Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories

by Clive Barker

  “There must have been something else wrong with Susan,” says the young journalist, “something they didn’t tell us. Otherwise she wouldn’t have been damned like that—denied the Heaven of further up and further in. I mean, all the people she had ever cared for had gone on to their reward, in a world of magic and waterfalls and joy. And she was left behind.”

  “I don’t know about the girl in the books,” says the professor, “but remaining behind would also have meant that she was available to identify her brothers’ and her little sister’s bodies. There were a lot of people dead in that crash. I was taken to a nearby school—it was the first day of term, and they had taken the bodies there. My older brother looked okay. Like he was asleep. The other two were a bit messier.”

  “I suppose Susan would have seen their bodies, and thought, they’re on holidays now. The perfect school holidays. Romping in meadows with talking animals, world without end.”

  “She might have done. I only remember thinking what a great deal of damage a train can do, when it hits another train, to the people who were traveling inside. I suppose you’ve never had to identify a body, dear?”

  “No.”

  “That’s a blessing. I remember looking at them and thinking, What if I’m wrong, what if it’s not him after all? My younger brother was decapitated, you know. A god who would punish me for liking nylons and parties by making me walk through that school dining room, with the flies, to identify Ed, well . . . he’s enjoying himself a bit too much, isn’t he? Like a cat, getting the last ounce of enjoyment out of a mouse. Or a gram of enjoyment, I suppose it must be these days. I don’t know, really.”

  She trails off. And then, after some time, she says, “I’m sorry dear. I don’t think I can do any more of this today. Perhaps if your editor gives me a ring, we can set a time to finish our conversation.”

  Greta nods and says of course, and knows in her heart, with a peculiar finality, that they will talk no more.

  That night, the professor climbs the stairs of her house, slowly, painstakingly, floor by floor. She takes sheets and blankets from the airing cupboard, and makes up a bed in the spare bedroom, at the back. It is empty but for a wartime austerity dressing table, with a mirror and drawers, an oak bed, and a dusty applewood wardrobe, which contains only coat hangers and a cardboard box. She places a vase on the dressing table, containing purple rhododendron flowers, sticky and vulgar.

  She takes from the box in the wardrobe a plastic shopping bag containing four old photographic albums. Then she climbs into the bed that was hers as a child, and lies there between the sheets, looking at the black-and-white photographs, and the sepia photographs, and the handful of unconvincing color photographs. She looks at her brothers, and her sister, and her parents, and she wonders how they could have been that young, how anybody could have been that young.

  After a while she notices that there are several children’s books beside the bed, which puzzles her slightly, because she does not believe she keeps books on the bedside table in that room. Nor, she decides, does she usually have a bedside table there. On the top of the pile is an old paperback book—it must be more than forty years old: the price on the cover is in shillings. It shows a lion, and two girls twining a daisy chain into its mane.

  The professor’s lips prickle with shock. And only then does she understand that she is dreaming, for she does not keep those books in the house. Beneath the paperback is a hardback, in its jacket, of a book that, in her dream, she has always wanted to read: Mary Poppins Brings in the Dawn, which P. L. Travers had never written while alive.

  She picks it up and opens it to the middle, and reads the story waiting for her: Jane and Michael follow Mary Poppins on her day off, to Heaven, and they meet the boy Jesus, who is still slightly scared of Mary Poppins because she was once his nanny, and the Holy Ghost, who complains that he has not been able to get his sheet properly white since Mary Poppins left, and God the Father, who says, “There’s no making her do anything. Not her. She’s Mary Poppins.”

  “But you’re God,” said Jane. “You created everybody and everything. They have to do what you say.”

  “Not her,” said God the Father once again, and he scratched his golden beard flecked with white. “I didn’t create her. She’s Mary Poppins.”

  And the professor stirs in her sleep, and afterward dreams that she is reading her own obituary. It has been a good life, she thinks, as she reads it, discovering her history laid out in black and white. Everyone is there. Even the people she had forgotten.

