Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 3

by Cheryl Mullenax

  The scratching sounded like an animal digging, claws scraping against a door, the sound of tunneling, determined tunneling. She cried out involuntarily. She couldn’t bear it any more. Her greatest fear was that whatever was doing it, might get through.

  Get through from where?

  But she didn’t know. She just didn’t know.

  Night—another abstract concept to the sightless—was a time she had always enjoyed the most. The noise of the city diminished and she could really hear the world. The gurgling of pipes in the ceiling. The gentle breeze playing at the eaves. Bats squeaking as they chased bugs around streetlights. Mr. Astano rocking in his chair on the third floor. The young couple—Jenna and Josh Ryan—at the end of the corridor making love, trying to be quiet because their bed was so terribly creaky (through the furnace duct she always heard them giggling in their intimacy).

  But that had changed now, hadn’t it?

  Yes, everything had changed. These past few weeks, the night breeze was contaminated by a sweet evil stench like nothing she had ever smelled before. Mr. Astano no longer rocked in his chair; now he sobbed through the dark watches of night. For three nights running she had heard whippoorwills shrilling in the park, growing louder and louder in a diabolic chorus. Rocky howled and whined, sniffing around the baseboards almost constantly. And the Ryans … they no longer made love or giggled, now they whispered in low, secretive voices, reading jibberish to one another out of books. Last night, Simone had clearly heard Josh Ryan’s voice echoing through the furnace duct, “There are names one must not pronounce and those that should never be called.”

  The scratching was persistently loud tonight and no one could ever convince her it was hallucinatory. It came from outside, not within. Her nerves frayed, a frost lying over her skin that made her shiver uncontrollably, Simone turned on the TV. She turned it on loud. The voices on CNN were initially comforting but soon enough disturbing. There had been a mass suicide in Central Park. By starlight, two thousand gatherers had (according to witnesses) simultaneously slit their left wrists, using the gushing blood to paint an odd symbol on their foreheads, something like a stem with five branches. The police were saying they were members of a fringe religious sect known as the Church of Starry Wisdom. In Scotland, there had been arrests of a group—the Chorazos Cult—in Caithness who had gathered on the bleak moorland at a prehistoric megalithic site known as the Hill of Broken Stones. Apparently, they had ritually sacrificed several children, offering them to a pagan god known as “The Lord of Many Skins.” In Africa, there were numerous atrocities committed, the most appalling of which seemed to be that hundreds of people had congregated at a place known as the Mountain of the Black Wind in Kenya and cut their own tongues out so that they would not, in their religious ecstasy, speak the forbidden name of their holy avatar. There were rumors that the offered tongues were then boiled and eaten in some execrable rite known as the Festival of the Flies which dated from antiquity.

  Madness, she thought. Madness on every front.

  Christians called it Armageddon and began feverishly quoting from the Book of Revelation as, all across North America and Europe, they flung themselves off the tallest buildings they could find, smashing to pulp far below, so that the Lord could wash his feet in the blood of the faithful as he walked the streets of men during the Second Coming.

  It was falling apart.

  It was all falling apart now.

  There was mass insanity, religious frenzy, mob violence, murder, and genocide coming from every corner of the world.

  Simone finally shut the TV off. The world was unraveling, but there seemed to be no root cause. At least none a sane mind would even consider.

  * * *

  The whippoorwills resumed their eerie rhythmic piping in the park, growing louder and louder, their cries coming faster and more strident as if they were possessed of some rising mania. Rocky began to whine in a pathetic puppy-like tone. At the windows, Simone heard what sounded like hundreds of insects buzzing. It all seemed to be building towards something and she was more afraid than she had ever been in her life. Now there were screams out in the street, hysterical and rising, becoming something like dozens of cackling voices reaching an almost hypersonic crescendo of sheer dementia. They resonated through her, riding her bones and making her nerve endings ring out. There was a power to them, some nameless, menacing cabalism that filled her head with alien thoughts and impulses. Now the walls … oh dear God, the walls were vibrating, keeping time with the voices and the whippoorwills.

  Not out in the streets, not out in the streets, but from within the walls.

