“I’m sticking with the gun,” says Peter. “At least until midnight. After that it won’t matter.”
“Someone will come looking for me. People are going to want drinks.”
“It’s been taken care of. Alyssa had to go to the hospital—an accident with a broken glass. An occupational hazard of sorts. I had my driver take her.”
“Okay, so we’ll just hang out here until midnight then,” says Alyssa in a soothing voice. “That’s all you want—some company on New Year’s Eve, right?”
“No,” says Iris-Nancy. “You don’t understand. I can’t be in the same room with him.” Peter is staring at her. She feels tendrils of his will winding themselves around her mind. “He’ll make me be what he wants. He’ll make me want to please him.”
“Don’t take it so hard,” says Peter. “Look what I turned myself into. I saw you checking me out before you knew who I was. Just relax and go with it.”
“No!”
“You say no, but it doesn’t mean anything,” says Peter. He studies Iris-Nancy’s face. “I like the Asian look,” he says. “Not so much the gap between your front teeth though. And you could use some more boob.”
Iris-Nancy stares at him, her face a mask of hatred. The tendrils slide around her body, run across her breasts, urging them to be larger. “Fine,” she snaps. She won’t fight that. The breasts don’t matter. She needs to pace herself.
“What are you doing to her?” says Alyssa, staring at Iris-Nancy’s chest as her breasts go up a cup size. Are you making her boobs get bigger? Because you could totally make money from that.”
“No, she’s doing that to herself.” says Peter. “But I certainly appreciate it. You see, Nancy’s suggestible tonight, at least for another half hour or so.”
Iris-Nancy feels a wave of anger from Alyssa—a memory like a slap across the face—the shock of rejection for not playing by the rules, not squeezing herself into an expected role. “Nancy, fight back. Change him too. Make him be something else!”
“I can’t. It’s not his birthday. Peter, stop. Please stop.”
“Not yet. Just relax. You’ll like it by the end.” Iris-Nancy feels Peter’s personality washing over her in waves—a sick, twisted joy in power, of bending her to his will. It’s overwhelming her, erasing the edges of Nancy.
“Fight him,” says Alyssa, fists clenched. “Be Iris!” Iris seizes onto the sound of Alyssa’s voice like a handhold on the edge of a cliff. Iris drags a semblance of Nancy back into herself. She tries to nudge her breathing closer to Alyssa’s.
Peter shoots an appraising glance at Alyssa. “You want in on the action? Don’t get your hopes up. Nancy hardly knows you. And Nancy and I have an affinity of sorts, so anything I put out there is going to dominate anything that comes from you.
Iris-Nancy feels a wave of desire from Peter shot through with a dark strength, an aching need. She sees her own face through Peter’s eyes. The presents he bought her, how he had offered her everything, the rage that it hadn’t been enough.
“She wants to be Iris,” says Alyssa.
“Actually, I think Nancy has always had a secret desire to become a porn star,” Peter says smoothly. Iris-Nancy feels a sense of exhibitionism building in her body. Peter is impossibly attractive. They belong together. She wants to be with him, with him and with other men while he watches. “No,” she says. This she will fight. This is non-negotiable. She focuses hard on Alyssa—not her appearance, but her essence. She twists the tendrils from Peter—forcing them into a different shape—fashion—she wants to look good, wants to wear a different outfit every day—to display an image—a look, nothing deeper than that, nothing intimate. She heaves a shuddering sigh.
“That’s my girl,” says Peter, a look of triumph on his face.
“She’s her own girl,” says Alyssa.
“Shut up,” says Peter.
Iris-Nancy-Alyssa digs deep inside herself. She’s been missing something since she took this job—flowers. Back at college Nancy used to run a long loop in the spring just so she could smell them, freesia in the day, and night blooming jasmine edging into summer. She misses the scent like Alyssa misses Iris—a sweet girl who died too young. No not Iris. She needs to be something stronger, something hard as stone. She feels her body and her psyche shifting, combining in new ways. She seizes the tendrils from Peter, follows them to their source and yanks them out by the roots. With a shift, they wind their way into her veins, slide along her spine. A new identity—she needs a new name to go with it, something beautiful and strong. Jade. The name echoes inside her mind.
