Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 4

by Cheryl Mullenax

  I lost weight. I took long baths and showers, liking the feeling of scrubbed skin and the closed door between Dad and me. In the afternoons I sat outside on the wheelchair ramp and pretended to read catalogues. From there I could see people walking past on the sidewalk, but they couldn’t see me. I saw the public school kids walking home from the bus stop, and housewives on their way back from the baker and the butcher. Once I thought I saw the Irish girl walking past with a loaf of French bread and a sack of tangerines, but I couldn’t be sure it was her. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever seen her face.

  I slept long nights on the pilled mattress of the Murphy bed. Dad’s leg glowered from its pedestal, a wooden occasional table with one wobbly leg that Dad had made Rory and me drag in off the curb. He said the table would hold fine as long as we propped the broken leg with a stack of flattened cigarette cartons, and it did.

  My dreams were bad, and got worse as the summer wore on. The worst dream of all came on the night it happened, the night after the fourth of July. I remember because it was right before the heat wave broke. You remember - the bad one that tripped the grid and blacked out the entire east side.

  Has is been over a month already? Christ. You lose track.

  That night was the hottest night I’d seen since the chapel in the jungle. The apartment was stale and suffocating, and the reek of garlic and cigarettes and formaldehyde was everywhere. I felt miserable and feverish even after I’d stripped to my underwear and cranked the knob on the window fan as far as it would go. My stomach gnawed as I lay sleepless, watching red digits on the clock radio in the kitchenette stack minutes into hours. It was a little past three when I heard a crack like a gunshot—a transformer shorting out. The fan blades stopped whirring and all the streetlamps went dark. I’d never thought about how much light comes in through a person’s windows, even with the curtains closed, but suddenly the whole apartment was black as pitch. The clock radio clicked into battery mode and its red glow gave shape to the card table, the icebox, the world’s biggest pickled pig’s foot. I heard the door to Dad’s room creak open, telling me the transformer had woken him too, and he would need a couple cigarettes and a spoonful of Carnation and maybe half an hour on the toilet listening to his own satisfied grunts to soothe him back to sleep.

  A sound came from the hall like something catching or dragging on the carpet. I tried to climb out of bed to help, thinking he’d wedged his wheels against the baseboards again. But as always happens in nightmares, I found myself fixed flat on my back, paralyzed and numb. The dragging sound grew louder and closer. I panicked. Fear swarmed through me and I screamed at my frozen muscles, GET UP, JESUS, GET UP! But my arms and legs were too heavy or too weak or too tired. My eyes raced to the only scrap of light, the red glow of the clock, and something was wrong. The light was all wrong. It wasn’t doing something it usually did, wasn’t casting the right shadow on the linoleum. It wasn’t casting the shadow of…of the leg.

  The leg was gone.

  The steel caps were still locked tightly in place, but nothing floated in the yellow preservative except a layer of fallen-off bits that formed chunky sediment at the bottom of the tube. The dragging came again, this time right next to the Murphy bed. I squeezed my eyes shut, pressing hot tears between my eyelashes, and for the first time in a long time my lips moved silently in frantic prayer. Slowly, I rolled my eyes to the side of my head and I saw it, the ghastly rotten leg. It was coming for me, sliding through the dark, using the rubbery remains of its toes to drag itself across the rough theater lobby carpet. Strings of flesh and the knob of jellied femur left a trail of preservative to show where it had been.

  And I could smell it. Not the formaldehyde smell but the smell from beneath the palmettos, the smell of maggots feasting on raw cheeseburgers, of flesh rotting in the tropical sun. I felt a tug at the sheets and the exposed knuckle of the leg’s big toe appeared above the mattress. I felt myself losing it, delirious with fear. Then came the second toe, struggling over the hump, gripping the sheet like a monkey to pull itself up onto the mattress. The other toes followed as the leg slithered into bed with me. I gagged on the stench and the fear and the feel of spongy flesh against my belly. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. I was going to drown in fear. I shut my eyes and felt my heart thump out one more massive helping of blood, before everything went bright white.

  And then I was awake. I leapt out of bed and wheeled around, sweeping my eyes to the tube in the corner. It bobbed there innocently in the red glow, as if to say, “See? I’ve been right here the whole time.” The blood rushed from my head and I dropped to my hands and knees, weak. My ribs stood out from my chest as I breathed in and out. My heart skipped and started. I think I might have grayed out for awhile.