  Yes, echoing voices from some terribly distant place and as she listened, she could not be certain they were of human origin … guttural croakings, discordant shrieking, bleatings and hissings and vile trumpeting, a reverberating lunatic chanting, hollow noises as of storm winds rushing through subterranean channels.

  Dear God, what did it mean?

  What did any of it mean?

  There was a sour taste on her tongue and a foul stench of graveyards.

  Feeling dizzy and weak, her stomach bubbling with a cold nauseous jelly, Simone fell to the floor, cupping her hands over her ears as the blood rushed and roared in her head, making it feel as if her brain was boiling in her skull. The sounds were getting louder and louder, the floorboards shuddering, the room seeming to quiver and quake like pudding. There were smacking and slurping sounds, the cries of humans and animals, of things that were neither … all of it lorded over now by a cacophonous buzzing that made her bones rattle and her teeth chatter. It sounded like some monstrous insect descending from the sky on droning membranous wings.

  Then it stopped.

  All of it ended simultaneously and there was only a great, unearthly silence broken by her own gasping and Rocky’s whimpering. Other than that, nothing. Nothing at all. A voice in Simone’s head said, it was close that time. Very, very close, they almost got through. The barrier between here and there is wearing very thin. But she had no idea what any of it meant. Between here and where?

  “Stop it, stop it,” she told herself. “You’re losing your mind.”

  She pulled herself up from the floor, barely able to maintain her balance. The silence was immense. It was a great soundless black vacuum of the sort she always imagined existed beyond the rim of the universe.

  She made it to the sofa and collapsed on it, wiping a dew of sweat from her face. With a trembling hand, she turned the TV on because she needed to hear voices, music, anything to break that wall of morbid silence.

  On CNN, there were voices, yes, but they spoke of the most awful things, things that only amplified her psychosis … because it must have been a psychosis, she couldn’t be hearing these things, these awful sounds like the veneer of reality was ripping open.

  It was reported that several million people had made a pilgrimage to Calcutta to await the appearance of a dark-skinned prophet at the Temple of the Long Shadow whom they referred to simply as “The Messenger.” Border skirmishes had broken out in Asia and the Middle East. There was pestilence in Indochina, bloodshed on the Gaza Strip, immense swarms of locusts blackening the skies over Ethiopia, and the Iranians had fully admitted that they were in possession of several dozen hydrogen bombs, each of which were equivalent to fifty million tons of TNT. With them, they would soon “ascend to heaven in the black arms of destiny” via a synchronized nuclear detonation which would bring about what they referred to as the symbolic “Eye of Azathoth.” In Eastern Europe, a terror organization calling itself either the Black Brotherhood or the Al-Shaggog Brigade had been burning Christian churches, Jewish synagogues, and Muslim mosques, calling them “places of utter blasphemy which must be eradicated so that the way be purified before the king could descend from the Dark Star and the Great Father rise from his sunken tomb …”

  “Kooks, Rocky,” Simone said. “This world is full of kooks.”

  The idea made her smile thinly. Was it at all possible tha
t the human race was losing its collective mind at the same time? That instead of sporadic outbreaks of insanity there was a global lunacy at work here? She told herself it was highly unlikely—but she didn’t believe herself.

  * * *

  That afternoon, the UPS man came to her door, knocking gently, announcing that he carried a parcel that had to be signed for. It was perfectly innocuous. He was delivering her new laptop with screenreader software … yet, as she made to open the door, a sense of fright and loathing swept through her as if what was out there was something hideous beyond imagining. But she did open the door and right away she was gripped by a manic paranoia and a mounting claustrophobia.

  “Package for you,” the man said, his voice cheerful enough. But it was a façade, an awful façade … for there was something sinister and lurking just beneath his skin and she knew if she reached out to touch his face it would be pebbly like the flesh of a toad. Right away, she heard that dire scratching coming from inside him like rats pawing and chewing. In her mind, she sensed a spiraling limitless abyss waiting to open like a black funnel. A voice—his own, but ragged and wizened—whispered in her skull, has she … has she … has she linked? Have the angles shown her the gray void? Has she seen the black man with the horn? The voice kept echoing in her head until she felt a cool, sour sweat run down her face.

  “Are you okay, ma’am?” asked the UPS man.

  “Yes,” she breathed, taking the parcel from him with strained, shaking fingers. “Yes, fine.”

