His angry, taunting voice came to her on the wind: “Next time, we kill the pig.”
—
When the last haunted house-patron had exited the barn, and Priscila had cleared the maze, scooped her props back into the bucket, and removed her second skin, it occurred to her to wonder if Stu would have her follow him to the party, or offer her a ride.
I bet he’ll give me a ride. We’ll talk about how Opening Night went, and then we’ll—
She was about to step from between wispy, shifting stalks, when a voice, shrill and unhappy, cut through the night.
“What do you mean, you invited her? Are you insane? Tell her she can’t come!”
Priscila froze. Her eyes stung at the malice in Stu’s girlfriend’s voice.
“She’s part of the crew now, what difference does it make?”
Priscila nearly dropped the mask, sweat causing her to lose her grip, but she caught it before it could hit the ground and give her location away.
“Let’s leave! Then she won’t know how to get there.”
Priscila waited for Stu to refuse, to suggest that maybe she should leave. But Stu only sighed.
“Please,” the girl pleaded.
The tone was so childish, so pained, much like…
Priscila heard herself whisper, so pitifully it seemed not to have come from her own lips: please. And perhaps she hadn’t uttered it. Perhaps it was only a memory...
Another set of footsteps crunched through the leaves.
“Nathan,” the girl whined. Priscila had never learned her name. “Can you please tell Stu he can’t have Pris-killa at the party tonight? It’ll be weird for everyone there.”
“You invited Priscila?” There was surprise in Nathan’s voice. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”
Priscila swallowed the lump in her throat.
Under the weight of their judgement, Stu sighed again. “Fine. You guys are probably right.” He snorted. “I mean, God forbid she really is a murderous psychopath and someone finds us all tomorrow morning, dead as her fucking dogs. Speaking of fucking dogs, she probably did fuck them, and that’s how they all croaked. Let’s go before she comes out of the maze.”
Priscila’s devastation was like breathing too close to a fire; the acuteness of it instigated choking.
She sat on the cold earth, chewing on a husk and stroking the smooth flesh of a pig that, like her, had been alive only that morning. She felt carved out, as empty as the grinning jack-o’-lanterns that welcomed visitors to Gourd Falls. When she was sure the farm was vacant, she struggled to her feet.
They left me. They left me without a second thought, and all I’d wanted was one thing to call my own. My own dog. A livelihood. A fulfilling relationship with a co-worker. A friend.
She walked through the silent farm grounds. The bucket of pig parts swung from one hand, while the mask lolled gently from the other.
And the tears Priscila cried cut through the tinge of blood staining her cheeks like razors drawn through tender flesh.
—
Her headlights cut through the fog, sunrays trying to penetrate too-deep water, and she drove slowly, not caring if she ever made it home. She had crested the top of Rabbit Run Road when she saw the cherry red Range Rover. The smoke billowing from beneath the hood was thick even in the impenetrable fog, and the tree the driver had barreled into was stark in the up-close beam of its only working headlight.
Priscila pulled up beside the wreck. She climbed out and was at the driver’s side door in four long strides, more excited now than she’d been at any point policing the maze.
Either the driver’s window had been down, or it had shattered so completely that not a single shard remained in its frame, impossible to determine in conjunction with the demolished windshield. An arm hung from the open window, the hand wedged between the accordioned front bumper severed from the wrist but for the thinnest rope of muscle.
Priscila reached out and touched the man’s wrist, an inch above the injury. The traumatized flesh reminded her of her mask. The man stirred, moaned. When he lifted his head and locked eyes with Priscila, she heard the echo of his voice coming to her in the cornfield: “Kill the pig,” he had chanted. “Cut her throat.”
My piglets have come home to sty.
“Help.”
The word was raspy, reminded her of the skitter of paw pads on the farmhouse floor. Priscila turned and walked back to her truck.
Mike called after her, panicked.
