“I was going to put it on Instagram,” he remarked nonchalantly to his incredulous entourage.
Barnaby Wright never came to trial. He slit his own throat in the back of the police car using a concealed razor and died haemorrhaging blood into the face of the same policeman that he’d covered in eyeball fluid.
Evan’s introduction to the supernatural world was, at first, a subtle affair: nocturnal scraping sounds from beneath uneven floorboards; fragrant breezes in closed rooms; sobbing cries that lingered hauntingly in the air. His only confidant was Victor, an ageing concierge who seemed more interested in poring over lurid old paperbacks, the kind with semi clad women in peril on the cover and titles like, “She Paid in Flesh,” or, “Born for Sin.” Victor was a simple man, happy to listen to Evan bantering on without paying the slightest attention, and that suited Evan fine.
While unsettled by the strange goings on, Evan still managed to convince himself that there was a rational explanation . . . until things became impossible to talk away. He began to catch sight of nefarious creatures moving about the flat. The glimpses were fleeting and usually from the periphery of his vision. The ephemeral manifestations came in three forms; one a wolf-like she-beast and another, by its sleekness and agility, more like a leopard or panther. The last gave him most reason for concern; a hunched troglodyte beast that watched from the darkest shadows. Its eyes burned in the gloom and its fetid breath made him gag. Usually he would see it in waking moments; it was as though the beast appeared only in times of vulnerability—when consciousness returned after heavy sleep, drunken binges, or coke-fuelled orgies.
There were two explanations, he told Victor who, because he was ensconced in his latest book, D for Delinquent, managed only a conciliatory glance. The first was that the apartment was indeed haunted and, by the nature of the manifestations, possibly a gateway to hell. The other was that he was simply going mad.
Victor’s advice was to live with his ghostly intruders; better that than suffer the indignity of being branded a lunatic or even worse, a hypocrite.
The biggest irony was . . . Evan came to realise that he was clairvoyant as well.
Soon after the haunting started, he began to hear voices. One in particular took to the fore—the gritty tones of a man by the name of Harry Speirs—a discarnate spirit who quickly became Evan’s personal guide to the “other side.” Harry had fought on the Western front during the 1914-18 war. Injured twice, he eventually returned to the “frightfulness” at Fleurbaix as a war correspondent. He was killed in action after volunteering himself to report on a night-time raid. Married for barely a year and with a baby daughter back home in Reading, Harry’s tortured spirit refused to let go of its mortal ties. What particularly amused Evan though was the way Harry would growl “allo guvn’or” whenever he wanted to make his presence felt.
Communicating with an ethereal lodger in his head wasn’t something that came easily to Evan: the most obvious being, should he think a reply or speak it? Thinking it seemed a bit hit and miss; speaking aloud was more reliable but would appear odd in social situations, unless your name was Derek Acorah. What concerned him more though was just how much access Harry had to the thoughts in his head; some of them just lately had been a little . . . extreme.
“I sees fings, Evan,” Harry told Evan, “Stuff like you couldn’t imagin’. Been savin’ the best stories for you. Gonna put ‘em in your head so’s you can write ‘em down. Always wanted to write stories, I did. Now I can do it through you. Make you a mint it will. Nine Lives, we’ll call it.”
“Why nine?” asked Evan.
Harry scoffed at that.
“. . . ‘cause nine is the number of human discord. Cats ‘ave nine lives and according to the Cabal, nine is the number of achievement. There’s nine plains of the Chinese sky and the Greeks and Egyptians consider nine to be a sacred number. There’s nine months of human gestation. Jesus snuffed it on the cross on the ninth hour an’ then appeared to his disciples nine times after his resurrection. There’s nine choruses of the Angels and accordin’ to the Freemasons nine is the number of immortality. A stitch in time saves nine an’ I’m sure you’ve been on cloud nine or gone the whole nine yards, Evan. Thrice and inverted it is the number of the beast, and in Dante’s Inferno there’s nine circles to Hell. You want more?”
