Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 4

by Cheryl Mullenax

  Eyes full of a strange light, Heath looked down at where Thomas was still crouched before his brother. “Who do you want to talk to?”

  Thomas shook his head, at a loss. “What?”

  “Anyone that’s gone before.”

  “Heath…”

  “Choose.”

  “My…great aunt?” Thomas looked from the twisting skull like visage before him, screaming silently behind its veil.

  “Say her name so she can hear you.”

  “Marie…Marie Anne Withrows.”

  At once Hawthorne grew still. Heath slowly released the fabric so that the screaming face disappeared, but left the hood on his brother’s head.

  It felt as though someone was walking around them, behind them in the room, pacing like a cautious observer.

  Thomas turned his face anxiously up to the hooded face and from behind the fabric a soft voice crept forth—muted and wavering like a candle’s flame—but undeniably that of an Irish woman.

  “Tommy, is that you?”

  * * *

  They supped in the parlor, as the dining room was far too big for the three of them. Thomas had agreed to stay on the condition that Hawthorne remain behind the locked doors of the study. He couldn’t stomach seeing the slack face from which his great aunt had spoken. And he did believe. As he explained, helping himself to some cold chicken and blackberries without much relish, no one outside of his family knew they had Irish blood in them. Not even their priest.

  “It’s a grave power you have at your fingertips,” Allan said slowly. He’d lit a cigarette and had been musing. Leaned back in his chair away from the table with his ankle crossed over his knee, he almost looked like a dandy. Thomas had said as much and got a smoke ring to the face for it. Fixing his eyes on Heath, Allan arched an eyebrow. “You could make a lot of coin off of this.”

  Heath laughed. “And have to deal with that Spiritist lot? No thanks.”

  Thomas still looked gray from his encounter. He seemed tired and shook his head more at his plate than at anything else. “I wouldn’t sell that. I don’t think men would know whether to drink or ask for their money back after that sort of parlor trick.”

  Allan ashed his cigarette into his teacup, sneering. “It’s a service.”

  “I don’t suppose you’re going to ask for a refund?”

  Thomas fixed his gaze on Heath for a long moment, then he sighed. “If I could have the entire memory erased by asking, I might.” Standing, he gathered his coat and hat and tapped at the brim of it lightly, weighing his words. “I’ve got to get back to town; I’ve got a dinner appointment with Carmichael and a lot of gin.”

  He shared a ghost of a smile with all of them and, winking, went to the door where he paused anew. “It’s not that I regret it— But I’m glad I didn’t call anyone closer to me.”

  With a significant look at Heath and a casual bow of his head, he left and his footsteps echoed down the hall.

  Allan laughed and helped himself to Thomas’ tea. “He’s just mad we found out he’s a filthy Irish. This gift is wasted on wanting to speak to dead relatives, anyway.”

  Heath’s eyes were on the door. His mind was with his brother’s haunted temple of a body. “What do you mean?”

  Putting out his cigarette, Allan moved his chair closer and dropped his voice. “Spiritists focus on resolution. On easing the mind. It’s so stuffy and tired. Not one of them sees all it could be: that we could play and laugh anew with the dead.

  “How many men would pay to see their wives again, touch their mistresses again, bed Cleopatra for Christ’s sake?”

  Heath turned his attention to him. “Are you asking me to run a brothel out of my own estate where men can pay to bed my brother?”

  Allan was unfazed. “You said yourself he was headless. Just a body with an incredible gift. Besides, what better justice for his deviance than to be a tool for the living to commune with the dead? It’s far holier than what he was doing.

  “He wanted the dead for their rotting, carnal bodies. We want his body for spiritual renewal with our dearly departed.”

  Heath stared.

  Leaning his chin into his palm, Allan smiled, eyes heavy from the opium in his cigarette. “I’ll pay handsomely.”

  * * *

  The sun had long since set behind the advent of a storm and now lightning crackled beyond the window’s glass. For a moment Heath found himself holding his breath. There was nothing to fear here, of course. Here, together, they were safe.

