A Haunting of Horrors: A Twenty-Novel eBook Bundle of Horror and the Occult

by Chet Williamson

  The mambo rolled over, tearing loose wires and IVs, and threw herself partway over Max. Mr. Tung collapsed and tried to save himself by holding on to the bedposts. The frame shook, the night tables tipped, the candle on the mambo’s side toppled. Wisps of smoke curled up from the mattress edge. Shadows flickered with frantic abandon on the walls, like a dance of witches. “Enoch,” the mambo whispered desperately in Max’s face. Her sour breath had the acrid sting of smoke.

  Max grabbed her shoulders, pushed her up off of him, shook her. “Who?”

  Mr. Tung screamed. Stood up. His face twisted into a mask of horror, as if he had seen the hell to which his soul had been consigned.

  Outside, doors opened, smashing against walls. The door to the Box, and to the loft.

  Max grunted as the child in his womb delivered a savage kick, as if anticipating a fight for its life.

  “Tonton!” Kueur cried out from beyond the doorway. “Mr. Tung!” shouted the guards rushing into the loft. Mr. Tung snarled. His eyes darkened into lightless pools of night untouched by Creation.

  “Enoch … “the mambo said, chest heaving, “an angel… of destruction, taking on… the Lord’s wrath… against your sins … yours … a mad angel, broken heart… beware the mad angel—”

  A flame crawled up along the sheet, crackling and snapping as it consumed cotton and peeked over the top of the mattress.

  Mr. Tung jumped on the bed, crouched. He pulled a thin, black ceramic blade from an ankle strap. Spasms seized the mambo.

  Max tried to hold her, protect the fetus, position himself to counter Mr. Tung. He noticed Mr. Tung had stopped breathing.

  The twins burst through the bedroom doorway.

  The mambo slipped out of Max’s hands. One of her convulsive kicks caught Mr. Tung in the chest as he lunged. Max’s countering kick was snagged by wires. A medical console flipped over. The mambo cried out as Mr. Tung’s knife stabbed her in the back of the neck.

  “Farewell,” said Legba in the dying light of the mambo’s face. “My apologies … to her family …”

  Max threw the mambo aside and grabbed Mr. Tung’s head, trying for a head snap. Mr. Tung pulled the knife out of the mambo, stabbed again. Max felt bone break, the blade penetrate his arm. Pain shot straight to his head.

  Kueur and Alioune jumped on top of Mr. Tung.

  Men in suits piled into the bedroom.

  Flames surged up the side of the bed, catching on the mattress. Fire-control foam sprayed down from recessed nozzles.

  Mr. Tung pulled out the knife, tried to bring it down again. Alioune held him back, wrapping both her arms around his. Kueur growled as she reached down his pants, ripped at his crotch. The men in suits tackled them from behind, pushed the twins and Mr. Tung toward Max. Hands grabbed, pushed, punched. Bodies piled on top of bodies. Fire pinched flesh. Foam soaked fabric, and a chemical smell filled the air.

  A fist landed a glancing blow against Max’s belly, despite his frantic efforts to protect himself.

  The Beast’s roar filled Max’s mind. The sound chased off fear and doubt and sickness, shook thought and feeling loose from their moorings in his mind, shot rage like liquid lightning through his body.

  It was as if he had never experienced the Beast’s appetite before, had not lived with its hunger all his life, had not spent every waking moment satiating the Beast’s needs when it was still alive in him. The Beast’s voice flowed through him like an instant intoxicant, sparking flashes of hot memory: the flesh, the cries of pain, the spasms of pleasure. For the moment of remembering the Beast was alive, and its power was his.

  And the Beast was like a shark breaking through net keeping it from the sea; a leviathan breaking for air through a thick blanket of suffocating kelp.

  Max pulled his legs back and under himself, rose up onto his knees, and fended off a pair of men trying to restrain him. He slid out of their attempted locks, struck one in the throat, the other in the solar plexus, sending them both gasping for breath as they scrambled off the bed. Sheets and covers snapped, the mattress rocked, foam flew up even as the rain of fire retardant slowed. Only a pair of candles remained lit, their flames the only fire in the room, but even in the dim light Mr. Tung was easy to spot in the press of bodies. He was at the center, his own men now joining in the twins’ effort to contain him. Unlike the twins, they were trying not to hurt him, and interfered with Kueur’s and Alioune’s attempt to finish him. The conflict allowed Mr. Tung to lash out with his knife every few moments, cutting Alioune on the thigh, stabbing one of the suited men in the eye, scraping Kueur’s skull, stabbing himself in the shoulder.

