Horror Library, Volume 4

by Bentley Little

Kathy felt exhausted. She hadn't even thought of escape. Girls always tried to run in the movies and something horrible always happened. It was better to just rest until her mind cleared. Then she might think of a plan. Right now, she just wanted to sleep. "Tough day?" Silver asked, sitting on the edge of Kathy's bed. "The first shoot can be rough."

  Tears rose in Kathy's eyes. How could he seem so nice? After what she'd seen? After what he'd done to her? How could he seem so kind? Did all monsters have such warm smiles and such fatherly eyes?

  "Before," Silver said, "before all of this, I was a doctor, but I had to give it up. I. . ." He smiled wanly. The corners of his mouth pushed at the tired flesh of his face. "There's a certain attraction for me in the opening of skin. The way it releases under a blade and opens like a waiting kiss, and then the blood comes, constant and warm like affection just waiting to pour over me, and of course in that line of work the beautiful wounds proved distracting. But I saw girls like you every night, trundled through the emergency room because their boyfriends or tricks had gotten tired of them, discarded them after making sure their pretty faces would never land them another man." He shook his head. "They always went back to these men. I used to stay up nights wondering what had become of them. Eventually I had to give up medicine, because of my distraction. Financially comfortable, I went into filmmaking. I tried to justify my early films by telling myself that I was saving children like you from a lifetime of pain. It wasn't very effective. When I found my glue, I found a way of balancing my art with my ideals."

  All of Silver's talk about medicine and wounds and glue confused her. He murdered people for movies. He was crazy, and she could care less about hearing the details of his insanity.

  "I don't care," Kathy said. "I just want to go home."

  "Which home is that? The home with the abusive parents or the home with the boyfriend who sold you for a hundred dollars and a bottle of Jack Daniels?"

  "Keith loves me," Kathy said. Her voice cracked as tears filled her eyes.

  "He doesn't," Silver said. "Kathy, I'm not a good man, but I am an honest one. If you go back to him he will sell you to someone else, and the next man isn't going to have my glue. Any damage done to you will be permanent. Yes, this place is odd, maybe even a little scary, and you will have to endure some terrifying moments, but you will have the support and protection of everyone here—like a family—and when you leave, you will leave whole and ready to make a new life for yourself."

  "Can't I just go?" Kathy pleaded.

  "If that's what you want," Silver said. "But you need to stay until your neck heels. The glue's efficacy is limited. I'll send William down to give you another shot. We don't want that wound to open."

  Silver stood, casting one last smile at Kathy. "I do hope you'll reconsider. I think our film would be stunning." Then he left the room.

  The loneliness entered her like frigid air, filling her body and freezing her lungs. She stood hesitantly and walked to the hall. Stepping forward she gripped the door and rubbed the wood with a palm. All that Silver had told her bustled and wrestled in her mind. Her decision should have been easy. Escape. Get as far away from Silver and his freaks as she could go. Run back to Keith. He'd tell her that he loved her, and he'd apologize and kiss her and make love to her and promise he'd never let anyone hurt her again.

  Except he wouldn't. She wanted to believe this fantasy, but fantasy was just another word for fiction.

  Kathy pressed her cheek against the door, hugged it.

  Outside a child picked through a dumpster, hoping that his breakfast wouldn't make him sick before it relieved the foggy exhaustion in his head and the ache in his belly. In the adjacent building, a mother gave birth to a child and sawed through the umbilical cord with a broken bottle before abandoning the screaming bundle in a cardboard box and creeping back into the dawn. A good husband and concerned father opened the door to his silver Honda and let a fourteen-year-old boy back onto the corner he'd taken him from. Cars raced by and the city awoke. It was the day after Christmas and the season for giving had come to an end.

  Lee Thomas is the Lambda Literary and Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the novels Stained, Damage, and The Dust of Wonderland, and the critically acclaimed short story collection, In the Closet, Under the Bed. Current and forthcoming titles include the novellas The Black Sun Set, Focus, and Crisis. His novel, The German, will be released in March 2011 from Lethe Press.

