The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Dark Terrors 05]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  Suko touched one of the beer cans. It was icy cold.

  Something inside the cake server was moving. He could just make out its faint shadowy convulsions through the opaque plastic.

  Suko slammed the door and stumbled away. Justin was just coming back in. He gripped Suko’s arms, stared into his face. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing -I—’

  ‘Did you open the fridge?’

  ‘No!’

  Justin shook him. The strange lilac eyes had gone muddy, the handsome features twisted into a mean mask. ‘Did you open the fucking fridge}’ Suko felt droplets of spit land on his face, his lips. He wished miserably that they could have got there some other way, any way but this. He had wanted to make love with this man.

  ‘Did you—’

  ‘No!!!’

  Suko thought he might cry. At the same time he had begun to feel remote, far away from the ugly scene, as if he were floating in a corner watching it but not caring much what happened. It must be the rum. But it wasn’t like being drunk; that was a familiar feeling. This was more like the time Noy had convinced him to take two Valiums. An hour after swallowing the little yellow wafers, Suko had watched Noy suck him off from a million miles away, wondering why anyone ever got excited about this, why anyone ever got excited about anything.

  He had hated the feeling then. He hated it more now, because it was pulling him down.

  He was afraid it might be the last thing he ever felt.

  He was afraid it might not be.

  * * * *

  Justin half-dragged, half-carried Suko into the bedroom and dumped him on the mattress. He felt the boy’s delicate ivory bones shifting under his hands, the boy’s exquisite mass of organs pressing against his groin. He wanted to unzip that sweet sack of skin right now, sink his teeth into that beating, bleeding heart. . . but no. He had other plans for this one.

  He’d closed the door to the adjacent bathroom in case he brought the boy in here still conscious. Most of a body was soaking in a tub full of icewater and Clorox. Suko wouldn’t have needed to see that. Justin almost opened the door for the extra light, but decided not to. He didn’t want to leave the bedside even for a second.

  His supplies were ready on the nightstand. Justin plugged the drill’s power cord into the socket behind the bed, gently thumbed up one of Suko’s make-up-smudged eyelids and examined the silvery sclera. The sleeping pills had worked fine, as always. He ground them up and put them in a glass before he left. That way, when he brought home company, Justin could simply pour him a drink in the special glass.

  He used the scissors to slice off Suko’s shirt, which was so artfully ripped up that Justin hardly had to damage it further to remove it. He cut away the beads and amulets, saving the tiny wooden penis, which had caught his eye back at the Stag. His own penis ached and burned. He pressed his ear against the narrow chest, heard the lungs pull in a deep slow breath, then release it just as easily. He heard blood moving unhurried through arteries and veins, heard a secret stomach sound from down below. Justin could listen to a boy’s chest and stomach all night, but reluctantly he took his ear away.

  He crawled on to the bed, positioned Suko’s head in his lap, and hefted the drill, which was heavier than he remembered. He hoped he would be able to control how far the bit went in. A fraction of an inch too deep into the brain could ruin everything. It was only the frontal lobes he wanted to penetrate, the cradle of free will.

  Justin parted the boy’s thick black hair and placed the diamond-tipped bit against the centre of the pale, faintly shiny scalp. He took a deep breath, bit his lip, and squeezed the trigger. When he took the drill away, there was a tiny, perfect black hole near the crown of the boy’s head.

  He picked up the syringe, slid the needle in and forward, towards the forehead. He felt a tiny resistance, as if the needle was passing through a hair-thin elastic membrane. He pushed the plunger and flooded the boy’s brain with chlorine bleach.

  Three things happened at once.

  Suko’s eyes fluttered open.

  Justin had an explosive orgasm in his pants.

  Something heavy thudded against the bathroom door.

  * * * *

  Suko saw the blond man’s face upside down, the lilac eyes like little slices of moon, the mouth a reverse smile or grimace. A whining buzz filled his skull, seemed to jar the very plates of his skull, as if hornets had built a nest inside his brain. A dull ache spread spiderlike over the top of his head.

  He smelled roses, though he had seen none in the room. He smelled wood shavings, the sharp stink of shit, the perfume of ripe oranges. Each of these scents was gone as quickly as it had come. Lingering was a burnt metallic flavour, a little like the taste that had lingered in his mouth the time he’d had a tooth filled in Bangkok.

  Shavings. Roses. Cut grass. Sour milk. And underneath it all, the smell of rotting flesh.

  Suko’s field of vision went solid screaming chartreuse, then danger red. Now Justin was back, a negative of himself, hair green, face inky purple, eyes white circles with pinholes at their centres like tiny imploding suns. And suddenly something else was in the frame as well. Something all black, with holes where no holes should be. A face swollen and torn, a face that could not be alive, but whose jaw was moving.

  A hand missing most of its fingers closed on the back of Justin’s hair and yanked. A drooling purple mouth closed on Justin’s pale throat and tore away a chunk.

