Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 4

by Cheryl Mullenax

  He smiled. “And the artifact.”

  The voices whispered to her, buzzing like wasps inside her head. “Yes. Of course.”

  He followed her into the living room and took a seat on the couch. He scrunched up his face. “When’s the last time you cleaned?”

  “Let me start brewing the coffee,” she said, ignoring his allusion to the odor that permeated her home. “I’ll also grab the papers.”

  As she turned toward the kitchen, he put his hand on her arm. His eyes focused on the scars on her hand from her bloodletting. “Miranda, I’m concerned about you. Your hand’s all torn up. You’ve clearly dropped a ton of weight, despite your always having been rather thin. Your hair’s falling out. It looks like you’ve been through hell. There something you wanna tell me?”

  Cancer. He probably thought she had cancer.

  “Why are you so concerned all of a sudden? You certainly weren’t worried about my wellbeing when you fucked Tina.” She pushed him away and trudged toward the kitchen. She started brewing some coffee and then went to her study to retrieve the documents.

  The voices from the ether were growing louder, more insistent, crowding out her thoughts.

  She tried to shut them out by focusing on the tasks at hand. Carrying the divorce papers into the living room, she dropped them and a pen into Damien’s lap. “Sign these. I’ll get the book.”

  He glowered. “How did you know it was a book? You didn’t open it, did you?” His tone straddled a razor-thin line between panic and anger.

  “You got me,” she said. “Don’t worry. I didn’t damage it. I was just curious why you were so obsessed with it.”

  “Okay,” he said, visibly shaken by her revelation. “Can I see it?”

  “Sure. As soon as you sign those papers.”

  “Oh, right.” He rifled through the documents and began signing them.

  “Let me check on the coffee, then I’ll get the book. Do you know much about its history?” she said, walking out of the room.

  Damien’s mood seemed to flip-flop from hysteria to excitement. “Oh, I spent years investigating an obscure letter General Patton sent his wife, Beatrice, during the Second World War that mentioned an odd relic captured from German forces in North Africa. Before that, the grimoire’s history is hazy, but based on the cover’s inscriptions, it harkens back to Egypt’s Old Kingdom.”

  She grabbed a knife and crockpot, and walked back into the room, approaching Damien from behind. “How can you be so sure?”

  “Isn’t it obvious from the Eye of Thoth on the cover?” he said, tilting his head back toward her.

  “Eye of Thoth?” she said in a half-hearted attempt to deflect his attention.

  He regarded the crockpot and knife with apparent confusion, but continued. “In Egyptian mythology, the Eye of Thoth symbolized the moon, and the god, Thoth, was associated with magic, writing, and judgment of the dead.”

  She walked up to the couch and stood directly behind him. She handed him the crockpot. “Put this on your lap.”

  He seemed baffled. “What’s that for?”

  From behind, she cupped his chin in her left hand and slit his throat with her right. Blood fountained from his neck, pulsing with the rhythm of his heartbeat. He stumbled upward, his eyes wide with shock. He opened his mouth to speak, but could only gurgle as he choked on his blood. He struggled to maintain his balance.

  A chorus of voices wailed in a discordant symphony, but one voice—the only one that mattered—screamed in regret.

  Damien collapsed. His arms reached out to Miranda.

  Her heart raced. Tears streamed down her cheeks. What had she done?

  Bloody divorce papers underscored the gravity of her sin. Yet otherworldly voices soothed her, convincing her she no longer needed the documents.

  Death had done its part.

  The discarnate voices admonished her not to waste the man’s life force. Calmed by these phantoms, Miranda obeyed, gripping Damien’s hair and settling his gaping wound over the crockpot for the blood harvest.

  She shook afterward, terrified of what she’d done. But her guilt succumbed to self-preservation. Miranda slumped Damien’s corpse onto a dolly and wheeled it into her garage, dismembering the body with a circular saw. When she’d finished, she fed the remains to Pepper.

  That night, she painted the grimoire’s pages in her dead husband’s blood.

