What Fears Become: An Anthology from The Horror Zine

by Piers Anthony

  Dim realization bloomed in his thoughts. The rider pressed itself against him. Its naked chest scrubbed against his cheeks, filling his lungs with the scent of rotted leaves and stagnant runoff. Its pelvis humped up against his throat. Tissue began to slide over him, rubbery cords working furiously to knit up around him, draw him in. He tried to veer off the road, perhaps collide with another vehicle—any type of distraction would do—but the Volvo's wheel was locked and unmovable. So much for forward momentum, he thought.

  He slammed on his brakes.

  The Cadillac rear-ended him with a grinding force. The jolt snapped his head backward. The creature was flung into the back seat in a tangle of gray limbs and a spiteful flash of orange eyes. Max hit the gas and nosed the Volvo blindly into the breakdown lane. A speeding van clipped his right fender, sending another shockwave through the car. The creature made an incensed bleating sound. Max steadied the Volvo and set his sights on the trestle ahead, on the broad shadow traced like an ashen thumbprint across the highway. Finish line, he thought with grim assurance. He glimpsed the mirror one final time. The creature lunged at him from the back seat, its hands locked in a vicious claws-out rigor.

  Max closed his eyes and braced for the blow. The Volvo passed beneath the trestle. Shadows clenched at him, but their hold was ardent one moment, insubstantial the next. No claws slashed him, but there was a slight pass of air at the back of his neck and then nothing but the rumble of his tires on the craggy breakdown lane.

  He opened his eyes to the realization he was once again alone in the car, and that he needed to steer if he wished to stay on the road. He clamped the wheel tightly. Pain sizzled inside each cut on his arms, his face, his scalp, burning deep down like cruel betrayals and things unsaid.

  He took the next off ramp (a green sign properly designated it as an "Exit" and informed him that Dubuque, the next city of notoriety, was 42 miles away) and the road ahead expanded to three lanes. He chose the center lane because it seemed the least congested.

  The first gas station he came to had a phone booth just inside the plate glass entrance and he pulled in. Blood ran from his cheeks and onto his chin like oily tears as he dialed Linda's number, the well-worn handset pressed to his ear. When she answered, his first utterance was a broken sigh of relief. But she knew it was him. She asked, with real concern, what was wrong. Where was he? Was he coming home? So smart, his Linda. So intuitive.

  Outside, traffic glittered and passed benignly in the afternoon sunshine.

  About Dean H. Wild

  Dean H. Wild has been writing for over twenty years, and most of his work is in the horror and dark fantasy genre. Some of Dean's work in print include: "The Laughing Place," published in Brian Hopkins' Extremes 5: Fantasy and Horror from the Ends of the Earth, and "The Kid," included in William Simmons' Vivisections. He is the Assistant Editor of The Horror Zine. http://www.deanwild.com

  THE HOUSE AT THE END OF SMITH STREET

  by Stephen M. Dare

  The two men stared at the small, partially burned house at the end of Smith Street. It was bordered on one side by the high trees of the Park Woods, and on the other by a vacant lot full of tall grass, weed-trees, and the junked hulls of appliances and cars. They stared, amazed that so much of the house was still standing; so much was still intact, somehow surviving the fire. The worst of the fire looked to have scorched the house's right side where some blackened bricks of the foundation had been kicked over, probably by kids in the neighborhood—kids in rags and bruises on their unwashed bodies, most without shoes, but all with rings in their ears and noses.

  Kids, the men thought, not much younger and not much different than their sister Rachel's boy, Eddie. Head-shaven Eddie, with the new stainless steel gauge in his earlobe, a bit less expensive than the diamond Rachel had studded into him when he was six months old. Eddie was eleven now, bearing their father's eyebrows and cheekbones and their mother's pouty mouth.

  Eddie hadn't been to school in three days. The school had finally called his Uncle Shane, one of the men who was now staring at the house. Shane had called his own brother Al, the other man. Al worked the second shift, so he was home now; two brothers staring at their sister's home across the street, and wondering where Rachel was right now. The last they knew, she had wound up in some friend's trailer, after the fire had broken out, though now in a meth-haze.