Peter’s eyes widen. “Nancy,” he says, his voice breaking. “Undo it all—everything I said. There’s still time.” He looks at the gun in his hand, sets it on the sink next to Alyssa’s phone. “Nancy, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” says Jade in a soft voice. She goes to Peter and kisses him. He pulls back in surprise.
“You smell like flowers,” he says. “That’s new.” He bends to kiss her neck. Jade runs her fingers through his hair. Her other hand finds the pistol. The grip feels familiar as an old friend. Her finger squeezes the trigger hard and steady as if she’s done this before. Her hand jerks and sound slams around the room, rattling her bones, echoing back from the walls and tile. Peter slumps to the floor.
Jade looks at the gun like she’s surprised to be holding it. “I should feel bad. Why don’t I feel bad?” She can hardly hear the sound of her voice. Alyssa points to her ear and shakes her head. She radiates fear and the need to get out before the cops come, to avoid becoming a person of interest. Jade could use that, make Alyssa do what she wants. That’s a foreign thought—or is it a Jade thought?
Jade focuses on her ears, making tiny adjustments inside. She swallows and senses the return of her hearing. Her eyes are wheeling, her body humming. There’s a hole where her compassion should be. Perhaps action will lead to intention. She reaches out her free hand, touches Alyssa’s ear. Alyssa flinches. Jade doesn’t pull back, but makes a similar tiny adjustment. She has not tried this before tonight, making a change in someone else. “Better?”
Alyssa swallows and nods. “Nancy?” she says tentatively.
“I’m Jade now.”
“Okay…Jade.” Alyssa digs through her purse, fingers fumbling with the clasp on her wallet. “I don’t want any trouble. Here, let me give you back your money.”
“Keep it.” Jade senses her inner workings. A cascade of changes is shifting her essence, altering the foundation of her identity. A pattern forms, a dark kaleidoscope turning inside her mind. So little time left to make sense of it. Jade shifts the whorls on her fingertips, and then her final shape solidifies. She can no longer sense Alyssa’s feelings. She bends down and pushes Peter out of the way enough to open the door. The sounds of cheering and champagne corks popping come from down the hall, together with the pop and bang of distant fireworks.
“No one heard the shot. That’s good, but there’s blood and he’s too heavy to move,” says Jade. She turns and studies herself in the mirror. “Sort of Asian, but not too much like Iris, I hope. I didn’t want to steal someone else’s face.”
“No, you’re not her anymore—just a little like her.”
“I could claim self-defense, but no one will know me. They’ll think I stole Nancy’s purse, and maybe even her dress if they’re sharp. I should go to my family—they’ll help. They always do. You can come with me if you want.” Jade puts the gun in her clutch. She hands Alyssa her phone. Jade tugs on the top of her dress until it falls into place, looking more suggestive than before, but socially acceptable.
Alyssa is watching Jade. “You’re a different person. It’s not just your face, is it?”
“No, it goes beyond that. Especially this time. I’ve never gone so deep before, never been able to control the process—to pick and choose what changes and what stays the same.”
“Is Nancy still in there? I kind of liked her.”
“Sure, I still love to run
, still love the legs,” Jade points to her Top-Model legs. “But I’m more than Nancy now—so much stronger. There’s even a little of you in me. In fact, I think I just became a mixologist.” She steps over the body on the floor and looks back over her shoulder. “Coming?”
Whatever It Takes
Byron Barton
For the fifteenth time in the last hour, Lisa checked her makeup in the rearview mirror. She chided herself for fawning over superficial appearances like a sixteen-year-old on prom night. She’d left behind such behavior in her twenties, well over a decade past.
The makeup looked good, just like it did five minutes ago. Dark eyeliner around blue eyes, Cleopatra-esque wings extending half an inch past the ends in an upward flip. Artfully applied concealer lessened the crow’s feet creeping like a cancer across her temples with every passing year. A smear of bright red lipstick announced she was still in the game, not yet brought low by the burden of age, years piling on like the encumbrance of a blood-sucking lamprey.