  * * *

  The maggots came first, squirming from beneath the cellar door and into Miranda’s kitchen. The rats followed, rattling the walls as they scurried through them, chewing and scratching. Then the crows descended on her home, covering the oaks and maples in her yard in a kudzu-like shroud.

  The night before, she’d been frustrated when, after so much blood and human sacrifice, the book had chosen to show her a mundane equation she’d mastered as a college sophomore.

  The logistic algorithm was a simple differential equation biologists used to predict population growth. Miranda hypothesized that the increase of these vermin populations was linked to it, but there were so many variables that testing her hunch was impossible. She couldn’t see the rats in the walls, the maggots were too innumerable to tally, and the crows never stayed in one place long enough to count. But when the vagrants began arriving, shuffling in the snow outside her doors, her theory proved right. The number of drifters ebbed and flowed with the logistic equation’s mathematical certitude.

  Plucked from the worst of Cambridge’s and Boston’s homeless populations, the vagrants loitered menacingly outside, surrounding her home. As individuals, they appeared mentally unstable; together, they acted as a single organism.

  On the rare occasion Miranda left her home, they would spread like ripples from a stone splashing in a fetid pond. She saw the rabble’s arrival as the first tangible sign the godhead was within her grasp. They worshipped her; she was their god; her house, their church. And the fount of her power emanated from the cellar, a place she hadn’t ventured to since the summoning.

  Miranda continued to race through the grimoire. She was on the verge of reaching its conclusion. But the closer she got to the end, the more pages she had to read. Each page was thinner than the previous one. The grimoire refused to end.

  It was asymptotic agony.

  Yet still she read. She read until her eyes were soaked in blood.

  * * *

  The next night, a vagrant entered her home unbidden and descended into the cellar, never to return. The following evening, another repeated this grim ritual, fueling the arcane writing on the grimoire’s ever-thinning pages. But with each new offering, new writing appeared on fewer pages until, by the sixth day, the sacrifice produced only a few words.

  Tina phoned on the seventh day.

  “Hello, Miranda? I know this is awkward, but have you seen Damien? He’s been missing for a week. I’ve asked everyone else.”

  Miranda hesitated. Her first impulse was to lie to the homewrecker, to deny that Damien had visited. But the discarnate shades counseled her to tell a more twisted truth. “Yes, he’s here,” she said, clouding her deceit with the smoke of omission.

  “What? Why’s he there? I’ve been trying to reach him, but he never answers,” Tina whined.

  “Not my problem,” Miranda said with venom. “You’ll have to come here and see for yourself.” She hung up.

  Thirty minutes later, Tina’s late model Audi screeched to a halt in front of Miranda’s residence. A woman with long, sinuous auburn hair and golden hoop earrings stomped toward the front door in skinny jeans and a black halter-top.

  Miranda watched her from the window, waiting. She could hear Tina huffing with frustration as she pounded on the door.

  When Miranda opened it, Tina’s eyes widened. “What happened to you?”

  “You can find your lover in the cellar.”

  As Tina entered, her look of surprise shifted to fear as she saw the gauntlet of ten filthy vagrants lining the hall. Before she could scream, a shower of daggers desc
ended on her.

  The vagrants harvested Tina’s blood in black plastic buckets. She was still thrashing and wailing when they lowered her into the cellar. Miranda could feel the discarnate entities pushing through the increasingly diaphanous veil separating her world from theirs as they devoured Tina’s essence in the festering blackness.

  Tina’s blood fueled the next stage in Miranda’s enlightenment. In her mind’s eye, she could project her consciousness everywhere and nowhere, never and always. It wouldn’t be long now. They were coming, and with them, her anointment. She could taste the power.

  She was so close, only a hair’s breadth away. She turned the page, then another, basking in forbidden lore.

  Soon it would be all hers. Very soon.

  * * *

  Shadows enveloped Miranda as she wallowed in oscillating dreamscapes in quantum superposition with Miranda’s own reality. The entities had become incarnate, occupying the skins of Miranda’s worshippers. She could feel herself dissipating, becoming both ethereal shadow and supreme consciousness.

