He opened a new tab in the browser, and searched for articles on strange dreams, came across an article on something called "Astral Projection," where spiritualists claimed to project their spirit outward as their body lay in rest. He was certainly no spiritualist, no medium, but what of the demon Asmodeus? Could this be more than just him using his dead uncle's ring as a talisman, a good luck charm to increase his self-confidence with?
"Come on, are you nuts?" he asked himself aloud, earning a disapproving glance from an old timer sitting nearby, reading the newspaper.
He decided to test the theory. He'd go home, and remove the ring, place it back in the box, and close it, as everything had happened after he put it on. If any of this was true, then taking the ring off and sealing it back up should stop, or at least change, the chain of events. He logged out of the computer, got up, and left the library.
It seemed like forever before Mark finally stood up and pulled the signal cord as he approached his stop. The bus pulled over, and he stepped out, walking briskly to his building. Nothing visible in his mailbox, he quickly went up the stairs to his apartment, and closed the door behind him. He sat at the small kitchenette, the box opened in front of him.
He pulled on the ring, but it wouldn't budge. It wouldn't even turn on his finger, feeling frozen in place, and then he heard the deep voice emanating from the bathroom.
"Tsk, tsk, Master Baker. You disappoint me so, and I had such high hopes for you."
Frightened now, more like his old self, Mark walked slowly to the open bathroom door, not seeing anyone inside, but that deep voice continued speaking.
"You displayed such promise, much more so than Edgar ever did. And yet, here you are, ready to cast it all aside, to cast ME aside."
"Who . . . who's there?" Mark called, his voice shaking.
"Gaze upon me, you pathetic worm!" it commanded. Mark walked into the empty bathroom and looked into the mirror over the sink.
Not reflecting the room any longer, the mirror was filled with dark smoke, swirling slowly around the face of the demon. Blazing red eyes set deep in a hard, chiseled face, it's tongue split and forked as it surfaced between rows of sharp teeth, staring now at Mark with open contempt.
"I offered you everything, exacted vengeance on those who'd wronged you, and still you choose to turn your back on me?"
Mark stuttered weakly, unable to form words, frozen in fear by the vision in the mirror before him.
"Weak, miserable excuse for a mortal, just like the others before you. Let me show you very clearly the choice you have made!"
Hours later, Detectives Joe Bannon and Felix Perez walked up to the apartment building. Bannon glanced at the notebook in his hand.
"Yeah, this is the one. Baker, Mark, lives on the second floor. Let's ring the super to get in."
George responded, buzzing the door, and then walking out to greet them.
"I'm Bannon, this is Perez. We need to talk to one of your tenants, a Mark Baker?"
"Oh yes, Mr. Baker. Good man. He lives up in 2D."
"Is he home now, do you know?"
"I think so. I heard noise up there earlier, like maybe moving something around, but quiet since."
"Let's have a look. Do you have a passkey?"
"Yes, I have all the keys for the building."
They walked up the stairs, and Bannon rang the doorbell, then knocked.
"Mr. Baker? Police. Open the door, we need to talk to you."
The apartment was quiet, no response at all.
"Hey Felix, try his phone, will ya?"
Perez looked at his notebook, and dialed the number. They could hear Mark's cellphone ringing inside.
"Well, his phone is home, anyway. Want to open the door for us?"
George selected the key, and unlocked the door, knocking again as he did.
"Wait here," Bannon said, as he walked inside, Perez right behind him.
George waited in the hallway, wondering what this could be about, when he heard Bannon inside.
"Jesus H. Christ, what a friggin' mess. Felix, call for the meat wagon and the lab rats will ya? This one's even worse than the others."
Felix Perez stepped back from the open bathroom door, desperately trying to hold back the bile that rose so quickly in his throat. The small bathroom was splattered with blood from floor to ceiling, and pieces of Mark Baker were tossed everywhere they looked, completely dismembered.
