Dark Delicacies II: Fear; More Original Tales of Terror and the Macabre by the World's Greatest Horror Writers

by Unknown

  “Hello?”

  “Alma!” he shouted.

  “Eric?”

  “Alma, listen to me, please.”

  She said nothing.

  “Are you there?” he said.

  “How could you,” she said, just above a whisper. “How… could you?”

  Then she hung up.

  “Oh, fuck!” Eric shouted as he slammed the phone down onto the counter. The plastic panel that held in the batteries came off and clattered to the floor. He paced in the kitchen a moment, then went back to the phone and picked up the receiver again. He looked around for the rectangular plastic panel, found it, and put it back in place on the back of the phone. He punched in his number again. He got the repetitive sound that indicated a busy line. He waited awhile longer, then tried again. The line was still busy.

  She took the phone off the hook, he thought.

  He turned and left the kitchen, went back down the hall, and out the front door. He stormed down the walkway without locking the apartment behind him, then down the stairs to the courtyard.

  He felt panic move through him like some possessing demon. It settled in his knees and made them weak, in his chest, which suddenly felt tight and breathless. Back on the street, he opened the car door and practically fell into the driver’s seat. He fumbled with the keys, started the car. He put his hand on the gearshift, but then he stopped and thought. He had to figure out where he was first, which direction he’d have to go. Once he had his bearings, he drove away from the sidewalk.

  Going back the way he came, he got back on the freeway, then floored it.

  He thought, A perfect alibi for tonight’s killing—I get pulled over for speeding with strong ale on my breath.

  He looked at the speedometer, and when he realized he was going over eighty miles an hour, he quickly slowed down.

  He passed a sign that read ROADWORK AHEAD, then another that read PREPARE TO STOP.

  “Oh, shit,” he muttered.

  Another sign: RIGHT LANE CLOSED AHEAD.

  He wondered where the construction had come from. It had not been there earlier—apparently they only did their roadwork during the night these days.

  The traffic was fairly light, until the right lane closed, then the cars and pickups and SUVs bottlenecked.

  Three quarters of a mile along the single lane, the cars slowed to a stop. And there Eric sat, waiting. He turned the radio on—the oldies station was playing something bouncy and upbeat from the eighties.

  Coherent, sensible thoughts came hard; he had to work for them, weed them out from all the loud, yammering fear in his head. That was all he could feel—fear.

  The minutes clicked by slowly on the digital dash clock: 8:26, 8:27, 8:28, 8:29, 8:30, 8:31…

  Judas would arrive at the house, if he hadn’t already, and find Alma there with another woman. He would assume it was Marianne, Alma’s sister, and he would go ahead and kill her, too, just as Eric had told him to, just as Eric had insisted.

  The dash clock read 8:32.

  You might not want to be the one who discovers her, Judas had said. It’s going to be bloody, Eric. Nice and bloody.

  “Oh, dear God,” Eric groaned as he felt trapped there in that frozen car, unable to move forward or back, just frozen, crippled. His entire body felt like quivery Jell-O.

  Suddenly, the cars began to move. Slowly at first, but then gradually picking up speed, until suddenly the traffic on both lanes was back to normal. Eric drove the speed limit along the freeway until he got to the second Newbury exit. He took the cutoff, which put him on DeNancie Street. He turned right and forced himself to resist the urge to slam the accelerator to the floor. “Not yet, Judas,” Eric said as he drove, “please not yet.”

  He went two miles down DeNancie, then turned left on Emberson Park Street, past the park and into the residential district in which he and Alma lived in a ranch-style house with a circular driveway in front. He shot into the driveway, then hit the brakes and the car skidded forward over the gravel for a bit, then stopped—right behind Jill’s Toyota. Alma’s car was in the garage, to the left of the house, just off the circular driveway.

  Eric threw the car door open and tried to jump out of the car, but he could not. A second later, he realized his seatbelt was still on. He unfastened it, tossed it aside, then promptly fell out of the car, gravel biting into the palms of his hands. He scrambled to his feet and ran around the car, leaving the car door to slowly swing back into place—it stopped a few inches short of closing.