  She turned the page.

  But no matter how many pages she turned, she was always one page from the end. The pages continued to fray and thin. It was as if they were a physical manifestation of the weakening membrane separating her reality from the outer reaches of unreality.

  She was desperate to reach the godhead. She needed to reach the godhead. The godhead was her only hope.

  Then the solution presented itself in crystal clarity. How had she not seen it from the very beginning? The pages, they’d always been the key. Their texture had always seemed so familiar, so close. And they bore the mark of great sacrifice. If she were to progress further, she needed to offer one of her own.

  The ringing doorbell lurched Miranda out of her daze. As she shifted from unreality to reality, she experienced a twinge of horror.

  Her nephew, Tommy, waited at the door.

  Part of her resisted the urge, but it paled in comparison to what lay across the threshold of the grimoire’s final page. She knew the path; she understood what had to be done.

  Miranda’s worshippers dragged Tommy into the house. The ten year old screamed and flailed. She waited in the kitchen. Three more worshippers clenched their knives in preparation for the final ritual, the last stage of her metamorphosis.

  They bound Tommy to a chair opposite hers. He cried, “Aunt Miranda, they’re hurting me!”

  Miranda sat with the serene knowledge that by opening her dimension, she’d unlock the gate to godhood.

  Her followers sharpened their knives. Transcendence required both a sacrifice and a witness.

  An acolyte strapped Miranda to her chair and flayed her alive. The pain was exquisite, and the last she’d ever feel before she left her mortal coil.

  Tommy bawled.

  As Miranda had instructed, the acolyte infused Miranda’s flesh into the grimoire.

  The grimoire reached out to Miranda as she sought infinity. Pushing beyond the envelope of reality, she knew eternity. Time was nonlinear; all possibilities, instantaneous. She held them all in her mind’s eye simultaneously, with perfect clarity.

  She was the harbinger of all that was to come, of all that was, and of all that is. She reached forward from the future and backward into the past.

  She unwound the dream.

  She was transcendent.

  The book slammed shut. A foul wind reeking of decay swirled around Miranda’s dying body. She’d never suffered more intense pain.

  Now that the entities were free, they ended the farce.

  Tommy stopped crying and smiled. Eyes black as obsidian were the last things Miranda ever saw.

  <<====>>

  Author’s Story Note

  The Godhead Grimoire” explores the perils of forbidden knowledge, the dark side of mathematics, and the corrupting allure of divinity. In turn, these elements reinforce each other as they chisel away and eventually obliterate Miranda’s soul.

  The story’s eponymous tome embodies all these themes. By appealing to her love of mathematics, it lures Miranda into its mesmerizing web. As Miranda delves into its mysteries, the book exacts a terrible price, slowly degrading Miranda’s mind, body, and spirit until she becomes an apparition of her former self. From its cover, adorned with the eye of Thoth, the Egyptian deity of the moon and wisdom, to its pages of human skin, to its insatiable thirst for human blood and sacrifice, the book demands to be explored and promises to unveil its dark secrets.

  The volume’s ever-thinning pages and seemingly infinite length represent the asymptotic nature of seeking the path to divinity. The closer Miranda gets to achieving transcendence, the more her essence disintegrates into oblivion; the more the membrane keeping the entities out of her plane of existence weakens.

  A certain mathematical logic underlies nearly every aspect of the story. It manifests itself in the asymptotic nature of the grimoire and the logistic growth of Miranda’s worshippers. As the son of a high school teacher, I’ve always been fascinated by the beauty and elegance of mathematics. In our natural world, mathematical principles are both universal and sublime. Their presence often hides in plain sight with Fibonacci sequences appearing in patterns as diverse as the arrangement of leaves on a stem to the spiraling of galaxies.

  Closely tied to mathematics is the story’s final theme: the will to power and the inevitable corruption and destruction of those who seek it. As Miranda approaches omnipotence, her reality frays. She becomes the veritable moth seeking a flame—a flame that renders her to cinders.

