The Bones of the Earth- The Complete Collection

by Scott Hale

  Beatrice disappeared within herself—a tactic that had never failed her in the past—and ran as fast as she could. The motion activated lights flickered on and off, making of the murder hall a blood-drenched blur. She looked back. The flesh fiend was down on all fours, crawling after her, blinking forward with the strobing light.

  “Hello, is there—”

  Beatrice screamed as she crashed into—the lights flickered on—a man. He was young, her age, and drenched in blood. One of his eyes was swollen shut, and the other wasn’t far behind. He had a Brooksville University sweatshirt on. He looked familiar in the way all sporty types do. She’d probably passed him in the halls, on the road. She wondered if she had known then what she was about to do now if it would’ve made a difference.

  “Oh, Christ!” he shrieked, taking hold of Beatrice’s arm. “We have to get out of here.”

  Beatrice nodded and then, with one shove of herculean might, sent him stumbling down the hall. He slipped, landed chin first; a tooth blew out of his mouth and plinked off the wall. The flesh fiend rumbled towards him, a whirling dervish of stolen skin.

  “God, please! Please!”

  The flesh fiend mounted him and proceeded to eat that which it had quickly fucked into a paste.

  As Beatrice hurtled down the hall, a geyser of stomach acids burned through her throat and mouth. Using the motion activated light, she turned down several winding tunnels, until, when its influence grew dim, she found another illuminated place.

  The doorway was a bloody slit, a stone womb with a hot, red light bleeding through. Beatrice went sideways and slid in, because at this point, why not? There were heat lamps here, too, as though the flesh fiend’s skins weren’t enough to keep it warm. But stranger still were the decorations, the cruor-smeared specks of the thing’s personality. Trashy popular novels covered the floor, while philosophical journals were stacked like cairns across the room. Along the walls reams of paper ran, crayon depictions of men and women of various races and ethnicities drawn onto them. What stood out the most, however, were the skulls. Atop a desk, beside a tipped-over wardrobe, twenty or thirty skulls sat, each one a different size and shade. Trophies, Beatrice thought. But then she saw an order to their placement and bits of flesh like straps beneath their jaws. No, not trophies. Masks.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Beatrice spoke just to hear her own voice.

  What was it? Human? She’d heard stories of serial killers and psychosis, drug-induced or otherwise. It wasn’t a boy. Beatrice wouldn’t let herself believe a child could do as it had done. That was just some degrading pet name given to it by Ødegaard. So what else? A monster? It’d fucked its way through a full-grown man without batting an eyelid. Then again, how had she reacted? An entitled sense of survival, a bit of guilt, and a spoonful of bile—that was the extent of her response. What did that make her? Why hadn’t she… if she made it out… the nightmares would find her… they deserved her… and she’d let them have…

  … Beatrice fell to her knees, the drop adding a few more bruises to each. She was done, had given everything. Her eyelids fluttered in revolt, but sleep’s army was one that could never truly be bested. She fell back on her heels, arms limp at her sides. Kneeling before the skulls, one would’ve thought she was worshiping them, and perhaps she was. The flesh fiend, man or monster, was clearly capable—was that its poetry she saw upon the desk?—and clearly, terrifyingly, important.

  Important. Whether it was a man or a monster, it didn’t matter. She’d seen the cameras fixed to the wall, and now that she was thinking about them, she caught their lenses blinking nearby. In a corner, a pile of the plastic peeping toms had been stacked high, like bodies left out as threats to future predators. Ødegaard wanted to observe the flesh fiend in its most secluded state, but the creature clearly wasn’t having any of that. But the professor clearly hadn’t given up the ghost, either. Beatrice doubted he traveled the halls this far to the fiend’s chamber just to put up surveillance, so either the thing was tranquilized on sight… or there was another way out.

  A surge of energy coruscated through Beatrice. Her legs shook as she stood. She could feel the strain across her body, the subtle strings of biological processes of which only the damned truly know. Could she really leave this place? Even if she did, she wouldn’t. Every night she’d revisit this room and maze, and every night would be worse than the day she’d spent in it. At this moment, she was dead. And she feared what would happen if she started living again.