  Eric kicked up gravel as he ran, wobbly at first, then straightening up and heading straight for the front door. It was unlocked, and he burst into the house.

  “Jill?” he called. “Alma?”

  The living room was to the right of the front door, and it was empty. Two lamps were on, and the television played with the volume turned down to a vague murmur. The Christmas tree stood in the front window, its tiny colored lights twinkling like stars. Down the hall ahead of him, Eric saw light spilling from the kitchen doorway at the other end.

  Eric’s shoes thunked on the hardwood floor of the hallway as he ran down to the kitchen. He turned right, went through the doorless doorway, took three jogging steps in, and suddenly his feet were up in the air and his tailbone hit the kitchen’s tile floor, sending an explosion of pain up his spine.

  His hands smacked to the wet, sticky floor and slid over the slick surface a few times as he tried to sit up. He managed to roll over onto his hands and knees, and there he stayed for a long moment, not moving, not breathing as he stared down at the red floor.

  But the floor was not red, it was not supposed to be, anyway. The tiles were an earthy brown-and-tan. At that moment, though, the floor was red, and it was a wet red. And the red had a smell—a cloying, pungent, coppery smell. There was another smell in the room—the smell of feces from bowels that had gone slack at the moment of death.

  Eric’s hands slipped out from under him, and he fell flat, then struggled further until he was up on his knees, then on his feet. He looked at his hands, his arms, the sleeves of his coat, his pants—he had blood all over him. A moment after he stood up straight, he bent rigidly at the waist and vomited onto the floor.

  There was a tiled bar that separated the kitchen from the living room, cluttered with newspapers and magazines, a couple paperback novels, a half-drunk beverage in a glass, a coffee mug. On the floor just under the bar lay Alma, next to an overturned bar stool.

  The phone rang. Eric was surprised to find it operating again after getting the busy signal a couple times. On the third ring, the answering machine picked up.

  “Hello? Eric? Alma? It’s Betty Macomber next door. Anybody there?”

  That busybody, Eric thought, clenching his teeth. Betty Macomber was their most annoying neighbor, a woman who lived to gossip. Alma was too nice to ignore or avoid her, but Eric avoided her like a bad road.

  “Well…” She sounded worried. “I heard the screams, and I called the police, so they should be coming soon. I… I hope everything’s okay.”

  A cold explosion went off in Eric’s gut. The police. The answering machine ended the message with an abrupt beep.

  “This just happened,” Eric whispered. Gooseflesh erupted all over his back when it occurred to him that Judas might still be in the house. He stood and listened for a moment. He heard nothing—the house was empty. Eric was familiar with the house’s emptiness, knew when someone was moving around in it somewhere.

  He was alone with Alma. He looked down at her corpse.

  Her eyes were open, her head tilted back to reveal an enormous open gash where her throat used to be. The corners of her bloody mouth were pulled back so that it echoed the deep smiling slash of her throat—two unnatural smiles, both in death. She wore a pale-blue sweat suit—she usually worked out on the stationary bike in the early evening. The sweat suit was punctured in several places in front where she had been stabbed repeatedly. Very little of the suit’s pale blue color remained—it ha
d been obliterated by all the blood.

  “Oh my God, Alma,” he said, mere breath forming the words. The next words were too jagged and sharp to speak aloud—they would cut his lips to ribbons—so he simply thought them: What have I done?

  A sound.

  Wet and gurgling.

  Eric looked around, trying to determine the sound’s source.

  It happened again—a soggy, gurgling cough.

  He hurried through the doorless doorway beside the bar and into the living room, turning sharply right. He looked down and found Jill sitting on the floor between two bar stools with her back slumped against the front of the bar, head tipped back just enough to reveal the bloody gash across her throat. Her arms were limp at her sides, her legs sprawled in her roses-on-black-print skirt below a red sweater. There were a lot of different kinds of red, and Eric squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, rubbed them with thumb and finger, then opened them again. The red roses, the red sweater, and all that other red, that glistening, dribbling, smeared, and splashed red.

