Best British Horror 2014

by Johnny Mains

  ‘I’ll have you executed in the morning. You disgust me.’ Her face has begun to shake and she pulls her bed sheets up to her chin, as if to stop me looking at her bird body in the shiny nighty. ‘People will thank me for having you put down. You should have been smothered in the cradle. Why do they let things like you live?’ All this I have heard before when she is in a spiteful mood. But the thing that makes me so angry is her suspicion that I want to look at her skeleton body in the silk gown.

  At any moment I expect Gemima to come in and start wailing. Then the white ape will be up here too and I will have a few hours to live. I stare at the bird-face with the plume of grey hair. Never have I hated anything so much. A little gargle comes out of my throat and I am at her bedside before she can say another word.

  She looks up at me with surprise in her eyes. Neither of us can believe we are facing each other like this in her bedroom. This is not how I imagined it would be: the light on, me in my night gown, and Mrs Van Den Broeck’s dry-stick body sitting upright and supported by pillows.

  She opens her mouth to speak, but no spiky words come out to hurt my ears. It is my time to speak. ‘You,’ I say. ‘The boys. The boys in the truck. You brought them here.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Have you lost your mind?’

  I take one of the pillows from behind her back. Mrs Van den Broeck never liked to see my china-doll hands poking from the sleeves of my uniform, so it is only right they are the last things she sees before I put the pillow over her face.

  ‘Oh,’ she says in a little girl voice. Her frown is still asking me a question when I put her in the dark and take away the thin streams of air that must whistle through her beak holes. I grin the wild grin I cannot control that makes my whole face shake. This bully-bird can’t peck me now.

  Her pigeon skull fidgets under the pressing pillow. Twiggish legs with brown spots on the skin kick out inside the sheets, but only make whispers like mice behind the skirting boards. Claws open, claws close, claws open, claws stop moving.

  I put my big onion skull against the pillow to add weight to my late-night pressings. Now our faces are closer together than they have ever been before, but we can’t see each other. A few feathers and some silk is the only thing between us. The pillow smells of perfume and old lady. Squalls and squirts of excitement start in my belly. Triumph makes me want to take a shit.

  I whisper words through the veil between us. I send her on her way with mutterings. ‘The little boys from the truck were crying when they were taken into the tiled room’ – flicker of talon on the mattress – ‘They were scared, but didn’t know why they were going to be hurt. They didn’t understand’ – stretching of a single bony leg under the sheets – ‘What did they look like on your plate?’ – final kick of twisted foot, and yellow nail snags on silk – ‘There was laughter in the boardroom during dinner. I heard you. I was outside and I heard you all’ – all the thin bones relax and go soft under me – ‘Then you made me bring the left-overs up here in white bags. They banged against my legs on the stairs. They felt heavy. The bags were wet inside.’

  Now she’s still. Nothing under me but bird bones, fossils wrapped in silk and some hair, but not much else.

  I stay on top of her for a while. Now it’s done I feel warm inside. Milky sweat cools on the skin under my night gown. I take the pillow off Mrs Van den Broeck’s face and step back from the bed. I pad out the part that was over her beak. Leaning across her I put the pillow back behind her warm body.

  Underneath my body one of her chicken-bone arms suddenly moves, quicker than I thought something old and skinny could move. Yellow claws curl around my elbow. I look down. An egg-shell brow wrinkles. Pink eyes open and make me gasp. I try to pull away.

  Bird snarl.

  Pinched mouth opens wide. Two rows of tiny yellow teeth sink into my wrist.

  Now I’m drowning. Pain and panic fills my balloon skull like hot water. I pull and tug and yanky-shake at her biting beak that wants to saw off my dolly hand. Grunting, she holds on. How can an old thing like Mrs Van den Broeck, made from such tiny bones and paper skin, make so deep a noise?

  Digging my heels into the rug, I push backwards with all my strength, but her body comes forward in a tangle of sheets, pulled across the mattress by her mouth. Snarly and spitting, she shakes her head from side to side and I think my wrist is broken. I should have guessed 170 years of her evil life could not be stopped by a soft pillow in the night.