He hadn't been cut apart, but torn apart by something inhumanly strong, the skin jagged, stretched and shredded at the edges.
His head lay in the tub, eyes wide open, an expression of abject terror etched across his face. As bad as the others had been, this one was much more savage, more personal somehow than those were.
Bannon stepped out of the bathroom, looking at his partner.
"Go out and get some air, kid. Can't have you puking all over the crime scene. I'll call it in."
He took out his cell phone, as Perez nodded gratefully and walked to the door.
Neither of them glanced at the small bookshelf or the small, beat up wooden box that sat beside battered paperbacks.
G.A. Miller discovered horror very early on, courtesy of Creature Features on television in the late-1950’s/early-1960’s. There, he first saw the Universal classic monster movies and many others. As he grew a little older, a friend’s brother had a treasure trove of EC Comics from the mid-1950’s and this only furthered his fascination. In 1976, he browsed paperbacks at a newsstand, a cover catching his eye. Embossed black, with one spot of color on it: a red drop of blood. It was the first paperback printing of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, and it marked his induction as a Constant Reader, a position he still enjoys to this day.
HUNGER
by John Leahy
My friend Edwin Gill was a most annoying person. The reason I found him annoying was because he was good at everything he tried. An excellent athlete, gifted handyman, a guy who could seduce a woman with only a few simple lines, and a brilliant stock trader who infuriatingly only spent about half the time at his desk that I spent slaving at mine. He was also a fan of various high-octane activities like big wave surfing, hang-gliding and rock climbing amidst a host of others. The man was fearless. So, when the terrifying hands erupted from beneath London’s tube tunnels, snatching random tube carriages and whisking them back down into whatever unimaginable location in the bowels of the earth that they had emerged from, it didn’t surprise me much when Edwin said that he was going down into the hand-hole left between Liverpool Street and Bank. He wanted to see for himself what that hand was attached to.
Edwin was also a brilliant mountain-climber and caver.
The first hand tore through the ground on the Northern Line between Kentish Town and Camden Town. The second one appeared between Elephant and Castle and Kennington and yet still the swarms of London commuters—that hard, creature-of-habit breed—refused to abandon their sacred, high-speed transport. The first hand returned (forensic analysis of CCTV footage had determined that it was indeed that same one as had emerged on the Northern Line) between Knightsbridge and Gloucester Road. By the time the second hand burst forth again between Bank and Liverpool Street, crowds on the tube had diminished by nearly seventy percent. Edwin hadn’t been scared, he’d been curious.
So down he’d gone.
I’m looking at two giant . . . things, their huge maws open to receive the screaming people tumbling from the tube carriages that the unspeakable behemoths are holding in their hands. The camcorder footage zooms in on the head of one of the impossible beasts and I can see its dreadful jaws working as it chews on the unfortunates that its mouth contains. Not everything has entered the orifice fully and various human body parts and chunks thereof spill to the ground. The camera descends to the floor of a vast cavern, treating me to the sight of human legs, arms, heads, bits of all the above—some rotting, and parts of skeletons. The view ascends to the thing’s head once more. A sickening knot tightens in my gut as my mind grapples w
ith the fantastical nightmare before me. Above the creature’s mouth there is no discernible nose, only two small black diamond shapes which I presume are eyes of some sort. And above these, the head ends in what I can only describe as . . . a broccoli-type shape of sorts. The demon’s chin is equally grotesque—it is inordinately long, out of all proportion to the being’s head—as out of kilter with the whole as are its tiny eyes—and for all the world looks like that of a giant puppet.
The screen goes black.
I look at my old friend in his bed, his hair pure white, his once handsome thirty-year-old face now that of a wizened septuagenarian. His eyes are open, the fear that drove him to his suicide still present in them.
The tube finally stopped running yesterday after the fifth hand incident, which occurred between Bayswater and Notting Hill Gate.
So now the monsters have no more food.
