A Haunting of Horrors, Volume 2: A Twenty-Book eBook Bundle of Horror and the Occult

by Brian Hodge

He recalls his past experiences with fire, all of them. Burn down the monster. He drops the match into the thin pool of accelerator glistening on the bar top and the flame grows, quietly.

  By striking the match, he has just purchased a feeling, as the Count would no doubt observe.

  The Monster blunderingly topples a rack of beakers, a modern-day sorcerer's brew of flammables and caustics …

  Never has he precipitated the end on purpose. Never, except in the first sequel. We belong dead. He was making a point.

  The movie poster stays behind, in its smashed frame. That will be the price paid. Sacrifice something valuable.

  More convincing, that way. He is staying dangerous.

  Good.

  And Blank Frank does, in fact, feel better.

  Light springs, hard reddish-white now, behind him as he makes his exit and locks the door of Un/Dead. The night is cool by contrast, near foggy. Condensation mists the plasma globe as he strolls away, pausing once beneath a streetlamp to appreciate the ring on his little finger. He doesn't need to eat, or sleep.

  Uninjured by the cataclysm, the Monster stumbles, grunting, away from the village and into the forest …

  But this time, thinks Blank Frank, the old Monster knows where he's going.

  He'll miss Michelle and the rest of the club staff. But he must move on, because he is not like them. He has all the time he'll ever need, and friends who will be around forever …

  Un/Dead blazes. The night swallows him.

  Blank Frank likes the power.

  Author's Note:

  This story might be considered a thematic bookend to another flight of fancy titled "Monster Movies." It is one of the stories I read during my 1991 Halloween lecture tour, at Vassar, among other places. Craig Spector read the part of the Count and John Skipp read the character of Larry. You had to be there.

  Where the Heart Was

  Victor Jacks ambled through the back door to ruin their lives on Thursday. Which was a pain, since Victor had been pronounced dead the previous Saturday.

  "Stubborn sumbitch." Renny reached under the bed for the ball bat. He was on hands and knees, forced to paw around until it finally came out with dust balls and hair kitties chasing it. Renny, who was allergic to animal dander, sneezed ear-poppingly. This trebled his rage.

  Renny's life was one that Victor's back-from-the-dead encore was designed to ruin. Barb's was the other. Just now she was backed into a corner, shrieking like an ingénue in a fifty-year-old horror film. Unlike those World War II heroines, she was naked. Renny still had his socks on. Apart from his Timex, he was garbless, but for the baseball bat. This, he refused to wield in the name of mere modesty.

  Victor looked a bit shaggy, having been deceased for the better part of the work week. His shoulder blades, butt and legs down to the heels were blue-black with dependent lividity. His eyes were so crusty that one was welded shut. His hair was lank and wild, the most alive thing about him; his skin tone hung somewhere between catgut and bottled pig's knuckle.

  He crackled as he moved. That would be rigor.

  He had obviously been walking for some time. At each of his joints the dry flesh had split into gummy wounds with chafed and elevated flaps. The distance from the morgue to Barb's bedroom was about twelve pedestrian miles.

  Provided, that is, Victor had come here directly, after sitting up on his slab and deciding to ruin their lives, Renny thought. And that pissed him off even more.

  Renny's next explosive sneeze spoiled his aim. He wiped his nose with his forearm. Barb kept screaming, totally out of character for her, and Renny wished in a mean flash that she would either faint or die.

  Enough.

  At the crack point it was the batting that mattered, not the invective. The bulb end of the bat smashed Victor's dead left ear deep into the dead left hemisphere of his dead brain. Victor wobbled and missed his zombie grab for Renny. He didn't have a chance.

  Renny was foaming and lunatic, swinging and connecting, swinging and connecting, making pulp. It was what he had ached to do to Victor all along. What he had fantasized about doing to Victor just last week, when Victor was still alive. His yelling finally drowned out Barb, who was still shrunken fetally into her corner, her eyes seeking the deep retreat of trauma.

  Renny's eyes were pink with rage. Flecks of froth dotted the corners of his mouth. He kept bashing away with the bat, pausing only to sneeze and wipe. Victor put up as good a fight as a dead person could, which is to say, not much.

