Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories

by Clive Barker

  “I want to apologize,” she says at last.

  “For what? Taking care of my sister’s hair? I should be thanking you. She can be a handful with her tantrums.”

  She looks down. “We should have reported him.”

  Darkness squeezes my vision, heart kangaroo-kicking my throat.

  “After your mom passed away, he continued to bring Sophia here. Every week, like clockwork. But he’d make all kinds of . . . inappropriate . . . comments to the girls working here. And to your sister. He’d . . . kiss her. On the mouth,” Carol winces. “I once saw him put his tongue in. And his hand went —”

  Rage rears up like a viper, twisting and spitting. I turn away from her, hands balling into fists, and walk off into the scalding parking lot.

  “Barry! I’m so sorry. We talked to him, and—”

  “You talked to him? Why the fuck didn’t you report him?” God, I’m shaking. Nausea spikes my throat.

  “I don’t know. We just didn’t want to—”

  “What? Interfere? FUCK YOU! YOU SHOULD HAVE FUCKING INTERFERED. Can’t you see she’s defenseless?”

  People stare at us through the windows of the other shops. Carol scurries back inside the salon. My breakfast comes up, spattering the curb, scorching my mouth. I kneel in the weeds by the parking lot, sinking in molten grief.

  I knew it. God-fucking-dammit, I knew it.

  Since childhood, you see, I’ve had dreams. Not telling the future, but rather, seeing through people and events. If someone lies to me, does something miles away, I see the real events in a dream. It’s how I found out about Dad’s illegal activities. And other things. Mom called me her Superman because of my “x-ray” vision.

  After Mom died, I’d had nightmares of Dad molesting Sophia. Nothing graphic, thank God, but there was no question what was happening. Unfortunately, you can’t take a dream journal into a courtroom and ask the probate judge to give you conservatorship. Allie and I had even talked about kidnapping her, but decided against it. I lost weeks of sleep to anxiety.

  But does Sophia remember any of it? Maybe her brain injury is a blessing for once. Twenty-five years after the car accident, her memory is still so bad that it dances a constant box step between reality and fantasy. Unless a witness like this woman had come forward, Sophia would never have brought charges against Dad. Her memory was too weak to register trauma unless it was an event that everyone around her discussed repeatedly.

  He would have gotten away with it. He did get away with it.

  Storm clouds rumble behind my eyes as I pay for Sophia’s hair wash and style. I leave without saying goodbye to Carol. Before I unlock Sophia’s car door, I crush her in a big brother hug, my heart breaking. “I love you, Booger.”

  “Don’t call me that, Mary!” she says, pushing me away. Mary and Booger. She remembers childhood nicknames.

  I take her home.

  Sophia shows me how her caregivers have cleaned out the master bedroom and moved in her bed. I still picture the piss-stained mattress that they found Dad on when he died, but that’s been tossed. We watch some TV and play a game of Scrabble, Dad’s favorite game. It’s amazing how good she is at it. I go through some spider-infested boxes in the garage for the caregiver and do some maintenance on Sophia’s ancient computer running Windows 98. But the whole time, the storm clouds in my head keep thundering. I consider texting Allie, but I don’t want to spoil her celebration.

  Besides, it’s all done. Past.

  After the dinner I barely touch, a new caregiver arrives and starts her overnight shift. I say goodbye to Sophia, who’s already dressed in her flowered cotton pajamas, and plant a big kiss on top of her misshapen head. I then make the American Sign Language symbol for “I love you”—two middle fingers bent down into my palm, fingers and thumb extended. It was how she talked to us before she got her speech back. Sophia’s wide brown eyes twinkle as she returns the gesture.

  Raina.

  My car flies over the hilly roads as I try the last known number I have for her. Disconnected. I have to reach her. She’s the only one who’d understand. And I have to talk to someone. Now. The pain feels like glass shards in my lungs. I don’t want to call aunts and uncles who would then be as tormented as I am about what had happened—or, worse, disbelieve it. But my old high school friend Raina would. I haven’t spoken to her since Mom died, but she’d remember Dad.

  If only I could reach her.