I close Edwin’s eyes. I wonder how long it will be before the things under the city can no longer contain their hunger.
I imagine it’ll be more than their hands that will be coming up and out of the ground.
John Leahy has had three novels published – CROGIAN, The Faith, and Unity. His fourth novel, Harvest, is upcoming with Post Mortem Press. He lives in Abbeyfeale, Ireland.
NAILED
by Michelle Mellon
I wouldn’t have survived on the colony ships. I’m not just saying that because they wouldn’t take me. There’s lots of folks who didn’t qualify to escape Earth, but really wanted to. Me, I wasn’t one of them. I like it here.
Okay, that’s not entirely true. I liked things a hell of a lot better before. I guess it’d be more accurate to say I need to be here. The dirt and the desperation—without it, I couldn’t do what I do to survive.
I toured one of those ships, back in the early days when they were still a promise of things to come. Everything on it looked so neat and contained and sanitary. Not much chance for me to salvage from folks, and I don’t have many other skills to offer.
You’re young, so you don’t know things to be any different. But for these three decades since people have been fleeing this planet, looking for a new home to muddle, we dregs have had to adapt to life on a world that’s become little better than a hospice.
Some of us survive better than others. Me, I have a job. You might not think it’s much on the surface, and things have obviously gotten, uh, complicated around that recently. Heh. But at least it’s not one of those we’re-going-to-try-unsuccessfully-to-turn-things-around, blatantly-lie-to-your-face type jobs.
No offense.
Anyway, I’m not important enough to be hated, and not respectable enough to be appreciated. And that’s just fine. That means people leave me in peace to do what I need to do: garbage collection.
That’s what we used to call it. I know along the way it’s gotten many fancier titles; the ones they use to trick us into feeling better about our lot in life. Like they think all of us stuck here on terra firma are dumber than the folks out there in space, and we don’t know any better.
Not true. I mean, there are an inordinate number of idiots down here, now that there’s been so much culling of the gene pool, but not everyone was left behind because they weren’t smart enough. Hell, I even went to college for a while.
But you can call it whatever you want. Garbage collection, waste management, sanitation science—at the end of the day, it’s just me cleaning up after other people’s messes.
I started with big-time hauls. You know, street stuff. Dumpsters. But the scale was too large for me. My needs are more . . . personal.
Eventually, I worked my way into household management. My specialties were hotels and tenement buildings. Oh, the riches I found in those!
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Or sidetracked, I guess. Maybe not. I mean, that’s where it started, so that’s just as important as where it all ended up, right?
Anyway, it was much easier after I got the indoor gigs. I could stop scrounging in the waste cans of friends and acquaintances, and rifling through rubbish during the odd office visit.
(Although you’d be surprised what kind of personal things people leave in the office trash. I guess nobody cares anymore, not when it’s a race to see who’s going to die first—you, or the planet you’re “living” on.)
Things were great for a long while. The clients liked how meticulous I was, and I, of course, got my own benefits out of it.
But you’re probably wondering why they’d care? Why they’d pay precious money for a cleaning and disposal service, when most of them just used up a site till it was uninhabitable, then move on to another? I mean, no shortage of empty buildings in the world these days.
Well, with all that talk of another colony launch, those business operators knew folks would try to clean up their acts. They want to look respectable in their jobs and find homes that weren’t clearly temporary and one step up from the dump. Not going to impress the evaluators if you want a spot on that ship, but you live like a beast among men, huh?
It’s been nice, you know, to see people pulled back from the brink of savagery. Not too much of the cream left, which means more curds have a shot to get out this time. Like I said before, though, not for me.
Things were good. I mean, even before the big push to be civilized. Because no matter how down-and-out folks get, there are some things you just gotta take care of. When you don’t own a lot, letting a fingernail snag your clothes or a toenail rip through your last pair of socks just won’t cut it.
No pun intended.
I see it like this: people had parts they needed to get rid of, and I had a need for those parts. And in those places I worked, there was no shortage of clippings, especially if you devised a sifting system like I did.