Evan raised his hand; he’d heard enough. He’d play along, for the moment. Eavesdropping on the dark side might even prove to be fun
“. . . the best thing is,” growled Harry, “you’re first story happened right here in this apartment when some surgeon geezer lost ‘is nut an’ fucked up a bunch o’ young’uns.”
In order to dampen media interest and exploit his new project, Evan made it publicly known that he was taking a lengthy sabbatical. His television was consigned to a skip, newspapers cancelled, and mobile unceremoniously cremated in the basement furnace. For the price of a bottle of scotch and an endless supply of sleazy pulp fiction, Victor became his own personal firewall to the outside world.
Harry helped Evan by bridging the intangible gap between life and death so that he might find himself more tales from beyond the grave. Consequently, the flat became a spiritual squat for those beleaguered souls trapped in a twilight world.
Immersing himself in such dark matters drew the attention of less friendly entities. He wasn’t frightened though; such malicious activity served only to strengthen and focus his resolve. His sexual appetite, fuelled by rapacious demons, became voracious. The frequent visits by escorts did not go unnoticed by the residents of Dakota House and his demands became quite extreme. Screams of ecstasy might well have been cries of agony, not that anyone seemed to care.
As time passed so the nocturnal intrusions became even more menacing; furniture and ornaments hurled in Evan’s direction became a daily occurrence. The incarnate visitors thrived on the shadowy darkness that surrounded him. Obscenities were whispered in his ear and the stink of things long since dead filled the air.
What followed next though took him beyond the realm of the corporeal world and possibly to the edge of his own sanity.
One night he was drawn from his bedroom by the sound of woeful crying emanating from the dining room. From the gloom of the doorway at the end of the hall he heard the brutal thud of what sounded like meat being chopped on a butcher’s slab. Cautiously and with a racing heart, he approached the room, and by the flickering light of several ghostly candles saw four unclothed bodies slumped in chairs.
A large man donning a surgeon’s gown was standing behind the trembling figure of a young woman, hacking at her shoulder with a large knife. Apparently drugged and in a state of paralysis, the girl whimpered, but her tearful cries were those of one resigned to a dreadful fate. The man continued in frenzied fashion until, with a resounding crack her arm was wrenched free of its socket.
“Welcome,” uttered the surgeon calmly as he studied the dismembered limb, “come and wonder at my magnificent creations.” The wretched souls sat about the table were barely alive. Smiling somewhat insanely, the surgeon moved on to one of his male victims and continued with his butchery.
“I see your adventure has begun, Evan. Believe me it is a glorious descent. I’m quite envious of the journey that lies ahead of you. Remember this my friend; for you there is no more right or wrong. From now on you live by your own rules, not those imposed by conceited hypocrites.”
The surgeon hummed merrily as he continued his work. With one deft movement of a surgical saw he cut through the neck of his whimpering subject. The shrill whine of the motor drowned out all but the surgeon’s demented laugh as he held the head aloft like a grotesque carnival lantern. With eyes still blinking and mouth contorted in silent scream, he turned his trophy so that it could see its own headless torso.
“It has been proven that consciousness remains after decapitation, as with the guillotine for example. The severed head could still see from the bucket,” he told Evan. “Under such circumstances, the brain continues to fu
nction for anywhere up to a minute.” He chuckled.
Far from being appalled, Evan found himself curiously aroused by the merciless slaughter. He had entered a world where desire was ruled by depravity, and he found it an exhilarating experience.
That night, when his scalp began to itch . . . by the light of a candle . . . he parted his hair and saw . . . there, just a few inches above his right brow . . . letters, as though tattooed on his skin.
And he found himself laughing like a man unhinged.
In glorious fashion, his book had begun. Not just in his head but indelibly etched onto his flesh. No longer was he imprisoned by the human condition, for this was a transformation of the most profound kind.
He celebrated the only way he knew—with bottles of vodka and copious amounts of cocaine snorted from the sweaty flesh of several hastily summoned working girls. Even by his own standards it was a marathon session of unrivalled debauchery and substance abuse.