  “Okay, if you’re sure.”

  But deep within her, perhaps at some subconscious level of atavistic fright, she could sense a godless vortexual darkness opening up inside him, and a noxious stench like seared porcine flesh blew into her face and that dry, windy voice whispered once again, show her, show her, it has been promised in the Ghorl Nigral as such … let her gaze into the moon-lens and gape upon the Black Goat of the forest with a thousand squirming young … let her … let her … find communion with the writhing dark on the other side …

  “Listen, are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Yes … please, I’m fine.”

  But she was not fine. She was blind and alone and a ravening outer darkness was spilling from this man in diseased rivers of slime. She felt scalding winds and dust blowing in her face, a fetid odor enveloping her that was no single stench but dozens breathing hot in her face with a fungous, gangrenous, nearly palpable odor.

  He reached out to steady her, clutching her wrist with a flabby, leprous claw.

  She screamed.

  She could not help herself.

  She slammed the door in his face, ignoring the whining and growling of Rocky. Physical waves of disgust and utter repulsion nearly paralyzed her, but she managed to reach the toilet as the vomit came out of her in a frothing expulsion. And crouching there on the bathroom floor, shuddering, drooling, her mouth wide in a silent scream, she could still hear that voice whispering from unknown gulfs: eh, even now at the threshold, the veneer of the Great White Space weakens as the time of the pushing and the birthing draws near—

  * * *

  Enough, by God, it was enough.

  She went into the kitchen and made sure Rocky had enough food and water. He had touched neither all day. He was hiding under the kitchen table, trembling. When she reached out to comfort him, he snapped at her. Even my dog, even my dog. Feeling depressed and defenseless and without a friend in the world, Simone climbed into bed and tried to sleep. After a desperate round of tossing and turning, she did just that.

  Her dreams began right away.

  Twisted, unreal phantasms of limitless spaces closing in on her. Immense and shaggy forms brushing against her. Monstrous pulpous, undimensioned things moving past her. Crawling up winding staircases that led into nothingness and being hunted through shattered thoroughfares of wriggling weeds and monolithic towers that felt like smooth, hot glass under her fingertips. And a world, an anti-world, of shifting surface angles where everything was soft and slimy to the touch like the spongy, mucid tissue of a corpse. And through it all, she heard a voice, a booming and commanding voice asking her to make communion with the beautiful, cunning darkness that awaits us all in the end.

  A sinister, malign sort of melody was ever-playing in the background, at first soft and silky then building to a harsh feverish pitch, an immense ear-splitting dissonant noise of bat-like squeaking and shrill creaking, bone grinding against bone, thunderous booming, saw blades biting into steel plate, chainsaws whirring and jagged-toothed files scraping over the strings of violins and cellos … all of it combining, creating a deranged jarring cacophony of disharmonic noise, filling her head, melting her nerves like hot wires, cracking open her skull like an eggshell until she came awake screaming in the deathly silence of her bedroom—

  * * *

  Soaked with sweat, shaking like a wet dog, she forced herself to calm down. She was awake and she knew she was awake, but the terror and anxiety bunched in her chest did not lessen; it constricted tighter. Her brain was sending a steady current of electricity to her nerves and the result was that her entire body was jittery and trembling. She had the most awful sense that she was not alone in the room, that another stood by her … breathing. She could hear a low, rasping respiration, a coarse, vulgar sort of sound like that a beast might make.

  “Rocky?” she said in a weak, barely existent voice. “Rocky?”

  Her voice reverberated around her oddly. The sound waves it created seemed to make the air around her vibrate. Her words bounced off the walls and came back at her like ripples she could feel on her skin.

  She could still hear the breathing.

  Terrified, she swung her legs out of bed and stood, instantly recoiling because the floor was not the floor but something almost gelatinous, a cool burning mud that was crawling with squirming things that began to slink up her legs. Dreaming, dreaming, you’re still dreaming. But she couldn’t convince herself of that. She reached out for the bed but it was no longer there. Panting, she stumbled towards the door and felt an immense momentary relief when it was still there. Something had happened. A pipe had burst or something and she was wading through shit, yet there was no odor save a dank, subterraneous smell. She was in the short hallway that led into the living room. She pushed on through the slopping ooze. She reached out and could find no walls. The hallway seemed to have no end and no beginning.