  He has published dozens of short stories and non-fiction articles in print and online publications, in addition to appearing in a number of anthologies, including A Walk on the Darkside, Darkness on the Edge, Inferno, Unspeakable Horror, Supernatural Noir, Specters in Coal Dust, and Wilde Stories: The Year's Best Gay Speculative Fiction. You can find him online at www.leethomasauthor.com.

  —THE FISHING OF DAHLIA

  by Ennis Drake

  "There is no such thing as an insignificant life, only the insignificance of mind that refuses to grasp the implications."

  — Laurence Overmire

  "My name is Job," he said, speaking the words as if they belonged to an arcane language from some lost, dark epoch.

  He was disconnected and in shock, but driven still by a vestigial inner valor he believed himself to possess. His mind was broken; his memory an ill-fitting puzzle composed, or so it seemed to Job, of second-hand albums filled with a stranger's old photographs.

  "My name is Job," he said again—his single anchor of certainty—and throttled the boat.

  The sun was cooling molten copper in the west. Cypress and heart pine stood along the north bank of the river like grim sentinels to an alien world. The only sound was the roar of the 225-horse Mercury, the sleek boat skipping across the water as it hurtled toward the river bank.

  "My name is Job and it. . .it took her," he said.

  Lightning flared in his mind and time spun out. He never felt the impact.

  When Job awoke, he was sprawled on the prow of the boat, his lip split and bleeding. Below him, water slunk and gurgled, slow-seeping its way through the shattered hull. He ran his tongue across his teeth, feeling the cracked canine and incisor; touched his lip with a trembling hand. Winced. But were the wounds from the impact? Job wondered. He didn't think so.

  "She. . ." he began, but trailed off, standing shakily. The boat rocked where he had grounded it and he lurched on the deck. "There was," he continued, licking blood from his swollen lip as he tried to order the few fragments of memory he still possessed, "lightning in the woods. Right here," he said, pointing at the river bank that rose before him, images tumbling out of the electric-charged blackness of his amnesia. . .

  The river house. Stripped of most of its furniture. Boxes stacked everywhere. A man was pounding on the door. His son, Michael. . .his oldest. Michael was shouting as the door opened and, too quick to anticipate, he punched Job in the mouth, splitting his lip and cracking two of his teeth.

  The river house dissolved into the river itself. An osprey lunged into the sky from the water's edge, abandoning its nest atop an ancient cypress. The sun was copper, but not yet molten. Something thrashed and thumped against the deck of the boat. There was a flash of light, like lightning in the tree line. . .a tangle of blonde hair. . .a scream, and. . .there was blankness. . .and he was throttling into the river bank.

  Job saw again the twist of blonde hair and bright pain like the blade of electric fire on an arc welder dug a furrow across the front of his brain, as if invoked by some outside Power to purge the memory from him.

  "No! You're not going to take that from me!" he screamed in defiance, the lightning-pain threatening to sear his mind to smooth scar tissue, to rob him of memory and self. He hooked his hands through his thinning hair, pounded his temples, but for a terrifying, interminable span of seconds, he lost everything. He was, again, an empty vessel; dispossessed of who, where, why, and how. His muscles seized and there was familiarity in that. He convulsed and there was familiarity in that, too. He heard, again and again, like a d
istant echo, thrashing, thumping, and a woman's scream.

  "Please, she's out there," he said, voice rasping like decaying machinery. "She's out there, Goddamnit! ALI!"

  He fought his own short-circuiting mind and. . .

  ***

  Job remembered the bass. He remembered it and held the image in his mind'seye like a talisman. The way it had thrashed and thumped against the hollow fiberglass deck, blood running from its mouth and gills, the monofilament line disappearing into its throat.

  He'd gut-hooked it.

  By then, the sun had ridden out the last of its track, an unblemished twilight left in its wake as it fell into the west to die its lazy, phoenix's death. The river had faded from chocolate to an ashen copper that reminded Job of the pennies he used to bury in coffee cans when he was a boy. He was fumbling with the bass, thinking of those pennies, when an osprey, frightened from its nest, lunged skyward from the water's edge. She had said something, then. . .

  What did she say? Was it important?