  Greta sleeps beside her boyfriend, in a small flat in Camden, and she, too, is dreaming.

  In the dream, the lion and the witch come down the hill together. She is standing on the battlefield, holding her sister’s hand. She looks up at the golden lion, and the burning amber of his eyes. “He’s not a tame lion, is he?” she whispers to her sister, and they shiver.

  The witch looks at them all, then she turns to the lion, and says, coldly, “I am satisfied with the terms of our agreement. You take the girls: for myself, I shall have the boys.”

  She understands what must have happened, and she runs, but the beast is upon her before she has covered a dozen paces. The lion eats all of her except her head, in her dream. He leaves the head, and one of her hands, just as a housecat leaves the parts of a mouse it has no desire for, for later, or as a gift.

  She wishes that he had eaten her head, then she would not have had to look. Dead eyelids cannot be closed, and she stares, unflinching, at the twisted thing her brothers have become. The great beast eats her little sister more slowly, and, it seems to her, with more relish and pleasure than it had eaten her; but then, her little sister had always been its favorite.

  The witch removes her white robes, revealing a body no less white, with high, small breasts, and nipples so dark they are almost black. The witch lies back upon the grass, spreads her legs. Beneath her body, the grass becomes rimed with frost.

  “Now,” she says.

  The lion licks her white cleft with its pink tongue, until she can take no more of it, and she pulls its huge mouth to hers, and wraps her icy legs into its golden fur. . . .

  Being dead, the eyes in the head on the grass cannot look away.

  Being dead, they miss nothing.

  And when the two of them are done, sweaty and sticky and sated, only then does the lion amble over to the head on the grass and devour it in its huge mouth, crunching her skull in its powerful jaws, and it is then, only then, that she wakes.

  Her heart is pounding. She tries to wake her boyfriend, but he snores and grunts and will not be roused.

  It’s true, Greta thinks, irrationally, in the darkness. She grew up. She carried on. She didn’t die.

  She imagines the professor, waking in the night and listening to the noises coming from the old applewood wardrobe in the corner: to the rustlings of all these gliding ghosts, which might be mistaken for the scurries of mice or rats, to the padding of enormous velvet paws, and the distant, dangerous music of a hunting horn.

  She knows she is being ridiculous, although she will not be surprised when she reads of the professor’s demise. Death comes in the night, she thinks, before she returns to sleep. Like a lion.

  The white witch rides naked on the lion’s golden back. Its muzzle is spotted with fresh, scarlet blood. Then the vast pinkness of its tongue wipes around its face, and once more it is perfectly clean.

  DOMINION

  Christopher Coake

  Friday night they all camped by the lake, as planned, and then what happened with Mason happened, and the next day, Saturday, while the others hiked up a nearby ridge, Hannah lay alone in her tent, trying to think of a way out. She came up with nothing. Would anyone even believe her, if she told? Kyle was Mason’s older brother, and Beth was engaged to Kyle, and constantly stoned. Hannah was in the middle of the Nevada desert, a hundred miles from Reno, and her cell phone didn’t get coverage, and instead of figuring out any kind of plan, she kept falling ba
ck into telling herself how stupid she was, how she’d made all the dumb choices she’d spent her life trying not to make, and now what could she even do?

  When the others came back from their hike, she rose, reluctantly, to meet them. Mason grabbed her around the waist and kissed her cheek, smelling of sweat and dust. Maybe Beth saw the dismay on her face.

  Not feeling any better? Beth asked. Hannah had told them she was hung over.

  Say it, say it, Hannah told herself. But instead her mouth opened and out came, I guess.

  Kyle grinned. I told you to go easy on the booze, but did you listen?

  She said nothing, and so she watched, sick at heart, as they went ahead with their plans. They packed their tents into the Jeep, and Kyle drove them down from the lake, then farther into the desert, toward the abandoned town, where they were going to explore and camp a second night, where Hannah would be even more alone.

