Original Tales of Terror and the Macabre by the World's Greatest Horror Writers

by Del Howison

  How did I know this was the biped graveyard? Because every plot was well tended and marked with unmistakable, stylized pictures of manlikes drawn on papery bark, that’s how. And one of the graves—a mound without the weird plants—was brand-new and the soil still wet!

  I would have left at once but the strangest thing happened. One of the fattest of several asparagus stems on an older grave had started quivering, and the leaves or petals on the big bulb at its tip were peeling back on themselves and leaking a gluey liquid. Not only that, but something was wriggling in there—something pink!

  That was enough. I got the hell out of there.

  Luck was with me; I got back to the clearing and my habitat without encountering any more Pinks, and Friday was waiting for me with a big bunch of those purple carrots. This time, though, I haven’t accepted them. Actually, I’ve only just realized that I’ve been feeling a little sick and dizzy ever since breakfast.

  DAY FOURTEEN (I THINK … OR MAYBE FIFTEEN?):

  God, I’m not at all well. And what happened this morning hasn’t much helped the way I feel.

  I was dreaming. I was with this woman and it was just about to turn into a wetty. We were in bed and I was groping her: one hand on her backside, the other on her breasts, while the, er, best of me searched for the way in; but damned if I could find it! And even for a guy who has spent most of his time in space, that wasn’t at all like me. I mean, it simply wasn’t there! But anyway, as I went to kiss her, she breathed on me, causing me to recoil from her strange, sweet breath—and likewise from the dream.

  I woke up—came startling awake—and saw these big limpid, alien eyes staring straight into mine! It was Friday, under the sheet with me, and both of us were sweaty as hell!

  What the screaming fuck? He (shit, maybe I should have been calling Friday “she” all this time!) was holding my face in its wet, three-fingered hands, its body trembling with some kind of weird passion. I jerked back, kicked it out of there, and was on my feet before it could get up from the dirt floor. But finally it did, and there it stood in a padded bra, frilly panties, and a lacy chemise that could only have belonged to Emma Schneider. And I knew it was so because Friday’s mouth was a ghastly crimson gash that was thickly layered with the Albert E.’s ex-exobiologist’s fucking hideous lip gloss!

  Jesus H. Christ!

  And out he, she, it went; out of my habitat, out beyond the defensive security perimeter, and out of what’s left of my life in this fucking place for good. And I hurled the February 2196 issue of Lewd Lustin’ Lovers it had left lying open on my folding card table right out there into the clearing after it! But even after I’d washed myself top to toe, still I felt like I’d been dipped in dog dirt, and here it is noon and I still do….

  LATER (MIDAFTERNOON):

  I went down to where a stream joins the ocean to swim in a pool there. I’m still not a hundred percent, crapping like a volcano blowing off, and throwing up purple, but at least my skin feels clean again.

  When I was in the water, I thought I saw Friday lurking near the rocks where I left my pants, socks, and shoes, but he wasn’t there when I came out and dried off. Back in the habitat when I went to switch on the perimeter, I couldn’t find my remote … I could have sworn it was in my pants pocket. And that’s not all; the perimeter’s wiring had been yanked out of the generator’s connection box. It’s not impossible that Friday did it accidentally when I tossed him out of bed, but it’s also possible he’s been in here sabotaging stuff. When I’m felling better I’ll fix things up again, try to knock together a new remote.

  But that’s for when I’m feeling better. Right now I’m feeling lousy, so I’m going to have to get my head down … rest and recuperation, Jim lad.

  LATER (EARLY EVENING):

  Went back to the old Albert E. I was going to climb the ladder, go looking for tools, electrical gear, and like that. No way, I was too weak. Made four rungs and had to come down again before I fell.

  Down there under the ship’s crumpled hull, it suddenly occurred to me maybe I should pay my respects to the crew, which I haven’t been doing for a while now. And what do you know, these slimy shoots were gradually uncoiling, standing up out of their graves.

  Dizzy and staggering about like I was falling-down drunk, I went to kick the things flat, crush, destroy, and … and murder them? But a bunch of bipeds got hold of me, guiding and half-carrying me back to my habitat.