  A few days ago, the brothers had gone to the trailer to try to reason with her. Rachel wailed that she "didn't know nothing" about Eddie until Al shoved her head against the wall. That was when she finally cried out, "The house has him! The house has my Eddie, and it won't let him go!"

  Disgusted with her drug-induced psychosis, the two brothers had left in Shane's Mustang to find out for themselves if Eddie was trying to live inside the burned house. Once there, they talked in front of the house, watching its burned silence behind a single strand of yellow police tape over the front door. Shane lit a cigarette, and Al kept nodding at what he was saying until Shane pointed with his cigarette across the lot at another house just like Rachel's. This one was surrounded by a ragged wire fence, yard stomped to dust by dogs and kids. One of the kids—a child certainly no older than three, diaper sagging yellow around its middle—stood at the fence staring at them. The child stared and stared and stared so long that both Al and Shane soon believed the child could not blink.

  Across the street and in the tall grass of the other lot waited an older child dressed only in cut-off jeans so baggy that the boxer shorts underneath were in full display. The boy was smoking a gray joint. He watched them as if waiting for something before finally sitting on the crumbling curb. A dog barked with menace down the pitted road somewhere.

  Shane pulled his palm across his forehead. The heat had stilted the air to a smother. Maybe there would be rain later, but this early, the sky was white with August fatigue.

  Al said, "No crickets here."

  "No crickets anywhere," Shane said back. Then he finished his cigarette and tossed it into a pothole in the street, and they went together to the path scrawled through the weeds up to the house.

  Rachel's satellite dish had been moved since they were last here. Rachel and her goddamn daytime TV and her Xbox, and all the while Eddie ran wild over God knew the hell where. The brothers had long known that Rachel lived only for Rachel. Plasma TV Rachel, iPhone Rachel, Wi-Fi computer Rachel; probably all stolen. And the latest was that BioFab one of her old boyfriends had installed; that penthouse-designer carpet you never had to vacuum. That was their sister. Gotta have every new and trendy thing because she was tweaking all the time and always needed a distraction, and go screw the rest of you.

  Approaching the front stoop, the brothers saw that a rotting board was set on cinderblocks as a step before the battered screen door. Al broke the single strand of yellow tape, pulled the screen door open, and tried the knob on the weather-warped storm-door behind it. Shane would have gone instead to one of the windows along the side of the house, but each window had been barred, probably so that Rachel's stolen items wouldn't get re-stolen when she had lived there. With all those bars, it was amazing that anyone had gotten out that night when the house had caught fire.

  Al pushed the big front door open and they both stepped in. Though it was mid-morning, it was dark inside, the air smelling of old fire. It was close and stale, but with something in it that made them both pause. Al didn't like it and said so. Shane grunted. It was like wetness, he said. Wetness from the firemen's hoses, hauled in like heavy snakes through the front door. Wetness and rot. Like a pile of vegetable scraps and meat left to rot in the sun. But Al thought of something more: it made him think of rank digestion.

  They shut the door against the outside and waited in the dark for their eyes to adjust. They couldn't turn on any lights since Rachel hadn't paid her bill before she left. No electricity for almost a week before the fire. Maybe she couldn't stand the lack of TV and Xbox and that was why she left. It sure wasn't the smell of the burned roof; Rachel h
ad lived like this for years. She might have continued living here, even with the fire damage and its rank smell. Except neither of the brothers could remember when the smell had been this bad.

  Al called for Eddie several times, his voice filling the empty house. Nothing. You could tell when someone was hiding out in a house. An empty house felt empty, vacant and hollow. The feel of it here said that Eddie was sure as shit gone. Probably living with someone, some girl maybe.

  In the dimness, as they waited and talked in near-whispers, Al thought he heard something move across the designer carpet to their right. A mouse, maybe. They were all over these places, rats too. But it didn't sound like a mouse. It sounded like something pushing its way over the floor, jabbing in one long, darting movement through the paper and trash. Not scurrying like a mouse, but something more like a snake.

