Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 4

by Cheryl Mullenax

  “The stupid dog,” Esther said.

  He nodded and said, “Lily.”

  She found Lily cringing behind the washing machine. Getting her out proved a struggle. Pulling on Lily’s paw, Esther found herself sobbing and saying over and over, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” The fur clutched like rotten fruit, she carried Lily back to the bedroom so that he could hold it while she sought a butcher’s knife. With it in hand, she knelt next to him and followed his instructions on where to cut.

  When she finished, they were almost ready.

  He said, “There’s just one more thing. One last thing.”

  The blood of the dog covered them both. He pointed to the cardboard box at the other side of the room.

  “You need to bring that. He’ll want it back.”

  She regarded the box containing the murderer’s head. The blood on her body burned like his semen.

  “You need to be the one to get it,” he said. “And if you don’t leave with me, he’ll just come here for it. Go or stay, it’s your choice. But I’m not coming back. You don’t love me. You said.”

  She needed both arms to hold the box, so she couldn’t hold his hand. But she stood next to him and waited.

  “I have a one more confession,” he said.

  Esther didn’t need to hear this one.

  “There is a hell,” she said. “I already knew.”

  And then she told him she was ready.

  <<====>>

  Author’s Story Note

  I started writing “I Have a Confession” in 2017, around the time that sex with ghosts was becoming a thing—or at least when venues like The Huffington Post started reporting on it like it had become a thing. Apparently, celebrities like Bobby Brown and Kesha have gotten it on with supernatural entities, and some people even seem to prefer ghosts to the living. I’m not one to judge, but I know good story material when I see it, even though the entity in this story is technically not a ghost. It does have the bad taste to prey upon the protagonist’s grief, which comes as a result of an all-too-true source of horror—mass shootings. I have to think about mass shootings a lot, unfortunately, since I work on a college campus. I did read an edited version of the story to my fellow faculty and students one afternoon, and despite some of the grim components of the story, it turned out to be a lot of fun to perform in a public reading. Maybe I like the idea of sex with supernatural beings more than I’m willing to admit. In any case, I’m thankful for its inclusion in this volume, as well as for its original publication in Infernal Ink. If you enjoy it, I’m delighted, but if you choose to have sex with ghosts or entities that might be ghosts, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  When the Owls Call

  Lyman Graves

  From Grotesque Quarterly Magazine, Volume 2 Issue #2

  Editor: Nicholas Haust

  Grotesque Publications

  Lowell Paxton paused halfway under the fence, a strand of low-gauge barbed wire bisecting his belly. Someone with a low throaty voice was laughing at him. Timing had been crucial to his plan, requiring that he enter the park on its wooded side after the ranger trucks posted near the gate rolled out of sight, but before the fall of total dark. He had given those trucks eight full minutes. Now frosty sweat broke on his forehead. He had fucked up somewhere. A solitary park ranger idling over a cigarette, or hanging back to take a leak, might well laugh at catching Lowell as he crawled under the posted notice which he took as an invitation despite its wording to the contrary.

  All Park Areas will be closed from 7:00p.m. FRIDAY, MARCH 19th to 7:00a.m. MONDAY, MARCH 22nd for seasonal maintenance. Public use including trail hikes, barbecues and camping during this period is prohibited. No amenities or aid services will be available. Trespassing or illegal entry will incur prosecution. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this temporary closure.—Best wishes, Pecan Bend State Park Mgmt.

  A second laugher joined the first, mocking Lowell with belly-deep chortles. Only because they were so alike did Lowell figure it out. They were not off-duty rangers but a pair of owls hooting to each other. They were out of bed early, maybe, but a glance into his rain-warped field guide, which he’d shoplifted five years ago off the sanctimonious hag running his community college bookstore, would have confirmed that they were common barred owls, Stix varia.

