by Pete Kahle
Not Your Average Monster! II
A Menagerie of Vile Beasts
Edited by
Pete Kahle
Copyright © 2016 by Bloodshot Books
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of Bloodshot Books, except for the purposes of review.
Cover Design © 2016 by Elderlemon Design
http://www.elderlemondesign.com/
ISBN-13: 978-0692644737
ISBN-10: 0692644733
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the fertile imaginations of the authors within or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
READ UNTIL YOU BLEED!
CONTENTS
A Note from Pete i
One Mississippi – Leigh Harlen 1
What Clayton Found – Betty Rocksteady 11
With Covered Eyes – Johann Thorsson 21
Lorelei – Logan Noble 39
Mockery – Patrick Lacey 53
The Client – B.T. Joy 65
Apt Pupae – John F.D. Taff 81
Salt on the Dance Floor – Nisi Shawl 91
Cryptozoa – Aaron Worth 105
Two Cheeseburgers and That Weird Little Kid – Jenny Orosel 141
Bempton – Richard Farren Barber 151
Tiny Necks – Marlena Frank 167
Darling Brother – Erin Michelle Jendras 179
A List of Grey and Crimson – Jared Oliver Adams 193
The Esurient Hyrst – Michael Picco 213
The Grand Sacrifice – Sallie McDaniel 223
Death of a Housefly – Shawn Francis 237
Raja – Wednesday Lee Friday 281
Bristles – Meryl Stenhouse 289
A Note from Pete
Last April, I decided to plunge into the world of small press publishing when I formed Bloodshot Books. Six months later, our first book, Not Your Average Monster: A Bestiary of Horrors, was released to excellent reviews. Since then, a couple of things have happened:
Two of the stories from that anthology were chosen for inclusion in Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, Vol. 1 by Comet Press (due out June 1).
We just signed a deal with award-winning Australian author Brett McBean to reprint The Awakening, his widely acclaimed coming-of-age zombi novel (and yes, that’s the Haitian vodou zombi, not the classic undead Romero zombie or the fast rage virus zombies a la 28 Days Later).
So, as you can surmise, I am quite happy with the progress of our organization. Down the road, in the next month or so, we will be expanding our operations yet again with an Open Call for original novels. There are no guidelines just yet, but I will be looking for stories that I would want to read myself – what I consider real horror. I don’t mind gore at all, but it has to drive the plot and I do have a weakness for creature horror, but, as you should notice from the subjects of the tales within this book, I like a wide variety of horror. More information will be posted when we announce the dates to submit your stories.
There will be future volumes in this series as well, but I think that we’ll wait a few months before putting out the call. As with the first volume, Volume 2 features stories by authors whose names you should recognize alongside newer contributors whose names will become much more familiar to the horror world over the next few years. Of this I have no doubt.
Now, please, find yourself a dark corner with a flickering light, wrap yourself into a fuzzy blanket and sink into a large soft chair. Listen to the rain drumming on the roof and the wind howling in the chimney. Settle in for a long night ahead of you because the nightmares that have been put on the pages within will not release you soon. You’re here for the long haul.
Enjoy,
Pete Kahle
Owner/Editor – Bloodshot Books
One Mississippi
by Leigh Harlen
They've been there, every moment of every single day of my life. The only constant. While family, friends, and lovers died or gave up and disappeared from my life, they stayed. Every day I wish to see them go up in a glorious burst of fire. But I wonder sometimes what I would feel if they were suddenly gone. Would I panic? I think I might.
You can't see them. Probably. I don't know, maybe I'm not the only one. Maybe you're lying in bed, just like me. Afraid to go to sleep or even close your eyes. For your sake, I hope not. I haven’t left this bed in years. The last time I tried to move, I ripped the skin off the back of my right leg. I’ve been here so long that I’ve become a part of this mattress. Fused and rotting together into one soiled and used up lump.
I'm not sure if they're everywhere in the world. They're everywhere for me. Watching, watching, watching.
They weren’t always this bold. They used to hide in the shadows. I think maybe they know they don’t have to worry about me much longer.
# # #
The first one to die was my mother. I was seven and asked her to play Hide and Seek with me.
“Sorry, little bug, I’ve got work to do,” she said.
I cried. Not loud, not a tantrum, that would have gotten me sent to my room. I just crumpled up on the floor and let my pitiful tears fall on the carpet. I had a flair for dramatics and was a manipulative little shit.
She sighed, “Alright, but just for ten minutes, okay?” I told her to hide first. I pretended to close my eyes, but peeked out the corners to see her duck behind the couch. She caught me. She laughed and said, "Cassie, that's cheating."
I blushed. I tried to act like my attempt to cheat had never happened it all. I squeezed my eyes closed as tight as I could and started counting. "One Mississippi, two Mississippi..."
I opened my eyes. I looked behind the couch, behind the door, under the beds and couldn't find her. I opened the door to the basement and there she was. Sprawled on the stairs, her eyes open and staring.
