR’S STORY NOTE

  The title of this story comes from the Arabic name for the Sphinx of Giza, bu al-Hawl, which is commonly translated as The Dreadful One, but literally means Father of Dread. Like the Sphinx, it is a found artifact (as good titles so often are).

  This was originally written as a Lovecraftian Mythos story for the Cthulhu Lies Dreaming anthology by Ghostwoods Books. Obviously the ancient world is fertile soil for this sort of thing, and the figure of the Sphinx allowed me to draw on a convergence of Greek and Egyptian mythology.

  The Greek world was never a totally closed cosmological horizon like those of the monotheistic religions. Before the Olympian Gods there were the Titans, and before them there were more shadowy figures like Chaos and Gaia rising out of primeval darkness. The Greeks’ awe and trembling before the Fates and the Furies, their spiraling obsessions with space and time, their majestically dark theatre with its origins in primitive rites, all fit very well with the Mythos tradition. And the Egyptians, well, read the Book of the Dead—baboons feeding human hearts to crocodiles!

  Monotheistic religion came along and suppressed what dark, irrational currents in paganism it could not incorporate. The psychological law says that when darkness is repressed it loses its virtue of balancing against light and becomes absolute evil, absolute other, an alien consciousness waiting for its chance to revenge itself up on the waking world. That, I think, is the psychological core of Lovecraft’s best work, and what I was aiming for here.

  ON THIS SIDE OF BLOODLETTING

  STEPHANIE M. WYTOVICH

  From 555 Vol. 2: This Head, These Limbs

  Editor: Joseph Bouthiette Jr.

  Publisher: Carrion Blue

  ______

  T HE HANDS OF A SEVERED POET

  I often think about what it
would be like to cut off my hands, to have two stumps that plop and bang rather than fingers that glide over keys, make words and tell stories. I wonder if people would listen to me if I went silent, if they would make poetry with my mute remains.

  INSIDE OF ME, SHE BLEEDS

  There’s a monster in my veins. Her name is my own and she bubbles and bleeds, tries to convince me to let her out, to let her play. Sometimes I make an incision. Just enough to give her a taste. But still she cries, still she screams, screams pleas of amputation, cries operas of pain.

  BRUSHING WITH BLOOD

  The walls in my room were white, but everything in my mind was red, red like the cherries I ate, red like the pomegranate juice that dripped down my chin. I liked red, liked the way it stained my teeth, the way it complimented my gums when I brushed my teeth with the morning’s blood.

  OEDIPAL SOLUTIONS

  I wasn’t happy. The world was ugly and I didn’t like what I saw, what I was forced to look at every day. Outside it was bright. It hurt to be alive, hurt to watch. But I felt better when I took out my eyes, because then the world went dark. Then, I could see.

  POSTMARK TO PAIN

  My body has 555 cuts on its skin, each made with love, each made with careful consideration, for I, myself, am a mailbox of suffering. Learn my address. Postmark your hate mail, send it straight to my heart. This is who I am. I’m made for it. 555 slots for sorrow. I can take it.

  DATING MY DEATH WEAPON

  Knives are what I know, what I trust. They don’t fail me. They don’t walk away. In fact, their slim, metal bodies are the best lovers I’ve known. Dependable. Efficient. Consistent. Their foreplay is torture. Their penetration is climax. When I fuck them, I bleed. When we make love, they write notes on my back.

  MAKE ME BLEED, MAKE ME HISS

  I wanted to pierce my ears, so I took a needle and shoved it through my lobes. They barely bled, except for a drop or two, so I pierced my nose. When that didn’t bleed, I took scissors and cut out a section of my tongue. I swallowed the cube of flesh muscle. Hissed breaths.

  HUMAN PINCUSHION

  The spikes hugged me in my body drawer, in my metal casket, and I was the Iron Maiden, the girl who slept with the thorns and dressed herself in holes. My skin, polka-dotted and infected, beat shades of red and pink. I dressed my wounds with the tears I laughed. I cried my blood away.

  ARSONIST LULLABY

  Father Fire sings me my lullaby, his voice burning the world as he lulls me to dream with ashes, tucks me in with flames. When I drift off to sleep, there’s a match in my hand, when I wake up in the morning, there’s destruction on my breath. I am his death phoenix, his redemption.

  DARK ROAST

  She cried hard into her coffee when she wanted to mix the cream and sugar, and silently wept into her mug when she took her caffeine black. The trick to a strong cup was the amount of suffering she put into it. If her heart wasn’t black enough, the dark roast never came out right.

  ELECTROCUTION JUNKIE

  The hurricane screamed itself raw with its booming voice and electric words, and the girl took each strike, each hit, as her ragdoll body was flung side to side, beaten and bloody near the front door of her mind. She’d come around. Always did. Most women were made for madness. She was made for storms.

  COMMIT THEM TO MEMORY

  There’s a code to this trade, a set of rules that I follow, rules that keep me on schedule, that prevent me from making mistakes. I never take trophies, have no need for reminders. I commit each detail—every name, every taste, every article of clothing—to memory. I know I’ll never forget my girls.