At least she was parked this time. On the drive over, focusing too much on her makeup, she’d nearly run down a pedestrian carelessly crossing the street, texting on his phone instead of watching where he was walking. At a half hour to midnight on New Year’s Eve, he was probably drunk.
A hundred meters in the distance, across a dark field of long grass, brown from winter and matted by the trampling of feet and cars, illuminated by a crescent moon and stars, lights from the party were visible. At this distance, she could barely hear the sound of music spilling over the wooden fence surrounding the front yard. Lisa loved that about rural parties. With the closest neighbor half a mile away, they could blast the music and not have to worry about noise complaints. Her friends were in there, some she’d known for three decades.
Lisa turned off the car. As her eyes adjusted to the night, she took one last look in the rearview mirror and saw a pair of eyes, set in a shadowed face, staring back at her. With a startled sucking of breath, her heart hammering, she turned around to face whatever was in her backseat. Nothing. She risked another look in the rearview, afraid of what she might see. Nothing.
Lisa tried to laugh, blaming her imagination. She should really lay off the booze. Too much to drink. That was the problem, Lisa told herself. She was too old to be pre-partying, even on New Year’s Eve. Nonetheless, the open field suddenly looked more ominous, the shadows between parked cars darker and more foreboding. For the first time, she noticed how far away she really was from the party, parked where the grass met dark woods.
Perhaps she should just start the car back up and park closer, Lisa thought, but then she would be blocking somebody in. No, Lisa told herself, she was being silly.
Taking a breath to bolster her nerves, Lisa readied herself for the party, trying not to look off into the woods through her passenger side window. Trunks and branches of denuded trees, waving in the wind, reached out like a skeletal army of long dead lovers engaged in an orgy from beyond the grave.
Lisa opened her door and stepped out into the night. Cold air cut through her thin jacket and even thinner party dress. The sooner she was inside and drinking, the better. She took a couple of rapid steps, but her heals became tangled in the long grass and irregular bumps in the frozen ground. Cursing, trying not to lose her balance, she slowed.
Was that a noise? Lisa jerked erect, head slightly tilted, listening. Shivering from the sharp cold, she looked back into the dark woods. Just some branches rubbing together, she thought uneasily. She turned back toward the distant party and felt something thick and muscular slither around her neck. She tried to scream, but suddenly lacked the ability to move air past her throat. She struggled, trying to slip her fingers between the cord of muscle and her neck. When this proved futile, she settled on clawing it with her long nails, the bright red paint a hue of dark grey under the moon’s scarce light, but this did nothing to ease the intense pressure around her throat. Nightmares of an assault from twenty years ago, and the helplessness she’d felt in that long ago time, came flooding back as blackness descended.
“Damn, this party’s hoppin’. There must be fifty cars here,” David said as he exited the wooded lane and drove out into the parking area, the headlights of his car sweeping across trampled grass and parked cars.
“Hurry, it’s only ten minutes to midnight. Park up there, close to the gate,” his girlfriend Jenny said. They were both in their early twenties, invited to what was supposed to be the biggest New Year’s Eve bash in central Kentucky by one of their older work colleagues.
“There’s no room. I’d block somebody in. We’ll have to park by the woods and walk.”
“Fine, just hurry. I don’t want to miss the ball drop.”
David turned off the lane and drove across the grass, down the line of parked cars, looking for an open space. There was almost enough room to start a second row behind the ragged first, but judging by how people seemed to have pulled in without any thought to a parking plan, parking close was asking to get his car dinged by some half-drunk guy.
“If people would have parked in a straight line, we’d have plenty of room for a second row. Or maybe even a third,” David said. He hated it when people were less than fastidious.
“There’s no space,” Jenny said accusatorily, as if David were personally responsible for the haphazard parking. David rolled his eyes.
“If you hadn’t insisted on stopping at Lynn’s we would’ve been here two hours ago,” David said, referring to one of Jenny’s high school friends, whose parties were always as lively as an oncologist’s waiting room and attended by half a handful of rejects who had nowhere else to go.