  "Snakes're all over out here," Shane said when Al spoke about it, "'specially under these houses. Foundations're crawling with the fuckin' things. Fire could have drove them out though."

  "We need a flashlight," Al said.

  "We need to get this place searched and done with."

  "You lead, then. You deal with the snakes."

  Shane stepped through a heap of wet, soiled clothes. He kicked sopping pizza delivery boxes, Cheetos and Lay's potato chip bags, and mildewed newspapers out of the way. The big room—really, no larger than Shane's garage—doubled as a TV room and kitchen, the kitchen set to one side of the room. Dishes crusted with macaroni and dried spaghetti and pot pie tins were piled in the rust-spattered sink. A Breyer's vanilla ice cream box left on the peeling counter had dribbled a tacky white stream down a scarred cabinet door to a pool on the linoleum.

  Against the wall by the fridge were towering stacks of Budweiser, Mountain Dew, and Coca-Cola cans. Some of the stacks had fallen over, the remaining contents in the cans having trickled to a sticky pale sheen on the floor. A Monster energy drink can lay by the trim-strip where the linoleum met the BioFab carpet. Some of the carpet had frayed there and bits of its curly strands lay across the linoleum. Their ends were pasted into the tacky pool of puke-colored energy drink.

  The men moved through the kitchen onto the carpet and bent down to examine it. The BioFab carpet looked like a graham-colored Berber, but unblemished by stains. Somehow it had survived the fire completely intact. Al moved another box away to find a half-eaten piece of pale pizza crust stuck to the carpet. He nudged it with his boot, but the crust didn't budge, the BioFab pinning it down tight like glue. Soon the BioFab would have made the crust disappear altogether.

  "That designer carpet shit actually works," he said, amazed.

  "The lazy housekeeper's dream," Shane said. "Look at this place. It'll be condemned, I'll betcha."

  They went through the trash to the window on the far side of the room and moved the fire-eaten curtain away. Through the filthy window, they could see two new shirtless boys standing on the edge of the weed-lot across the street where the older boy had been. They were watching the house, their tanned skin like tough bronze. They were barefoot and in cut-off shorts. One had a mohawk, the other a mullet, they were both smoking cigarettes or joints. Eddie's long lost friends, Al thought.

  "Let's see what they know," Al said.

  "After we look in the bedroom," Shane said.

  They went back across the carpet and around the kitchen wall into the bedroom. Most of the fire damage was here, where Rachel and Eddie had shared a bed. It had probably been someone's cigarette that started the fire. The walls and ceiling were ravaged by fire as it had consumed up and into the roof before the firemen could put it out. Had Eddie come back to hide out?

  They searched the closet, glanced under the ragged bed. No Eddie. So Eddie was gone, all right. Maybe he had hooked up with that gang everyone was so scared of over on Adams Street.

  "What now?" Al asked.

  "Let's go outside and talk to those kids out front," Shane said. "Those kids look like they know something, the way they were watching the house. Like they're waiting for something to happen."

  Al peered out the window to the backyard. Through the bars, he saw the edge of the woods running away and the sea of yellow weeds reaching up past the window. There were power lines further out, leading to brick apartments on a distant grassy hill. Too far off, Al thought, to tell if anyone is standing on a balcony of one of the apartments, grilling something good with an icy Busch beer at their side. Al swallowed, wanting to taste it. He waved a couple of fingers at the invisible griller. Be there soon. Save a cold one for me.

  Back in the combined living room and kitchen, the light had brightened as the sunlight shifted. It looked as though somehow there was more trash on the floor, and more light on the far side of the room. They remembered that there was a plant on a stand in the corner, some viney tropical thing living on neglect. A perfect plant for their sister.

  But the old wooden stand had toppled, and the pot fallen away from it onto the carpet. The plant still lived, its vines and leaves rolling over a greasy Domino's pizza box. Frayed grayish strands of BioFab carpet had curled into the spilt black soil. In here the light had moved enough for them to see that several fuzzy strands had climbed the walls in long twists. The brothers looked closer and closer until they each had their faces hovering several inches from the BioFab's strands, which were hooked into the wallpaper, curled like stiff worms underneath it―not pulling the wallpaper out, but having pushed through it, some of it forced into the drywall itself and into the wall.