  Suko managed to sit up. His vision spun and yawed. The reek of rot was dizzying, and overlaying it was a new stinging smell, a chemical smell he could not identify. Something salty ran into his eyes. He touched his face, and his fingers came away slicked with a thin clear substance.

  The thing wrapped skeletal arms around Justin and pulled him off the bed. They rolled on the floor together, Justin’s blood fountaining out of his throat, the thing grunting and lapping at it. Ragged flesh trailed from its mouth.

  Justin wasn’t screaming, Suko realized.

  He was smiling.

  * * * *

  It was the boy from the bathtub. Justin couldn’t see his face, but he could smell the Clorox, raw and fresh. He had carved a great deal of flesh off of this one, as well as removing the viscera. But he had not yet cut off the head. Now it was snuggled under his chin, tongue burrowing like a worm into his wounded throat. He felt the teeth tearing at him, chunks of his skin and muscle disappearing down the boy’s gullet. He felt one of the bones in his neck crack and splinter.

  The pain was as shocking as an orgasm, but cleaner. The joy was like nothing he had known before, not when he watched his mother die, not when he tasted the flesh of another person for the first time. It had worked. Not only was the Asian boy still alive, but the others had come back as well. They had never left Justin at all. They had only been waiting.

  He got his arms around the hollow body, pulled it closer. He cupped the cold rubbery buttocks, entwined his legs with the thrusting bones of its thighs. When its jaws released his throat, he pressed his face against the voracious swollen one, pushed his tongue between the blackened lips and felt the teeth rip it out. His mouth filled with blood and rot. He swallowed, gagged, swallowed again.

  A head rolled out from under the bed, pushing itself by frantic motions of jaw and tongue. The severed ends of the neck muscles twitched, trying to help it along. Its nose and left eyebrow were pierced with silver rings, its empty eyesockets crusted with blood and greasy black make-up. It reached Justin and bit deep into one of his thighs. He kicked once, in surprise, then bent his leg so that the teeth could more easily get at the soft muscle of his groin. He felt his flesh peeling away.

  The upper half of a body was pulling itself out of the closet. Its black-lacquered nails dug into the carpet. Ropes of intestine trailed behind it, coming apart, leaving a trail of shit and ichor on the rug. This one had been, possibly, a Mexican boy. Now its skin was the colour of decaying eggplant, and very few teeth were left in its gaping mouth. Dimly Justin remem
bered extracting them with a pair of pliers after the rigor mortis had slackened.

  It tore Justin’s belly open with its hands and sank its face into his guts. He arched his back, felt its fingers plunging I deep, its mouth lapping at the very core of him.

  The small pleasures of his life - reading, listening to the music of another time, choking the life out of boys and playing with their abandoned shells - were nothing compared to this. He wanted it to go on for ever.

  But, eventually, he died.

  The corpse from the bathtub chewed at Justin’s throat and chest. Half-chewed pieces of Justin slid down its gullet, into the great scooped-out hollow of its abdomen, out on to the floor. The corpse from the closet sucked up the liquor and partly digested meat it found in Justin’s stomach.

  The head bit into Justin’s scrotum and gulped the savoury mass of the testicles like a pair of tender oysters.

  They seemed to know when to stop feeding, to refrain from pulling him completely apart, to leave enough of him. When he came back, Justin knew exactly what to do.

  After all, he had been doing it long before most of the others.

  * * * *

  Suko stumbled out of the bedroom and slammed the door behind him. Something was rolling around and around in the refrigerator, banging against the inside of the door. He almost went over to open it, only caught himself at the last second. He wasn’t thinking very clearly. His head felt wrong somehow, his brain caught in a downward spiral. He did not understand what he had just seen. But he knew he had to get out of the apartment.

  No problem, a voice yammered in his head. Stay cool. Chill out. Don’t have a cow, man. He barely knew the meaning of the words. The American voice seemed to be receding down a long black tunnel; already it was so tiny and faint he could hardly hear it. He realized he was thinking in Thai for the first time in years. Even his native language was strange, a flurry of quick sharp syllables like little whirling razorblades slicing into the meat of his brain.

  He fumbled with the complicated series of locks, yanked the door open and nearly fell into the hall. How had he entered the building? . . . Up a metal staircase, through a door at the end of the long dark hall. He reached it and let himself out. The hot October night seared his lungs. He could smell every poisonous particle of exhaust blanketing the city, every atom of shit and filth and blood baked on to the streets. Not like the ripe wet kiss of Bangkok, but so arid, so mercilessly dry. He felt his way down the fire escape and around the corner of the building.

  The empty street seemed a mile wide. There was no sidewalk, only a steep curb and a long grey boulevard stretching away towards some other part of the city. There were no cars; he could hear no traffic anywhere. Even with his head feeling so strange, Suko knew something was wrong. LA streets were often empty of people, but always there were cars.

  Far away at the next intersection, he made out a small group of figures straggling in his direction, bathed in a traffic light’s red glow. For a long moment he watched them come, trying to be sure they were really there, wondering what he should do. Then he started towards them. The blond man had done something awful to his head; he needed help. Maybe the figures would be able to help him.