  . . .and that's when he'd seen it: The strange, stroboscopic light, pulsing like a living sapphire behind the veil of heart pine and palm scrub that piled along the north bank of the river. That's when it had taken. . .when she had. . .

  Quicksilver pain slid along the curve of his skull.

  "Just remember the bass," Job said, grinding his teeth together painfully to keep hold of himself.

  When the pain receded, he moved further along the prow, watching. Sweat rolled down his sun-baked temples, crowded his high, lined brow. He was waiting for the lightning. The pulse. Whatever it was. He knew it would come—he remembered the hunger in that light.

  And, moments later, the sapphirine light raged—as if Job had summoned it— throwing the trees into jeweled relief. He tried to look away, knowing the wyrd light was stealing his capacity to think, understand, and reason; stealing, if not his soul, then the very essence of his identity. . .

  . . .but Job found himself climbing the muddy swath that clove the river bank, the grass and weeds worn away by an exceptionally large animal, probably an alligator. He didn't remember dismounting the boat and as he caught himself clawing his way up the slope, he realized he'd taken his Smith & Wesson 9mm from the compartment under the steering wheel.

  He looked back at his ruined boat. The current had drawn it away from the bank and it wallowed, half-submerged; the metal-fleck paint twinkled in the last of the day's light, then it was gone, pulled downriver, pulled below.

  The light flared, deeper in the trees now, and Job shielded his eyes.

  I'm coming, Ali, he thought, desperate to think of anything but the image of tangled blonde hair.

  MEMORIA

  He had not seen the light in some time and more images—memories, Job supposed—had been coming in an intermittent flow. All of them began with the bass (he had learned to use this memory to lead him to the revelations he sought) and from there, the flashes of recollection directed him back through crucial moments of his life.

  Ali. His wife. She was showing him quarterly reports for their business. She was shaking her head, her short black hair bobbing and swaying. It was all red. The numbers were red.

  There was light. . .no, color. It was not blue, nor red, but pink.

  There was another woman. Her hair was blonde.

  Lightning. The lightning in the woods. Pain.

  Ali again, now throwing his clothes out the front door of the home they'd shared for more than twenty years. She was screaming. Crying. Furious. Betrayed.

  Pink. Blonde hair. Crooked grin. Lips glossed with sex.

  Lightning and pain.

  The bass. Thump-thump-thump. Its black eyes stared. Its great mouth puckered open and closed as it suffocated.

  The forest opened before him, black as a charcoal rendering. Twilight had gone and stars scarred the night—crystalline wounds in dark flesh.

  Job's legs were burning, the muscles in his calves knotted into fiery, stone claws. His breath came hot and fast, and his heart was knocking like an engine about to throw a rod. He raked at his face with mud-caked hands.

  Worse than his aches was the emptiness that sometimes followed the surges of memory. There were moments when, on the verge of a breakthrough, he would blank completely; moments when he thought he didn't know who he was anymore, and he'd have to chant his name just to hold his claim on himself. The pistol in his hand was a constant surprise. The darkness and the forest a recurring stranger.

  "I am Job. It took her. She's out there," he reminded, leaning against the scaled hide of a knotty pine.

  But who is she? Not Ali. Not his wife, as he'd hoped. No, don't think that. It's Ali. Ali's the only thing that makes sense.

  Pink. Sex. Twist of blonde hair.

  Job frowned. There was no night-noise. No opera of insects. Not even the chainsaw buzz of mosquitoes, which were in full breed this time of year. There was no noise at all, save the slow, liquid slink of the river somewhere at his back.

  In the distance, the light flared. A beacon.

  He'd lost his sandals somewhere and rotting leaves and fleshy pine needles crumpled beneath his toes. Sticks and cones bit painfully into the soft underbellies of his feet.

  More time passed. The quality of the night shifted toward pitch and Job left the lap-and-murmur of the river far behind—though he had no memory of moving so deep into the forest. Silver radiance played over him and through the crosshatch of pine boughs above, he saw a scimitar moon ascending to its zenith.

  He tried again, for the thousandth time, to piece together what had happened. Wondered if he was having a breakdown. Was that possible? Could he be having some kind of stress-induced hallucination?