Her mouth moved and I thought she was talking to me. It opened wider and wider but no words came out. Two little hands reached out between her lips and gripped her cheeks. Two mucus colored eyes stared out at me from inside her mouth. It pulled itself out and I heard her jaw crack. It stood there and stared at me, its body wet and slimy from saliva, blood, and whatever other fluids and goo are inside the human body. I couldn't read its expression, but it seemed frozen with fear or indecision. It was the first time I ever saw one unobscured by shadows. I started to cry, for real this time. Big noisy sobs. There was no one in the house to hear me. I clamped my eyes shut and screamed. One long, continuous wail.
By the time my dad came come home, the creatures had all returned to their usual places, lurking in the shadowy corners of the ceiling. I was curled up in an exhausted pile on the floor and too hoarse to tell him what happened right away.
With a child’s naiveté, I thought that the adults in my life would believe me about the monsters even though all of my previous evidence suggested the contrary. My parents had long ago started calling them my imaginary friends whenever I tried to tell them. No matter how much dread and fear I tried to convey, they just thought it was a game. A child's overactive imagination. But surely, they would believe me now, this was proof.
The only time my father ever struck me was when I told him that monsters killed my mother.
While the paramedics were wheeling her body away, he bent
down and looked me in the eyes. Between sobs he asked, "Cassie, what happened to mommy? Did she trip?"
I shook my head. "It was the monsters on my ceiling."
His tear-filled eyes turned angry. I didn't even see his hand raise. My head snapped to the side and my cheek stung. The pain and surprise made me start crying again.
I’m not sure which one of us was more hurt.
Our relationship never really recovered. I never completely trusted him again and he stopped trusting himself around me. Guilt and fear that he’d do it again kept him at a constant arm’s length until he died.
After they killed my mother, the monsters became bolder. They would skitter out of the shadows and gaze down at me. I kept my eyes locked on their unblinking, lidless eyes until they returned to their dark corners. It felt like we were having a staring contest except I didn’t know what the stakes were. I didn’t know how or why, but I knew that for some reason they were here, and had killed my mother, because of me.
On the night of my thirteenth birthday my dad caught me trying to sneak out to meet a boy. I don’t even remember what his name was. Mike or Martin or something. I remember he was a year older than me and had hazel eyes. We were going to meet at the beach and he was going to bring beer. When I climbed out of my bedroom window, my dad was already waiting for me on the front lawn. I hadn’t been as sneaky as I’d thought.
I refused to tell him where I was going or who I was seeing so he prohibited me from seeing anyone outside of school for the next month. I laid in bed and cried the way only those afflicted by puberty hormones and first lust can.
When my tears dried up, I was left with anger. In a fit of pique I closed my eyes tight and whispered, “One Mississippi. Two Mississippi.”
I opened my eyes and immediately felt guilty and also a little foolish. I accepted that there were monsters, but they weren’t goblins who could be commanded with magic words.
I went to sleep. When I woke up, I went downstairs, fully prepared to give my father the silent treatment until he released me from my social isolation. But instead, I found him dead on the kitchen floor. His body cold, mouth open too wide, like a snake who had unhinged its jaws to swallow its prey.
My grandparents raised me after that. They were stern and humorless. They made me go to church every Sunday and wear long skirts with stocking every day. That was also when I decided to start trying to do something about the monsters.
First, I tried to stop sleeping. Of course that didn’t work. I went a couple of nights. I ate coffee beans and swallowed caffeine pills until my stomach burned and I started vomiting. After the second night, I dozed off in class. I woke up to a squirt of water in the face. Mr. Parsons glared at me, the bottle that he used on the overhead projector screen pointed at my face. I looked around, terrified. Everyone was alive and I breathed a sigh of relief. But the monsters had crept out of the corners and were clinging to the ceiling over Mr. Parsons’ desk.
Since never sleeping again wasn’t an option, I decided to attack them. I tried to smash them with a mop. I was quite a sight. Jumping and cursing and trying to hit them while they skittered away like cockroaches when a light turns on.
I taped a kitchen knife to the handle and tried to stab them. It took hours, but I finally hit one. The knife cut through its wiry arm.
They swarmed. They fell on top of the injured creature, a squirming wave of bodies. I couldn’t see what happened, I heard crunching, snapping, and tearing. When the others moved, there was nothing but a bloody smear on the ceiling.
As a mob, they clambered down the mop handle towards me. I dropped it and ran from the room. Of course, they were in the hallway too, waiting and watching. But they stopped coming for me. I guess they were happy enough that I was too afraid to hurt them again. I slept very little that night, afraid that I’d wake up to them crawling across my body.
The next day I was so tired that I dozed off in English.