  Two stories inspired this tale: George R.R. Martin’s “Sandkings” and Algernon Blackwood’s “Smith: An Episode in a Lodging-House”. The former also explored the theme of divinity gone awry, while the latter served as an inspiration for the entities that tempt and taint Miranda.

  This story is ultimately about obsession. The relentless pursuit of an endeavor without regard to consequence nearly always leads to a grim end.

  CARNAL BODIES

  R.E. Hellinger

  From Two Dead Queers Present: Guillozine.

  Independently Published

  All of young Lord Heath’s friends wanted to know how his brother had gotten locked in the family crypt.

  “He’s always been a deviant,” was his answer, and surprisingly everyone agreed. Of course they knew him. He, Heath, had been the one who had stayed nearest home—dogging his father’s steps, learning the family business, and sometimes tending the blackberry thickets when it wasn’t so hot. Hawthorne had always been away, gallivanting back and across the earth, doing God knew what. Their father had encouraged it. Perhaps because he’d never gotten along with his own brother he’d felt separation was a healthier rite of passage for growing boys. But it was rumored Hawthorne had been a hedonist, so why not a deviant? The more Heath told the story, the more he believed it himself.

  But maybe he wanted to.

  “But his own family,” Thomas laughed, turning with him into the East wing of the estate. “Somehow that’s worse!”

  Heath didn’t laugh.

  Lowering his voice as they drew nearer to a set of tall oak doors, Allan looked at him. “How long was he in there?”

  Twisting a key into the lock, Heath pursed his lips as if recalling the stench of the tomb. Instead, the memory of Hawthorne’s face—sick with fear as Heath closed one of the innermost cellar doors between them and locked it—swam before him. “Three days.”

  Pushing the doors open, Heath let them inside. The room was awash in morning sunlight that seemed to touch the wooden shelves and sheer drapes with gold. Gilded titles of books that lined the shelves winked out at them and one of the windows had been opened just slightly so that a breeze lightened the air. Turned so that the breeze was on the side of his face, Hawthorne sat strapped to a wooden wheelchair, looking like a doll that had been discarded.

  Heath’s friends stopped where they stood and it only occurred to Heath then that his friends had never met Hawthorne before then.

/>   “You’re twins!” Thomas blurted.

  It wasn’t true. Hawthorne was exactly one year older. They shared the same birthday, and thus—as children—had thought to share everything. Their games, their secrets…Suggesting they were twins both drew insidious lines between their true natures and benevolently suggested that Heath was just as entitled to the estate as Hawthorne had been.

  They did look remarkably similar. Though, even if Heath cut his brother’s hair there would be a division in that Heath could only be described as handsome while his brother—especially now that something had broken inside of him—could only be described as beautiful.

  “Come closer, he can’t bite.”

  Allan crossed himself before crossing the threshold, circling the room slowly before he stopped at the other edge of a table that stood near to them. He shook his head slowly. “You should have left him in there, Heath; something doesn’t feel right.”

  Undeterred, Thomas stepped right up to Hawthorne, nearly spitting on him. “Fucking necrophile.” Crouching down, he peered up into Hawthorne’s slack face, his staring periwinkle eyes. “Why did you save him? What good is he?”

  Heath laughed thinly from where he stood behind Hawthorne’s chair, twisting a strand of Hawthorne’s hair between his fingers. “Christ, Thomas, we just lost our father. He’s my brother. Does everything need to have a purpose for it to have a place in this world?”

  “You forget what he might have been doing to your father in that crypt.”

  Something flashed in Heath’s eyes. “I don’t. He’s the only living family I have now. Besides,” he frowned slightly, using both hands to tilt Hawthorne’s head up and back slightly, “He has a sort of purpose.”

  He pulled a black hood from the back of the chair and draped it over Hawthorne’s head. Then, without warning, he fisted the fabric tightly in both hands, pulling it back and around the back of Hawthorne’s head—so tightly they could see his mouth stretching open against the fabric, straining for air, and the outline of the eye sockets of his skull. He made no sound, but stirred weakly which made it all the more worse to watch.