"But you haven't yet received your surprise, Blenny. You can't possibly return home with unfinished business." Blenny watched, horridly mesmerized, as she plucked hairs out of the pig-tailed doll on her lap. "It simply isn't done, you know." Pluck. "Not in polite society." Pluck. Pluck. Pluck.
The lascivious doll in the back of the bus stared glassily into space, completely motionless. Blenny stumbled toward the door. "For crying out loud!" he brayed. "This is a bad, bad place, and I'm going home right now!"
Iris stopped rocking. This time she was not smiling. She spoke quietly. "I object."
Blenny froze. An invisible force stayed him. He tried with all his might to run, but to no avail. He yelled.
Iris resumed rocking, this time furiously. "When I was a little girl, disobedience was punishable by forty whacks from a wooden ruler. We were taught to have manners, you filthy little ingrate. Manners!" She made a hawking sound, and pointed at him. "And you, you spoiled creature, you have the presence of mind to be an ungrateful guest!"
Blenny was wailing now. "Leave me alone, for crying out loud!" He tried to shake free of his invisible bonds, but couldn’t. "I'm getting out of here!"
"Did Cyrus not inform you of your surprise, Blenny?"
He blubbered.
Iris stopped rocking.
"Blenny."
Blenny felt himself walking backwards, being pulled inexorably toward the mottled scarecrow in the wheelchair. His will was limp. Struggling invisibly, he was pulled backward to stand before the witch.
"I can't move! I can't move!"
Iris grinned nefariously. "Did you know that one can often tell a person's age by the rings around their rectum?" she cackled. "How old am I, Blenny?"
Blenny found himself tearing mindlessly at Iris' petticoats. "S-s-s-stop, stop!" he yelled. "Help! P-Police!"
He hoisted Iris up and rolled her onto her stomach on the floor with a strength he didn't know he had. Her bones emitted an almost flatulent creak as he did so. He whimpered.
"Tie me to my wheelchair, sugarpubes!" Iris cried, cackling with horrific glee.
He lowered her bloomers and gagged as her old-lady queefstench corrupted the air. Screaming, Blenny peeled Iris' runneled butt-loaves aside, revealing a sphincter that was winking and blinking in gelatinous anticipation. The grotesque Cyclops winked at him obscenely. He filled his pants.
"No, you little nitwit!" shrieked Iris. "Turn me over the other way! Other Way!"
Blenny tried with all his might to resist, but to no avail. His will was hers.
He flipped her over. A huge puff of elderly gray muff bushed up at his face; it sprang in kinky tufts around something that looked like a hanged worm.
The surrounding dolls were now tittering like insane cicadas. In a horrible moment of insight, Blenny realized that they were the source of the humming he'd heard in the village.
Iris lifted her petticoats higher. Her breasts oozed over the sides of her ribcage. An oozing, gaping stoma smiled out at him from her chest. It pulsed and throbbed, opening its lips wide to receive.
Iris screamed "You little bastard! Listen here!"
Blenny felt another contraction-like, invisible pull—the strongest yet. Shouting and bawling, he unzipped his corduroys and plunged his manbit into the scabrous stoma.
Ruptured pustules bled burning sputum into his urethra. Blenny heaved, and then vomited hard. The afternoon's half-digested corndogs ran down Iris' back.
She grunted like a farm hog in heat. The stoma held an iron grip on Blenny's member, gulping him in further as he beat at Iris' face with his free hand. Fragile bones crunched beneath rotted pumpkin skin, yet Iris' invisible hold on him was relentless.
Suddenly, Blenny felt a shocking coldness around his disappearing member. He looked down. Incredibly, the stoma had expanded to reveal a set of metallic jaws yawning around his shaft. Before he could scream, the jaws grinned wide, expanded, and snapped shut around him.
"Uuuuhhhh!"
The windows were spackled crimson. Limb by limb, the poor Down syndrome man's body was chewed into the vortex of the glittering stomatic bear trap. Bone, gristle, and orange cotton fibers flew. The dolls were gone; in their place sat tiny skeletons chattering madly in the bus seats.