She returned only seconds later, the pig mask covering her face. Mike whimpered. In those unfocused eyes, Priscila saw the liquid brown ones of her Rottweiler, cataracted in death and the glare of the morning sun.
Priscila reached out. She took the man’s wrist in one large hand and pressed the other against the battered metal.
She pulled.
In her truck, Mike regained consciousness only once. “Hospital,” he croaked. He held his arm to his chest, the stump wrapped in a dirty swatch of burlap.
The pig woman nodded.
—
He did not wake until many nights later and by then, the flies had descended upon the farmhouse like a plague. The room was a series of twists and turns, a maze of passages made from wood and metal and sheetrock. At the far end of the labyrinth was a door, outside which was a night lit only by the moon.
The door slid open and a harrowing figure in a rubber butcher’s apron emerged. Its face was a macabre impossibility, a dripping candle of waxen horror, half-melted flesh ripped from some fever dreamed up in Hell. The rotting flesh moved in a writhing kaleidoscope, animated by the bodies of hundreds upon hundreds of flies. More flies circled its ears; they crawled in and out of its sunken, sodden eyes.
The man in the dog crate went to crawl from his prison. He stopped when his hand clanked wrongly on the bars. He directed his attention downward, saw the hoof that replaced his hand. Shock of a sort unable to be adequately expressed suffused his pallid face.
“I had to,” the pig said. The gilt pig. Madame Pig. Madame Piggy. “And I had to do them all to make it even.”
The man began to convulse, beholding his hoof-hands, hoof-feet, the Frankensteinian stitches, red-raw flesh, white, bloodless skin that frayed along the edges.
“Why?” The one discernible word he managed.
A fly flew into his open mouth, crawled across his swollen tongue. Priscila, in her pig mask, looked out across the shadow-ridden farm, the buzzing of the flies like an unseen spacecraft forming crop circles in the fields.
Sensing motion, a porch light kicked on.
“I tried for too much. I see that now. I tried to hold onto things I’d never have been able to keep. I’m content with the things that are willing to come to me. The flies, for one. They don’t require much. And you.”
The man’s cries turned into squeals of fear. “Beast!” he choked out.
Priscila rubbed her gloved hands together.
“Maybe there is a beast… and maybe it’s only us. Either way, you are here. Everyone wants to be Lord or Lady of something. If I must settle for you, than I thought I should make us as similar as possible. You have me, in all that makes me invisible, unworthy of connection. And I have you, in all that makes you incomplete. A freak.”
It felt good to talk. If felt good to have someone listen.
Methodically, Mike rapped his hooves against the bars. The sound was like the beating of a steel drum.
“And the flies. I mustn’t forget about the flies. They visited me once before, and how ungrateful I was then.”
She turned to him. She had cut the stitches at the pig’s mouth, so it appeared that even with the mask on, Priscila was smiling. The porch light was positioned so that the mask’s holes seemed to glow from within.
Her captive tried to scramble backward, fear driving him to panic. “Your face!” he screamed. “What is wrong with your face?”
“What is a face?” Priscila asked. “What is anything, really?”
&nb
sp; And she joined him in the pounding of the bars.
THE GIRL WHO LOVED BRUCE CAMPBELL
No Bottom Pond might have had a bottom, but as far as the three clammy and restless individuals that sat in the idling car by its banks knew, it very well might not. The cold sweats and body aches would not assail them for much longer; the lankier of the two males divvied up the wax baggies of brown powder, and each in turn began their own sacred ritual of preparation. It took only seconds for the first of the three to realize a key element was missing from their assorted paraphernalia.
“Damn,” the stocky male said. “Does anyone have a water bottle?”
There was no reply as each of the three checked the space around their feet, and the nearest cup holder.
“Now what?” the lone female asked. “We can’t hit a gas station. We need to stay off the roads for a while; someone may have seen us leave that house.”
There was murmured agreement from the two men, followed by a morose silence. The lanky man broke the quiet with a snort of derision.
“This shit’s fried our brains,” he said. “We’re sitting next to a lake, complaining about not having any water to shoot up with.”
