Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 4

by Cheryl Mullenax

  Mampy knows best. Mampy knows right.

  Keep the Ugly at bay, it’ll serve them right.

  The lurgy.

  The Ugly?

  Was this the Ugly? An advert?

  A cartoon caricature? A misheard lyric?

  Had the atrocities they’d faced made them so raw that it had warped and twisted their impressionable minds? Alone, with no one to guide them, these protective dark fantasies had grown.

  Mutated.

  Festered.

  The poor dears.

  Without warning, Hayley felt a blow against her side as Lenka struck her in the stomach. A bang as her head hit the wall, pushed to the floor by the brother and sister. A searing pain arched across her stomach as the blade tore through her torso. Ebon stood above her with the dripping weapon held aloft.

  Hayley tried to stand, but a slash across her thigh brought her crashing back down. She yelped with pain as she clutched her gushing injuries, her slippery fingers failing to stem the crimson flow.

  A cold gust swept through the room, and something shifted within her peripheral vision. Something dark. Something big.

  It couldn’t be…

  ‘Please…’ Hayley begged, trying to force words out through her agony. ‘You don’t need to do this.’

  A slice across her face caught her lips, turning her speech into a blood-curdling shriek. A shriek that echoed around the deserted building.

  ‘Make her suffer,’ Lenka laughed as her hungry eyes regarded the defenceless woman. ‘Make her scream, so we don’t have to.’

  ‘No!’ screamed Billy running towards Ebon and taking the knife from his hand.

  Tears of relief streamed down Hayley’s cheeks as she dared a half smile.

  ‘I want to do it!’ he demanded, turning towards his mother.

  Her eyes widened as she watched her son slowly step towards her. Lenka and Ebon whooped with delight.

  ‘That’s right, Billy. It’s the only way to be safe. He’ll get you too. We have to hide. Make her scream!’ Ebon hollered ecstatically. ‘Keep the Ugly at bay.’ His word’s echoed the advert.

  Hayley tried to stand, but a mixture of pain and shock held her pinned. The sinister smile of her son loomed near as the knife tip waved, centimetres from her face. For a moment his eyes were glazed; the shadows from the room dancing in his pupils.

  The advert had him too.

  Mampy knows best. Mampy knows right.

  Keep the Ugly at bay, it’ll serve them right.

  The melody floated through the air carried by the lips of the eight-year-old audience.

  ‘Ebon and Lenka love me. They want to keep me safe from the Ugly,’ Billy spat his words with venom. ‘You just want to shout at me. To hit me!’

  His face grew red with anger as he dragged the point across her check.

  Even if she was able, how could she fight against her own child?

  ‘Winter’s coming. Don’t get caught,’ he recounted the commercial as he scored into her skin.

  Billy, Hayley tried to say, but terror made her mute. She wanted to tell him that it was just an advert. A grisly, stupid advert. She wanted to tell him that she loved him, that she had felt so bad about striking him this morning, but all she could do was scream as she felt the blade slide deep into her eye socket.

  ‘Gouge it out! Gouge it out!’ the murderous duo egged him on. ‘Mampy knows best. Mampy knows right. Keep the Ugly at bay, it’ll serve them right.’

  Pain seared through her body as he pulled at her eyeball, cutting away at the surrounding skin. Wrenching at the optic cord, he sliced through the meaty membrane and licked his lips.

  ‘Chew on it. It’ll slide down your throat with a wondrous taste.’ Lenka called, her reciting of the commercial made effervescent with sickly anticipation.

  ‘Mmmmm,’ Billy exclaimed as he burst the juicy orb between his teeth. ‘It tastes just like sugar knobs.’

  <<====>>

  Author’s Story Note

  The genesis of “The Ugly” came from a vivid nightmare I had about two children torturing and eating a cat to protect themselves from 'the ugly'. I woke up confused, especially about them exclaiming that, 'It tastes like sugar knobs, Mampy told us.' However it was so horrific I couldn't waste the vision, and jotted it down in my notebook. When I eventually came to write the story I knew I needed to capture that confusion in the story, as it seemed so much part of my own experience with it. The children had to remain a mystery, so I chose their names to sound very different, and purposefully kept their origin vague, like some grubby, long forgotten fairy tale.