  Hugging a waxed canvas duffel to his loosening chest, he wriggled the rest of the way under the block-letter notice and onto park grounds. He spotted the nearer owl in the fork of a live oak. It gave him an appraising glance as cold as the one Lowell shot back in return, then sprang off the tree with a dull whoosh of wings. Keep flying, funny guy. Lowell balanced a respect for natural order with the footnote that individual animals, purely out of self-interest, were typically assholes. His intrusion had been observed and commented on, although not by any witness that concerned him. Texas Parks and Wildlife, an entity he knew better than to jack with, was still none the wiser.

  Lowell still got occasional jitters, even after so many secret excursions on public land. The scenester fuckwits who had co-opted the practice called it “stealth camping.” Lowell belonged to a couple of their online forums but had not hung in long amid the inane proprietary jargon they coined, their useless opinions and bitchy admonitions to newcomers to leave real adventuring to “the experts.” Sifting through endless terminology, Lowell never found any substance to what could loosely be called their dialogue. In an online community full of embarrassingly suggestive monikers like Tru_Anarky and GreenSurgency420, user LowPax87 quickly lost his taste for the social vanguard of the stealth camping scene. His only amusement was lurking in the comment threads, hoping to ignite slapfights between crypto-granola pinko loons and reptile-milking survivalist loons. He had concluded that the benefits of going strictly lone-wolf outweighed any risk. He could live without someone to watch his back, even if it left him prone to the willies now and then. In his experience, you could never get so alone that you never felt watched.

  He kept close to the ground, picking his path across faded game trails through spider webs and thorn-covered vines. He circled wide around tree roots, wary of poison oak. Even with his attention focused on moving silently he was conscious of the rich earth aroma, the crispness of leaves both alive and freshly dead. Lowell had some experience of the many national and state parks at his disposal, but in its bland familiarity Pecan Bend retained a welcoming smell for him, despite its popularity with hundreds of almost-daily visitors.

  From his hiding spot outside the gate, he had seen the grumbling masses turned away for the weekend, mostly large families in search of heavily discounted Spring Break fun. Weighed-down SUVs passed the shut gate all afternoon, merging in a makeshift turnaround loop with cars being herded off the grounds by khaki-clad rangers. He knew every departing vehicle would be packed with runny noses, Little Debbie wrappers and coffee farts. Swarms of pitiful voices whined from backseats, begging sweaty drivers to divert to Galveston or Six Flags. Good luck beating the rest of Texas there. Hope the parking rates haven’t gone up. For dozens of parents in the sad fossil-guzzling parade, hellish miles lay ahead.

  A slender shape whipped loose from the dry leaves beneath Lowell’s chest, darting away before his elbow came down on it. By straight population odds alone, it could have been one of a dozen harmless varieties. A milk snake, an indigo or even a skittish king were likely candidates. But a dark instinct told Lowell he had avoided a brush with something more bad-tempered and venomous.

  In contrast to the robust overgrowth, park fences were worn and rotting along several footpaths. The roof of the visitor pavilion needed attention. The wetland observation decks looked on the verge of sinking. From beneath these failing structures, meant to fence in tourists and keep excessive human contact from clogging Mother Nature’s pores, the soil breathed out whiffs of deep primeval freshness. Lowell had explored the park half a hundred times beginning in childhood. Half-piney, half-oaky stands of woods encircled a wide marsh bustling with shorebirds and turtl
es. Mosquitoes too, the perennial scourge. The mix of forest and swamp made up an impressive sample of natural east Texas without tipping into theme park diorama, the highly marketable cancer eating so many of America’s public beauty spots. In all but the worst summer drought (or the rare January freeze), the main attraction was prime gator-watching. The slat fences in that area received more diligent maintenance. Chicken wire shored up the gaps to prevent unwatched kiddos and small dogs from casual swimming. Nobody wanted to see the placid basking carnivores leap from their torpor to mob a stray child. Except of course they did, secretly.

  Dusk found Lowell making his nest, a natural hollow canopied by the low branches of a white oak mott. Later in the year he might have worried about sharing the space with copperheads. This was less dangerous but not much preferable to bunking in the marsh with a water moccasin. Although it more or less deserved its nasty reputation, the musky cottonmouth employed a single debilitating strike, while a copperhead’s well-known tactic was to latch on and chew. In Lowell’s view that crossed a line from self-defense to plain meanness.