“It’s not a lake, it’s a pond,” the woman said.
“Technically, it’s not even a pond. It’s an estuary. And we can’t use that water because it’s brackish.” The stouter man sounded matter-of-fact.
“What’s brackish mean? That it’s dirty? Please, I’ve seen you use water from the tank of a gas station toilet, dirty should be the least of your worries.” This, from the woman.
“No, not dirty, brackish. It means it’s half freshwater, half salt. We can’t shoot that, it might mess with our bodies’ electrolyte levels or something.” Now the stocky man sounded less sure of himself.
The lanky man opened the car door. He reached for an empty Dunkin Donuts cup discarded on the floor of the passenger seat, removed the lid, and looked suspiciously into its depths. Shrugging, he started for the pond’s weedy shore.
“I didn’t get away with a B&E and buy dope from the shadiest dealer in town to let a little saltwater stop me. It’s only half salt anyways,” he called over his shoulder.
The woman and the stout man watched him creep toward the water’s edge. He folded his tall frame in half and scooped a cupful of water into the Styrofoam. He did this in the light of a moon so close it seemed to be perched atop the hill that loomed over No Bottom Pond, a luminous cherry bedecking a black forest cake.
The first full moon to rise on Christmas in forty years had occurred the night before. “A Christmas miracle,” the woman had said sarcastically as they listened to a radio talk show host lament the previous night’s fog cover on their way to Shore Road, and the house they’d been casing most of the past week. The upscale home had yielded extensive reserves of jewelry, cash, and three guns. There’d been a safe, but they had no use for a safe. They only took what they could trade quickly and easily to their dealer, and their dealer had no interest in safes.
The lunar display of December twenty-sixth happened to be free from a smothering blanket of fog. As the woman watched the tall man return, she noticed that in the bright moonlight, the water’s surface had a strange sparkle to it, was almost phosphorescent in the gleam. Parts of the pond were the shiny, black, oil-slick of water-in-moonlight she’d expect. Having spent her whole life in the seaside town, she’d seen water undulating under the moon enough times for the sight to be commonplace, but No Bottom Pond was greenish in its radiance, and did not steam so much as gurgle, like the stew in a witch’s cauldron.
She forgot her inquisitiveness over the appearance of the water when the passenger door slammed shut. Three syringe tips plunged greedily into the captured pond water, transporting water from cup to three waiting spoons. Mysticism, Rhode Island was a small town, and the population was reduced by half in the winter. The heroin dealers had been tapped into the same pipelines in and out of the closest major cities for decades; the three longtime users expected the same cut and purity of dope they’d had on the previous day, and on the occasion of their first use.
Subsequently, no lighter flicked on to form dancing shadows on the car walls, no Butane-fueled flame burned prospective toxins out of the contents of their spoons. They each shot up, one, two, three, and each fell into that first nod of euphoria, a scarecrow short of Dorothy and her comrades in the poppy field.
At the same time that legions of fish were rising to the vaporous surface of No Bottom Pond, dead and already beginning to putrefy, small boils popped up under the skin of the three beings in the car. The tall man thought he’d injected a hot shot, while the woman jerked out of her nod in wild agitation to inspect the tip of her needle, convinced she’d given herself cotton fever by neglecting to free the point from Q-tip remnants. Both of them were wrong.
The mutations occurred quickly and the changes were profound. When the transformation was complete, the three beings were no longer satisfied with the heroin that flowed through their veins. They were hungry in a way that made every torturous withdrawal symptom or harrowing mental craving of the past seem like a petty annoyance, a minor itch that could go without being scratched.
—
Two hours earlier, a local scientist named Craig Silas stood on a dip of Watch Hill Road, a dark silhouette overlooking the river that rushed into No Bottom Pond. Craig worked at a nearby pharmaceutical company, and the previous year had snuck a project home to his basement laboratory to continue his work free from the oversight and ethical regulations of his employer.