  I HAVE A CONFESSION

  Douglas Ford

  From Infernal Ink Magazine

  Editor: Hydra M. Star

  Infernal Ink Books

  When he slid into bed with her, she welcomed his body and didn’t even think of him as not alive.

  At least not that first night, when the dog growled at his presence and scurried away from its place on the floor near the bed. This dog no longer called Lily, just called “stupid dog” now, continually refused all of Esther’s invitations to share the bed with her, and now it left the room with its tail between its legs, too stupid to recognize the owner it missed so much.

  “Are you going to suck my blood? Eat me perhaps?” Esther said to her dead husband, barely awake.

  “I’m not one of those,” he said. With one hand he cupped a breast while he worked the other between her legs, and everything else felt like a dream. Ever since the shooting that claimed Rob’s life, she needed lots of medication to sleep and make it through the day, but she still felt herself slipping away little by little. The first night he joined her in bed, she accepted it the same way she accepted the dreams that raged at her in her drugged sleep.

  At least what happened that night felt good, something she learned not to expect from sleep anymore. When he fucked her, his hands on her hips felt real. Her orgasm felt real, too, and when he came, his jism burned her still tingling nerves like acid.

  In the morning, she discovered dried cum on her thigh and on the sheet. It had a brownish yellow color, so at first she thought her period had started. It hadn’t though.

  Each night, Esther’s dead husband visited her this way in bed, always slipping in beside her as she slept, and she welcomed the opportunity to forget how he died at the hands of two gunmen, inflamed by politics she scarcely understood or cared about. They killed him and six other people in the coffee shop where Rob liked to stop for breakfast every morning before work. Esther wondered if Rob understood what had transpired at that moment, when the bullets hit him. Did he even see the people who shot him with assault rifles. Did he lie on the ground and watch as they walked around killing survivors. Did he see one of the gunmen shoot himself as the other one fled.

  During Rob’s second visit, she realized he was no dream. Still, she didn’t feel afraid. She could never fear Rob. Not so for the stupid dog, whining as it ran off again. It would never bond with her, not even after Rob died. It just waited and waited for him to come home, too stupid to realize when it had finally happened.

  He hushed her when she tried to speak, to tell him that she tried to bond with his dog. He kissed her nipples and worked his way down her stomach with his lips and his tongue. As he spread her legs he kissed the hollows of her thighs, brushing her clitoris with his nose before dabbing at it with his tongue. He always said he loved how she smelled. He used his lips to spread her labia before probing with the tip of his tongue.

  The orgasm that night felt stronger than the last. With the last shudder, she reached down and pulled him closer to her face. She cried. “I missed you so much,” she said.

  “I missed you too.”

  “Can you stay?”

  “No.”

  She willed herself to stay awake so he couldn’t leave, but she couldn’t fight the medications as they pulled her down into sleep again.

  Eventually, as Rob left her night after night, she stopped taking her pills. During the
day, reality flooded her senses and she fought a losing battle against grief.

  At night, she waited in the bedroom for him to appear.

  She pretended to sleep as he opened the bedroom door, took off his clothes, and climbed into bed with her. The stupid dog whined again and ran past him out the door, but he paid it no attention. This time, they fucked, but she could not cum. They tried again a while later, this time with her on top, but she still could not reach an orgasm. She collapsed next to him, frustrated and angry.

  “I want you to stay this time,” she said.

  “I can’t.”

  “I’m staying awake. I won’t let you leave.”

  He sighed and held her. She trembled against him, feeling his semen drip out of her. Like the other times, it burned, but she welcomed it. Let it burn me up inside, she thought.

  “I have a confession,” he said.

  She waited for him to continue. Her head lay against his chest, and though it felt warm, she couldn’t hear a heart beat.