  The bathroom was lit generously with candles and Heath had undressed and placed his brother in the clawfoot tub by the windows. He sat behind him on the edge of a chair, sleeves rolled to his elbows, hands lathered in soap and buried in Hawthorne’s hair.

  “Do you remember,” Heath asked, carding his fingers through his brother’s wet hair slowly, leaning close to the shell of his ear, “When we found that thing in the cellars as children?”

  “We’d gone down,” he recounted slowly, almost lazily as he began to rinse the soap from Hawthorne’s hair. “Much further than we should have. Past the second set of doors, and the third…

  “We had father’s key, so we didn’t care how many doors there were so long as they would open. We lost count and the passages kept narrowing and going down and down. Father had told us how old this place was, but not how deeply they’d dug the foundations. I don’t even know if he knew.

  “And then we found it behind the old stained press and it was hungry. You were scared; it wanted you the most and you knew it. It seemed blind yet it followed us, pulling itself along, writhing on its belly, not so much screaming as sighing.”

  He stopped, his fingers trailing limply in the water behind his brother’s back. Drawing a breath, he laughed and it seemed to shake the chill off of him as he began to scoop palms of water up over Hawthorne’s shoulders, watching it run down his back in rivulets. “Do you remember? They would have organized a search party if father hadn’t already known where we’d gone. It felt like hours, running for our lives, tripping, picking one another back up. We dropped the lantern at one point and just kept going.

  “I don’t know how we made it back but father was waiting at the top of the cellar stairs with a shovel. Like he’d been waiting for this to happen.

  “You didn’t watch, but he savaged it. I saw the whole thing—Most of it.

  “He beheaded it and hit it over and over and over with that shovel until you could no longer tell what parts had been arms and what bits had been even remotely human. Whatever it was, he scooped it up the remaining slop and took it away.

  “Did you ever ask him what he did with it? I did. Once. And do you know what he said to me? That he’d burnt it and scattered the ashes far, far away.”

  Leaning ever closer, lips brushing the back of Hawthorne’s ear, he smiled. “But we both know he didn’t. I think he dumped its mangled leavings in that old press. Did you look while you were down there day and night? I hope you did. I hope it watched you. I knew it was down there somewhere…The air at the top of the cellar steps was never empty after we found it.

  “You should have chosen me!” He snarled, pulling back on Hawthorne’s hair as if reining in a horse. Hawthorne’s mindless eyes gazed heavenward at the ceiling.

  Panting Heath looked down at him, shaking his head, recalling the absolute fear that had lined Hawthorne’s face when there should have been understanding and desire. How drunk they’d been after their father’s funeral, holding hands as they went down to the cellar to face what they hadn’t been able to as children, laughing…How soft and willing Hawthorne had looked when Heath turned to him by the lantern light in that final room. He’d even let Heath press him back against the wall, his pale eyes had locked onto Heath’s lips, smiling.

  But when Heath had suggested they could have whatever they wanted—that father was gone, and they could run the family estate together…When he’d brushed Hawthorne’s cheek with his thumb and kissed him in that room full of rot and shadow
s, Hawthorne closed himself off to Heath. Frightened, shaking his head, he’d gently pushed Heath away and that was when the estate passed from Hawthorne to Heath and their future together ended forever.

  Hawthorne’s beauty hurt. To touch, but not to ever actually have him, Heath’s one truest friend and confidant—was agony.

  The bathroom was silent and still save for the flicker of the candles under the mirror. In its reflection, Hawthorne didn’t even bat an eye. He stared resolutely past some point on the wall.

  Still gazing at their reflection, Heath laid his chin on Hawthorne’s shoulder, leaning his head against his throat. He slid fingertips down the front of Hawthorne’s chest, watching as not even his muscles reacted to the featherlight contact. For once in his life, he had the money, the name, and the wits in hand while Hawthorne didn’t. Sighing, he allowed a smile to flicker across his face and slipped his fingers between Hawthorne’s waiting legs, enjoying his warmth, his placidity.

  “We’re going to play a little game tomorrow with a friend,” he said, stroking his brother’s cock, amused that his deviant brother would never be aroused again—by anything, “Something new, and if you disappoint me in any way, I’ll give you over to it. I’ll let it finish what it started after father died. I’ll let it undo the rest of you: body and soul, like it’s been wanting to all these years.”