I woke up to shrieking and the clatter of chairs knocked over in panic. My classmate, Naomi, was hanging from her chair, hair splayed on the tile floor. Her legs hooked on the bottom of the desk prevented her from falling. A small parade of the creatures crawled out of her mouth. For a moment I felt hope that maybe someone else saw them. But everyone’s eyes were fixed on Naomi, not watching the creatures scampering away from her body. One of the monsters even climbed up a screaming classmate so it could jump from his shoulder up to the ceiling.
I thought about killing myself. I wondered if maybe they would disappear with me and then everyone would be safe.
But then, maybe they would just be free to kill without me watching them. A valid concern, but really, I just didn’t want to die.
I settled for going home and drawing big green eyes on my eyelids in hopes of fooling them.
Even crazier than trying to fool the bloodthirsty monsters on my ceiling with markers, is that fact that it worked. I slept in fits and starts for a long time, but eventually people stopped dying and I started to relax.
It was hard work. I would draw them on before bed and wash them off immediately when I woke up. During the day I couldn’t doze off in class or even spend too long rubbing my eyes when they itched or they’d start swarming around someone in my vicinity.
I didn’t wake up early enough to wash them off one morning and my grandmother saw the eyes. She was terrified that I had joined a satanic cult. She scrubbed my face in the kitchen sink with dish soap and a scouring pad. I spent the next evening having an uncomfortable conversation with her Pastor about devil worship.
“I know every teenager likes to rebel, but there’s nothing cool about burning in hell for all eternity,” Pastor Thomas said.
I laughed. I mean, honestly, it was a funny thing to say. No one agreed and I had to spend every Tuesday and Wednesday evening at church having special Bible class with a handful of other teenagers who had been deemed by the Pastor and their parents to be incorrigible delinquents.
But, in spite of everything, I kept drawing those eyes on every night and for the next ten years no one died.
Now, you might be wondering what kind of life I could have had doing that. The answer is: not much of one. They’d been with me as long as I could remember, so I was used to them to some extent.
I couldn’t have a friend spend the night or even go to the Christian summer camp my grandparents were always trying to send me to. Dating and sex was almost impossible. It was pretty hard to feel romantic with those snot green eyes always staring at us, but that wasn’t even the biggest problem. I couldn’t get to the screwing when I was perceived as an off-putting creep who didn’t close her eyes while we kissed.
But then I met Ben. I told him that I thought it was hot to keep my eyes open while we made out.
“That’s cool,” was all he said. He turned it into a game. While we fucked he’d try to keep eye contact with me as long as he could. It was uncomfortably intimate in a way that was pretty hot. Having human eyes watch me while I moaned and squirmed, eyes that held desire and feeling that I could understand, eyes that I wanted to be there was an amazing feeling. And best of all, it held my attention so that I barely noticed them watching us from the shadows.
After a few months it became a source of tension that I would never spend the night. Intoxicated with all of the sexual and romantic feelings I’d never been able to really feel before, I relented. Every night I waited for him to fall asleep, I went to the bathroom, and drew on my eyes. Then I set my alarm to wake me up an hour before him, snuck out of bed and washed them off again. Then I climbed back under the covers, and kept my eyes open until he woke.
You probably already know it didn’t work. Anyone with a clear head can see that I was a dumbass.
I woke up to a shout. I opened my eyes and Ben was sitting up, staring at me.
I should have prepared some lie just in case he ever woke up early and saw my uncanny drawn on eyes, but I had trusted too much in my ability to keep them hidden and in the safety of our routine.
I babbled, “I um… It’s a superstition.”
He waited for me to continue. His face scrunched up in confusion and worry.
And then the truth spilled out. Love and youth makes us all stupid. God knows how we survive having both at the same time.
I told him everything in a burst of confused sentences and crying. About the monsters that killed my parents and my classmate. How I couldn’t close my eyes for longer than a few seconds or they might kill again and how drawing on my eyelids kept him safe while I slept.
To his credit, he didn’t call me crazy. He didn’t run away. He didn’t call the police to have me locked up. But I could see it reflected on his face, he wanted to do every one of those things.
So, I left. I went back to my house on the edge of town. I kept going to work. And they kept watching me. We kept watching each other.
Every night, I went home, buried my face in my pillow, and cried. I could barely shower or even feed myself. I grieved the last bit of me that had hoped for some kind of happiness.
Which is what killed Ben. A week after I left his apartment, he came to see me. If he knocked, I didn’t hear him. Using the key I’d given him, he let himself in. I’m not sure why, maybe he was worried that something had happened to me or that I’d hurt myself. But when I stopped crying and came out of my room to try and force myself to eat, I found him dead on my living room floor. His mouth wide open and bloody smears around his mouth.
I spent hours at the police station answering questions. No one seemed to know what killed him. They only told me that his jaw was broken and there was some kind of internal damage. Scratches, tears, and lesions that they attributed to something being shoved down, and pulled back out of, his throat. Of course I knew they were from something climbing in and out of him.