In the wake of a countrywide opiate epidemic, Big Pharma had sufficient incentive to develop an opioid-free painkiller, eliminating the potential for abuse and addiction. Craig had stumbled onto an unanticipated side effect of the chemical compound he’d been studying, and upon bringing his research home, further unlocked the potential of the drug. Characteristics included superhuman strength, laser-point focus, and a complete inability to feel pain. Craig spent weeks hypothesizing on the drug’s limitless prospects, until he’d descended the basement stairs one morning to find one of the pink-eyed lab rats feasting on his cage-mates’ brains. With every possibility of experiencing pain eliminated, the rats’ behavior had morphed into something much more ominous... and much more deadly.
After driving up and down the streets of Mysticism with the concoction swishing around a large vat in his trunk, Craig noticed that the adjacent river ran beneath the road and into a wide inlet. Theorizing that the body of water before him was the equivalent of a dead end street, he pulled onto the narrow shoulder and muscled the vat onto the guardrail before another car could appear. Craig Silas had left No Bottom Pond ten miles behind him by the time his miracle drug had seeped into the pond’s ecosystem, and was home in his favorite armchair with his feet up by the time the first transformations began to occur.
—
Sophisticated cognition already reduced to animalistic compulsion, the three addicts, who had become fiends of a different nature, were barely able to recall the chain of events that had led them to their last high, brought to the utmost intensity by the unorthodox mixture of heroin and pond-dispersed, opiate-free analgesic. But they were able to recall enough to know what they needed to do to feed the hunger that gnawed at their insides like so many of Silas’ lab rats. And so they began to move.
—
Kartya watched the spray of blood waterfall through the front door of the cabin, and grabbed Kit’s arm.
“That... was... awesome!” she cheered, the arm-grabbing escalating to arm-slapping. She turned to face her boyfriend. “How much time is left?”
“Kar, just watch, I’m not messing with it again. It’s thirty minutes long, like all the other episodes.”
This appeased Kartya enough to watch the last ten minutes in silence. She twirled a ringlet of cherry-coke-colored hair around blood-red fingernails. When the show was over, she turned to Kit again, eager to hear his opinion on the latest installment.
; “Well,” Kit said, “they definitely set us up for an epic showdown at the cabin.”
“Agreed! I wish there was more than ten episodes. That was a good one though. Buckets of blood!” A mischievous smile turned up the corners of her lips.
“Twisted, gory, and hilarious,” Kit said. “That dead cop put her fists through the campers’ skulls, and turned them into corpse puppets!”
“Let’s be serious, most of the other characters only exist to compliment Ash. To give the directors a springboard for his one-liners and so that we can see some different weapons brandished against the Deadites. It can’t all be about Ash’s chainsaw arm and Boomstick.” She mimed obliterating Kit with a shotgun blast to the face.
“Also,” she continued, “did I tell you that Ash, err, sorry, Bruce Campbell, wrote an autobiography a few years back... called If Chins Could Kill?”
Kit gave her a look that conveyed both incredulity and reverence, and broke into a hearty chuckle, no doubt visualizing the B-list movie actor’s signature square chin.
“That’s amazing. You need to get that book.” He gestured to two bookshelves flanking the television, which still rolled the blood-splattered credits for the show.
Kartya nodded with enthusiasm but did not turn to regard the bookshelves, pointing instead to the two Vinyl Pop characters facing off from their respective posts atop surround sound speakers. The plastic Ash and Army of Darkness Deadite had been Christmas gifts from her mother the previous morning. Though she didn’t share her daughter’s love for horror, Kartya’s mother knew Kartya and Kit harbored a cultish enthusiasm for Ash, and all things Evil Dead, from the campy originals to the 2013 remake, and now, the television series. She had wrapped the figurines knowing it would bring appreciative smiles to their faces.
“Instead of that speaker, a hardcover copy of If Chins Could Kill could be mini-Ash’s battleground in the fight against evil,” Kartya said.
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