  In the back seat, Hannah curled around her backpack and pretended to sleep, her face to the window. Mason sat beside her, and she swore she could feel it every time his eyes landed on her, like fingers touching her, hands pressing her down.

  ***

  She was younger than the others: seventeen, though she’d been told she looked—acted—older. Mason was nineteen; Kyle and Beth were twenty-five. The three of them worked together at a restaurant downtown, but Hannah figured they made a lot more money moving drugs; they certainly never lacked for good weed, or molly. She’d been proud of herself for figuring it out. (She was smart—people told her that, too.) When Mason had invited her camping with them for the weekend, she’d been even prouder, had felt a fierce and soaring freedom as they hurtled east out of Reno, hip-hop they let her choose playing on the Jeep’s stereo, Mason’s hand on her thigh. This, she had thought, was how she wanted her life to be.

  She’d met Mason three weeks before. He had come up to her at a house party, walking past girls who were older and prettier. He was beautiful: full-sleeve tats and laughing eyes; a beard thick enough to twine her fingers into. He knew how to dance. His presence seemed to make her high.

  When her mother met him, she said, That boy’s bad news.

  But her mother hung out with bikers, and was sometimes gone for days at a time; her life was a mess, her judgment worse. Hannah had sworn to do better. She got okay grades; she liked to party, sure, but she was—had always been—careful with boys. Her girlfriends made fun of her for being a virgin, but, god—Hannah knew better than any of them that if you weren’t careful, you’d end up living in a shitty apartment in a shitty Reno neighborhood, with a teenager of your own, dealing blackjack, your life never again your own. Hannah was going to graduate high school; she was going to go to Portland State, study design.

  Last weekend, she and Mason had fooled around a little on her bed. When she’d told him she wanted to take things slow, he’d laughed and said, Really?

  Really, she said, re-buttoning her blouse.

  An old-fashioned girl, huh?

  She didn’t tell him about her virginity; she didn’t like people, let alone boys, knowing she was afraid of anything. She pushed him back on the bed and gave him a hand job—she knew how—and that seemed to make him happy.

  After kissing her goodnight, though, he said, I’m not a very old-fashioned guy, you know?

  I know, she said. She kissed him again, made up her mind, and said, Soon.

  ***

  The abandoned town was named Dominion, and was a long way from anywhere inhabited—they’d driven for eighty miles on two-lane blacktop without seeing any life but a couple of distant ranches, and big rigs headed north to Idaho. The town wasn’t even marked by a sign. Kyle simply turned off the highway onto a rutted dirt road that curved slowly away to the east, around the base of a craggy mountain. Dominion was two miles farther along, a small clump of structures and trees circled by a high chain-link fence and bullet-pocked NO TRESPASSING signs. Kyle parked in front of the fence’s gates and turned off the engine. To the west were the mountain’s abrupt gray cliffs; to the east was a vast, bone-white playa, followed by another swell of mountains, all of it as empty of people as an ocean.

  Hannah knew about the town—a few Reno kids every year came out here to get drunk or stoned and scare themselves, or camp overnight, or both. It was a thing to do, and now they were doing it too.

  It’s spooky, but it’s cool, Mason had told Hannah, when he’d invited her along. He and Kyle had been there before. You can find all kinds of weird stuff out there in the houses.

  He told her the town had been built by a mining company in the 1950s, after they’d discovered a gold seam, a big one, under the mountain. The mine hired a few dozen men from Reno to work the vein, and built a suburb for them, with its own school and churches and store and golf course, so the men could bring along their families.

  Then in the 70s the gold had dried up, and just like that the town was dead, the residents moved out. The company cared enough about the property to erect a fence around the entire town, and the mineworks another mile away, but not enough to guard it. A liability thing, Mason had told her, in case some idiot dies out there. Every once in a while a highway patrolman might drive by and report damage to the fence, but that was about it.

  Hannah climbed now out of the ticking Jeep, looking at the decay on the other side of the fence, hearing—behind the noise of Kyle and Mason unloading—the deeper silence of the desert, the uncanny absence of motors and electricity.