  I drive to Daffer’s, the last place I hung out with Raina. Cigarette smoke lingers outside over the burly motorcycles lined up near the door. Inside, the place hadn’t changed much. Rickety wooden tables are surrounded by chairs on sawdust floors. The classic rock music on the jukebox is turned up high enough to drown out the shady conversations. I plant myself on a barstool and ask for a shot of Knob Creek. And then another. And another, until my thoughts spin out like a carnival ride, the seat tethers stretching dangerously into the surrounding murk of my rage. I should have killed him. When we were kids, I could have found a way to do it and not got caught. It would have stopped the pain early. Maybe Sophia would never have gotten hurt. She’d been staying at a friend’s house to get away from him. If she’d been home, she would never have gotten in her friend’s car that day . . .

  Eyelids heavy, I pay the bartender and stagger to the door. To the car. I sink into the back seat of the Prius, lock the doors, doze. No idea how long. I awake in fits, sobbing. Punching and kicking the tear- and snot-slickened seat.

  And I dream.

  Raina. Older. Heavier. Long, shaggy salt-and-pepper dreads. A gristly scar snaking up her right arm and across her cheek. Black tank, ragged jeans. Fingers sheathed in numerous silver, hematite and pewter rings. Reading by candlelight a worn paperback in a trailer parked somewhere in Murderville—a spot in the backwoods of Coloma where three girls from our high school had been raped and killed.

  I awake with a start, take a piss behind the bar, and drive.

  “Shit!” she yells, stubbing out her cigarette on the doorframe and flicking it into the dirt. “I should have fucking known you’d find me. Goddamn freak. C’mere.”

  We hug hard. Raina’s body odor is powerful, like she hasn’t bathed in at least a couple of weeks, but the smell is perfumed by the balmy summer night smudged with ganja. Inside her hazy, poverty-stricken trailer, the walls are layered with protection symbols. A large flowering Hamsa hand with an eye painted in the palm. Pentagrams. Ankhs. Eyes of Horus. Occult shit I’d forgotten even existed. I gesture to the walls, a hundred eyes staring at us. “I’m afraid to ask how you are.”

  Dropping into a threadbare loveseat, she pours herself a few fingers of cheap tequila in a grungy glass. Offers me one, too. I decline, sitting on a cracked vinyl kitchen chair across from her.

  “Shit’s gotten real, Bear,” she says, drinking. “While you’ve been out fucking Muggles, I’ve been here wrestling with the haints.” Her eyes gleam in the candlelight at that last word, one of her favorites. We dated briefly in school but after a Ouija board session that went totally crazy, I decided two spooky people together felt too much like the big battle scene in Ghostbusters on loop. I needed a “normal” person in my life. Someone to remind me to eat, sleep and hydrate. And clean. I later suspected Raina was schizophrenic. These protection symbols could easily be a symptom of paranoid schizophrenia, but I know better. She was raised by Wiccans who’d fallen off the “Law of Threes” bandwagon and indulged in various dark arts. I can see things, but Raina can do things. It’s probably how she keeps herself in smokes and food. Selling love spells. Banishments. Finding deadbeat dads. Getting revenge on unfaithful lovers.

  Not that she can do anything about this.

  She doesn’t offer specifics, and I’m afraid to ask. So, I tell her about Dad’s death and this morning’s revelation that wasn’t. She leans back in her chair, eyes narrowed.

  “What the hell do you want, Bear?” she asks. “I’m not being a bitch. I’m serious. You didn’t come here to cry into my tea c
ups. Or maybe you did, but that’s not what you really want. You and I both know that.”

  My head hangs, eyes squeezed shut against tears. “I want to dig him up and murder him a thousand times,” I say quietly.

  Raina grins, leaning forward. Dirty yellow teeth, one incisor chipped. A wraith of smoke sways from her cigarette, clouding her face. “What if you could?”

  The trailer temperature drops. Every hair stands up on my arms.

  Several moments of silence slip by. She rises with a groan—“Goddamn it”—and marches through the tiny kitchen back into the bedroom that swims in candle flame shadows. After a few moments of digging and drawer slamming, she returns with an indigo vial. She hands it to me as she takes a deep drag on her cigarette. “This is the last of it.” She drops back down on the loveseat and leans forward again, her expression sharp and dark. “Just pour it on the grave and wait. You’ll get your wish.” A smile smears across her face that chills me.

  Why am I so scared? It isn’t like you can raise the dead, especially with a bottle of crazy lady juice.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Give it back,” she grumbles, hand outstretched. “Don’t say shit like that unless you mean it.”

  The eyes in the room seem to judge me for my skepticism. “I mean it,” I mutter, closing the bottle in my palm.

  Raina smirks. “I know.”