  One strand had ventured high enough to grasp the low corner of the smoke-greased HD television and hung there.

  Al tugged on a strand, pulled it away from the wall, but plaster powdered down with it, and he cursed, letting it go fast and cursing again and again and holding his finger away from him in the sunlight. It dripped with bright blood, spotting his jeans leg and shoe.

  "Sumbitch bit me," he said, "bit me hard."

  "What bit you hard?"

  "What d'you think bit me, fuckin' carpet got me."

  "Bullshit."

  "Bullshit, lookit." He held his bleeding finger out at Shane. "Bit me like with a tooth or razor."

  Shane bent to look at the strand Al had pulled off. Held it between his fingers like a string. He quietly ran it between his fingers. Then he winced. He held the strand up to the light. A very tiny fragment was hinged on the strand so that it was able to flip up and down. It was no longer than a quarter-inch. A black tooth. Sharp. Snake-fang sharp.

  "Jesus Mary Christ, brother," Shane said. He ran his fingers a ways down the strand. There seemed to be a tiny burr at its end. It gleamed like steel in the light, as long as a carpenter's trim nail, with an edge like a razor.

  Al saw the lump in the new light first, the small risen area in the corner where the BioFab had swollen like something pregnant. And then he knew what had tipped the plant-stand. The lump had moved toward the dark corner, tipping the plant stand into the room long after Gotta-Have-It-Rachel had fled in her piece-of-shit Ford Escort. The lump had moved to a dark spot to get tucked away and hidden, like an engorged python digesting a goat in sleepy seclusion.

  Shane took his Buck knife and plunged it into the lump, slicing through the BioFab. A tiny hissing sound like a broken steam-hose came from somewhere under their knees or behind them as they stripped the rug back with their knives, the lump feeling soft at first, but then hard under them. A warm, wet vomit-acid reek came around them, filling their skulls, springing hot tears to their eyes.

  Al fell away, stumbling backward. Coming out of him was a combination of screaming and choking noises. Shane held a flap of rug away with the blade of his knife, the strands twisting, dangling like silkworms in August country air, and peered at the squashed thing inside the hole.

  It was a bony, flattened torso, the pink arm and leg bones; pale, moist flesh pitted like Swiss cheese, and stringy meat was glistening underneath. The slick and pitted pink skull gaped up at him. A stainless-steel gauged earring lay beside it in the w
arm, red-black, rotting muck. The entire thing was compressed, all folded tightly into itself, as if stuffed into a suitcase.

  Shane was holding the earring up to the light with his knife as Al ran to the front door, both hands gripping the handle and twisting together. He pulled hard, but the door wouldn't move, wouldn't even budge. He fell to his knees, spitting and cursing. He looked up at the door, blinking, not comprehending the slight bow in the wood before him, bulging out at him in the middle, and falling away into its frame at the sides.

  Then Shane was there beside his brother, studying the BioFab by the floor-trim, his eyes traveling upwards along the doorjamb. The trim covering the jamb had flexed away from the wall. Shane cursed, squeezing the tips of his fingers behind the trim, prying it outward only to see that the BioFab had curled under it, stuffing itself into the quarter-inch space between the wall and jamb. Stuffing itself like insulation but only tighter, so tight that even as Shane dug his fingers into it, he could barely make purchase. The twisted strands had snaked high, burrowing into the space, squeezing the jamb so tight it flexed the door inward, compressing it to not open, freezing it tight.

  "Christ, brother, what's it done?" Al cried with frustration and fear.

  "What's it look like?" Shane said as he forced his nails into the strands, managing to pull several frays out until finally he had enough to seize. He began stripping them outward, away from the jamb, the trim leaning by the few nails holding it to the wall. His hands worked, stripping the frays like long gray licorice. His eyes were wide with what he and his brother now realized had happened, this seeming entrapment. The strands came away only a few at a time, but revealed a newly twisted mass hardened into the jamb, the loose ones twisting against the frame and door like silkworms.