  I thought I saw Friday standing there, just watching all of this—the little pink fairy! But hell, it could have been any one of them. No, I reckon it was him. And now I can’t help wondering if maybe he’s poisoned me—and if so, was it deliberate?

  My temperature’s way up … I’m sweaty and dizzy as all get-out … puking all over the place but bringing nothing up. What the hell? Is this the end of it?

  * * *

  Don’t know what day it is, but it feels like morning.

  They’ve carried me out into the clearing, and I think it’s Friday who’s cradling my head. He doesn’t seem to mind me talking to my personal log. He’s seen me do it often enough before; probably thinks it’s some kind of ritual, which in a way it is or has become. Well, and we all have our rituals—right, Jim lad?

  I’m no longer sweating; in fact I feel sort of dry, almost brittle. But my mind is very clear now, and I think I’ve figured it out. Something of it, anyway. It’s that thing called evolution. If I was an exobiologist like Emma Schneider, I might have worked it out earlier; but no, I’m just a grease monkey.

  Evolution, yes. We human beings became the Earth’s dominant species by evolving. We walked upon the dirt—the earth under our feet, terra firma—but wanted a whole lot more. What about the winds above the earth, and the vast waters that flowed over it? So we made machines, vessels to sail on the seas and in the skies; finally we even built spaceships, to journey beyond the skies. So you might say that in a way we achieved our dominance mechanically: that old opposing-thumb-theory-thing.

  Well, the Pinks are also becoming dominant, on their world as we did on Earth. Except so far, with them, it’s all biological. For the time being, they don’t have much need for machines; they’re conquering the skies, seas, and forests without mechanical devices, by utilizing and changing the DNA of the various species that live in those environments and then by inhabiting them themselves.

  On Earth we took out the predators, who were our competitors, by killing them off. Well, the Pinks are doing it, too—except they are doing it by becoming them! It explains why the vultures stay way high in the sky and why the black hogs stick mainly to the deeper woods—because having evolved alongside the Pinks, they’re learning to keep their distance. As I should have kept mine …

  * * *

  I must have passed out but now I’m back. Probably for the last time, Jim lad.

  Friday is still cradling my head, but his sweating has become something else. The Pinks are unisexual, I’m pretty sure of that now. I can’t any longer feel my body, my limbs … can only just speak or whisper, and I’m able to turn my head a few inches, but that’s all. My eyes are still working, however, and from time to time as Friday relaxes his efforts (fuck it, I’ve gone and made him a “he” again!) I can see it’s his time. What time? Well, see, he’s not sweating anymore, he’s ovulating!

  I see these silvery droplets with their tadpole cores issuing drip by drip from beneath the steeply arched nails on his central digits, his ovipositors. And now he sticks his fingers deeply into my neck. I can barely feel it, for which I’m truly, truly glad, Jim lad.

  Who knows, maybe me and my old Albert E. shipmates—or I should say our pink descendants somewhere down the line—maybe they’ll get back out into space again. Because it surely has to follow that whatever issues from us will be a lot more manlike than these manlikes.

  And that, I think, is all for now, probably forever. Uh-oh! Maybe we should make that definitely forever, because here come the musicians….

  OUT TWELVE-STEPPING’, SUMMER
OF AA

  (with apologies to Joe Lansdale hisownself)

  NANCY HOLDER

  THERE WERE SEVERAL times when the cliffhanger fade-to-blacks of the Chronicles of the Cannibal Cats seemed to indicate that Dwight, having secretly nursed innumerable resentments against Angelo, who was hipper, handsomer, and richer—initially, at least—would devour Angelo, thus freeing himself from his homoerotic codependence on his blood brother, and become his own person.

  Alas.

  When they had first arrived in Los Angeles, young and hopeful glam rockers, Dwight hadn’t even been capable of dreaming of the fame and fortune that would befall them. Mansions, cars, chicks. They went platinum with each new offering, then double platinum. The movies they were in set new records.