  It’s going to be bloody, Eric. Nice and bloody.

  He had planned it this way—Judas had known ahead of time that it was going to be this cruel bloodbath. Was that necessary? Eric did not think so. The only possible explanation he could think of was that Judas enjoyed that, had fun doing it that way, nice and bloody. The way it looked to Eric—Judas was a sick fuck, a genuine psychopath, but a very clever psychopath who had figured out a way to get people to pay him big bucks to do the very thing that got him off.

  “Glorp!”

  The wet coughing sound came from Jill and was accompanied by a gout of blood from her mouth as her head dropped forward.

  Then that awful sound again—“Glorp!”—as more blood came from her mouth and dribbled from the gash in her throat. She seemed to be bleeding everywhere, having been stabbed repeatedly.

  “Oh, thank you Jesus, you’re alive!” he said, with relief in his voice so intense, it made the words sound painful to utter, turning them into what almost sounded like a groan. “Oh, God, Jill. Jill?” He hunkered down beside her and pulled her away from the front of the bar. She was able to lean forward a little under her own power, but she seemed very weak. She’d lost a lot of blood. Fortunately, Judas’s knife had managed to cut her throat without severing anything too important—a little farther along on either end of the slice and she would have been dead within seconds of being cut.

  “It’s me, honey, it’s me, Jill, it’s Eric, you’re gonna be okay, you hear me, you’re gonna be fine as soon as we get you to a hospital,” he said as he eased her out from under the bar, whispering as he rambled on, as if he were afraid of being heard. He realized he was whispering and did not understand why, but he could not stop—it simply did not feel right to speak out loud.

  “Come on,” Eric whispered as he put his right arm around her shoulders. His elbow hit something that did not belong there. He pulled his arm back, lowered it, reached with his hand and—

  —his fingers closed on the handle of a knife sticking out of Jill’s back, and he was so horrified by it, so deeply offended by its presence there that—

  —without thinking, without wondering if it was a good idea and before examining the possibilities—

  —he pulled the knife from her back.

  Jill cried out and more blood came from her mouth, dribbled over her dark-red chin and down over her throat and onto her red sweater.

  Eric clutched the knife in his right hand as he scooped Jill up in his arms.

  “C’mon,” he said as he carried her across the living room, “I’m gonna get you to a hospital.” He took a moment to get his balance, first swaying right, then left, wobbling like a crippled penguin.

  He went down a mental list—his keys were in his coat pocket, the car was unlocked, St. Elizabeth’s Hospital (aka Queen of the Mountain) in Hope Valley would be the closest and the best. He was only halfway across the living room and he was already thinking of the best route to take, wondering if he should hit the freeway, or take the surface streets he knew fairly well. He decided the surface streets would require too much thinking, and he didn’t need that tonight, no more aggravation, thank you very much, and he decided to take the freeway.

  “Please don’t die, Jill, I need you, do you hear me? I need you, Jill. You can’t die on me, you hear me?” He continued to plead with her as he crossed the living room, a trek that seemed to take forever, as the front door retreated farther and farther away in the distance.

  His cheeks were wet, but not with blood for a change. The tears fractured his vision for a moment as he reached out with his left hand and turned the doorknob on the front door.

  A beautiful kaleidoscope of colored light danced through his tears when he opened the front door—blue and red lights swirled and spiked and became sunbursts of color. Eric sniffed and blinked his eyes a few times, blinked away the tears that clung instead to his eyelashes now.

  The lights were on police cars in the driveway.

  Eric refocused his eyes on the black hole at the end of a gun held by a police officer.

  “Put the woman down!” the officer shouted.

  “But officer, she’s hurt, I—I—I just fuh-found her this way, and she needs medical attention immediately, she’s lost a lot of bluh—”

  “I said put the fucking woman down now, asshole!”

  Jill made a terrible sound then. A deep gurgle in her throat that came to an abrupt end. Then she stopped breathing.