  Finally, he went on.

  “I’m not Rob.”

  She didn’t know what to say, so she remained silent, listening for his heart to start. Beat, she thought, just beat once for me. Your cock works, why won’t your heart?

  “I’m sort of borrowing Rob,” he said. “His clay.”

  “Who are you?” she said. She wouldn’t allow herself to say, What are you?

  “Someone who’s always loved you.”

  She thought of the different places she lived with Rob, the one-bedroom apartment they moved into when they became a couple during college. Pictures would fall off the wall, sometimes, plates and cups would break without any apparent cause. They joked about the building being haunted, but when they moved into a house, other things happened. The TV would turn on without anyone in the room, and they would hear scratching sounds in the middle of the night. The stupid dog, called Lily then, would whine at blank walls and closed doors. None of these occurrences ever seemed threatening, and since they could attribute them to natural causes, they never gave them much thought.

  Esther asked “Rob” if he were a ghost, and he said no. “I was never alive,” he explained.

  She thought about this, knowing she should feel fear, but she found herself holding his body tighter.

  “Can you pretend to be Rob?” she said.

  “Yes.” He’d watched Rob for so long, he said, that he could imitate Rob perfectly.

  “Stay then,” she said.

  “I can’t.”

  When he tried to leave, she held on to him, and he had to peel her arms away. She kept reaching for him as he got out of bed and began putting on his clothes. She cried at first, but then she screamed at him. Hurling obscenities, she flung a glass at him. It hit his head as he pulled his pants on. He winced when it struck, but he continued to dress himself, and he eventually left.

  She worried that he wouldn’t show up again after that, and waiting for the dark felt like torture, but he did appear the next night. He climbed into bed without saying anything to her, not even an apology, and when she wouldn’t return his kisses, he spread her thighs and moved so he could trace her labia with his tongue. Her body would decide on its own, she thought, whether it wanted this thing wearing Rob’s skin. She wondered if she could empty herself, would something inhabit her skin too, just so she could fuck this strange and familiar thing. Moving again, he repositioned himself so the head of his cock met the lips of her vagina. When they fucked this time, she searched his eyes and just when she could say for sure that yes, this was a stranger, she had an orgasm that wracked her body, and he pressed his penis in as deep as it could go and whispered to her as she felt the last shudders leave her. “You feel so good,” he kept saying, this thing speaking with Rob’s mouth.

  “I’m sorry for last night,” she said.

  Instead of answering, he held her close.

  She said, “I can’t stop thinking about the people who killed Rob.”

  “Who killed me,” he said.

  “No, don’t. I don’t really want you to pretend to be him.”

  Now he seemed to not know what to say. She watched him sit up, like he intended to get out of bed. But he just sat like that, as if trying to decide how he should talk to her. She said, “Is there a hell they can burn in?”

  First he told her no, then he told her yes, then he confessed he didn’t really know. She thought about the dead one, the one who blasted his skull onto the ceiling of the shop. She hoped he would spend eternity burning.

  “But they never found the other one,” she said.

  Now his inability to answer frustrated her.

  “I changed my mind,” she said, “I want you to pretend to be Rob. He would say something now. He would comfort me. He would tell me everything’s going to be ok. He’d tell me that we lived in a just and righteous universe, where bad people have to answer for what they’ve done.”

  “People get what they deserve,” he said. He sounded so much like Rob when he said that. Just the sort of thing he would say, too. It made her hurt swell because if Rob said that, he’d believe it. He wouldn’t say anything he didn’t believe.

  “Don’t lie to me,” she said. “I’m mad at them for taking Rob away. I can’t love you the same way I love Rob.”

  “Will you love me,” he said, “if I bring you his head? The one who ran?” Hearing these words in Rob’s voice stunned her. His voice, so soft and gentle, promising to rip off someone’s head and present it to her.

  “You know where to find him. You can’t tell me if there’s a hell, but you can find him.”

  He nodded.