  Max, riding the power of the Beast’s rage, bullied his way through the crowd, ignoring his belly’s cumbersome weight, and locked his fingers around Mr. Tung’s throat.

  He tore Mr. Tung’s flesh with his nails. Forced his fingers through the wounds. Dug into muscle, feeling the artery, the trachea. Confirmed Mr. Tung’s heart no longer beat, his lungs no longer drew air.

  Mr. Tung suddenly took a breath, shocking Max so that he nearly allowed the ceramic blade to penetrate his ear. But the dead man had only taken air to speak, though Max could not understand his babbling. Max probed with his fingers, tore out the voice box, snapped the windpipe. Dug through blood-soaked tissue, tugged at bone.

  The twins, sensing he had a purpose, fought off the men in suits who were bearing down on Max. In a few moments, he succeeded in ripping Mr. Tung’s head away from his body. The Beast let loose a triumphant scream that scraped Max’s throat raw.

  The suited men hesitated, shock on their faces, as Max threw away the head and dug into Mr. Tung’s body, which still moved and struggled. The knife point pierced the back of Max’s shoulder, but Kueur caught the weapon arm and pulled it away before the blade could penetrate through muscle to bone. Max grimaced, and the Beast tasted its death, remembered, and faltered.

  He reached into Mr. Tung’s torso, closed his fist around the heart, pulled the organ out. More of the suited men fell back when Max threw the heart after the head. Mr. Tung paused. Kueur reached down his pants again, finished the work she had started and pulled out his genitals. Alioune worked her hand through his back, drew out a liver.

  The darkness left Mr. Tung’s eyes, where the head lay on the floor. Mr. Tung’s body slumped to the floor, the ceramic blade clattering on the wood. The smells of blood and shit and chemical foam and smoke and burnt linen combined to spice the bedroom’s night.

  The Beast hung on to Max as the sea rolled up to take him, as the baby in Max cried out for attention, for sustenance and nurturing.

  Strength left Max, and he melted into the twins’ arms. He closed his eyes, clutching his belly with his hands, the Beast with his soul.

  A storm shook and tossed the sea. Clouds roiled, dark and wounded, bleeding flashes of lightning. Wind howled with the voice of outrage, keened with the pain of betrayal. Angry waves drove Max back and forth in the rift between the himself and the sea. He no longer felt a part of the ocean. The current that had pulled him to a distant shore still tugged at his legs, but other currents and undertow and waves fought for him,dragging him first in one direction, then another. An invisible boundary, like the idea that he belonged to the living, waking world and the sea was a place of dreams and the not-yet-alive, surrounded him, protected him from the worst of the primal punishment.

  Something took hold of Max, dragged him through water. He suddenly found himself clinging to a rocky precipice that might have been the highest peak of a sunken continent peeking above the waves, bracing himself in a crevice as if his life depended on his hanging on to land.

  Next to him crouched a shadowy figure, wet and shivering and somehow insubstantial, like a black spirit cut from smoke and shadow. Its talons scraped stone. Its growl echoed thunder.

  Man and Beast huddled in the shelter of cold, hard rationality, bonded by death, saved by the life they had just taken in the waking world. Man and Beast, they hung on to the reality of their life together
, determined to survive until the storm tides of intimacy with the new life in his body ebbed.

  Staccato gunfire ripped through the safety of dreams. Bullets pinged as they bounced off of medical equipment casing, the surveillance pod and armored walls, ricocheting until they embedded themselves or exhausted velocity. Muzzle flash shattered the darkness, burned off images of stormy seas and rocky crags. The roaring echoes of every shot drowned the thunder reverberating in his skull.