  While the Renny on the outside was cussing and bludgeoning, the Renny on the inside was smirking about several things. Number one–zombie movies. In the movies, reanimated corpses boogied back from the dead with all kinds of strength and powers. What a bagload. Cadavers had all the tensile strength of twice-cooked pasta. Even in the movies, you could put them down with a headshot. What threat, where?

  Deeper down, Renny was enjoying himself. He thought Barb watched too much cable. When he had first proposed murdering Victor–just as a hoot, mind you, nothing serious–she burdened him with probable cause and airtight alibis and where-were-you-on-the-night-of. Ridiculous, in a world where people simply dropped off the planet on a daily basis, never again a peep. You break his neck, you dump him in the first available manhole, the sewer is a disposal system, end of story.

  Barb had wanted to play faithful and loving right up to the climax of the drama. Loving, hah. Faithful, not since she'd met Renny.

  In the end it hadn't come down to murder, but right now Barb sure was reaping some drama.

  Things were so lively right now that Renny had busted a workout sweat and Barb's vocal cords were rawing. He finally turned around and told her to shut up while what was left of Victor Jacks twitched in a pile on the floor. The business end of the bat was a real mess.

  "Is he dead?" said Barb, cowering.

  "I don't think he's gonna move no more right now." Renny would have wiped his be-gored hands on his pants; his pants had been off since just after dinnertime. He let his hands hang in the air as he looked around, uselessly. He said sheeeit, slow and weary. It didn't help.

  "How? How did he? He…we…I don't…it just." Barb was still having a bit of trouble being coherent.

  "Victor was always a stubborn sumbitch, you know that one, babe."

  Barb stood up and risked moving a little closer to what was left of Victor. "Maybe he, you know, didn't really die. Went into a coma or something."

  "Barb, Victor was dead. He was dead last week and he was still dead when he walked in on us. He is the deadest thing I ever saw."

  "You knocked his head off," she said, dully.

  "Stopped him, didn't it?"

  "What're we gonna do, Renny? He's all … ehh."

  "Shush. What we're gonna do is call the morgue and tell them some pervert snatched the body and mutilated it, and dumped it here as a joke. Some old boyfriend of yours. You can make up a description. Nobody'll bug us."

  "What makes you so smart?"

  Renny had to stop a moment to ponder a good answer to that one.

  "I mean, you think they'll buy it?" There she went again. Barb was one of those people who strolled through life obliviously, thinking a call to the police would sling her free of any sort of trouble. Now she was just as convinced that the Authorities–capital A–would swoop down at any moment to point j'accuse.

  "Babe, just dream up a good description. Say he was a Mexican in a green windbreaker."

  "But Renny, I'd never go out with no Mexican, and how come I have to say he's my old boyfriend? I mean–"

  Renny sighed, held her by the shoulders, met her eyes. "We'll deal. Trust me. Please." He forced a smile for her. It was like jamming a finger down his throat to chuck up an emotion. He needed to divert her, to say something that would get her mind off police procedure, so he said, "Uh got any towels?"

  Renny mopped off. Barb brought a big Hefty bag. Renny stuck the bat back under the bed. Touching it again made him re-experience the sheer satisfaction of pound
ing ole Victor right back into death, and this gifted him with a healthy and urgent erection.

  Barb glimpsed what was coming up, and managed to finish him off before the police came knocking. Once again she told Renny that she'd never done that with Victor, and Renny smiled and stroked her head, keeping to himself the private notion that Barb could probably suck the stitches off a hardball through a flexi-straw. Victor Jacks would never have hung with a china doll. Renny would never have been tempted by one, either.

  Then the Authorities arrived, and Renny and Barb set about making up stories.

  Funerals never were much of a hoot. Neither Barb nor Renny had RSVPed many in their combined forty-odd years, but this time they dutifully duded up in basic black, and held hands, and dabbed at crocodile tears as the rearranged remains of Victor Jacks were boxed up and delivered six feet closer to Hell.

  Half an hour after the services, both of them were naked and neither of them was very depressed.

  Most annoying of Barb's bed play habits was her wont of lighting off to the toilet as soon as…well, right after. Renny had once joked about it:

  "I make all that effort to give you something, babe, and you just go piss it away." Barb had made a face. Crude, her face told him. Not funny. Then hi-de-ho, off to the can again.