  “Thanks, Raina. I owe you.”

  “No, you fucking don’t. Just forget it, okay? And forget me now. Seriously. You didn’t even ask why I’m living out in this shit hole.”

  “I figured you wanted to escape the living.”

  She shakes her head. “It ain’t the living,” she says. “It’s the dead. Now get the fuck out of here.”

  When I arrive at the massive cemetery, it’s almost two in the morning. The gates are locked, but with my cell phone light I find a way in where kids have cut the chain-link fence and peeled it back like a candy wrapper. My eyes are adjusting to the night slowly. I train the light on the ground to keep from stumbling on headstones. Crickets chirp. Leaves rustle like the dead rolling over in their beds.

  I recognize the gravesite by its proximity to a tall stone angel that guards a nearby family who passed away in the 19th century. My knees fall on the damp grass at the foot of the grave, cell light beaming on the headstone.

  Shit.

  I forgot that Mom and Dad are buried together. Not next to each other, but on top of each other, coffins stacked. I guess Dad’s coffin’s on top? What if this works and I’m wrong? A Celtic cross crowns the double headstone. Mom’s side reads, “Beloved wife and mother. Forever and after.” Dad’s merely says, “At last he has found peace.” I chose that with Sophia. What I’d wanted it to say was “Dick in the Dirt,” but even I couldn’t do that. Dad still has living relatives. I have to respect their feelings and memories, which are apparently more pleasant than mine.

  Mom. Seeing the headstone rips open my heart, releasing a cataract of grief. I’ve missed her far more than I realized. Her kindness, her simple thoughts. The gentle way she’d kiss my cheek, even when I was being a teenage jerk. Her laugh, which I heard too rarely. She and Sophia were my world, the only ones I loved growing up. But I also grieve her inability in life to leave my father. Her love for a monster. And how my sister’s accident shackled her to him for decades as they cared for her. In a way, I’m just as angry at her as I am at him, but he’s the one I want to murder.

  A thousand times.

  Wait. What the hell am I doing? If by some small chance this is real, there could be a terrible price. I stew in my rage for a few minutes. He got away with countless crimes, against his family and others. I don’t believe in Hell. I do believe there might be something like reincarnation. But if he’s been reincarnated as a cockroach, that’s not much of a punishment. He won’t be aware of it. If there isn’t any kind of eternal retribution, that means I’m the only one who can set this right.

  I love Allie and our life together, but my first love and duty is to Sophia. The sister who was always there for me until her accident. The one who bandaged my wounds when Mom wasn’t home. Who stuck up for me when Dad lied to Mom and said I’d assaulted him. Sophia never, ever let me down. Yet I let her down when I didn’t do everything possible to end the molestation. Price or no, I would never be able to live with myself knowing I could have made up for it but didn’t.

  Still kneeling on the grave, I open the bottle and pour its contents on the grass, wondering what will happen, if anything.

  As the last drop hits the ground, a ropey arm closes around my throat from behind, crushing my windpipe. I struggle, lungs screaming for air, vision fading. Before the other arm can grapple me, both of my fists shoot back, connecting with a face.

  “Christ!” an older man yells. I strike him again. He wilts. But as my head slips out of his grip, he shoves me to the ground and lands on top of me, crushing me against the grave. “I should have killed you when you were a kid,” he snarls into my ear. “You goddamn little freak.”

  My Dad. Younger. Maybe when he was ten years older than me. Shorter than I am, but at least now it’s a fair fight.

  “Fuck you,” I gasp, seething with childhood hatred.

  He gets up and slams his foot into my side. Pain floods my body. I cry out.

  Focus. Breathe.

  I roll over out of range. Scramble to my feet. I see him for the first time: a silhouette with clenched fists rushing me. I dodge, slugging him in his kidneys, and wrench one arm up behind him. A mass of darkness in my grasp. I catch his unmistakable profile as he tries to turn his face toward me. Seeing him again releases a torrent of childhood anguish.

  Those bad memories, resurrected.

  With a sharp pull, I snap his arm out of its socket. His screams echo through the cemetery, air wavering like hundreds of black ribbons swimming through the air. One of my heavy Fluevogs connects with the back of his ankle. Another dimension-shattering shriek.

  Even after he falls, I keep kicking—just the way I’d always wanted to as a kid. Mercilessly. Viciously. Delivering bully vengeance with every strike. My foot stomps his face until he stops moving.