  “Jill?” Eric said, looking down at her face. “Jill?”

  “Do you hear me?” the cop shouted, his voice breaking at one point. “I said put! The woman! Down!”

  It was such a final sound, that gurgle.

  She’d chosen that particular moment to die. As if she’d looked around, then said, “Oh, fuck, cops? You’re on your own, honey.” And then expired with that death rattle in her throat.

  Another police officer had joined the first one on the porch. He, too, aimed his gun at Eric and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Put the woman down or I blow your fuckin’ head off!”

  Eric wanted so much to say that she needed help. But she didn’t, of course. She was beyond ever needing help again. He could not hide behind her wounds.

  He was holding a corpse.

  “Put down the fuckin’ woman and—”

  “Goddammit, are you deaf? Do you wanna die? Are you—”

  “—get down on the floor!”

  “—a fuckin’ retard, huh? Let go of the woman and—”

  “I got a bead on your fuckin’ face!”

  Eric turned to his left, gently bent forward, and placed Jill on the floor, out of the way of the open door.

  The shouting stopped for a moment. Then one of the officers went wild with shouting again: “Weapon! He’s got a fuckin’ weapon!”

  “Drop the weapon, asshole!”

  “Drop it! Throw it down!”

  “I will put a fuckin’ hole in your Goddamned head if you don’t—”

  “Drop that fuckin’ knife, asshole!”

  At first, he had no idea why they were still shouting at him. He was unaware of holding the knife in his right hand, the handle clutched in his fist, the blade serrated—something from the kitchen, Eric guessed—and dark with Jill’s blood.

  His fingers were stiff, but he opened them up, let the knife drop to the floor.

  The two cops were on him then, tackling him to the floor, shouting, “Hands behind your back!”

  “Stop resisting!” one of the cops shouted, then punched him in the kidney before Eric could say, “I’m not resisting!” Pain exploded from the point of the fist’s impact and radiated all through his abdomen. It made him retch.

  They cuffed his hands behind his back, then jerked him to his feet. One cop put a hand to the center of Eric’s back and pushed him while the other dragged him along by the elbow.

  The cage-grating that separated the front seat from the back in the patrol car cast webworks of shadows
across Eric’s face as light shifted and passed through the moving car. He leaned forward—he’d been talking to the two police officers.

  “Why’d you do it?” the cop in the passenger seat asked.

  “I told you I didn’t do it!” Eric insisted, speaking loudly now. I found them that way.”

  “Then how the hell did you get all that blood all over you, huh?” the cop asked. “What’d you do, roll in it?”

  “Well… kind of, yes. I, uh, I fell.”

  “You fell.” The cop reached across and slapped the shoulder of the cop at the wheel. “He fell.”

  “Yeah, right,” the driver said.

  “Alma was already dead, and Jill was just hanging on.” Eric’s throat was soar, and his eyes were damp and puffy. He’d waited for what seemed a long time in the backseat of the patrol car before the two cops got in and started driving. During that time, he’d done a lot of crying.

  “And you just happened to be holding the murder weapon,” the driver said.

  “I—I pulled it out of her back!” Eric said, a note of pleading in his voice.

  “You idiot,” the passenger said. “Don’t you know you never pull a knife out of somebody’s—”

  “No, I didn’t know.”

  “Boy, you better get yourself a really clever lawyer,” the passenger said. “ ’Cause you’re gonna need one. Even then, I bet you get the needle.”

  Slowly, Eric leaned back in the seat, even slumped a little, but all very slowly. He chuckled. The chuckle got a little louder, and quickly turned into a laugh. He pressed his lips together and tried hard to hold the laughter back, but he could not. It burst from his closed lips, and he tilted his head back as he laughed and laughed. He tried to stop again, but it only got worse, and pretty soon, tears of laughter rolled down his cheeks.

  “I’m glad you think it’s funny,” the passenger said. “Because if you ask me, you’re fucked three ways from Sunday.”

  Eric continued to laugh. He bent forward and held his cramping stomach as he laughed on and on.