  His eyes narrowed as he studied where their similarities met and their differences separated them. Physically, aside from their style and manner, they were nearly twins. Other than that, well…The difference was all in their heads.

  * * *

  The morning brought bad news from the thickets. Some of Heath’s men had come across something viscous and dark near the roots of a bush, smeared in the dirt. Taking their knives, they’d cut one sliver and then another out of the plant only to find the same dark mess inside. They came into the house immediately to report it to Heath as he took his coffee in the library and presented him with the evidence.

  Heath left to look at the material himself.

  Like sap, it was thick but not sticky, though it stained and stank a good deal. None of the men had ever seen anything like it and, wrapping a section of a branch in packaging paper and tying it with twine, Heath sent a man off to London with it and a letter for a friend of the family’s who had served as their father’s botanist. Certainly, if it were some sort of virus or fungus, he would know.

  By the time Heath had set a solution for the misfortune in motion and washed the slime and its horrid dark stain from his hands, he came downstairs to find Allan waiting for him in the parlor.

  They passed the afternoon hunting and riding. After supper, Heath sent the house staff to bed, and lighting a candle, led Allan to Hawthorne’s room. He’d laid him out in a clean nightshirt and brushed his hair out against the pillow. In the still, silent way his body waited, Heath had the impression of a giant, awful doll that knew what was coming.

  Heath swallowed back a lump that had risen in his throat and handed Allan the black hood he’d used to call up Thomas’ great-aunt.

  “I’ve given him opium to make him more docile, just in case.”

  “Perfect,” Allan said. His eyes were carving a line down Hawthorne’s body.

  “You know how to use it?” Heath touched the hood.

  Allan frowned down at it as if it, alone, was the distasteful part of the whole process. “Can’t I just use my hands?”

  There was bile in Heath’s throat now. Images of Allan’s fingers squeezing what life remained in Hawthorne out of his body flooded into his mind unchecked. Allan’s face was cruel in these images: Hawthorne’s eyes frightened, the bed rocking, Hawthorne’s body lifting and crashing effortlessly against the mattress again and again.

  “You could, but it will help not to see his face. The spirit speaking through his face will be…strange. Who are you calling forth, anyway?”

  “A whore I fucked last summer,” Allan said, stretching out a finger to stroke Hawthorne’s exposed wrist slowly, his mind elsewhere, lost in summer. “Died of consumption.”

  So I truly am running a brothel, then, Heath thought. “That’s too bad.”

  He wanted away from the candlelight that highlighted the pearlescence of Hawthorne’s skin. Wanted a door between himself and Allan’s lust.

  “Remember to state the woman’s name clearly,” he advised, stopping at the door and turning. “Oh, and Allan: please don’t need anything more from me before morning.”

  Allan laughed loudly, but even as Heath closed the door behind him, he couldn’t escape the sight of Allan climbing on top of his brother, pulling the hood over his head.

  Swallowing bile, Heath’s hands shook as he pulled the door shut. His fingers trembled too badly to fit the skeleton key in the lock and turn it so he retreated to the study where he poured himself a large glass of brandy.

  It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d seen Hawthorne with a man. He could still recall the summer afternoon he’d stumbled across his brother with a man from their hunting party. The party got separated, and when Heath’s half of the party determined their horses had had enough for the day, Heath went to look for them on his own.

  He found them in a glen just beyond the thickets, well hidden by trees and brush. In this sun dappled clearing, spread like an eager whore, Hawthorne laughed as the man called him his little fox and squeezed his hips with hands larger and rougher than Heath’s. Instead of making his presence known, Heath stayed hidden, watching as the man fucked Hawthorne roughly, the two of them hissing and growling like animals. Hawthorne pushed the man out of him before he came, saying he didn’t want any of his seed on his riding clothes and the man came on a patch of wildflowers beside them, grumbling. Then Hawthorne came on the man’s thigh and they fell into a tangle of limbs as they wrestled and kissed.