  Beatrice took a deep breath and, out of sheer curiosity, snatched the poem from the desk. She had to focus her eyes to read it, because the words were crooked, jagged, as though the flesh fiend had meant to carve rather than write them.

  In this place,

  I found my space,

  Among those I hope to see.

  In this skin,

  I live within,

  Among those I hope to be.

  In this hell,

  I hear the knell

  Among those I hope to free.

  They will look up to me,

  And see themselves reflected,

  In the blood I’ve taken,

  And the lives I’ve rejected.

  They will look up to us,

  As we look down upon them,

  And be glad to stand in our shadows.

  It read like something between a murderer’s manifest and baby’s first bleak poem. What struck Beatrice about the piece was the arrogance of it, the entitlement. The flesh fiend ran around in the stinking bowels of the earth, skinning and fucking everything it came across, and still it viewed itself as Ødegaard’s gift to man. Perhaps it was human after all.

  “How are… going down there?”

  Beatrice’s head snapped towards the sound. She’d heard a voice, not the flesh fiend’s, but a woman’s, soft and quiet and echoing. Across the room, near a stained mattress, she caught the glint of wet skin in the red light. Moving closer, she saw that the bloody strips billowed outward, as though they were covering something.

  “He doesn’t need… You there?”

  She parted the strips of flesh and found the mouth of a chain-link box. It stopped at her hips, so she went down on all fours to have a better look inside. The wall sweated before her a few feet ahead. She plodded forward, hands sinking into piles of stinking sludge, and then craned her neck as the box opened at the top.

  “Mother fuck,” she said, unable to restrain herself.

  The metal fencing twisted upward and ran for twenty or thirty feet through the earth. At the top, a silver light sat, doing little to stop the darkness. Beatrice jumped back as the ground gurgled and sputtered. Looking down, she watched rotted run-off slip into a drain beneath her.

  “These cameras… can you see them?”

  The voice wound down the chamber, bouncing off the walls like a patient in an insane asylum. As her eyes probed the dark for signs of the speaker, she saw the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen in her entire life: a ladder.

  It stood freely, running straight up from the floor to the tunnel’s end. She was too far down to tell how it stayed in place, but by the grime on the rungs, it was obvious it saw frequent use. As quiet and careful as she could be, Beatrice went for the ladder and started to climb it. The flesh fiend had to be close by. If not, then it wouldn’t be much longer until Ødegaard and his partner realized she’d given their “boy” the slip.

  “… all a little much.”

  Beatrice looked up. Suddenly, the silver light was no longer silver and seemed to be moving closer.

  Oh fuck.

  She stopped, pressed herself into the ladder. A river of blood and sinew poured down the tunnel, drenching her body in the bodies of others. Severed fingers and toes bounced off her shoulders. She could feel teeth cracking against her head wound. If she didn’t die by cannibalism or dismemberment, then surely infection would do her in.

  The turning of a wheel, the groaning of pipes. Beatrice rubbed her eyes until she could see
again. The woman was cleaning. By the amount she’d hosed over the edge, it seemed here was where they fed it themselves, or watched it closely, like gawking mouth-breathers at a zoo.

  When the deluge was reduced to a dribble, she started up the ladder again. Red eyes beamed at her from behind the fencing—more cameras, but smartly out of reach—yet she heard no commotion above. Either the cameras weren’t working, or they weren’t watching.

  “When did the lock break?” the woman asked, her voice clearer now.

  A distant response from Ødegaard: “What?”

  Lock? Beatrice squinted: The silver light above her was thinly gridded. Another door, a grate at the top, sealing off the tunnel, stopping her escape.

  “Give me a status update!” the woman shouted.

  Beatrice’s grip weakened as panic set in. They were going to check the cameras. She hurried past their unrelenting gaze and then, in one motion, swung herself around the ladder, so that she was holding to it from behind.

  “I’m taking a shit!” she heard Ødegaard belt.