  I was so tired. So tired and so hungry and so weak. I looked up at the leg, hating it. I wanted everything back the way it was. I wanted to walk into our old kitchen and find Dad standing on two feet in front of the stove, flipping a batch of his Famous Hotcakes and practicing aloud his sermon for the day. I wanted Rory to come back and make me believe I wasn’t alone anymore. I wanted to sink my teeth into a hamburger or a banana or a slice of roast beef without feeling my tongue begin to explore its imaginary craters and boils. I just wanted to be rid of it. All of it.

  The tube was easier to break than you’d think. It really only took one good whack with the hotplate to shatter the entire thing.

  Dad heard the noise, of course, but he must’ve considered his own obvious limitations, because he didn’t even try to pull me off. He screamed curses at me from his wheelchair, and when that didn’t work he dialed the number Farther Claussen had written next to the phone. Then you guys came, and brought me here. At first you strapped me to the bed, but I got that privilege back for good behavior. I’m not sure how long it took you guys to arrive after Dad called. I don’t really remember that part at all. I expect it probably took longer than usual, on account of the blackout. All I remember is a terrible, throbbing urgency to have Dad back—the real Dad. The Dad who’d made us pancakes and hated the smell of ashtrays, and who stood sweating before a tribe of villagers, intent only on the word of God. The Dad who’d said in a voice I can now recall only as an echo: “Take, and Eat. This is my Body, given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

  <<====>>

  Author’s Story Note

  So I was trying to join this writers' group. They were a very literary bunch, and I desperately wanted their approval. I've been writing horror fiction since I was a little girl but now I wanted to write grown-up literary fiction so people would take me seriously…or something…I really don't know what I was imagining. Those men's sweaters with the suede patches over the elbows were probably involved. Anyway I'd emailed back & forth with the group before my "tryout" visit, so I knew they were doing a Scary Story prompt for Halloween. "What fun!" I thought to myself. I wrote this story in a single night so as to impress them with my very adult literary fiction. "In this story I'll explore…religion!…and…fear of "The Other"! And the malleable nature of budding sexuality!" But somewhere in the process I lost control and this story happened instead. I was not invited to join the group. But I'm in a Best Of the Year anthology, so where ur patchy elbows & universal themes now mothafuckas??

  THE BEARDED WOMAN

  Alessandro Manzetti

  From Splatterpunk Forever

  Editors: Jack Bantry & Kit Power

  Splatterpunk Zine, November 2018

  Midday. Syrena, the Bearded Woman of the Supreme, heats up a grenadine of orange crystals in the large silt-static ignition pan, a cult item for circus trailers; her red bean soup, kept in her fridge inside flexible water cans with a variable-value tag: Expire le 3 Fevrier, 37 p.U. Three years ago.

  “Armand? Armand!” The lady is restless.

  “I’m here, sweetmeat,” the dwarf answers in a syrupy voice, hopping and popping his miniature jaws.

  “Stop doing that hideous noise, you know I can’t stand it!” the wom
an groans; she is the size of a career gladiator. “Have you bought sweet potatoes?” she immediately adds, scratching her right breast.

  “But…honey, you know this morning I had rehearsals for the donkey show, how could I…”

  “Fuck, fuck and fuck! I should have married Mister Skeleton, not a flea like you…He still fondles my ass, you know? That’s a real man…”

  “Sure, sure…twenty years ago, maybe,” the proud dwarf defends himself. “Since they installed the Faberge electric pick in his prostate, he can hardly walk, all spread-legged…and he pisses more than a horse. It’s those discharges, you know, that contraption doesn’t work well…That’s what you get when you do surgery in a garage…”

  “You’re only jealous—always have been. That’s a real man, let me tell you. And next time he fondles, I’m spreading my thighs for him…Knowing that, maybe you’ll get hard again too, Mister Flea.”

  “But, sweetmeat, what are you saying?” the tiny man whines. “All this fuss over three kilos of sweet potatoes, eh?”