  Max curled into a ball as he lay on the bed, protecting his belly with legs and arms. By the light of the gun flashes, he knew Kueur and Alioune had seized two nine-millimeter automatics each from some of Mr. Tung’s fallen guards and were returning fire coming from the bedroom doorway. He was grateful the twins’ fire was keeping incoming to occasional blind shots.

  “Cover!” Alioune shouted to Max over the deafening roar of the fire fight. Double clicks and metallic slides signaled her reloading while Kueur kept up her fire.

  Bullets whined past Max’s ear like angry hornets. Grazed his right hip, punched through thigh meat, stung nerves. He grunted, cursed his stupidity in trying to protect the baby while forgetting the most basic principle of survival: duck for cover. He crawled off the bed as Alioiune leapt over him, guns blazing. Once on the floor, he found Mr. Tung’s ceramic knife, grabbed it, went under the bed wishing for a gun. The twins closed in on the doorway from both sides of the room, firing until their guns were empty. Standing at the bedroom entrance, they looked out at the rest of the loft. No one shot at them. They dropped their weapons and rushed to Max.

  In the sudden quiet, Max counted the seconds he had lost to dream, the moments the gun battle had taken. The twins helped him out, tried to get him to stand. But he fell back onto the bed soaked with blood and fire extinguishing spray, betrayed again by a body responding not to his will but to the needs of his child. He looked to the ruined surveillance equipment above the doorway and wondered what the observers on the other end had made of what had happened. He threw the knife at the remains of the pod. It clattered uselessly against a lens housing and fell to the floor. Then the accumulated seconds and moments crashed over him and he gave up his concerns to the twins as dream claimed him.

  In this dream, the infant was human. It was hot, and though it suckled at his breast Max felt the heat of its body against his thigh. It gnawed at his teat, sucked the milk of life from him. Drained him, left him a shell of brittle skin. Dragged his soul down, down to the sea, the raging sea …

  Floating in the water, rolling up and down with the steady swell of waves, salt taste in his mouth, Max suddenly panicked, flailed and splashed, sank, blubbering and choking, crying out for the Beast, reaching for the rock island of rationality that had somehow slipped away, until Alioune said, “Stop struggling. We have enough to contend with.”

  He came out of the dream spitting blood, his wounded thigh throbbing under the field dressing. Kueur and Alioune were carrying him, by the knees and shoulders, out of the ruined bedroom to the wreckage of living room. His belly lay like a mountain across his body. Tremors passed through the baby it sheltered, and in the aftershock blades of pain carved his spine into slivers of agony. He cried out. His voice sounded small and frail in the silence.

  The twins brought him out to the couch, laid him out on the cushions, threw blankets over him. Glass crunched underfoot as they walked back and forth, dragging bodies, tossing guns into a pile, clearing broken furniture. He dragged himself up to look out the window. The world was dark beyond the glass, and he wondered how much time had passed since he learned of his pregnancy—a day, a week, a month? Disoriented, he started to ask the twins. Then the darkness flooded through the window and engulfed him.

  Storm winds whipped him, walls of water pummeled him, as the storm continued unabated in the world of dream. He turned to the shadow figure and asked, “How long?”

  Muscles he never knew existed squeezed, pinched, contracted in his lower abdomen and groin. Soon water seemed to hiss as it shot through gaps and crevices in the rock.

  “… the hell happened—”

  “If we needed a critic, we would’ve called the Times, Dr. Plummer.”

  “I’m surprised the neighbors didn’t call in a SWAT team, judging by these bullet holes.”

  “Our neighbors are discreet. They have done worse. Just check him, Doctor.”

  “No artery hit, some muscle tissue loss. Good field dressing—Who was it, you or Alioune? Nice job. Although he won’t be running anytime …”

  “The baby?”

  “Fine, as far as I can tell. Due, judging by the timing of his moans. Listen …

  “There are arrangements to make….”

  “And your wounds?”

  “We will handle them ourselves.”

  “I suppose you expect me to deliver—”

  “Do not worry, Doctor. Others are coming for that. Just make sure he’s stable.”

  “And who’s going to stabilize his surroundings?”

  “Not you, Dr. Plummer….”