  The woman, who had to be his wife, groaned. The sharp click of her heels stabbed the air as she stepped up to the grate. A long shadow slithered down the tunnel’s walls. Seconds like hours passed, and then a flashlight beam bore down on the ladder. Beatrice held her breath, held on tight. Being behind the ladder, beneath the small outcrop to which it was attached at the top, she was mostly hidden. But her hands, those pale and gangly things, were out in the open, about to give her away.

  Beatrice prayed to every god she could, even the vermillion one Lauren’s sister had set out to free, and waited for an answer.

  “Who was the girl?”

  The flashlight was pulled away and Ødegaard’s wife’s shadow followed after. She hadn’t seen her. She hadn’t fucking—

  The element of surprise would be enough to blindside the bitch, so she went for it. She swung back around the front and clambered up it. Her hands and feet slid and slipped, but the adrenaline pumping through her veins kept her centered, focused.

  “I hate how smart he is,” Ødegaard’s wife said, walking back towards the grate. She went to one knee and looked through it. “How does he always…”

  Beatrice’s eyes met hers.

  “No!”

  Beatrice propelled herself up the ladder and slammed her hands into the grate. It flew backward, bashing Ødegaard’s wife’s jaw. As she reeled, a burst of heat blew out of the woman’s hand. A rubber bullet grazed Beatrice’s shoulder.

  “Come here!” she bellowed, a searing hot pain shooting through her arm.

  Five rungs left… three, two… She jumped, grasped the edge of doorway, and hoisted herself up. Her pupils dilated and everything went white, but she’d seen where Ødegaard’s wife had fallen. She rolled on top of her and broke her knuckle on the woman’s shattered jaw.

  “Frederick,” his wife begged, the words bloody spit bubbles on her lips.

  Beatrice stood up, her eyes having adjusted some, and kicked the gun out of the woman’s hands. She paced back and forth inside the enclosure, looking for a way out. There, there, she thought, hating herself for thinking those words. A door half her height sat slightly ajar, the keycard reader attached to it blinking green.

  “Beatrice stop,” Ødegaard said calmly.

  The world had begun to spin, causing the colors of the farmhouse—where was she? The basement?—to coalesce and consume the objects before her.

  She bent down, clawed at the ground until her fingers wrapped around the pistol. She lifted it, trained it on the shape of the man she’d once imagined loving and now only wanted to kill.

  “Come out of there, Beatrice,” he said, stepping forward. His hands were up, she could see that much. “Isabelle, you too. We underestimated her, and now we owe her an explanation.”

  “You… you owe me a lot more than that, dickshit,” Beatrice said, her words slurred, her bank of insults run dry.

  Isabelle stirred and started to crawl forward. Beatrice pointed the pistol at her spine and fired. The rubber bullet put an end to that.

  “All this noise, you better come out.”

  He was right: She could hear something in the tunnel, scaling not the ladder but the fencing. The flesh fiend was coming.

  “Six, huh? You said he was six years old.” She stepped over the hose Isabelle had used to wash down the enclosure and slipped through the doorway, shutting it behind her. Isabelle whimpered as the electronic locks thumped into place.

  She sidestepped as Ødegaard ran for the door and swiped his keycard. “He’s six, but not six years.” The locks relented and he hurried to his wife. She curled up like a snake, and he grabbed both her hands and started dragging. “Six months. He’s six months old.”

  “I don’t give a shit, you fucking liar.” Beatrice’s heart started to pound harder as the sound of the flesh fiend’s claws grew louder. She fired another shot, hoping to imprison both of the Ødegaards, but she missed.

  How many bullets are left? She didn’t know. The only time she’d shot a gun was with her dad on the range. That had been the only time they’d done much of anything together.

  “Can you imagine what he’d be like in a few years?” Ødegaard pulled himself and his wife out of the enclosure, but instead of shutting the door, he left it wide open.

  “What… what are you doing?”

  Beatrice started to shake. Up here, in the light, she had no strength. She had never truly learned how to function in it. Her place was the darkness, with the things that happen in it. Now that she had the chance to get what she wanted, she wavered. She wiped her face and wished for a new one.