  People had died in Dominion, Mason had said. A couple of kids who OD’d on something; and a lone hiker, who’d fallen while exploring a house and had broken his back.

  Sounds like a blast, she’d said.

  Hey, he said. Don’t worry. I’ll protect you. You’ll have a good time.

  ***

  But he’d lied.

  They’d spent all day yesterday at a little mountain lake a couple of mountain ranges southeast of Reno, swimming first and then setting up tents for the night. They’d all gotten drunk and stoned around their fire pit, and then they’d gone to bed.

  In their tent, she’d made out with Mason, laughing and tickling at first, then on to more serious stuff. One of the ways she ached, now, was remembering that she’d been ready, for a little while there, to go all the way. She’d gone to bed intending it.

  If she had, would she have ever found out what Mason was really like?

  While kissing her he’d said, Shh, and laughed against her neck, and Hannah heard it too: soft moaning, coming from the other tent. Beth’s voice, thrilled and tender.

  She heard more than moans, and she realized: they’d be able to hear her, too.

  She told Mason, I can’t, not here, and he’d laughed, as though she was joking. She pushed his hand away.

  Christ, he’d said, seriously?

  He was sulky after that. Her head swam with drink; she curled up alone and tried to sleep, and Mason left the tent; later she heard him talking with Kyle, the two of them popping beers and flicking lighters; their laughter sounded cruel, and she imagined Mason telling Kyle how skittish she was, how young, how old-fashioned.

  Even so, she went to sleep.

  Then Mason was back in the tent, and he was kissing her, hard, his mouth tasting of beer and something else metallic and awful, and she kissed him back, but then he had his hands under her t-shirt. He was panting through his nose, a heavy shadow above her. Then he was pulling off her shorts. She yelped, suddenly terrified, but he pressed his mouth down on hers and spread her legs with his knees.

  Shh, he said, during, a hand over her mouth. It’s okay.

  Afterwards, he said, Goddamn, and kissed her cheek. Thank you.

  Soon he was asleep, snoring, and she lay aching beside him, pinned beneath his big arm, too hurt and terrified to move, even to wipe herself off.

  In the morning, when he’d gone hiking with the others, and she was alone, she’d waded into the lake—it was the closest she could get to a shower. Shivering in the silvery water, she’d found bruises o
n her wrists, each one the size of his fingertips.

  ***

  Kyle and Mason cut a flap of the fence open with bolt cutters—they were suspiciously good at it—and shuttled their things inside the town. Soon they’d set up camp behind Dominion’s old, dark, boarded-up church, not far from the gates, near a fire pit some past visitors had made out of old sheet metal. Mason filled it with branches and boards they pulled off the walls of the church; the fire was now catching, rising and flickering. The sun had dropped behind the mountain, and the playa outside the fence was golden, deepening into mauve. On the other side of the fence, up on the mountainside, a coyote let out its liquid, gulping cry, and was answered.

  They were in what had once been the downtown. Next to their church was a small, boxy brick school building that still had the word Dominion painted in yellow above its entrance. Home of the Nuggets! Across the street from the school was an old store with a gas pump. Every building had its doors and windows boarded shut, though here and there boards had fallen, or been pried away, leaving dark holes.

  Past the school, to the north, the old neighborhoods began, dozens of sagging, shuttered bungalows clustered around culs-de-sac; that was where Kyle and Mason wanted to explore, later.

  In the meantime, Hannah sat cross-legged on an old door, just outside the tent. She didn’t want to go exploring, but she didn’t want to be left alone, either. Or, later, to be alone in the tent with Mason. Unless she told them she was sleeping in the Jeep, or in one of the houses, that was her fate.

  Beth had given her a headlamp on an elastic band; she put it on, but kept the light off and watched the fire.

  Mason dropped down beside her; she froze.

  He said, Dude, please tell me what’s wrong. You’ve been weird all day.