  He had expected a fresh chorus of owls to start up as night came on, especially after meeting those two jokers by the fence. Every few minutes he heard wings in the foliage overhead, but only big enough to be roosting songbirds. Lowell munched a stick of jerky. He seldom brought more than bare survival rations along. The clean air, even with occasional wafts of stagnant marsh, did more to refresh him and tame his contrariness than a good hot meal. He took a little scotch from a tiny all-weather flask, only a mouthful or two. He never brought more because he knew his own weakness. He promised himself a stop on the way home for a few cold beers. He frequently found it needful to tank up on Sunday nights, a final consolation for leaving the woods and wading back into the shit. He was a bit of a hangover masochist, finding that the discomfort actually livened up the profession of optician’s receptionist. He only needed to be half-sober for his freelance evening gig, fielding IT calls to keep himself barely paid up on an efficiency studio with stunning views of the municipal airport, with just enough left over for the occasional, pitifully inadequate payment into a meaningless 401(k) account. Every seven months or so, he would take another swipe at his associate’s degree in forestry, which had begun as a spiteful joke to annoy his parents. Now he was too chickenshit to abandon it, purely for reasons of callow vanity. Eventually he would have to stop blaming his mother’s death by aneurysm for depressing the ambition out of him and generally scuttling good relations within the family. He had surfed that glum wave for years, barely needing to tap his reserve scapegoat of national economic downturn. He resolved to take ownership of his personal issues after he turned thirty-five, so fuck it in the meantime.

  Lowell woke abruptly, unaware that his thoughts had bored him into a snooze. He scanned for owls or possibly a nighthawk in the eerie stillness. The bugs and bullfrogs were hiding in wary silence too. Eventually the moon appeared. Only a slim toenail was visible, just back from the dark of the new moon. This was Lowell’s favorite phase, not as impressive as the full stage but more interesting to him. It looked subtle and sly, a closed eye just awakened again.

  With his vision tuned by the night sky, Lowell saw rather than heard the first sign of something truly odd. The extreme quiet starting at sunset had been a little strange, but maybe crickets believed late March was still too cold for singing. Farther away from the coastal river lands, they would have been right. Two or three hundred yards down the patchy line of trees from where he lay prone, perched on his elbows, a sizable clump of brush swayed out of rhythm with the gentle western breeze. Something bigger than a songbird was moving into the open.

  And me without a gun, he reflected, no more than half-joking.

  Lowell’s interest in hunting had dissipated once he moved into his own place and quit talking to his dad, but he had spent a good deal of childhood learning to track deer for and with the (mostly) male members of his family. In truth he was a crack rifle shot, but as befell many people unfairly gifted with natural talent, his interests lay elsewhere. Having a deadly skill he did not cherish only made him self-conscious. In no other way did he resemble a modern Atticus Finch, but that lone parallel had struck him as a young reader.

  What Lowell retained from the aggressive hunting and gathering of his youth were the principles of the stalk, plus a few tools designed to harvest game but useful in any outdoor pursuit. He carried knives in several sizes, as well as a hammer-shaped instrument which could fold into a limb lopper, hatchet or saw for pesky branches in his line of sight and thorny vines under his can. He had a big threaded hook for hanging bows and arrows from a tree trunk, which did nicely for turning a tarp into a tent under wet conditions. His compact Chinese-made binoculars performed admirably for their sensible price, a stray echo of his dad’s maddening frugality, which had inspired the pet family phrase “tighter than a cat squirrel’s acorn-hole.” Lowell had promptly blown the savings on his binocs for a top-shelf range finder with night vision. It was designed for bowhunters who could also afford the lithium button batteries that the little machine ate like peppermints. Lowell did not mind. He liked being able to view night-moving things in moonless conditions, and took seldom-useful yardage readings on any critter he spotted. If he ever got interested in creeping on his neighbors, watch out.