  “All new creatures have kinks that need to be ironed out.”

  Beatrice bit her lip, tasted someone else’s blood there. This wasn’t the time for self-loathing, self-reflection. This is a cliché, she thought. I’m a fucking cliché. She raised the gun and fired directly at Ødegaard’s chest. Get it together.

  “Christ!” he gasped, releasing his wife and falling back against the enclosure.

  Beatrice shuffled towards him, pistol whipped him across the nose. He doubled over, mouth to her toes. As he drooled on them, she reached into his pants and swiped his wallet.

  “Amateur operation you’ve got going here,” she said, pocketing her pay. “I’ll—”

  The flesh fiend sat crouched at the top of the ladder, its swollen, blood-red eyes staring her down. It wore the college kid’s face now, and bits of his Brooksville University sweatshirt were pasted to the beast’s body.

  “They are the best of us,” Frederick Ødegaard said, sitting up, pulling his wife onto his lap. “They’ll make us better, show us where we’ve gone wrong.” He looked back at the flesh fiend, a fat tear in his eye. “They’ll keep the balance when everything else has gone out of order.”

  Beatrice unloaded the gun into the creature. The flesh fiend staggered backward, until it was wobbling on the edge. She screamed, threw the weapon. It cracked its head and sent it flailing, wailing, into the tunnel. They’re first, she thought. It’ll get them, and I’ll get away.

  Ødegaard shook his head as though he could read her mind. “He would never hurt us. We created him and his kind. I’d start running, Beatrice. Town’s a long way off.”

  Beatrice turned on her heels and gave everything she had left to get across the basement. She found the stairs, went down on all fours, and climbed up them. She pushed through the door at the top, into a hall. She crawled, crouched, ran forward, crashing into the walls. Picture frames fell down around her, spreading shards of glass across the floor for her to step on. Her feet flared with rough spots of pain, but she paid it no mind.

  The front door. Finally. She ran across the tongue of rug that led up to it and ripped the door open. Warm sunlight and fresh air. The sensations were so overwhelming that, in some ways, they were harder to take than anything else that’d happened to her. She stepped out onto the porch, the dense forest beckoning her forward. Her car was there, but her ke
ys were as good as gone.

  Here’s hoping no one escaped from the sanitarium today, she thought, hurrying down the steps, head wound leaking fluid down her neck. Because if anyone fits the bill…

  black occult macabre vol. 1 issue 7

  THE INTERROGATION

  No matter how many times Connor Prendergast pushed, poked, and prodded his mother’s meatballs, they continued to be totally inedible. For his mother, Mrs. Prendergast, the art of cooking was as messy as childbirth, and sounded about as enjoyable to her as an appointment with her gynecologist. Clearly the odds have never been in Connor’s favor.

  When he was five, Connor had developed a coping skill to manage the reoccurring trauma of his mother’s meals. With one eye shut and a fork raised high, he would become a towering cyclops, skewering helpless potatoes (fries) and oblivious chickens (nuggets). Using their blood, which was actually ketchup, he would coat the salty, golden limbs he’d collected in a pile and shove them into his gummy mouth. Of course, Mr. Prendergast had found it all very appalling. It was almost as inexcusable as placing one’s elbow on the table. But to Mrs. Prendergast, Connor’s imagination offered some relief. It meant she no longer had to stoop to the family dog’s level and scoop the leftovers into his bowl just so it wouldn’t go to waste.

  Twenty-one years later and Connor still found himself wreaking countryside carnage on the villages of Little Fryerton and Noodle D’Cluck. Except now, he kept it a secret. Unfortunately, the meatballs, which were staring him down like the starving third world kids his father had warned him of, were impervious to his imagination. He tried to make of them nefarious diplomats or holy homebodies brandishing bibles for beatings, but it was impossible. Consumption was inconceivable.

  He set down his utensils, wincing as they clinked loudly against the plate. He couldn’t do it. All hope now rested in the family dog and his garbage pit stomach. Needless to say, for Connor, at the golden age of twenty-six, hyperbole wasn’t just old vocab word—it was a way of life.