Horror Express Volume Two

by Bentley Little

  CP. What do you read when you aren’t exploiting?

  I am extraordinarily fussy and impatient with writers and get bored easily. I hate expositional writing and I hate being told I OUGHT to read things. I don’t just limit myself to horror fiction. I like great stylists, writers who have great panache and skill with words. Writers I like include: Henry Fielding; Lawrence Sterne; Martin Amis; Saul Bellow; William Faulkner; HP Lovecraft; Thomas Ligotti. I also LOVE with a desperate passion the poetry of Ted Hughes.

  CP. What frightens you?

  RH. In the abstract, very little. And very little horror fiction frightens me. Real danger in real life frightens me.

  CP. What excites you?

  RH. New ideas. Other people’s talent.

  CP. You are closely connected with the Manchester heavy metal and punk music scene, and are also in a band. Discuss.

  RH: Two bands I’ll have you know. Shrieking Goblin (punk metal thing) and Nightmare Engineers (spooky electro thing).

  CP. What are your musical influences?

  RH. Don’t know about influences, but if you mean who do I like then . . . Punk stuff like Dead Kennedys, Alice Donut, The Cramps, and The Stooges. 70s rock like Deep Purple, Floyd, Sabs etc. - all usual suspects. Then tons of classical stuff like Sibelius, Gorecki, Bartok, Mozart, Solti etc etc

  CP. How do you spend your free time?

  RH. Walking in Peak District / Lake District; twatting about with friends. Oh, and making the acquaintance of charming ladies. Actually . . . mainly the last one.

  CP. Describe your house/flat?

  RH. A bit of a mess

  CP. Describe your desk?

  RH. A bit of a mess

  CP. What films do you like and why?

  RH.I like entertaining films like thrillers and Hollywood blockbusters – things with Bruce Willis saying ‘yippee –yi-ay mother fucker’, things with exploding trucks and tidy lasses in them. I tend not to like ‘serious’ films that much cos actually find film an intellectually weak art form that is never as clever as it thinks it is. Also- I hate going to cinema these days cos it’s such a time consuming fucking chore going out to some fucking hanger out in the middle of fucking nowhere and paying a million pounds and you can’t get those boxes of raisins in chocolate, or smoke, or watch the dah dah dah dah Pearl and Dean advert, or shit adverts for exhaust re-fitters and Chinese restaurants (‘After the show why not experience the mystery of the orient at The Pearl City: number 37, Sunderland Street, Macclesfield, )flirt with chicks selling ice cream (who are usually mate’s older sister) in a cheeky way, or get to pub in time for last orders. The Evil Dead ii and Return of the Living Dead are my two favourite films.

  CP. What frustrates you about your work?

  RH. The publishing industry’s relentless underestimation of the reading public’s intelligence.

  CP. Is it more important to you that people like you or your work?

  RH.I couldn’t give a fuck what my friend’s and people I know in real life think about my work. On the other hand I couldn’t give a fuck about what readers think of me as a person.

  CP. What would you do if you weren’t a writer?

  RH. Criminal Mastermind in Moriarty / Lex Luthor vein.

  CP. Does it come more naturally to you to write unpleasant fiction? Is it harder for you to write less ‘negative‘ fiction?

  RH. Yes. But y’see I see it as comic rather than negative. I think horror and comedy are two similar forms of writing. One of biggest unconscious influences on my work is probably Monty Python which I watched loads of as kid. Grotesque comedy perhaps? Also, horror is a ‘have your cake and eat it genre’ : you can appeal to a broad readership as well as be experimental and literary.

  CP. My dad said to me, “Why don’t you write about something nice for once?” Discuss.

  RH. Tell your dad to cock off! Tell your dad that if he can show you the magazine or publisher that accepts stories about nice things then we’ll both write about cake and flowers. But really, all fiction is about conflict, suffering and ‘negative’ things. No conflict=no drama = no story.

  CP. So horror/terror is not a negative thing?

  RH. No. Cos there is a big difference between literary / artistic horror which is poetic device (which can be done well or badly), and horror and terror in real life: i.e. road accidents, disease etc. They are not the same thing.