  “I’m serious. No potatoes? Spread thighs. Understood? Let me think about his prostate…I’m going to work that stud with gusto. Just let me finish cooking this shit and feed the kids…that noble ancestry of donkey tamers you had me dump on the Earth. You’ll have to live with it, and don’t you come watch…”

  Armand’s cheeks turn red, unlike the violet tomatoes in the bowl close to the woman, dark and weirdly chromed like every vegetable on their table, coming from the illegal magnetic-induction greenhouses in district 4. Though their circus wages aren’t half bad, they certainly cannot afford New Scotland products. Clean products. The little man squeezes his diminutive fists, pops his jaws again and assaults the calves of his granitic wife. A bite, then two more. Not even a piranha would be that quick and lethal.

  “Son of a bitch!” she screams, bucking, while her precious red beard dips a few centimeters into the by-now boiling soup. “Jesus, look what you’ve done. If this gets burned, I’m losing my job…shitty flea. Let me catch you!”

  A Satanic sneer on her face—like a billy-goat from whom they have just snatched a testicle—she grabs a knife and chases her husband, making the trailer rock. Two dogs, out there, guarding the empty air set beneath the yellowish sky, begin barking, almost resurrecting.

  “Stop, or this time I’ll charge double!”

  The tiny man zigzags around the table, like a rabbit with its ass on fire; he must find his wife tamer before she grasps his neck, or he will be in trouble. He hid it under the cube of the kids’ entertainment system. The she-bison is strong, but slow; he kneels on the carpet, reaches out and finds the Holy Grail of the sons of a lesser and drunken god, the instrument turning any South Paris 5 dwarf into a superman. He stops shaking and stands, brandishing—with glittering eyes—his electric cat-o’-nine-tails.

  “Come here, sweetmeat…” he hisses, like a cobra ready to strike.

  Red button? No, come on: killing her would be too much, the usual lesson will be enough…blue button it is. The cat-o’-nine-tails sucks energy in a single breath, excitedly vibrating; LEDs light up on the tips of the claw-shaped whips, then its induction lead spheres animate themselves. Flagellation, without going too far, and then a nice screw to make peace; Armand’s usual schedule, whenever he forgets buying something for his neurasthenic corsair bride. Jesus Christ, sweet potatoes!

  The Bearded Woman pulls up short, staring at that hellish device as it flares up in the hand of the man of the house. “Bastard…” she whispers, already exhausted, blood squirting backward in her veins, filling up too soon her disproportionate head; just at the sight of the flail, she feels her back and buttocks burn like hell.

  “You know how this is going to go down, right, sweetmeat?”

  The little man swings his portable Armageddon upward, popping his jaws to infuriate his wife even more, as she stays unmoving like a presidential guard, the tips of her pink slippers on the imaginary red line of pain, on the threshold. She is going to pass it, it is going to hurt. Outside, the ghost dogs keep barking; the smaller, contaminated by strange purple stains on his back—you really shouldn’t suck on bones buried in Uxor-sick dirt—leaps forward and approaches the flexible water window of trailer 7. He wants to enjoy the scene, his paws laying on the laminal gap where sludge flows, and his tail up straight.

  The dwarf stops lingering; he articulates his shoulder and bends in baseball-pitcher pose, ready to unleash the flail on the woman’s massive body, as she foams rage-bubbles from the corners of her mouth. But something does not work: an invisible motherfucker—the same wraith which scared the dogs outside?—snatches the cat-o’-nine-tails off his hand, sucking it upward. Armand raises his eyes on the low ceiling of his mobile home, and sees the clawed rosary—his only weapon—coiled up among the blades of the fan. It’s been goddamn hot, these last days, and the fixing up of the environmental temperature generator has ended up somewhere with Syrena’s sweet potatoes. The blame falls on the donkeys, with their phosphorescent reins and their semi-organic saddles with silvery fringes, affixed to their back via hinges grafted to their spines—may Michelet be blessed for his invention of the neural screw, better than prehistoric Jenner and his smallpox vaccine—and antimony sulfate around their big, stupid bluish eyes. Beasts demanding daily care and training.

  Unarmed, the dwarf grins to the Bearded Woman, showing her the small piano wedged in his mouth, made of yellow and black teeth, while its hammers beat on his palate making him stammer, his quick little eyes pointed on her knife—he tries to say something useful: “Can we skip directly to making peace, this time?”

  Clenching her teeth, his wife advances walking wide-legged, slowly rocking, as though she wore jeans with a too-narrow crotch—maybe she is possessed by John Wayne’s holo-ghost. She grabs the donkey tamer by his hair, lifts him up and takes him close to her big rage-flaming face, perfectly matching her polished violet lipstick and reddish beard.