  HE’S BETWEEN MY LEGS

  I cut his name into my thighs with a piece of broken glass from the bottle I knocked off the desk when he walked away. He was the only man I saw when I spread my legs, so I marked him in flesh, in memory for how he still fucks me even though he’s gone.

  MY VAGINA IS A ZOMBIE

  I don’t bleed like a normal woman, because I’m not a normal woman. Every 28 days I hemorrhage until I die, a lifetime of deaths served by the slit between my legs. I have the axe wound that never heals, the river that always runs red. My vagina is a zombie, a reanimated gore machine.

  MY MEN DON’T BRING ROSES

  If I had to choose between lovers, I would choose the one who scares me, the one who makes my heart beat fast out of fear. I need a partner who’s going to bring an axe to the bedroom every once in a while. I like a man who knows how to make me scream.

  BLOOD MAPS

  I puked razor blades and knives, threw up needles and a pair of shearers, and still my body takes the abuse, still it begs for more, more cuts and incisions, more holes and puncture wounds. When will the blood maps that I’ve drawn in scars be enough? When will those pictures lead me to recovery?

  RED IS MY FAVORITE COLOR

  There’s something about the color red that gives me peace, that lets me open my lungs and breathe a breath of fresh air. I’ve painted the walls in my house crimson, soaked all my clothes in wine, and I suck on veins for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, happily starving in scarlet, cynically crying in carmine.

  JACKSON POLLACK, REVISITED

  I smiled when I read the headlines. They saw me for who I was: a visionary, a connoisseur of culture, of philosophy, of art. I wanted to capture the idea of rebirth, silence the notion of death. It was sacrifice, expressionism in blood. I laid down my paint, my bodies, a canvas of organized chaos.

  SHOOT TO KILL

  I’m a visual learner, a Pinterest picturesque plotter. I don’t see people for who they really are until I see them through my camera lens, and once I snap their picture—once I commit to a subject—they’re imprinted in my brain; a face forever hanging in my gallery, a mental collage of pre-inflicted pain.

  THE MAP OF OUR RELATIONSHIP

  I am many things in this life, but I’ll forever be the cartographer of your scars. You’re my canvas, my journal of pain, and every time I look at you, I look at the map of our relationship, trace it back to where it started, to the first mark, to where our love story began.

  FAMILY TRADITION

  This machete has been in the family for ages—passed down generation after generation—but it’s been shadow sleeping, retired too long. The blooms of rust call to me, the decade-old blood stains weep, and it makes me nostalgic for the good ol’ days when pleading filled the night and grandpa laughed himself to sleep.

  DIRTY LAUNDRY

  I wet the bed until I was thirteen. Mother made me sleep in my mess, refusing me clean sheets, denying me comfort until I learned to stop; but I didn’t stop and mother hated me. Now my sheets look different. They’re practically soaking in all the red. I think Mother would maybe love me now.

  SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY

  There’s an abandoned house that I go to sometimes to sleep with the man who broke my heart. One time, I took an axe with me. I wondered: would I have stopped swinging if he apologized, if he repeatedly begged me to stay? I’m not sure, but the body next to me is baffled, too.

  GUILLOTINE GIGGLES

  Most of the time their last words are prayers, prayers or maybe confessions, every once in a while an apology or two, but this one, this one just giggled, giggled until the blade dropped, until his head hit the ground, and even then I swear he was laughing, smiling as he rolled and rolled around.

  BENEATH THE FLOORBOARDS

  It’s cliché and it’s Poe, but it makes me happy that I get to walk over your grave every day, that I get to trap you like you trapped me, but unlike the story, your murder doesn’t drive me mad, for it’s the phantom beating of your heart that allows me to sleep, to dream.

  MY WEEK-OLD SEX DOLL

  It’s been a few weeks, and he’s losing the color in his cheeks; I added some blush to help him come back, some foundation to take out the bloated hue, and if I squint, he looks just like his old self again, only this time more sophisticated, more debonair. The sex has never been better.

  STALK, STA
LK, PREY

  It’s waking up in the morning and knowing what your soon-to-be victim is having for breakfast. It’s knowing his favorite pub to visit on Wednesday nights, just like it’s studying his approach to picking up girls. It’s dying your hair black because you know he prefers brunettes to blondes. It’s obsession, practice. A widow’s skill.

  BECOMING THE BUTCHER

  At first, I refused to believe that I did it. That I was capable. How could I be so stupid? I needed to go back, to try again. I waited all my life for their bodies, and now their dismemberment disgusted me. I was a hack. A butcher. They deserved better. I needed more practice.

  THE EXECUTIONER’S DIARY

  Murder is a game, but when I take the players to my basement, my secret chamber of penance, of retribution, there’s no God waiting for them. It’s just me, me and my notebook, an executioner with a plan. I scribble their sins in poetic eulogies, tell them to close their eyes. To count to ten.