He had been crashed out in an armchair for several hours when he found himself roused by movement in the room. Upon waking he saw a man, quite possibly just another manifestation, standing before him.
Evan was neither surprised nor shocked by his uninvited guest, but merely glanced at his watch and smiled as he gently drifted back into consciousness.
“I was expecting some more young ladies,” he declared wearily, “my appetite in that department of late has become quite voracious.”
“Sorry to spoil your plans,” replied the well-spoken man.
Evan chuckled at that. “I think I was going to do something bad to them.”
“I came just in time then.”
“Full marks for getting past Victor.”
“The old man on the door? He was fast asleep with a rather sordid looking book on his lap.”
Evan chuckled at that, too.
“You seem familiar?” said Evan.
“Edmund Frankes, proprietor of Cedar Lodge Publishing. Creator of fine, limited edition books of the dark arts. Our books are a form of embodiment of the printed word; we like to call them living books. And to answer your question, we met on your show; you might remember that you were rather critical of my publishing business. A load of airy-fairy bollocks, was your exact comment.”
Evan lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply and with a wry smile studied his mysterious visitor.
“The thing is, I’ve heard that you intend to write a rather interesting collection of short stories. If that’s so then Cedar Lodge would be the perfect retreat for you to create what I am sure is destined to become a unique and incredible document of the afterlife, and one that we would be proud to have in our esteemed collection.”
As far as Evan was aware, only Harry, his spirit guru, knew about the book, which intrigued him even more.
“So, who’s been blabbing and why so interested in me?”
Edmund allowed himself an amused chuckle. The reason to him seemed obvious.
“You are not exactly discrete, Mr. Gore. You, a renowned sceptic of all things supernatural, suddenly consider writing a book documenting genuine stories from beyond the grave. A man who used to inflict such vitriolic mockery on well-meaning people? It is what I believe is termed a U-turn.”
“Well, Edmund, it’s certainly true that I used to be a cynical cunt. I’m just not quite so cynical these days, although deluded people living in cloud cuckoo land made my job an easy one, and I still believe that most of the guests on my show were exactly that.”
“. . . and therein lies the germ of a fascinating book.”
“. . . a fascinating book that might be better placed with the big boys?” declared Evan as he stubbed out his cigarette on the arm of his chair.
Edmund considered his reply and moved to the window. Tapping once on the rain-spattered glass, he made a beckoning gesture and then returned to his chair. Several minutes later a young woman entered the room, her clothes drenched and clinging. She wasn’t wearing a coat. Just a thin blouse and skin-tight leather trousers.
Frankes shook his head in despair at Lilith’s appearance. She was determined, it seemed, to catch her death of cold. But Lilith had studied her quarry and knew exactly what she was doing: an unfastened button and a tactical tease of flesh; a coy smile and decorous grin; and of course, the drama of a memorable entrance. She stood before Evan and rested the palm of her hand on the side of his face. Her stare, cold as her icy fingers, silenced him and sent a shudder through his body. She too shivered and then, with an expression of ecstasy on her bloodless face, uttered a blissful sigh.
Evan saw another place in that sultry gaze, a chimerical land blissfully disengaged from the world for which he had so much contempt, and for a moment he experienced a lightness of being that was as euphoric as an ecstasy high.
“What do you see?” she asked him.
Evan sighed and stepped back so that he could focus on her face.
“You know damned well,” he told her.
Her priggish grin said it all.
“Take me there,” he said.
Kissing him gently on the cheek she whispered, “. . . of course.”
Several days later Evan was collected by a burly chauffeur driving a midnight blue Bentley Continental. The limousine slipped silently into the London traffic to the accompaniment of Chopin’s Nocturnes. On the backseat in an ice bucket was a perfectly chilled bottle of Louis Roederer: 2000 Cristal Rosé, a champagne flute and an accompanying note.
“Evan, allow me this divinely decadent way to welcome you to our world. Enjoy your journey and your passage to revelation. Yours cordially, Edmund Frankes.”