  The universe had blessed Angelo and him overly much, and who could say where the credit really lay? Dwight knew they were a team; he knew that he added something to the mix. He just wasn’t sure what it was. So he let Angelo live.

  At least, that was what he told himself. On other days, long ones, and longer nights, he knew that he loved Angelo and couldn’t imagine life without him. Not that they were gay. They had never done anything like that, but Angelo had fed Dwight his little toe when, in his deep depression, he had stopped eating. In the old days, before all the metrosexual stuff, men could be close without people misunderstanding what it was all about.

  So, the money was mind-bending and the fame was mind-blowing, except that success loaded a lot of pressure onto their cannibal lifestyle. Devouring people—okay, women, call them misogynistic for preferring the taste of women over that of men, maybe it was estrogen or some kind of fat content—was a lot harder to get away with when reporters routinely went through your trash.

  Because sometimes your trash contained mandibles and patellas and stuff. They were always careful, but there was always a lot to clean up. Eating people wasn’t like some chichi coke habit, for God’s sake. You couldn’t just flush your leftovers down the toilet.

  “We have to stop,” Angelo announced one night, after a tasty treat of a couple of untraceable groupies.

  Dwight was completely caught off guard. Angelo’s timing was majorly bizarre, because the night was beyond perfect. The girls were nobodies—the safest of victims—and they had succumbed to the drugs in their drinks very quickly. The boys had plenty of time—these were not girls who were going to be missed—so they washed them and dried them and told them good-bye in their own special ways. Slow heartbeat, clean, sweet flesh; it didn’t get much better than that. Dwight had been weeping with contentment; being an artist, he was emotional. A therapist he’d seen at a few parties—he would never dare to actually see a therapist—had once told him that she thought people in the arts were defended deep feelers. Dwight liked the ring of that. He was a defended deep feeler.

  So after devouring his girl, he had wept without shame.

  His tears dried as Angelo sat cross-legged on the water bed beside him. Angelo had just showered and was wearing a fluffy white bathrobe. Though he was in his mid-fifties, Angelo Leone still had the goods. The chiseled jaw, the high cheekbones—though plastic surgeons maintained it, he had come by his sculptured profile naturally. Dwight Jones, not so much. Dwight was wearing a kimono one of their groupies had given him long ago. His bright red hair was brightened chemically. His blue eyes had faded. He was getting a tummy. He was starting to have boy boobs. Dr. Cohen was warning him that really, the best way to keep the liposuction and the Botox going was to get enough sleep and exercise. Dwight knew he should listen. This was the same guy who had surgically implanted stubs on his and Angelo’s matching missing pinkie tips.

  Angelo continued, “We need the best kind of help to help us stop.” He looked hard at Dwight, whose mouth was hanging open while his tears dripped down the end of his nose. “You know I’m right, Dwight. This is going to catch up with us. Already has.”

  Dwight couldn’t quite hear his heartbeat. He couldn’t hear anything. Then the sound came back in slowly.

  “… give it a shot,” Angelo said. “We’ve talked about quitting before, but we’ve never done it.”

  They talked about quitting, yes, they did. They talked about quitting. Usually when they had almost gotten caught. Once the danger died down, that conversation went away.

  “We have to at least try,” Angelo insisted. “That’s all I ask.” He reached out a hand. “If I don’t quit, I’m going to die.”

  Dwight sighed at the drama, knowing he was already defeated. Whatever Angelo wanted, Dwight gave to him.

  It was their way.

  “Drinking is just a metaphor,” Angelo reminded Dwight, as they stepped onto the grounds of the United Methodist Church on Franklin in Los Angeles. They had dressed carefully for the occasion, Angelo in a black sweater and black leather pants, Dwight in, well, a black sweater and black leather pants, too. It was pretty much all they wore; except that when it was warm, they switched to black T-shirts. They had to dress like that. They were rock stars.