  CP. What does it say about the author?

  RH. It says that they have chosen to work in a particular literary tradition and they find the horror genre a productive and fruitful one. That they find it offers them a range of devices and images that they can use to great effect.

  You can find Rick Hudson and his many bizarre groups and acquaintances on Facebook

  AN EXCERPT FROM THE FORTHCOMING NOVEL BY HORROR EXPRESS PUBLICATIONS

  by

  Rick Hudson

  ‘SHRAPNEL’

  OK,

  Let’s talk about love and death.

  Let’s talk about sex and violence.

  The Hero

  There are no gods or devils.

  But monsters?

  There are thousands upon thousands of monsters.

  Me?

  I’m Beowulf, Gilgamesh, Jack the Giant Killer…

  The Nemesis

  Bitterness collects in the sump of my heart

  Like black oily tar.

  Infiltrates my blood

  Like treacle sticky poison.

  Swells like a tumour

  Gnaws like a cancer.

  It’s so deep I can taste it.

  The rich, bitter syrup of hatred.

  The Law Enforcement Agent

  I’m deep down now, how many floors? Two? Three? Every tiny sound: every click of my heel, every pulse of my heart, the whisper of the radiator, the grumbling of the pipes, the hiss of his breath is amplified by the blackness. My breathing is irregular now. No! No! That’s HIS breath, that desperate staccato stammering.

  ‘Huh… huh…huh!’

  The blood in my ears roars. I drop to my haunches, hold my breath and listen.

  ‘Huh…huh…huh!’ and his footsteps scraping on the gritty concrete. Clumsy collision noises. Panting he snaps on a torch, sweeping its beam erratically over the room, revealing nothing but dusty filing cabinets and old wooden desks. There’s a burst of vivid flame from a nervous pistol. Deafened, all I can here is the echo of gunfire one thousand miles away. I level my own revolver and squeeze the trigger three times, spacing each bullet around the source of the torchlight. The room flickers with red strobe light and I see Stephen Kelsall dance awkwardly. I hear three dull cracks as my gun spasms in my palm and then silence, broken only by the low reptile noises of the radiator and Stephen Kelsall’s throat.

  His gun slips from his slack fingers, hits the floor and scuttles under a desk like a startled cockroach. I find the light switch and cold blue neon flickers on. Stephen Kelsall swaggers drunkenly; burgundy stains soak his white shirt. He smiles weakly and apologetically. I level my gun once more, supporting my wrist with my left hand. If he dies there will be an inquest, but I don’t want Stephen Kelsall in my world. I pump two more bullets down the barrel of the gun; one to his heart and one to his head. Kelsall is picked up and dashed against the wall. With a wet choke and an expression of stunned betrayal on the remains of his face, he slides to the ground leaving a dirty slug trail of blood on the brickwork behind him.

  My gun’s too hot to re-holster, it would scorch my jacket and shoulder, so I place it carefully on a desktop to allow the barrel to cool down. I massage my fingers and shoulder as they start to ache from the recoil. I check the position of the body and Kelsall’s gun: I’ll get away with self-defence. I feel strangely disappointed, I expected to feel elated by this victory, but as the adrenalin seeps away I’m left with only the mild satisfaction of a job well done. I do not shriek with horror and revulsion. Does that horrify and revolt you?

  Later at the station.

  Howarth, bloated and ruddy
shuffles out of his office, once more playing his working class hero versus the educated fop card:

  ‘Is that what you learned at college or while you were on holiday playing cops and robbers in America?’

  Always the streetwise cockney versus the naïve provincial. I don’t mind maverick smart mouthed cops as long as they stay on the other side of my TV screen. Blue suited Bowlby drifts behind Howarth’s shoulder, blanched and speechless at the thought of the paperwork, the enquiry, the litigation.

  Way, way back in my past I devoured a copy of Agoton Sax and the League of Silent Exploders with no inclination of where it would take me; to Sherlock Holmes, to Sigmund Freud, to college, to work with The Ministry, to secondment to the States.

  At 30, I reflected, an awkward lad from Sheffield, who had never considered himself to have a talent for anything, had become an expert.