"Surprise, Blenny!" Iris keened.
When all was screamed and bled, Mrs. Iris Pubefant dragged herself back to her wheelchair and rested: her work here was done. She rocked serenely, croaking softly to
herself.
"The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round..."
***
Somewhere in a distant, obscene pocket of the universe called Bleak Street, Iris Pubefant's sphincter dilated and contracted spasmodically. Near the Route 6 bus stop, a
midnight man in dreadlocks and rags startled a passing officer with loud, unwarranted screams of laughter.
Also on Bleak Street, in a graveyard of abandoned busses lying like felled whales beneath a stand of quivering pine trees, an obese mustachioed man was dragged along in a wheelchair by a slobbering, legless black dog. In a neighboring bus, an old lady asked the nothingness where the kitty' went.
All was fine and well in this corner of the universe...at least until the next surprise.
About the Authors
John Mcnee
An unemployed journalism graduate living on the west coast of Scotland. He writes solely to distract himself from the crushing boredom.
Daniel Fabiani
A 22 year old kid from NYC with the accent to prove it! He loves all things horror and works in a hospital, witnessing horrific things and getting paid for it. He is a fanatic for cooking and romance languages and is also a wine lover. He writes existential horror and feels it is sewed to his soul. He is a self-proclaimed bookworm and is not afraid to show it.
Lucas Pederson
The undisputible Dark Lord of Earth and at this very moment he's sending his minions into children's closets, stuffing them under beds, and filling every dark shadow in every corner of every room. He will kill you if you so much as utter his name and—
—he's also the published author of over fifteen short stories in various anthologies and ezines.
He lives in Iowa with his beautiful wife and three wonderful daughters...
...or does he...?
Danny Hill
Your Tender Loving Touch was one of those fun stories that took an impossibly short short time to write. Once I had the germ of the idea the writing process took only a few hours. It was only once I'd read back the first draft that I suddenly realized just how... wrong it was, just how terribly sick and disturbed. Even my mother read it. She hasn't called for a while. I had one of those "Give yourself a little talking to" moments and resolved that no publisher's gonna touch this with an eleven foot pole.
Or will they?
Jessy Marie Roberts
Jessy Marie Roberts lives in a "haunted" house in Western Nebraska, though she grew up in Morgan Hill, California. She writes in an office where a doctor put a bullet through his brain about 100 years ago. The west basement of the house has a morbid history of people hanged from the rafters whereas the east basement was once lined with deep freezers stuffed full of dead cats stored in plastic baggies.
Shane McKenzie
He has no idea what’s going on. Who are you people? He lives in Austin, TX where he writes down what the voices tell him to, then runs and hides under his bed. The voices have published over twenty short stories in various ezines and anthologies. Their hungry for more.
Jared Donald Blair
I am twenty years old and currently in my junior year at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. My mind is constantly running off with ridiculous and fanciful ‘what ifs’, most of which usually include quite a lot of blood. So I have decided to put my imagination to work, taking these macabre scenarios as far as my words will allow. My main intention is to make my readers squirm and writhe, laughing as they go. I hope to describe brutality and gore as bot
h beautiful and surreal; and prove that the happy ending is not always the right one.
Lesley Conner
A closet serial killer, plucking victims from her imagination and eviscerating them on the page....well, when's she not too busy raising two kids (and a husband) anyway. It is this double life which has kept the authorities in Maryland (where she lives) off of her trail, for now anyway. Which victim will be her last?? For
details, visit www.lesleyconner.com.
David Bernstein
When David, A.K.A. MacabreZombie, isn’t writing horror, he can be found reading or watching it. He won the prestigious Macabre Zombie award for best horror fiction in 2009 and believes he’ll win it again in 2010. He’s been published in Blah-Blah, and the awesome Yada, Yada, Yada Magazine of bullshit. He loves chocolate ice-cream loaded with other chocolate goodies, but finds it’s like a tasty boogeyman that lurks around the corner and is always stalking him, wanting to envelope his tongue and invade his stomach. He lives in the NYC area and believes car horns should be banned while within city limits.