  “Then yes,” she said, “I’ll love you. Bring me the bastard’s head, and I’ll fucking love you.”

  * * *

  The head appeared the next evening. She woke up to find it propped on her bedside table.

  At first she recoiled from the upturned eyes, the blue face, and the ragged, torn neck, and she pushed herself as far away as she could. She fell off the bed and found herself hunched in a sitting position against the wall. From where she sat, she could still see the head, raw and bleeding. She didn’t even hear him come in, and she waited for him to come back into the room and comfort her.

  But she remained alone and didn’t sleep again for the rest of the night.

  She didn’t know where the stupid dog went. It no longer slept in the room.

  The following evening he didn’t appear, nor the night after that one.

  The head remained where he left it. In the daylight, it glared at her with its dead eyes. At first she feared it. Then she loathed it. Then she studied it.

  She thought of the day of Rob’s murder. Before they went to bed the night before, they fought over the heap of cardboard in the garage. When they moved into the house, they tossed their empty boxes there as they unpacked, and Rob promised that they’d spend a day breaking them down for recycling, but he always had an excuse for not doing it. Meanwhile the cardboard became a home for spiders and roaches, and she just couldn’t stand it anymore. She complained about his lack of motivation, but it all seemed so stupid now.

  She stared into the dead eyes of the killer. The day of the shooting, she went into work before Rob and didn’t know anything had happened until she heard people whispering outside her office door. Nervous energy. It happened here. It always happened somewhere else, never here. Two undereducated, very sad people filled with paranoid delusions and conspiracy theories. She didn’t care about their excuses. She just knew they stole her life along with all the others, and this one, just a head now, didn’t even have the courage the turn the gun on himself. Instead, he ran and somehow got away.

  She wondered about the rest of his body. She wanted to ask him about it when he returned.

  He finally did, two nights later.

  Without sedatives, Esther could no longer sleep.

  She watched him walk in. He didn’t take off his clothes as he normally did. The clothes he wore looked like those worn by R
ob the day those butchers killed him. They appeared bloodstained, and by the moonlight coming through the window, a bloody hole in his temple became apparent. Bone and brain fragments spotted his face.

  “Where did you put the head?” he said.

  She pointed toward a cardboard box sitting by the back wall of the room. It came from the heap in the garage, along with the plastic she used to line it. At times she had to chase the stupid dog away from it. She didn’t know why she was protecting it or what she was saving it for.

  “You’re hurt,” she said, though he didn’t have to tell her the nature of the wounds she saw. She saw those wounds when they showed her Rob’s body on the day of the shooting.

  “It’s going to start looking worse soon,” he said.

  “I don’t care.” She reached for him, with her fingers touched his cock through his pants, but she found him flaccid, uninterested.

  “First tell me,” he said, “do you love me now?”

  Instead of answering, she tried stroking him, rubbing him through the pants the way Rob liked. His hand, when it seized her wrist, felt cold.

  “Do you love me?” he repeated.

  She looked at him. His blue eyes now bore a white film.

  “No,” she said.

  Without answering, he stood up and walked over to the dresser. On its surface sat knick-knacks they collected on vacations—snow globes, figurines, even an hour glass—and he began pushing them off. Glass shattered. Without pausing he walked to the wall and began pulling pictures frames off the wall. His movements appeared sinuous and unnatural. She thought of the way things used to fly off the wall in seemingly random ways so long ago.

  When he finished, they stood amidst the carnage, looking at each other.

  “I have a confession,” he said.

  She waited.

  “I can’t stay,” he said.

  “I know. You told me already.”

  “But you can come with me.”

  Esther looked down at her feet where a shattered picture frame held a wedding photo. She could never have him back, not really, she knew that, so what else could she do?

  She took his freezing hand, sticky with dried blood, as if she only needed to walk through the door with him. It wouldn’t lead to the living room, not anymore. It would take her somewhere else, and it didn’t matter where. She waited for him to guide her, but he just stood there. “You need to do something first,” he said. “Fresh blood.”