  “It’s you who doesn’t know how this is going to go down, big man…” she says to him in a hoarse voice, then turning back to check the sizzling pan. The soup is burning, goodbye. “You’re worse than plague…see what you’ve done? Not only I’ll spread my thighs for Mister Skeleton, but your nice white belly too…”

  While Armand tries to struggle out of the she-bison’s grasp, jerking like a jack-in-the-box with his feet in the air, she sinks her knife in his still-empty stomach, spits in his face and drops him, deflated, on the floor.

  The man twists on the ground, his short-fingered hand trying to plug the gash; he is dying accompanied by a strange soundtrack: the overheating fan engine, bogged down in the wife-tamer’s tails. It rustles and buzzes like a hornet about to explode in a little glass trap—the last sounds he will hear, besides the blops of the bitch’s knife that keeps raging upon him, everywhere, with its ham blade. The dwarf was hoping, whenever the moment came for him to cross the blue gate, to be accompanied by the bray of his donkey friends: Ingres, Monet, and Cezanne; those beasts have always respected him, more than any bipedal of his life, kids included; tailed angels with brains cooked by radiation and contaminated horse feed. How good they were, as they marched during the show.

  Blop, again, and then sguash, his throat. The blue gate appears, just like Armand had pictured it, but he cannot even reach up to the doorknob to get on the other side.

  Will they have a circus in Limbo? And donkeys, maybe?

  Everything burnt: no lunch, and the kids are about to be back, I’ll have to make do…Syrena thinks, rubbing her beard, soiled with the unlucky guy’s guts. She cleans her hands on the kitchen apron, adorned with drawn plums, and she watches her husband’s disarranged body, there on the floor, his eyes still hooked to that cursed fan. And now I also have to clean all this mess…who knew a fucking dwarf could have so much blood…that’s liters! I could as well have slaughtered a hippo!

  Seconds pass, the woman looks out of the trailer window and sees the two dogs, trained to survival, quickly scuttle to
ward the Baden landfill, until they vanish behind the first towers which lean on their foundations of rags, junk, and old spare parts. Down there, a little on the left, she seems to see a grey-silver rainbow arching between the molecular burners—the great nibblers of the past. It looks like a scythe blade, actually, or a giant meat cleaver ready to drop down on what used to be, what still moves, breathes, in that graveyard, under its flying horizon shaken by the flapping wings of the cloacal gulls.

  Cowards! So be it, she mutters in her thoughts, we need a special menu…piglet roast. Of dwarf. After all, we have to celebrate. I’m going to have a real man around, now, and a lot of bags of sweet potatoes. But now let’s think about the kids.

  “Mmm…smells good!”

  “What’s that?”

  “Mom, mom, Monet slapped me!”

  “Be quiet, and don’t touch anything; wash your hands, change your shirt and then sit down at the table. You little piglets!” Syrena groans, brandishing a wooden spoon toward the empty heads of the three kids. Ingres, Cezanne, and Monet—the abusive one. That’s right, Armand named them like his dancing donkeys. “Come on, hurry up. Special menu today…”

  The woman has set everything properly, even though it is not Sunday. The good dish set, enameled cutlery—Mister Skeleton’s wedding gift—and Armand as centerpiece: arms and legs cut off and an apple between his teeth, nicely roasted. You can no longer recognize him, after the treatment; his wife has worked hard with the Metzelder carver, then she has seasoned the poor devil with pink rosemary, mustard icing and an abundant dose of her signature spicy sauce, purple like a priest’s mourning. It only lacks a pretty circle of chopped sweet potatoes, all around, then the picture would be perfect. Dwarf stew a la Corse. The tiny man still seems to be looking upward, toward the fan blades, with his little blue eyes goggling and sucked out by the suction cups of the oven’s 750 degrees. He lays on the silver platter, the one with Syrena’s mother’s initials on the edge: L.B., one of the early stars of the Supreme: Lady Blackbeard. Too bad she croaked untimely, trying to strangulate her husband with his own guts after ripping open his belly with her teeth—she had caught him in bed with an Egyptian contortionist, a pearl necklace around his stout neck and a radioactive kiwi up his ass. Heart attack, right in the thick of it. A real badass bearded woman.