  But when he got closer, he saw that they were like the things he had seen in the bedroom. One had a long fatty slash wound across its bare torso. One had been gouged in the face with something jagged; its nose was cleaved in half and an eyeball hung out of the socket, leaking yolky fluid. One had no wounds, but looked as if it had starved to death; its nude body was all bone-ends and wasted hollows, its genitals shrivelled into the pelvic cavity, its blue-white skin covered with huge black and purple lesions.

  When they saw him, the things opened their mouths and widened their nostrils, catching his scent. It was too late to get away. He couldn’t run, didn’t think he would even be able to stand up much longer. He stumbled forward and gave himself to them.

  The little group closed around Suko, keeping him on his feet, supporting him as best they could. Gouged Eyeball caught him and steadied him. Slash Wound mouthed his shoulder as if in comfort, but did not bite. Lesions nudged him, urged him on. Suko realized they were herding him. They recognized him as one of their own, separated from the flock somehow. They were welcoming him back in.

  Miserably, Suko wondered what would happen when they met someone alive.

  Then the hunger flared in his belly, and he knew.

  * * * *

  Poppy Z. Brite has worked as an artist’s model, a mouse caretaker, a stripper and, since 1991, a full-time writer. Her three novels are Lost Souls, Drawing Blood and Exquisite Corpse. Short stories and articles have been published in numerous markets, including Rage, Swamp, The Village Voice, Revelations (aka Millennium) and The Best New Horror series. She is the editor of the vampire anthologies Love In Vein and Love in Vein II and her major biography, Courtney Love: The Real Story, was recently published. ‘The greatest horror of “Self-Made Man”,’ reveals the author, ‘is that it was written for Book of the Dead 3, an anthology that went through a series of delays, scandals, intrigues and near-lawsuits before sinking under the weight of editorial and publishing idiocy. As for the story itself, it was written when I was midway through my novel Exquisite Corpse, and I just had to get some of the Jeffrey Dahmer-mania out of my system before I could go on. Readers have said my characters in the novel are too influenced by Dahmer -wait ‘til they get a load of this baby.’

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  * * * *

  The Price

  Neil Gaiman

  Tramps and vagabonds have marks they make on gateposts and trees and doors, letting others of their kind know a little about the people who live at the houses and farms they pass on their travels. I think cats must leave similar signs; how else to explain the cats who turn up at our door through the year, hungry and flea-ridden and abandoned?

  We take them in. We get rid of the fleas and the ticks, feed them and take them to the vet. We pay for them to get their shots, and, indignity upon indignity, we have them neutered or spayed.

  And they stay with us, for a few months, or for a year, or for ever.

  Most of them arrive in summer. We live in the country, just the right distance out of town for the city-dwellers to abandon their cats near us.

  We never seem to have more than eight cats, rarely have less than three. The cat population of my house is currently as follows: Hermione and Pod, tabby and black respectively, the mad sisters who live in my attic office, and do not mingle; Princess, the blue-eyed long-haired white cat, who lived wild in the woods for years before she gave up her wild ways for soft sofas and beds; and, last but largest, Furball, Princess’s cushion-like calico long-haired daughter, orange and black and white, whom I discovered as a tiny kitten in our garage one day, strangled and almost dead, her head poked through an old badminton net, and who surprised us all by not dying but instead growing up to be the best-natured cat I have ever encountered.

  And then there is the black cat. Who has no other name than the Black Cat, and who turned up almost a month ago. We did not realize he was going to be living here at first: he looked too well-fed to be a stray, too old and jaunty to have been abandoned. He looked like a small panther, and he moved like a patch of night.

  One day, in the summer, he was lurking about our ramshackle porch: eight or nine years old, at a guess, male, greenish-yellow of eye, very friendly, quite unperturbable. I assumed he belonged to a neighbouring farmer or household.

  I went away for a few weeks, to finish writing a book, and when I came home he was still on our porch, living in an old cat-bed one of the children had found for him. He was, however, almost unrecognizable. Patches of fur had gone, and there were deep scratches on his grey skin. The tip of one ear was chewed away. There was a gash beneath one eye, a slice gone from one lip. He looked tired and thin.

  We took the Black Cat to the vet, where we got him some antibiotics, which we fed him each night, along with soft cat food.

 
We wondered who he was fighting. Princess, our white, beautiful, near-feral queen? Raccoons? A rat-tailed, fanged possum?

  Each night the scratches would be worse - one night his side would be chewed-up; the next, it would be his underbelly, raked with claw marks and bloody to the touch.

  When it got to that point, I took him down to the basement to recover, beside the furnace and the piles of boxes. He was surprisingly heavy, the Black Cat, and I picked him up and carried him down there, with a cat-basket, and a litter bin, and some food and water. I closed the door behind me. I had to wash the blood from my hands when I left the basement.

  He stayed down there for four days. At first he seemed too weak to feed himself: a cut beneath one socket had rendered him almost one-eyed, and he limped and lolled weakly, thick yellow pus oozing from the cut in his lip.