  ‘The police?’ you said. I remember the look on your face when I told you: the disbelief, the horror, the disgust. ‘The police?’

  ‘I’ll be working with the police but I won’t be a POLICEMAN,’ I stressed, ‘and besides, it will mean I’ll get the Ministry to fund my Masters.’

  This didn’t make things any more acceptable in your eyes. We argued savagely, I don’t remember the details: I remember that all I said over and over again was,

  ‘Look I want to do something real.’

  And you kept saying,

  ‘What do you mean “real”?’

  What I should have said was that I didn’t want to become an academic and I didn’t want to sit in a comfortable expensively furnished office all day long with my degree framed on the wall behind me convincing rich self indulgent neurotics and the parents of surly adolescents that I was worth fifty pounds an hour. What I should have said was that I wanted to be involved in the world. I wanted to drive fast cars, earn a massive salary and spend it frivolously. I wanted to be called upon by Scotland Yard to help solve astonishing murder mysteries. I wanted excitement, I wanted adventure.

  I wanted to do something real.

  The Expert

  Let’s start in America, where else?

  ‘Lomas?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I flipped open my wallet, exposing my ID. I was learning my lines from The Streets of San Francisco and Hawaii 5-0. I was in a tiny squad room in a run down precinct talking to five other guys, who all looked like they worked on the gates at Old Trafford, but this mass of beer guts, receding hairlines and double chins was the Homicide Squad, and this was New York.

  Mayfield introduces me to his men. He’s short and gutty, but broad: it would be easy to imagine him as a gangland boss or the sensei of some martial arts hero in a doomed TV pilot. As Mayfield concludes his introduction I rise and open a dossier on Burgess. I deal out some photos. I’m aware of the suspicious stares of the cops, wary of me. They shift in their seats, they don’t like young professionals, they don’t like college boys and they don’t like Europeans.

  ‘From what we’ve put together from the evidence gathered at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and the raid on Burgess’ apartment it would appear that our boy is in the grip of the usual conflict-denial-trauma psycho soup. Prepare yourselves gentlemen, this is not a pleasant story, we’re dealing with an 8th Dan loon here. The suspect: George Burgess, white, male, aged 24, upper working class. Born Charlottesville Virginia, moved to Manhattan three years ago. Insular, shy, neighbours say he wouldn’t hurt a fly etc etc etc, blah blah blah. All the usual stuff.’

  I pause for water.

  ‘He’s reported to have, on several occasions, expressed hatred for blacks and homosexuals. NYPD officers found the dismembered corpses of three black males at his apartment. The victims all appear to be between 16 and 21. I won’t go into too many details; you can see it all in the photos. The autopsies have revealed that the victims were drugged with an opiate mixed with beer and that they were sexually abused before and after death. The lab also reckons that the victims were abused after dismemberment as well.’

  I pause once again for water.

  ‘The officers also found a drawer full of Polaroids like these. Don’t open the bags.’

  I pass round a handful of photos, each one in a clear zip-locked envelope. The photos all feature lumps of meat that are not instantly recognisable as severed body parts.

  ‘The marks on the photos, you’ll be charmed to hear, are semen deposits. It would appear that Burgess not only photographed his handiwork but masturbated over it as well. OK Captain, that’s me done.’

  I sit and gulp down the last of my water.

  ‘Fuck!’

  ‘Christ!’

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘Shit!’

  Mayfield takes the floor;

  ‘Burgess is holed up in an abandoned building on the Lower East Side. We believe he’s armed with a variety of weapons. What exactly we don’t know. He’s also got a dog with him.’

  ‘What kind of dog?’

  ‘How the fuck do I know what kind of dog? A big bad fuck of a dog that will bite your balls off. That kind of fucking dog,’

  ‘HA HA HA HA HA HA!’

  ‘HEH HEH HEH HEH HEH!’

  Minutes later I was in my car, turning off Broadway, locking the wheel round as tight as I could as I cut the corner at high speed. My unmarked Ford led a trail of yelping and howling police cars. Mayfield sat beside me barking into a radio handset. Weaving between vehicles, charging through red lights, scattering crowds of pedestrians our column snaked towards Burgess. I was loving every minute of it.