  Mad from the pain, I swat my free hand around in the air and it hits something solid. Now there are stabbing pains in the knuckles of that hand too from where it struck the heavy lamp. Strength leaks out of my feet and into the rug. Black dots float in front of my eyes. I might faint. It feels like her serrated beak has gone through a nerve.

  I fall backwards and pull her whole body off the bed. Her stick-body hits the floor but makes no sound. I stand up and try to shake her off like I’m trying to pull off a tight shirt that has gone inside-out over my face. Tears blur my eyes.

  I reach for the lamp on the bedside table. My little hand circles the hot smooth neck below the bulb. Pulling it off the table, I watch the thick green marble-base drop to the biting head on the rug. There is a thock sound as the sharp stone corner strikes the side of her head by the small ear. She stops biting.

  I twist my wrist free of the loose beak and step away. I look down and can’t believe so much liquid could spill from the broken head of a very old bird. The liquid is black. It’s been going through her thin pipes and tubes for 170 years, and now it is soaking into a rug.

  Working fast I wrap the white cord of the lamp around her claw and make it go tight. Maybe they will think she fell from her pillows and pulled the lamp down on top of her bird head. With the tail of my night shirt I then wipe at all the things my dollish fingers have touched around the bed.

  I flit from her room like a ghost. Go down the long hall and close the front door behind me. In the light of the landing I inspect the circle of bruises and cuts her beak has made on my stiff wrist. Not as bad as it felt.

  I find it hard to believe Gemima is not screaming and that doors are not opening and that phones are not ringing and that residents are not shuffling down the stairs in dressing gowns. But there is only silence in the west wing.

  Then the shaking starts.

  Down the stairs I go on my hands and knees like a spider with four legs torn off. Back to my bunk.

  Curled up in the warm place I have made in the middle of my bed, with the thin sheet and itchy grey blanket pulled over my head, I try and stop the shakes and try and wipe away all the pictures that swirl around my pumpkin skull. There is so much room inside the big space, so I guess it can hold more memories than a smaller head. Over and over I see the chewing bird that was Mrs Van den Broeck, her beak fastened on my wrist, and then I see the heavy lamp land with a thock . . . thock . . . thock . . . It’s all I can hear: the sharp marble corner breaking the wafer of her veiny temple.

  What have I done in this giant house? What will become of me? They will know that my dolly hands got busy with a pillow and bedside-lamp to crush that flightless vulture in its own nest. I wonder if turning back the hands on my little brass clock will take me back to the time before I went sneaking and creeping into her room.

  An impulse makes my face scrunch up to cry and my body shivers under the blankets. Then I stand up beside the bunk and peer into the top bed where Vinegar Irish snores. I wish I was him. With no killing pictures inside his head, only thoughts of clear liquid to sup from plastic containers, flowing through his twitchy sleep.

  The cold in the porter’s dormitory makes my shaking worse. My wrist throbs. I want to get back into my bed and curl into a ball. Like the baby in the tummy before I was cut out and made my momma die.

  I leave the dormitory and look down to the washroom door.

  No one is shouting, there are no alarms o
r lights being turned on. All is quiet in the building. No one knows Mrs Van den Broeck is dead. No one knows it was me, yet.

  Inside I feel better. No one saw me. No one heard me. Gemima was asleep the whole time, dreaming of the hot green place across the oceans where she was born. I just have to stay calm. Maybe no one will suspect me, the big-headed boy with the doll hands. What can he do with those puppet legs and pencil arms? That big bulb head with the baby face stuck on the front is not capable of thinking of such things, maybe that’s what they will think. That’s what they thought at the orphanage too. That’s how I got away with it before. They never even thought of me at the same time as they thought about the nasty smacking carers all found dead in their beds. I did three of them carers with these small china hands.

  I grin with joy. My little grey heart slows down its pumping. All the pebbles of sweat dry across my skin. Warmth spreads through every teeny toe and twig finger, up through my see-through body to my roundish head, until I am glowing with the happiness of escaping and of tricking them. All of them who don’t know about the power in my tiny hands.