  It was very early in the morning. Hollywood was not a late-night town, which was problematic for music people unless they were of the caliber of the Cannibal Cats, who made their own fun at private parties in private clubs. Sleepy pepper trees shaded bubbly, lead-lined glass windows like the Tiffany windows of Oyster Bay at the Met in New York. Dwight had never actually seen the Tiffany windows—that would be so gay—but a prop guy he knew had made copies of them for Thunderstorm, their first movie, and was very proud of showing them off.

  A huge red AIDS ribbon was plastered against the bell tower, which assured Dwight and Angelo that although their destination was a traditional Christian edifice, the people who were running it were liberals. Dwight liked the tricked-out monastery look: The courtyard was quaint, with privet hedges and a fountain that trickled merrily, liquid nickel against a pewter sky. The church had been used as a location in many films including Sister Act II. A location manager would have to be blind to overlook it, set in the heart of Hollywood as it was.

  Dwight was going soundless with anxiety again. His palms were wet. He shivered with goose bumps. He did not want to run into any of their fans. Anonymity be damned; you were gonna tell people if you ran into the Cannibal Cats at an AA meeting. He fretted about that as his boots clomped down concrete steps toward the basement. He felt them, couldn’t hear them.

  He fretted about going deaf. He fretted about going inside a basement. There weren’t that many in L.A., because of the earthquakes. He and Angelo had been in L.A. during the Northridge quake of ’94 —not in a basement, but in the Capitol Records building—and it had been terrifying. It was like that disaster movie; like a dozen movies. A chick they knew had watched her stove fly across the room and land upside down. Then her chimney collapsed. She moved to Florida.

  Some people just have bad luck.

  But here they were, staring into the basement, and Dwight couldn’t hear a fucking thing. They stood together framed by double doors that opened into a large room bathed with gray light from a bank of more leaded glass windows. Dwight briefly pondered if he should have been a cinematographer, he was so interested in light.

  There were folks seated away from him in rows of metal folding chairs facing a podium. Wow, the guy at the podium was something else: bald with one earring; really dark eyebrows and eyelashes, framing iridescent blue eyes. They were so blue he looked like some kind of exotic bird. His had never been so blue. Contacts, Dwight surmised. He wore a black T-shirt and he was cut.

  He took one look at the Cannibal Cats, and he lost track of what he was saying.

  That was okay, because Dwight couldn’t hear him anyway.

  The smell of coffee and cream cheese—scents of a million dressing rooms on the road—wafted toward Dwight, who looked to see where the food was. He saw some silver trays on a trio of wood-topped card tables. Bagels and orange slices. Coffee urns like in the churches back home in the Midwest. He wasn’t hungry, but he sure could use some caffeine.

&nb
sp; Podium Guy waved them in with his fingers. He looked like he was about to have an orgasm. Fifty heads or more turned in their direction, and he recognized at least eight of the attendees of this, their very first AA meeting—no, make that an even dozen attendees—four A-list actors, three directors, two producers, and three other rock stars, a couple of whom were almost as famous as the Cats, which was saying something.

  The recognized grinned conspiratorially, as if to say, No shit! You guys, too?

  Angelo murmured, “Showtime, Dwight.”

  Taking a deep breath in unison, they walked steadily toward the bank of chairs, passing movie-star flesh, film-producer flesh. The elite of Hollywood were like Kobe beef, massaged and beer-fed.

  Only not this crew. No beer. At least, not anymore.

  “It’s so cool to be in a basement,” Dwight babbled to Angelo. He was so nervous. “Not a lot of basements in town. Earthquakes.”

  “Ssh,” Angelo snapped. “He’s reading.”

  Dwight focused hard, tried to hear. Words were being very weird to him. “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable …”

  “It’s a metaphor,” Angelo reminded him.

  * * *

  The guy with the blue eyes was Bob V. People didn’t share their last names. And now Bob V. was Angelo’s sponsor.

  It was obvious to Dwight that he was kissing up to Angelo because of who Angelo was, and not because he had ten years of sobriety and “needed to give something back.” He simpered like a roadie chick, and Angelo just dug it. Angelo slung his fingers in his pockets and listened hard, took the literature, agreed to call him every day.

  “At least once,” Bob V. ordered him.