  A sick shiver racks my body, teeth chattering. The self-loathing is worse than my wounds. He might have been dead already, but I feel like a murderer. I dig my phone out of my pants pocket. Screen cracked. Training the light on the scene, I watch the revenant dissolve into a storm of dust that rises into the star-littered sky. A breeze gusts over the cemetery. The air is still again.

  It’s done.

  Suddenly, a fist connects with my jaw from the side, blood souring my mouth. Stars shooting in my eyes.

  Another fight.

  His “haint” is more detailed this time. Rheumy eyes. Flabby jowls. That crazed fury tensing his body. My righteous anger curdles to blind violence so that I can survive to kill him again.

  But a thousand times? The last of it, she said. Unholy shit. Will I eventually have to run like Raina, hiding in a forest hovel crowded with occult symbols to keep out my father’s homicidal ghost? Or will I die first? If not from injury, certainly from the venom of revenge . . .

  The price.

  The fourth time he appears, he plows his fist in my nose. It feels like I’ve been clocked by a block of ice. White fiery pain explodes across my face, behind my eyes. I stumble backward, crumple to the ground. A lifetime of wreckage.

  I have to stop this. But how? I see now in my misery that idiot me didn’t really want revenge as much as I wanted to make him realize what he did was wrong. I should have known it wouldn’t work. The day he died, I had the crushing realization that there was now no chance he’d ever change. No last-minute requests for forgiveness. No deathbed redemption. He’d never be the father I wanted or needed. Why did I think after death it would be different?

  And now he’s going to kill me.

  I roll up, hands shielding my head, blood pouring out of my nose, dribbling over my lips and chin. One big ball of pain, coughing into the cool grass
.

  His old scuffed dress shoes are level with my eyes. A foot draws back to kick me in the face—

  —just as a luminous hand erupts from the grave. It grabs his ankle, yanking him back.

  My heart races as my mother’s shining revenant rises, halting when the dirt meets her narrow waist. Her face is veiled in mists. But those stooped shoulders. Long arms and slender hands. How could I ever forget?

  Dad goes down hard. He kicks and screams, clawing the grass to get free. Those eyes blaze with a familiar fury.

  Calmly, she pulls him toward her until he lies outstretched before her half-submerged form. She seems to consider him wistfully before her hands curl around his neck and she chokes him, his newly defined features blurring and smoldering as she forces him down, down into the ground. After a moment, he stops struggling and crumbles, devoured by the soil.

  She then regards me, head tilted. Questioning?

  Pleading.

  My tears come thick and hot as I grasp the full consequence of my actions. “I can’t do it, Mom. I didn’t mean to raise you. I . . . forgive me . . . please.”

  A moment passes. She then raises her hand, thumb and fingers splayed, and the two middle fingers bend to touch the palm.

  I love you.

  I tell Allie I got in a drunken bar fight with a biker bitching about gay marriage. It’s a good thing she doesn’t have my dreams.

  Whenever we’re in Placerville, I go to the cemetery. Sometimes I leave photos of our new baby, flowers or letters on the grave. Sometimes I even bring Sophia. Although I’ve robbed her of eternal peace, I suspect Mom is at least happy knowing that Sophia is so well cared for. So very loved.

  Me? I’ll never fucking sleep again.

  THE ONE YOU LIVE WITH

  Josh Malerman

  Mom held her face and said,

  “There’s two yous, Dana. And there always will be. There’s the you that you show to other people. The you who goes to school and goes to parties and meets people and talks a lot or a little, dances or doesn’t. Then there’s the you that you are inside. Now, since you’re just a kid, the two yous are much closer together than mine are. You might not even notice the split. But it’s there. You’re just not smart enough yet to see it. And the older you get, the more that split is gonna grow, breaking up the two yous, until you hardly recognize the you you are when you’re out of the house and the you you are when you’re not. Now, I’m not talking about split personalities here, though believe you me, they do live separately. The public and the private.” To Dana, it looked like a cloud passed across Mommy’s eyes, inside her head. “I think it’s the best thing a person can do is to try and keep those two yous as close together as they can. It’s hard. It’s damn hard. But you gotta try, right? Cause if you don’t try, one of your yous might get up and do her own thing entirely, without permission from the other. I’ve seen it before. It ain’t pretty, Dana. I may even be guilty of having lost sight of one of my mes a time or two, but I’ve always got it back. Back together. Under control. You know what control is, Dana?”