David flinched as his car, a brand new Ford Taurus, bottomed out in a rut. He slowed.
“Damn. There’s nothing,” David said as they reached the end of the field. A car was parked right up against the woods.
“It’s kind of spooky down here,” Jenny said, as if this too were David’s fault.
Rather than back out, David started a three-point turnaround. His headlights swept across deep woods. Most of the light was dissipated through overgrowth and brambles along its border, but what penetrated revealed a scape wrought sterile and unwelcoming by winter’s hand.
“Stop!” Jenny shouted. David slammed on the brakes.
“What is it?”
“I think I saw someone lying against that car.” Jenny was pointing to an older red Impala parked in the last spot right up next to the woods.
“Probably nothing.”
“No, I know I saw someone.”
David sighed. “Probably someone who drank too much, if anything.”
“We need to help him. He’ll freeze to death out there.”
“Fine.” David put the Taurus in park and opened his door. He heard Jenny scream a second before things went black.
* * *
Three hours earlier.
“This party’s rockin’ and it’s not even nine,” Joe Sanders said to Mike Healey. The two were in the kitchen, shotgunning beer over a beige ceramic sink. A dozen handles of booze were spread across an off-white Formica counter, along with plastic cups and mixers. The fridge was stocked with beer, and Prince’s “Tonight We’re Gonna Party Like It’s Nineteen Ninety Nine” was blasting in the living room. People were spread throughout the one-story ranch in two’s and three’s, drinking and talking. A few were drunk enough they’d started dancing.
Mike cut a one-centimeter triangle out of the bottom of a can of beer with the tip of a sturdy butcher knife, held it above his mouth while tilting back his head, and popped the top. Cold beer poured down his throat, the can emptying in less than ten seconds. Mike threw the spent container in the sink with a flip of his wrist. “Yeah!” he shouted, as Joe cut his own triangle in a fresh can.
“I bet there’s close to a hundred people here,” Joe said, after shotgunning his beer.
“Maybe.”
“I bet we get one fifty by midnight,” Joe said, offhand.
“Nah, probabl
y more like one twenty-five. Way out here in the boonies, people can’t just drop by. Most people who are coming are here by now.”
“I bet. One fifty.”
“One fifty is the over under?
“One fifty or more, I win. One forty nine or less, you win.”
“Sounds good. How much?”
“A hundred bucks.”
“Done.”
Mike stuck out his hand and Joe shook it. A done deal.
“Let’s do a count,” Joe said. Mike and Joe made the rounds, finally agreeing the tally was a hundred seven people. It was now a simple matter of keeping an eye on the front door, to see how many people came and went.
Mike was proud of his bet. It would be the easiest hundred bucks he’d made in a while.
As the night progressed, car after car rolled down the wooded lane and one person after another flooded through the front door. Mike’s elation at easy money and bragging rights was slowly replaced by a nagging discomfit, and finally, around eleven o’clock, downright worry.
“That’s one forty-four and forty-five,” Joe said as a buxom woman with long brown hair and her dorky looking date walked in the door right at eleven thirty. “Five more to go.” Joe rubbed his hands together eagerly, like a cartoon villain watching an evil plan come together.
Mike felt sick, like that time during his tenth birthday party. He was sitting there in a goofy hat, waiting to cut the cake, when his father told him his mother had been killed in a car wreck en route to the party. Mike felt the loss of a wager as keenly as he felt death. God, he hated to lose. Really, really hated to lose. He reached down and plunged his hand into the icy water of a Styrofoam cooler he and Joe had placed by the door. The cold felt good, numbing his hand as he rooted around for a beer, at last pulling a silver can free, icy droplets running down the side.
Ten minutes passed without the sight of headlights in the lane. Mike began to breathe easier. Maybe he would make it, after all. He grabbed another beer and popped the tab, drinking it down in three long slugs. Drops of cold water dribbled down his chin.
Year's End: 14 Tales of Holiday Horror Page 11