  He heard something moving in the brush. Whatever it was, it was big. And it was coming fast.

  This is it.

  Job gripped the Smith 9mm in both hands. Ran a dry tongue across drier lips, the skin, caked with old blood, rasping like. . .like an osprey's feathers.

  A deer broke from the scrub, leaped, and Job cried out. He threw his arms up to ward the animal off, but as its hooves left the ground, something seized it, and the deer was yanked violently through the air, back into the darkness of the trees.

  Its taking was instantaneous.

  Job fell to the night-damp ground. It all locked into place. He remembered everything.

  The bass had thump-thump-thumped its beat of asphyxiation against the deck. The sun had been going down. And Dahlia. . .Oh, dear God, it was Dahlia. . .had been painting her toenails pink.

  Job screamed. Long, painful wails that he was powerless to stop.

  ***

  He'd been fishing all damned day, skin burning under the fiery August sun, hands performing the dance that cast the line, reeled the line, and cast the line. Doing it again and again. They say muscles have memory and Job thought that was true, because he hadn't come out to the river to fish; had hardly been aware of the act at all. No, he'd come for the peace he equated with the murky brown waters of the St. John's. He'd grown up here, conspired here in play as a boy, and as a man he returned often, reveling in the connection he felt between himself and these waters.

  But there was no peace today. And he couldn't help but think he might never know peace again.

  Ali had left him. It'd be three months, tomorrow. His boys—men, now; hell, Michael had a wife and sons of his own—refused to talk to him. His business was a hundred-and-twenty-thousand dollars in the red, and he hated his fucking job on top of it all. Here he was, fifty-eight years old, and still selling carpet. Who wanted to sell carpet, whether you owned the company or not, whether you'd made (and lost) millions, or not? Success was a distant memory. Fuck, success wasn't even a concept he understood anymore. His failures were a mourning-suit. And I wear 'em, 'cause that's all I've got left.

  And today was just another God-accursed day like all the rest of them. That's what he'd told himself that morning, as he blindly performed the ritual of packing the boat. Except, from the moment he woke in the
near-empty river house, Dahlia crumpled silent and still in the bed beside him, something had felt different. The morning had crawled his skin like a current and he'd thought: Today feels like the culmination of something.

  A strange thing to think.

  "I must be going crazy," he'd said and sat up in bed, laughing haggardly. Dahlia had rolled over, asked him what he was laughing about. Then Michael was pounding on the front door and next thing Job knew he was lying on the foyer floor holding his bleeding lip and choking on the fragments of his cracked teeth. After that, after everything, what was left but the river?

  He'd dressed, avoiding Dahlia, but she had caught him in the den shoving his Smith & Wesson down the front of his khaki shorts. She had regarded him, not with compassion or concern, but with a look of shrewd self-preservation.

  "I'm going with you, Job. You shouldn't be alone today," she'd said.

  "Yeah, it'd be a shame if something happened to me and you had to go back to waiting tables at Steak 'N' Shake, wouldn't it?" he'd snapped.

  But it didn't matter. Dahlia was just protecting her ass and he hated to admit, least of all in that moment, what a fine little ass it was. Lust and self-disgust were a bitter pairing.

  They had spent most of the day in silence.

  Near sunset, he reeled the bass onto the deck.

  "Goddamnit, Job, could you stop rocking the boat?" Dahlia drawled.

  In her tiny black thong bikini, Dahlia was all legs and tits, golden skin, and platinum blonde hair. Twenty-three years old, Job thought and shook his head. More than half my age—younger than Michael, a year younger than Joe, Job's youngest son—but good-God-Almighty the girl fucks like a machine.

  He hadn't wanted to trade Ali for Dahlia. He'd wanted his proverbial cake and wanted to eat it too. But he hadn't just wanted to eat it, he wanted to slow-tongue every last bit of sickly-sweet icing from it in a series of long, emotionless acts of unveiled and unrestrained lust. He had wanted this for no other reason than that it made him feel young; a feeling better than the act itself; better than any drug. He hated himself for it, but it didn't change anything.