A.J. Brown
He was sworn to secrecy by a muse with dark hair, dark eyes and a wickedly delightfuly whip. For each accepted story he receives twenty lashes... For each rejection, well, that's where the secrecy comes in. Some of his beatings have occurred at SNM Horror Magazine, Liquid Imagination, and Static Movement among others.
Tom Olbert
I come from a great family. My dad is a physicist who emigrated to the states from eastern Poland where he served with the resistance during WWII. My mom's a great lady he met here. (She keeps us all on our toes.)
My sister Elizabeth is a fascinating individual. She marched against the Vietnam war back in the day. She's an artist whose had a number of gallery shows in New York City. She now teaches art at a college in Maine and lives on a farm with three horses, all of whom she loves dearly.
My family and I are all die-hard democrats. Me, I volunteer with local organizations hoping to advance the causes of clean energy and affordable healthcare. I'm also concerned about human rights, including a woman's right to choose. I tried to illustrate that theme in my story "Mother's Little Helper."
Nate Burleigh
Nate is the father of 3 fantastic children. He's been married for 14 wonderful years to his best friend and number one fan. Since becoming a father, the conglomerated stories in his mind have come to fruition in the form of bedtime stories, but the inner horror writer in him has reared its ugly head.
He’s only been writing prose for two years. But, he just completed his first book "Sustenance" and has had many of his short stories publish in various online magazines such as Horror Bound Magazine and SNM Horror Magazine. He also has a children’s story published at bedtime.com, (shhhhh, don’t tell anyone.)
Telling stories is something he loves to do, putting them on paper for the masses to devour—his dream. Be forewarned, he spent many nights as a child sitting on his Mother's lap watching horror movies. They may have rubbed off a little.
John Arthur Miller
John Arthur Miller, known as “JAM” to friends and fans, eviscerates his mind with anathema and borrowed nightmares from the criminally insane. This has delivered over to him over sixty publishing credits, an online magazine garnering around a thousand internet hits per day, and an abundant supply of bodies in the basement. Because he enjoys murder, he would rather promote others more than himself at his ezine, so that he remains beneath police radar. Find out more at www.Liquid-Imagination.com.
Thornton Austen
A retired political writer and avid treasure hunter, Thornton Austen lives deep in Southern Arkansas on Swamp Music farm with his wife, daughter, and an ill-tempered Basset Hound. There, Austen enjoys playing his fiddle on the front porch while contemplating the deeper mysteries of life at the end of the power line. His latest novel, Blood Knowing, will be available in April 2010 from Arkansas Traveller Publishing.
Aaron J. French
Aaron J. French lives in a deep dark hole somewhere in the American Southwest, from which he occasionally emerges to splatter his unconscious demons across various small press publications. He can be summoned at [email protected]
Eric Stoveken
Eric Stoveken is a writer of strange and unusual tales. He occasional entertains very dark thoughts. This is usually done with a blood-drenched puppet show.
Alec Cizak
Alec Cizak is a writer from Indianapolis. In his spare time, he collects roadkill off of I-65 and I-74, skins and prepares the meat and freezes it in packages he mails to starving children around the world. In a smug manner, he encourages the rest of us to be so generous.
D. Krauss
I'm an old guy, in my fifties, did shadowy things for shadowy agencies and lived to tell the tale (and not telling the tale keeps me alive). I live near DC, too near, and spend my days laughing at all the sincerity. We are just one temper tantrum away from the Dark Ages and the only real progress is in cell phone apps, each one making us a little more stupid. I am a cheerful person.
Airika Sneve
Airika Sneve is a writer and musician from Minnesota who is currently pursuing a B.A. in psychology. Readers often cite a compulsive need to shower after reading her stories, as well as Tourette’s-like symptoms and violent language regarding the fate of many of her characters. When she's not inflicting her poetically disgusting brand of “Ick-Lit” upon readers, Airika can usually be found rocking out with her band at Myspace.com/Midria.
Table of Contents
Ruthles: An Extreme Shock Horror Collection
Ruthless: An Extreme Shock Horror Collection Page 23