  “The girl? These dead men? The hospital equipment? This is New York City. Don’t you think questions are going to be—”

  “Let us handle the questions, Dr. Plummer. Vans are on the way to cart out the bodies. There is a… market for such things. The mambo knew the risks, and reparations will be made to her people. As for the equipment, you’re going to have to bring in whatever’s necessary for our Tonton’s survival.”

  “But that’s outrageous….”

  “No, Doctor. But what we will do to you if you do not cooperate will be.”

  The air smelled of cordite and burnt plastic and ozone and opened guts and sweat and perfume. Max opened his eyes. Daylight filled the room, though the long shadows told him it was dusk again. He tried to remember the last dawn he had seen, and could not. He tried to recall why his thigh was bandaged, and did not want to.

  The shadows moved. Low voices, heavy breathing, the grunts of heavy labor followed the shadows, which in turn lay at the feet of men in coveralls with a moving company’s logo and name—Absolute Transport—on their back. A thin, bald man with glasses and an electronic clip-board stood by the loft’s entry alcove speaking with Alioune.

  “Our blood of killers is honored to perform this service, mistress.”

  “Did you check the walk-in freezer and pantry?”

  “Of course, mis—”

  Alioune slapped him, knocking his glasses off and sending him staggering backward a step.

  The man fumbled with the clipboard, picked up his glasses, went back to Alioune, got down on his knees, and bowed his head. The movers glanced hungrily in their direction as they wheeled out plastic wardrobe boxes marked “Couture” and bins filled with a jumble of electronics parts and furniture.

  A contraction seized Max, and he cried out, putting his hands over his belly in a protective gesture. The baby within kicked. The Beast, still hanging on to the island that was its shared reality with Max, barked a faint protest, then returned its attention to the tableau of Alioune standing over the moving man with her hands on her hips, one brown leg protruding from the slitted white silk and red embroidered dress she wore. IV tubes and wires connecting Max to a new set of monitors stacked beside the couch swung and rattled as he shifted on the couch trying to make himself more comfortable.

  “Tonton,” Kueur said, descending on the couch, brushing her hand across Max’s forehead. “It’s almost over. Mrs. Chan and the others are on their way. Dex is ready in the Box. We have him on the brink of releasing his soul, which we’ve purified and distilled. Hang on, Tonton B`eb`ete. We’ve worked so hard for you, for the baby. Just a little while longer.”

  Alioune glanced at Max and her stern expression softened. To Max, they both looked as if they had not rested since his ordeal started. Their wounds were bound with bandages stained by old blood.

  “Those look like bad hits,” he said, gazing pointedly at their dressings.

  “If we were mortal,” said Kueur. “The
y’ll heal themselves, though the process will take a little time, and our strength.”

  “I didn’t realize …”

  Alioune’s stern expression returned. “What did you expect? We were taking fire in an armored room. We might as well have been in a tank with a live grenade. Maybe next time you had better rethink your security precautions.”

  “Thank you, my loves,” he said, shame, worry, and joy mixing with an equal measure of anger over their injuries. He traced a line from the corner of Kueur’s eye, over her cheek, to her lips, with his thick forefinger while looking to Alioune and smiling. He hoped the touch and the smile were both gentle, and harbored none of the pain or savage rage he was holding inside himself.

  “Be careful how you address me,” Alioune said, returning her attention to the man kneeling before her.

  He whimpered, put his face to the floor, and kissed the brocade on her white satin slippers. “Forgive me, mistress. I was intoxicated by your presence, and the killings, and the honor of performing a service for you and your sister. I forgot myself. Please, on behalf of the blood, I place myself at your mercy.”

  A pair of movers carrying plastic trash bags paused behind Alioune, tongues rapidly darting over lips, eyes squinting as if to filter out extraneous stimuli and allow only particular details to penetrate and fertilize their imaginations.

  “Some other time,” Alioune said, crossing her arms. “Be done quickly. We have other matters to attend to.”

  “Your pleasure,” the man said and scrambled away, hissing and snapping at the movers, who flinched and gritted their teeth and picked up their pace with quiet, manic efficiency.

  “The angel,” Max said, trying to hold on to Kueur’s arm as she stood and went to the walk-in closet near the entry alcove. Her cool, soft skin slid against his bloated fingers.