  Trying first with the binoculars, he found the movement at the treeline barely more distinct than with his naked eye. He powered on the night scope and peered through it. Even without extra magnification he instantly had a better picture of what was going on, though it made next to no sense.

  The billowing shrubs were people, most of them wearing elaborate costumes. A man and woman, hand in hand, led a column of others among the trees. The man was bloated and squat, buttoned into some kind of unflattering velveteen doublet. A plumed hat crowned his bald bearded head, catching in low branches until the feather was shredded down to nothing. His companion was not exactly petite, and a ruffled collar and sleeves gave her the illusion of extra volume. Her wide flowing skirt was a deep shimmering color, impossible to know under the conditions but Lowell guessed a leafy pagan green. A complicated bodice of leather and twine cinched her waist to minimum thickness and hitched up her tits, which fell in the size range between bodacious and hazardous, to an unnatural altitude. In his late teens, Lowell would have been thin enough to dive down her cleavage and make some trouble there.

  Lowell’s momentary shock at their appearance melted to resentment of their encroaching on his private illicit campground. No way had such a group obtained special permits to camp with the park closed. Their costumes gave them away as Renaissance Faire types, not casual Shakespeare geeks but the true zealots who put life on hold for weeks at a time to flounce around local fairgrounds. They sank wild sums of disposable income into authentic dresses, armor, lutes, Middle English phrasebooks and so on, breaking character only to titter at those with inferior knowledge and appreciation of archaic dork lore.

  Lowell had associated briefly with Faire folk through his ex-girlfriend Cassandra, a.k.a. Lady Rowen Summerisle. A certain percentage of diehards, with nothing else in life to give them joy, carried the act into the off-season. They roamed like shiftless carnies to every festival and outdoor concert where their unwashed finery earned them discounted admission. They camped where they dropped. They pooled their supplies of grass, booze and pills for all-night freakouts landing anywhere on the spectrum between cosplay orgy for the rancid unbathed and latter-day Manson Family jam. With Lowell in tow, Cassandra had only dabbled at the fringes of that scene. He had played along with half a heart, sporting plastic Viking horns and evocative heavy metal t-shirts. His lack of sincerity earned the scorn of aging pricks who preened and strutted for Cassandra’s attention. Dressing like ousted members of Jethro Tull was acceptable, yet for Lowell to call the entire ludicrous establishment as he saw it was tantamount to farting in church. Lowell had finally accepted that he was holding Cassandra back from her true goals one long
Sunday drive back to the city, the morning after he had wandered away from a mushroom-fueled recitation of Chaucer to visit an icehouse near the highway. Returning at dawn, he found Cassandra dallying astraddle the entire Round Table in order of gallantry. Lowell was actually impressed, though not in an appropriately literary sense. It was not lost on him that even Sir Galahad departed at first light without offering the flushed and sweating damsel safe passage home. Lady Rowen’s conveyance, like all thankless work, fell to her downcast and visibly drunken clown. Somehow he had gotten the two of them home alive, and in the two years following the subsequent split he had heard not a whisper of her. Not that he had advertised his own whereabouts much.

  With the knowing suspicion of one whose fair lady once fucked a coterie of knights, Lowell watched the party move into open ground. Enough starlight fell on the unshaded grass that he could scope their particulars through the binocs. Not all were done up in Elizabethan kink. In fact, he found the oddballs and outliers more interesting. One man wore only coarse linen pants and a stately pair of feathered angel wings lashed to his shoulders. A woman had painted her naked body in the textures of a flowering tree. A third specimen, shambling low to the ground, had opted for a full-cover gorilla costume. Next to the astonishing wood nymph it looked seedy to the point of sinister, a retired costume shop piece best suited to home-video porn renditions of King Kong. An androgynous pilgrim near the rear had clearly repurposed a Rocky Horror costume. Unlike Cassandra’s pals, this bunch welcomed all misfits. A trailing pair of musicians, hung with bells and tambourines, clattered as they walked. One strummed a ukulele painted some livid color. His companion molested a small, homemade-looking bagpipe that whined a succession of thin repetitive melodies like a horsefly taught to hum “Greensleeves.”