  Half hard, Heath had crept away. Hawthorne’s raucous laughter rose behind him until he was halfway home, shaming him.

  Tonight was similar, and though Heath contented himself with the fact that Allan could only help himself to the mere shell of Hawthorne it was a fragile comfort.

  Heath drank from his glass deeply, eyes locked on the lithe, dancing body of a candle’s flame at the opposite side of the study. He imagined Hawthorne: naked, standing at the end of his bed, hands moving over his body, presenting himself to Heath. In his mind, Hawthorne hummed a half-remembered fugue, body twisting and arching dreamlike.

  “Come here,” Heath whispered to the empty room. The candle stayed put but his imaginary Hawthorne smiled and crawled up over him, straddling his hips, letting Heath touch and explore him, going so far as to suck the finger Heath slid between his lips.

  Heath grunted as he imagined the softness of Hawthorne’s skin and the gentle weight of his eyes on him, his body open to him without fear or hesitation. Closing his eyes, Heath took his cock in hand and quickly worked himself to a feverish pace. His mind took him to the glen, then to Allan straddling Hawthorne only minutes ago. He imagined himself pushing Hawthorne down the cellar stairs again and again, imagined taking him in that deepest cellar by lantern light even as Hawthorne tried to push him off. It was his right. Their right. Their father wasn’t there to tell them it was wrong; their friends weren’t there to call them abominable. Who else had been there for them? Who else could love wild, twisted boys raised from thickets like them, besides one another?

  His imaginary Hawthorne smiled, fingers touching his cheek and Heath turned his face to kiss those invisible fingers, coming into his own hand in the study alone.

  Catching his breath, he watched the candle dance and seemingly wink. He thought he heard Hawthorne’s breathy laugh in his ear, but he was tired and the brandy was pulling him down, down, and so he slept.

  * * *

  His dreams were stormy and turbulent. At one moment, he’d been Allan instead of himself, bedding Hawthorne, but Hawthorne was weeping beneath the black hood and so he stopped rocking his hips and leaned down over him, lifting the fabric…


  Then he was in the middle of the blackberry orchards and the brambles had gone all but wild, making it difficult to traverse. Hawthorne was running somewhere ahead of him, only in his nightshirt, blood or berry-stained from the waist down. Whatever had infected his thickets had made the ground thick and sinking, and it crept up Heath’s riding boots as he ran. As a storm brewed overhead, skies darkening, he stopped, realizing he’d lost Hawthorne entirely. He called for him, but received no reply—only the growing sensation that he was being watched from all sides.

  Turning, he took a blackberry between his fingers and slit it open with the tip of his hunting knife.

  A rolling black eye stared back at him. The black-red muck of the fields was up to his calves.

  Gasping, he found himself back over Hawthorne in the bed and Hawthorne was screaming, fingers gripping at his chest, tears coursing down his cheeks. Hawthorne’s eyes rolled back and a black eye stared up at Heath from the darkness at the back of Hawthorne’s throat. “It’s blood! It’s all built on blood!”

  Heath woke up, gasping. He’d thrown his half empty glass of brandy to the floor at some point and the deep red liquid had left a gash on the Persian rug.

  It must have been about two in the morning, and the threads of his dreams still clung to him. Shaking himself, he forced himself to listen to the black silence wrapped around the manor. He thought he’d heard a scream and couldn’t be sure it hadn’t been his own.

  Somewhere on the other side of the study, he got the distinct feeling that something was pacing, watching, invisible. There was an almost palpable sadness; an urgency—

  The candle at the far side of the study flickered then went out.

  “Hawthorne?”

  The silence of the night was torn in two by a scream and then another—high and wet, like a pig’s squeal.

  Heath was on his feet in an instant and followed after the sound as it carried him back to Hawthorne’s room. The door was closed and something red and sharp rose up inside him. If Allan had done anything to his brother—

  As his hand closed around the doorknob, he was almost pulled into the room as Allan came crashing out, one hand gripping the front of his throat. He grabbed at Heath’s shoulder, eyes wild. He was still wearing his black riding breeches, but the rest of him that was bare was slathered in blood.