There was also a small book that was surprisingly heavy. It was warm and trembled in his hands, as though it was alive. The inside front sheet was inscribed: One of our early chapbooks to make your journey a little more fun. Lilith xx.
“. . . mad tart,” laughed Evan as he dropped the book on his lap and opened the Champagne. “So where is Cedar Lodge?” he called to the chauffeur.
The large man shrugged his shoulders and grunted a reply in what sounded like a foreign language.
Reluctant to pursue what would obviously be a strained conversation, he slumped back into the sumptuous leather seat and let the swirling music wash over him like a warm, intoxicating breeze. With the alcohol starting to take effect, he opened the book, started to read, and promptly fell asleep.
He was rudely woken when the limo stopped on a deserted country road and, in a confused and compliant state, Evan was transferred to another vehicle. The wide grit road was eerily still and silent, the only movement being when a thick mist began to seep through the trees and envelop them as though aware of their presence. For Evan, the whole incident felt quite surreal and within minutes of being settled in the carriage he found himself once again overwhelmed by lassitude.
Torrential rain hammering against the carriage glass and a howling wind, like a banshee cry screaming in his ears, eventually roused him. He woke in a cold sweat, sprawled across the extravagant velvet upholstery of a carriage drawn by four furiously charging horses. A coachman, who sat on a bench to the fore of the vehicle, was whipping the poor beasts like a man possessed. They were hurtling through a scorched landscape where charcoaled trees rose from the black earth like the charred skeletons of cremated creatures. Clouds, blacker and more oppressive than any he had ever seen churned restlessly across a blood red sky. It was an insane scenario and although very “real,” he couldn’t help wondering if he was hallucinating. Seeing the silhouettes of rampaging beasts, raised on muscular haunches and roaming the surrounding woodland, chilled him to the core. Some were running and following the passage of the carriage, others just watched from the cover of the trees, piercing the darkness with fiery eyes.
The horses galloped frantically, urged on by the coachman who was whipping them with a manic ferocity and inflicting raw lacerations across their backs. With all his strength, Evan gripped the carriage door and strained to get a view from the open window.
A violen
t jolt sent him sprawling backwards across the floor, causing him to strike the back of his head against the carriage door. He remained where he fell, dazed and wondering where the madness would take him next. The pounding of heavy hooves on the sodden earth grew louder, as did the gut-wrenching howls of the forest beasts. In a sudden fit of panic, Evan pulled himself up and leaned from the window as though about to jump out. The coachman caught glimpse of him and gesticulated madly to move back inside.
“Get back in for God’s sake, man . . . they’ll have your head off in a second,” he bawled.
There was a look of utter terror in the man’s eyes as he lashed first at the horses and then at the massing monstrosities that were closing in on them. Evan retreated just as one of the beasts leapt onto the side of the carriage and made a frenzied attempt to force its way in. He found himself confronted by the bloodshot eyes and flaring nostrils of a slavering beast. Claws, like razor-sharp talons that could slice easily through human flesh, gripped tightly, leaving deep furrows in the wood.
The creature glared back and let out a hellish howl. Behind it, as though drawn by its rallying cry, a legion of similar quadrupeds swarmed forth from the depths of the woodland. Bringing the heel of his boot hard down on the creature’s snout, Evan sent it reeling back into the savage wilderness, but not before it managed to inflict a deep gash in his left ankle.
In its place others followed and the carriage was soon shadowed either side by a baying horde of the rampaging beasts. The coach driver cracked his whip in an attempt to hold the hellish monstrosities at bay, but to little effect. In a fit of desperation, he lashed mercilessly at the horses instead and cheered when suddenly, the carriage emerged from the forest and onto an open road.
The beasts remained where they were, apparently reluctant to leave the cover of the forest.
Only when the movement of the carriage had slowed to a more sedated pace did Evan look from the window. With the forest far behind, they had ascended onto an elevated track that took them over a barren, swampy wasteland. In the distance were several pinpoints of light cast against a dark, foreboding sky. It seemed this was to be their destination.
Year's Best Body Horror 2017 Anthology Page 33