  “ROCKY!” she screamed in desperation.

  Again, her words bounced around, becoming waves crashing ashore on an alien beach and striking her with force in their reverberations. The air … warm, thick, almost congested … trembled like jelly. She kept moving, reaching out in every direction but there was nothing, absolutely nothing to touch. That awful, degenerate breathing kept pace with her but its owner made no sound as it glided along with her. Her head was throbbing, her temples pumping. A headache was gathering steam, its pain funneling out from the back of her brain to some excruciating white-hot spot in her forehead. There was an explosion of brilliance in her mind that left her reeling, it blazed like white phosphorus, igniting her thoughts into a firestorm of luminosity.

  What?

  What?

  What is this?

  Being blind since birth, she did not know sight. She could not conceptualize it. It was perfectly abstract in all ways to her. Even her dreams were of sounds, smells, tactile sensations … but not this. She saw for the first time in her life … a multitude of colors and images and forms like thousands of bright fireflies filling the night sky. And then, then she saw—if only for the briefest of moments—what stood breathing behind her. A man, a very tall man in a tattered cloak that crept with leggy vermin. He was staring down at her. His face was black, not African, but something like smooth shiny onyx. A living carved mask. Two brilliant yellow eyes, huge and glossy like egg yolks watched her. And then it was gone. Whatever had opened in her head had closed and she nearly passed out.

  The dark man gripped her with fingers like cr
awling roots and she let out a scream, one that seemed to echo from a distant room. Her hands, unbidden, reached out to him as they had done so many times in her life, finding a face that was greasy and soft like a gently pulsating mushroom. She cringed, but her fingers continued exploring despite the abhorrence that made her viscera hang in warm, pale loops. Beneath her fingertips, nodules rose and from each something worming slinked free. They crawled over the backs of her hands. One of them licked at a cut on her pinkie. Another suckled her thumb. Whatever they were, they came out of him in hot geysers, vermiform fleshy nightmares that gushed over her hands and brought a stench of death—old death and new death—that made her want to weep in her revulsion. Her fingers, seemingly magnetized to the face, continued exploring until they found something like a muscular, phallic optic stem growing from his forehead. It held a great, swollen, juicy eye that her index finger slid into like an over-ripened plum soft with rot.

  And a voice, a gurgling slopping voice that sounded as if it was spoken through mush, said, “So thou might see and thou might make communion with the beautiful, cunning darkness that waits for all …”

  * * *

  When Simone was next aware, she was sitting on the couch. She had no memory of getting there. She was in bed, she had nightmares, now she was on the couch. Her sense of smell, heightened beyond normal ken, gave her a sampling of the oily, sweaty, fetid odors that seeped from her pores in toxic rivulets.

  The TV was on.

  It was on the public access channel. She never listened to public access, but here it was. A man’s voice was droning endlessly in great dry detail about the cult of the Magna Mater, Cybele-worshipping Romans, and the depravity of Phrygian priests. Little of it made much sense, from the dark secrets of alchemy to the thaumaturgical arts and necromantic rites, from Etruscan fertility cults worshipping the Great Father of Insects to nameless miscegenations that did not walk but crawled within the slime of the honeycombed subterranean passages of Salem. “Was it not foretold?” the voice asked. “Did not Cotton Mather warn of it? Did not his sermons of those cursed of God, born of the tainted blood of those from outside, serve as an omen of worse things to come? Yes, but we did not listen! Was it not known to the mad Arab and his disciples? The time of the shearing and the opening is it hand, is it not? In Al-Azif—thus named for the sounds of night insects, some say, but in truth a cipher that prophesied the coming of Ghor-Gothra, the Great Father Insect—did he not tell us that Yog-Sothoth was the key just as the mad faceless god was The Messenger? Yes! Just as he hinted at the blasphemies of the Father Insect who was the needle that would open the seams of this world to let the Old Ones through!” He ranted on about something known as the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Angles of Tagh-Clatur and the Eltdown Shards. Becoming positively hysterical as he discussed De Vermis Mysteriis and the dread Liber Ibonis. “It was all there! All there!”