  And in my head now, I see the little boy who came in the white truck. The one they ate yesterday. He is dancing in heaven. Up there, the sky is totally blue. He likes the long grass that is soft between his toes and he likes the way the yellow sun warms his jumping running body. It was for him and his brother that I dropped the heavy lamp. Thock. What happened to him must always be remembered. I see it again now. I see it all behind my squeezed shut, black button eyes.

  But what of the other one?

  And then I go down to the washroom and I unlock the door. Behind the wood of the door before it is even open, I hear the skitter of dry feet retreat into a corner. A whimper.

  No, they shall not have you too.

  I open the door and walk past the dark wet bench beside the white wall. And I go to the huddled yellowish boy in the corner. I smile. He takes my small outstretched hand. Blinks wet eyes.

  I think of the Cathedral of Our Lady and of the mist. We’ll need a blanket.

  ‘Your brother’s waiting for us,’ I say, and he stands up.

  Guinea Pig Girl

  THANA NIVEAU

  She was beautiful. Quite the most beautiful woman Alex had ever seen. But it wasn’t just her beauty. What he loved most about her was the way she suffered.

  He had been horrified the first time. He’d felt the stirring in his loins and then the growing hardness in his trousers. A sidelong glance at his mate Josh, whose film it was, then some uncomfortable shifting.

  ‘Holy shit,’ Josh said with a laugh as the freak in the lab coat cut off one of Yuki’s fingers.

  She screamed, her beautiful mouth stretched open, her slanted eyes as wide as they would go. She screamed. Josh laughed. Alex got hard.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, to say something. Then he squirmed as Yuki’s torture continued and his erection grew.

  Oh, how she suffered.

  That night he’d wanked himself silly over the image of her terrified, pleading face. He didn’t dare go as far as imagining himself pinning her down on the filthy mattress in the basement room, fisting a hand in her long black hair and telling her how he would take her to bits, piece by piece. No, he didn’t dare. The image flickered in the background of his thoughts but he shied away from it. Pictured himself instead as the guy who came to tend her wounds, give her water and a bit of food, hold her and reassure her that he would help her escape if he could, honest, but they were watching him too . . .

  It was sick.

  He felt ashamed and disgusted once the last throbs of pleasure had faded and he’d cleaned himself up and thrown the handful of tissues in the bin, wishing he could incinerate them. He felt as filthy as the room she’d been imprisoned in throughout the film. He’d let himself go this time but that was it. He didn’t get off on stuff like that, no way. In junior school some bullies had once tried to make him join in with torturing old Mrs Webber’s cat and he hadn’t been able to do it. He’d suffered then, suffered their ridicule and taunting and calling him a pussy. But he wasn’t like them, couldn’t bring himself to hurt something else, something helpless.

  So why did Yuki make him feel like this?

  Days later he still couldn’t get some of the imagery out of his head. It was just some dodgy Japanese torture porn film he couldn’t even remember the name of but he remembered every moment of every scene Yuki was in. She was tiny and fragile, the way so many Japanese girls were. Sexy and girlish, slutty and innocent all at the same time. An intoxicating package in any context but seeing her so helpless and vulnerable had done something to Alex. That wounded expression, her eyes streaming with tears, her hands clasped as she pleaded in words he couldn’t understand . . . It got under his skin.

  He’d wanted to dive into the film and save her, protect her, and yet that wasn’t where his fantasies steered him afterwards. On the way to work his hands had clenched on the steering wheel as he sat in traffic and he imagined them wrapped around Yuki’s slender throat. If he closed his eyes he could hear her gasping for breath. He could smell her urine as she pissed herself in terror.

  Sick.

  And yet every night his hand slipped down between his legs and all it took was the thought of her wide eyes and high-pitched cries to make him unbearably hard. He couldn’t banish the images. All he could do was let them wash over him as he came so hard his ears rang. Again and again.