  Fine. Renny grunted manfully and rolled to his right side, his favored side for dozing. Swell.

  In the bathroom, Barb watched herself in the mirror for a long time, not quite sure what her surveillance was in quest of. Victor had hit her in this bathroom. He'd also done it to her, same day, in the tub, which was too small for love. Victor's tendency to boil over all at once was frightening, a pit bull on a very iffy leash, thought Barb. Whether it got hostile, life-threatening, might depend on a dozen factors. When it last ate. Whether it was pissed off. Whether it liked you. Whether it liked your smell. Victor Jacks had been like that.

  But when Victor got to the part where he put his big hands all over her; large, powerful, warm hands, unbuttoning and unzipping her, making her naked and telling her she was wanted, touching her in places only she touched–curve of ass, inside of thigh, underside of breast, smooth-shaven armpit–oh, my. He made her moist, filled her up; she would practically hallucinate and she had always slept gorgeously afterward. The sex was never violent between them; only the occasional backhand was.

  Barb knew she would never get around to enjoying the way men apologized, every time, after they smacked her.

  When she had met Victor Jacks, she was a waitress-newly-turned exotic dancer. Petite-chested, with good hips and sturdy, if not long, legs, she figured it was virtually the same aggravation for better tips and weirder hours; she fancied she needed more weird in her life. She got Victor. All he lacked was a puff of smoke to appear in.

  When Victor had met Barb, he was comfortably into pharmaceutical Dexedrine pops and on the cusp of crystal meth. He made do with the odd frame-weld for RUBs–Rich Urban Bikers–and bashed big-blocks for muscle-car meatheads with too much leisure cash. He paid Barb to table-dance and made her sit, just sit, while he looked at her. Management did not approve. Victor did not make a scene. He merely smiled and showed Barb's bosses more money. To Barb, whose concept of foreplay was someone bigger than her saying shut up and lay down, this was romance with a big R indeed. After a week of this bizarre courtship, she went out with him…and he stayed in with her.

  When Renny Boone had met Barb, he was so chemical-free you could almost see his halo. To Barb, by this time shell-shocked by two years of biker-speed tantrums and eight-ball insomnia, Renny's well-cut bod and addiction-less turn smelled like that myth come true, the Better Life.

  "You look like you could use a rest," Renny had told her, and so telling her, he took her straight away to bed.

  Five days later the two of them were still trying to dope out some rationalization that might convince, say, a jury that she, Barb, and he, Renny, were Meant To Be. But Barb lacked the heart to dump someone as spontaneous and romantic as Victor Jacks.

  Truth was, Renny preferred Barb as a rental. And that Victor wasn't such a bad dude. He'd even nailed the chronic carburetor wheeze suffered by Butch, Renny's black '66 Impala.

  Truth was, Barb preferred Victor's flashfire spats to shaking her ass for the beery swine who bellied up to the runway at Nasty Tramps.

  So Truth held sway, and Victor stayed ignorant, dangerous and sexy. Barb had Renny for the topics she could never broach to Victor. And Renny had Barb, the way cowboys have spittoons. And they all lived happily ever after for about two more weeks, until Victor came back to the house, unannounced, to fetch his set of Allen wrenches, and …

  … well, you can imagine.

  The "tool excuse" had been Victor's cover story. That afternoon, unbeknownst to Renny and Barb, Victor had fallen in love again–this time, with a smokable amphetamine called ice. He was pretty saturated, on top of his morning fistful of vitamins, and when he walked through his front door and caught Renny and Barb doing the bone dance on his sofa bed, the speed made his anger instantaneous; his reaction time, zero.

  Victor had snarled. Literally snarled, lip curling. He came for his betrayers, his face bright crimson, the sclera of his eyes pinking. Two steps closer he stopped, stiffened, pawed at his left arm, and fell stone dead of the most concussive goddamned heart attack his mesomorphic build could contain. Victor's fulsome, romantic-if-crazy heart shut down like a phone sex line with no callers, and all that remained was for the coroner to scribble death by chemical misadventure into the appropriate box…while Victor himself was trucked away to fill up another appropriate box.

  Which brings us back to Barb, in the bathroom.