I see your face, I get it. Sounds gross. But think about it. Lots of people chew their nails. Me, I’ve been chewing on my nails since I was a kid. It just got so I needed to supplement my own supply with others.
Hosiery works best, in case you were wondering. You know, for the sifting. Not fishnet stockings, obviously, but if you’re lucky enough to find a stretch of pantyhose without holes or snags or bodily fluids on them, it’s like panning the trash for gold.
And honestly, that’s where it ended for the longest time. I had it totally under control. I’d collect nails and bring them home and snack a bit.
After a while, after eating so many raw, they started getting stuck between my teeth and cutting my gums, you know? That’s when I started making a little effort. Marinated them for roasting, or added a sprinkle of something to sauté them with, or worked ‘em into recipes. And that was even better.
But I kept getting hungrier. So, I thought, if adding flavor after the fact is this good, how much better would it be to have some “original” flavoring? That’s what I call it, anyway. You know, it kinda makes it sound less gruesome.
No?
Well, that first time, that was total happenstance. I know that sounds kinda unbelievable, especially after what I just said about flavoring and all, but that kind of thinking was just fantasy. It’s not like I willed anything to happen. I certainly didn’t act on my idea. I mean, not at first.
And if I’d known what it would do to me! I mean, we don’t have to pretend. I see how you can’t stop looking at the extra membrane over my eyes, and my stiff skin, and how my hands are starting to look like split hooves. I call it my “keratin carapace.” You gotta laugh, right?
Anyway, it was one of the lower-end hotels, one I hadn’t worked before. The kind that’s maybe two steps above the dump. You should know better than anybody else the kind of bizarre things that happen in this world of ours, new attention to law and order notwithstanding.
I knew something was off when I got in the room, because it was already clean. Like, someone had gone to an extraordinary amount of effort to scrub the place down. There’s always places people forget, though. I did my usual crouch-and-bend; searching floor trim and under furniture for things that bounc
e away and get left behind.
I’m not sure why they didn’t think to check under the bed, but there it was. A big toe, barely bloody but newly shorn. Without thinking, I scooped it up. Put it in the special bag I carry for my collecting, added some ice from the machine down the hall, and went about the rest of my morning.
At lunch, I took a little detour home to deposit my find in the fridge. I hardly thought about it the rest of the day. I mean, I was back to my normal collecting habit, going through the usual grind. But that night, well, after that night, there was no going back.
My favorite part of eating meat (when I could get real animal flesh and not this synthetic stuff) was the ribbon of fat. You’d bite into it and get that burst of flavor, and your teeth were happy because they got to chew on something unexpected, attached to that chunk of cow or piece of pig or whatever it was you were eating.
That’s how it felt that first time.
I tossed that toe in the oven, thinking it’d be like when you baste a turkey and the skin’s crackly and tasty. Except when I went to carve away the nail, it didn’t come off cleanly.
You know how nails sit on that flat pad of flesh? The nail bed, they call it. There’s also this special area that feeds the whole deal. The matrix. Well, this bit hanging on to the nail was a bit of bed and a bit of matrix, curled up and crunchy-looking.
Sounds funny, considering where I was at that point, but I was actually a little bit squeamish about it. I got over it real quick, though. I mean, the smell of it, and the pool of saliva threatening to drown me, well, they decided the matter.
I shrugged and popped it all—nail and tiny shreds of meat—in my mouth. I don’t even know how to describe it. Chewy with a bit of salty tang, and then the quick crunch of flesh. You’ve never tasted anything so extraordinary.
I tried to ignore the cravings. I really did. But every time I sifted some nails into a pan or a casserole dish, I thought about how much better they’d taste with some meat attached. I’d known for a long time I couldn’t stop my nail addiction, and now I realized I couldn’t go back to the way things had been before.
Hinnom Magazine Issue 001 Page 5