  Yuki Hayashi. Actress. Born 13 April 1989 in Hokkaido, Japan. Filmography: Victim Factory 1 & 2, Love Hotel of the Damned and Aesthetic Paranoia (filming).

  Alex clicked on each film and read the synopses. They were all low-budget rip-offs of the notorious ‘guinea pig’ films from the 80s. Girls got kidnapped and tortured and that was basically it. Sometimes they also got raped.

  The fourth one in the filmography wasn’t finished yet and Love Hotel of the Damned didn’t seem to be available anywhere, not even on Josh’s pirate site. But Alex ordered the others.

  Like all rip-offs, Victim Factory aspired to take things a step further than its inspiration. The gore was over the top, even by Alex’s standards, and it was made worse by the homemade feel of the production. They looked like snuff films shot on someone’s home video camera.

  Yuki’s debut was as ‘2nd victim’ in an unpleasant scene where she was grabbed off the street and taken to an abandoned asylum. There she was stripped naked and thrown into a room stained with the blood and of previous victims. To wait. After listening in terror to the screams and cries of another girl, Yuki was dragged off to the torture chamber next door for her turn. The killer bound her wrists tightly with rope and looped them over a large hook. He turned a crank that noisily hoisted her off the ground while she screamed and wept and kicked her pretty legs. Even her slight weight looked as though it was dislocating her shoulders and Alex winced. How could you fake that?

  Finally, in a bizarre moment of artistry, the killer carved a series of Japanese characters into Yuki’s skin with the jagged edge of a broken samurai sword. The subtitles only translated the spoken dialogue so Alex had no idea what the words inscribed on her flesh meant.

  It drove him mad.

  The exotic swashes and flourishes streamed with blood that looked disturbingly real, a striking contrast to Yuki’s pale skin. Alex could almost believe that the mutilation had actually happened but for the fact that in the second film, the one Josh had shown him, she was unmarked. Pristine and ready for more. Ready to have her fingers and toes snipped off one by one, her mouth forced open with a metal dentist’s gag and her tongue cut out.

  He searched the Net for more information but the films didn’t appear to be widely known. There was the occasional mention on a message board but Alex couldn’t find any translation for the characters in the carving scene. Nor was there much information about Yuki. He found one screen grab from the first film, which he immediately stored
on his phone. Her eyes pleaded with him through the image and he felt obscurely guilty, as though he’d imprisoned her in a tiny digital cage. But he didn’t delete the picture.

  The films made him feel uncomfortable, almost sick at times. And truthfully, he didn’t enjoy the violence. When he played the DVDs again he only watched the scenes with Yuki and even then he felt funny afterwards. But he couldn’t get her out of his head. The very thought of her was enough to make him hard and even though he tried to picture her whole and undamaged, the images of torture would quickly take over. He tried to imagine her voice, cheerful and sweet as she chattered on her phone before being abducted in each film, but the musical sounds always devolved into screams of pain and madness.

  Her anguish was so excruciatingly real. He couldn’t tune it out, couldn’t un-see it. And he couldn’t help the effect it had on him.

  She was there behind his eyes every night, pleading with him to stop, her tiny body struggling helplessly against ropes and rusty chains. And no matter how much he tried to transform the images in his head, he always saw himself wielding the blades, the needles, the bolt cutters. Her blood ran like wine over his hands and he was drunk on the taste of her.

  ‘Hey, mate, you know that DVD you were after?’

  Alex froze, staring at his phone with apprehension. Then he took a deep breath before forcing himself to ask calmly, ‘Which one?’

  ‘Love Hotel of the Damned. I found it.’

  ‘Oh, cool,’ he replied, as nonchalantly as he could manage.

  ‘Yeah, some guy up in Leeds has it and he said he’d burn me a copy for a tenner.’

  ‘Thanks, mate. I’ll pay you back.’

  ‘No problem!’ Josh sounded pleased, no doubt proud of himself for tracking down the obscure film. If he had any suspicions about Alex’s obsession it wasn’t obvious. ‘I’ll drop it by your place next week.’