  She flushed the toilet. Flushed, then blushed, in a match-head flare of anger as she remembered Renny's idiotic joke about her having to urinate after sex. She would never forget it. Crude, Renny could be so crude. Maybe dumb, too–dumb enough never to have heard of Honeymooner's Cystitis, an inflammation of the bladder that was easy to get when you had too much foreign juice rammed up your tubes. And perhaps uncaring, as well–maybe Renny didn't give a big manly damn what havoc forty-five minutes of the missionary position could wreak on even a healthy girl's poor need to pee.

  In her mirror, by nightlight, she spotted a hickey on her neck. Crude.

  But she loved the way Renny liked to chew on her, just nibble and bite and suck all the right places, as though he was desperately hungry for her, physically starving. She always orgasmed first, even when she tried to outlast him, and once she was coitally zoned, she really did want him to leave marks. Little ones she'd see in the morning, when she felt the delicious residual ache of their workout.

  She liked to tease Renny about all the women he must have learned his bag of tricks from. If she had a headache or a rotten mood, Renny could bang it right out of her. Victor would never even touch her at her time of the month; Renny did not have that particular cultural problem. He made her feel more desirable on her doggiest days, and feeling desirable made Barb feel womanly indeed. Renny even understood about her having to go back to work at Nasty Tramps, now that Victor was no longer winning the bread. In fact, Renny had suggested Barb rejoin the working world. What a guy.

  Crude, dumb, uncaring, and boy-howdy opportunistic. Yeah, Renny was a prize, for sure. Prize catch of the day.

  Except that this day, somehow, Victor had found time out from his busy schedule to come back from the dead. This did not shock or befuddle Barb overtly. Maybe she'd seen too many monster movies, and lacked the emotional capacity for astonishment. She stared down her reflection eye-to-eye and reminded herself that Victor had done a lot of uppers in his thirty-odd years on the planet. Hell, he was probably spinning in his new grave right now–at 78 RPM.

  The bathroom light was harsh. It made her feel lonely. She was fortunate to know that it was a loneliness she could drive away. She wanted Renny on her, inside of her, the fastest way she knew not to feel lonely anymore.

  She found him semi-conscious and semi-erect. Re
nny functioned best with a five-minute nap between rounds. Barb woke him up with her mouth. She didn't say a word, but he awoke anyway. They made a great deal of noise over the next half-hour. Renny always lasted longer once he'd "primed his pump"; his words.

  They were both on their backs, kicking away sheets to let their own sweat cool them off, when Barb said, "Did you hear that?"

  "Hear what?"

  "Little scritchy noise. Like a mouse."

  "Probably that stupid cat of yours."

  "No, he doesn't make noises like that."

  "Then it probably is a mouse. This house is–"

  "No, listen."

  Renny listened. If the thing making the noise was a mouse, it was dragging off a dog for a bit of fun.

  Barb pounded his shoulder. "It's under the bed!"

  "Jesus Christ." Renny stayed calm and leaned overboard for a look-see.

  From beneath the dust ruffle, the baseball bat shot out like a piston, hitting Renny foursquare in the chin and making him see night sky. It still had clots of Victor drying on it. Then something whipsnaked tight coils around Renny's throat and dragged him down to tussle.

  Renny made a gargling noise in the dark as he was reeled in. Discombobulated, he thought he was being engulfed by a giant wiggle-worm with a whole lot of little worms attached. He dug his heels into the rug and fought to breathe. Barb was already making those screamy gasps that truly bugged him, deep down.

  It was a hand on his throat. He peeled it off. As he did, another appendage trapped his hand.

  Renny pulled back and dragged his rubber-limbed assailant out from under the bed–the preferred place of concealment for seasoned, traditional boogeymen.

  It was Victor again.

  Moreover, it was Victor as he had been buried that afternoon. Bones all smashed. No head.

  Renny was instantly mummified in a barbwire-tangle of leathery muscles and nonliving rubber flesh; it was like trying to wrassle a waterbed. What used to be Victor's arms and legs–now freed from bones and framework–coiled and constricted into tentacles that were much quicker than Renny's fist, They slithered snug around his windpipe, his chest, his stomach, and Renny could feel it coming–the big squeeze that would make the life jump right out of him.