  I pulled up outside the derelict building Burgess was held up in; an old brownstone apartment block. The police vehicles skidded to a halt behind us. Leaving the car I slipped six bullets into my revolver and got used to the weight of the loaded gun. I always forget how heavy bullets are. A SWAT team piled out of the back of an armoured car. I half knew their commander, Dupont I think. Yeah Dupont. I remember him correcting my pronunciation:

  ‘DOO-ponT, DOO-ponT!’

  Mayfield and Dupont conferred: pointing, nodding, arguing with superiors over radios. Dupont approached me;

  ‘How dangerous do you think he is?’

  ‘Fuck! He fucks people, kills them, fucks them, cuts them up and fucks them again. About as fucking dangerous as you can fucking get commander!’

  ‘Fuck!’

  Dupont’s men started making sweeps of the building followed by ordinary cops and the Homicide Squad. I followed, my palms getting sweaty. I’d lost track of what floor we were on when trouble broke out:

  I heard two short bursts of automatic weapons fire.

  There was shouting:

  ‘Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!’

  and a set of double doors swung open. A cloud of dense black smoke rolled out heavily into the corridor in which I stood. Engulfed I choked. My eyes streamed. I was giddy and nauseous. I heard more gunfire and shouting:

  ‘Jesus! Jesus! Get the fuck!’

  I was knocked to the ground as I was clipped by a monster shoulder followed by something that panted and trotted on light clawed feet. Disorientated and dizzy I floundered on the floor, choking and weeping from the fuck awful smoke. I got to my feet and stumbled like drunk along the corridor. I half remember dragging myself up some stairs but I don’t remember going through any doors. I guess I must have done though, because when I got to my knees after collapsing out of the smoke I was on the roof. I breathed slowly and deeply, my mind unable to decode my new environment: the muddled skyline; the grubby brickwork, the warehouses painted in gaudy flaking pink and yellow. The vast absurd billboards:

  NOW IS THE TIME FOR A COORS!

  All those water tanks that look like Martian war machines out of War of the Worlds. When I was quite small I had a book about Norse mythology. I loved that book.

  DIAL 1-800-PAIN FOR SAME-DAY HAEMORROID SURGERY

  Near the back there was a beautiful colour plate of Odin’s final confrontation with the Fenris Wolf. Odin reared up on Sleipnir, his blue armour shone as he hurled his golden spea
r at Fenris’ dripping red jaws. Fenris was all gaping maw, white fangs, lolling tongue and spittle as he tore across the roof towards me. I drew my .38 and fired three times in quick succession. The sound of the shots dissipated into the air; I had expected the rumble of Mjollinr, but all I got was three disappointing dull cracks. The dog’s head struck the floor abruptly, its hind-quarters, propelled by momentum, rolled forward. The dog’s body tumbled to my feet spilling its internal organs as it came.

  ‘You’ve killed my dog! You’ve killed my dog!’

  I looked up and saw a man running towards me. He looked unremarkable; I’m trying to remember what he looked like, what he wore. He looked unremarkable. I recognised his face though, from… his photograph…

  ‘You’ve killed my dog! You’ve killed my dog!’

  I’d seen his photograph… in a dossier… a dossier I had written…

  I’m bowled over onto my back when he leaps on me. I’m winded by the fall and my revolver spins from my hand. A man who fucks people, kills them, fucks them, cuts them up and fucks them again is bellowing in my face. I can taste his sour breath.

  ‘You’ve killed my dog! You’ve killed my dog!’

  His whole weight is on my chest, his hand squeezes my throat, he presses a revolver against the side of my head. I should panic, but the pain is too great for me to feel or think. Getting to his feet he drags me to a water tank with one hand, Christ, his left, he must be manic! He slams me repeatedly against the wall of the tank. My limbs flap loosely, I think my spine’s going to shatter. Each impact echoes like a hammer blow inside the tank. Since his photo was taken he has tattooed his own face with erratic razor cuts filled with dull blue ink. His face says: