Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 3

by Cheryl Mullenax

“The kind that is cheapest,” I said, annoyed.

  He harrumphed and poured my drink.

  “Do you happen to know if a Sir Willard Hilton frequents this pub?” I asked.

  He answered with a scowl. “You? Here to see Sir Willard?”

  “What? Were you expecting someone different?” I said, insulted.

  He rolled his eyes and then pointed to a table in the pub’s back left nook. I followed his arm to find a wiry-thin man with curly black hair that receded into a widow’s peak. He vibrated with nervous energy while he chatted up a curvaceous blonde. He clutched an overflowing pint of ale.

  I grabbed my cheap whiskey and made my way to his table, interrupting him in midsentence. “Excuse me, Sir Willard, may I have a quick word?”

  Sir Willard ignored me, sipping his drink.

  I cleared my throat. “Excuse me, Sir Willard …”

  He held up his hand, never taking his eyes off the woman. “Piss off.”

  “But Sir Willard, this can’t wait. It’s a matter of life and death.”

  His head swiveled toward me. “I said: Piss. Off.”

  Sir Willard’s stern tone and a glint of violence in his eyes told me that if I didn’t back off, the world-renowned explorer would very likely do me harm.

  So I took my whiskey and sat at the bar, where I brooded. I had to get Sir Willard’s attention, but I couldn’t compete with his companion. Then I had a curious idea. There was no need for me to compete with her for Sir Willard’s notice at all.

  My head slumped onto the table. In an instant, I was staring at Sir Willard from across a common table.

  “C’mon, luv. My flat’s only a few blocks away. We can have a nightcap there,” Sir Willard said, winking at me.

  I felt awkward inside this woman’s body. So I got straight to the point: “Sir Willard, I need your help. Professor Alastair Moorcock recommended that I seek your assistance about the Dictionnaire Infernal.”

  Sir Willard’s jawed dropped. His eyes shifted past my feminine host and stared at my empty human husk.

  “What are you?” he said.

  I gestured toward my original vessel. “I’m the chap over there you wouldn’t speak to.”

  He stood up and backed away from me, nearly stumbling over his chair. “No,” he said with a hint of panic in his voice. “What kind of thing are you?”

  “I’m a man, just like you,” I said in a woman’s voice and without any trace of irony.

  “But … but only demons are capable of soul displacement.”

  And with that one sentence, I learned more about my predicament than I had in the last month.

  “Tell me more,” I said.

  “Not here. And not until you release your hold over Victoria’s body.”

  “If I do, will you help me?”

  He nodded, so I released her.

  ___

  “Adramelech is its name,” Sir Willard whispered, paging through the ledger. Candlelight flickered in his dank cellar study. His mahogany bureau was firmly rooted in the middle of the room like a citadel anchoring its power in the center of a far-reaching kingdom. The floor beneath and the walls surrounding the bureau had a complex series of circular and triangular warding sigils scrawled in chalk.

  “Whose name?” I asked.

  “The entity that holds your contract.”

  “What entity?” I said.

  “The thing called Adramelech. According to the Dictionnaire Infernal, references to Adramelech pre-date the founding of Christianity. They point to its origin as a Mesopotamian deity. According to the lore, worshippers appeased Adramelech through ritualistic human sacrifice. It is said that Adramelech’s acolytes frequently offered it burning children.”

  I shuddered at Sir Willard’s words. What had I done? Then my thoughts became more urgent, more focused on solving my immediate dilemma. “And contract? What contract?”

  “Your immortal essence for the ability to project your soul into others,” he said.

  “But … but, I was coerced,” I stammered. “I had no choice.”

  “We always have a choice. You could have chosen death.”

  I bowed my head in resignation. There had to be a glimmer of hope, a way out. “Is there any way that I can break this pact?”

  He fixed his gray eyes on mine. “Tell me one thing: did you summon Adramelech or did it seek you?”

  “The latter,” I said almost too quickly, my desperation roiling beneath a thin veneer of calm.

  “I see,” he said. “Then, according to this tome, there’s still hope.”

  “Thank the Lord,” I said. “Tell me what I must do.”

  ___

  Procuring the hollowed-out bronze statue required a fair bit of archival work and logistical meandering, but the request was harmless enough.

  After paying Sir Willard a princely sum to recover the artifact, he returned with word that his expedition had unearthed the item and loaded it on a steamship in the Levant. He’d promised that the artifact would arrive in London within the month.

  When it arrived at my flat, enshrouded in black, I couldn’t help but experience a sense of deep foreboding and woe. The hidden statue had an uncanny aura that invoked dread in its beholders.

  I had the deliverymen lower it into my cellar. They used a complex system of levers and pulleys. The hemp groaned and creaked with the effort. I scarcely believed the relic would make the passage without snapping the ropes that held its colossal heft at bay.

  After they departed, and despite my trepidation, I removed the statue’s dark shroud. I trembled as I beheld the image of my nightmare cast in bronze—all those menacing eyes glaring at me, boring into the pit of my soul.

  I immediately covered the statue back in its shadowy veil before the ghastly figure befouled my mind with more sinister visions.

  And there it sat, awaiting Adramelech and whatever sordid purpose the fiend had intended for it.

  ___

  The next several years passed at a glacial pace. Serving as Sir Willard’s acolyte, I dedicated my life to uncovering the esoteric mysteries of the obscene tome I’d transcribed in my youth.

  Even with the meticulous warding in Sir Willard’s cellar, the book exacted a punishing toll on my constitution. Darkness became my permanent abode, and I a thing of midnight.

  Each year, on the anniversary of my contract, Adramelech summoned me on pain of death, compelling me to scour the barrows for the corpse of an orphaned child. It was a gruesome task, digging into the loamy earth and exhuming the tiny coffin.

  On one such night, I passed under the moon’s glowing crescent, its reflected sunlight scarring the blue-black sky like a cicatrix on unblemished skin. The light it cast revolted me—no doubt a consequence of the corruption festering in my spirit.

  My method for selecting which body to disinter was a simple one. Before my nighttime jaunts, I would pore over the obituaries of rural newspapers for the names of recently deceased orphan children. On this particular year, my research led me to Bocking Cemetery in Braintree, Essex.

  Stalking the lichyard in the service of my master, I meandered through a maze of tombstones and mausoleums without the aid of lantern light. There, I sought the grave of the Jameson boy. The ground was still muddy from the rainstorm that had soaked the land earlier that day.

  It didn’t take long for me to locate the Jameson plot with its freshly turned dirt. Hoisting my spade, I began to dig.

  A faint light glimmered through the distant hedges and oak trees. I ceased digging, fearful my illicit activity might garner unwanted attention.

  The light grew brighter and drew closer. My heart pounded. Sweat slithered down my brow. To avoid discovery, I hid behind a gravestone and lay on my stomach.

  The silhouette of a man passed through the trees. He shined a lantern in my direction. I held my breath, cowering.

  He approached slowly.

  I hugged the earth, clutching clumps of mud in a futile attempt to avoid detection.

  A lig
ht blinded me from above. “What the bloody hell are you doing here?” a gruff voice said.

  I held my hands before my face, trying to blot out the glaring light. As my eyes adjusted, I saw the night watchman, his countenance grimacing in disgust.

  “Stand up!” he commanded, waving a baton.

  This was the end. If he turned me over to the authorities, I would be forever severed from that spellbinding tome. I couldn’t bear the thought of it. There was a way out, but it terrified me. I’d promised myself never to use that dreadful power again.

  Now I had no choice. I locked my eyes on his.

  In an instant, I watched my body slump to the ground. Wearing the night watchman’s skin, I sprinted back toward the tree line, my lantern swaying like a chaotic pendulum scything through darkness.

  In moments, I’d passed through the oaks and hedges, and into Essex’s flat fields, running until the night watchman’s heart felt as if it were on the verge of bursting. My mind raced. It would take me hours to get him far enough away from the cemetery so I’d have enough time to unearth the body.

  But I didn’t have hours. I had only until daybreak.

  Then I stumbled upon my redemption.

  It was no more than a black speck on the horizon. As I drew closer, the stone well jutted from the earth like a broken tooth. When I reached it, breathless, I stared down fifty feet into its gaping maw.

  It was either his soul or mine.

  I leapt into the well.

  In half a breath, I was back in my own skin. I grabbed my spade and dug with a fury, using guilt as my fuel. I tried not to imagine the man’s frantic effort to keep his head above water in that black well. Despite my rationalizations, what I had done was unforgivable. But what choice did I have?

  Hours later, I placed the muddy coffin onto a dolly and wheeled it to the midnight-blue Ford Model T waiting on the side of the country road. There, I loaded the small coffin into the backseat, covered it with an olive drab tarp, and then motored back to London.

  With shame, I carried the coffin to my flat, removed the corpse of a freckled boy with strawberry-blonde hair, and placed it inside the repulsive statue. Then I positioned a brazier heaping with coals behind it, where I presented the burnt offering to my demented overseer.

  I know not why Adramelech forced me to repeat this grim ritual year after year. It was as if through these unspeakable acts, the demon was honing my instincts and inuring my conscience to prepare me for something far worse.

  I yearned to sever my contract, devoting every waking hour to study of the diabolical tome, scrutinizing it for a loophole. Sir Willard assured me from his extensive scholarship that the brazen statue was a crucial element of the remedy. Yet the puzzle remained.

  Despite my wretched nocturnal existence, I resolved never to use my unnatural ability again, fearing that each use only served to spread Adramelech’s infestation of my immortal soul.

  But through the toilsome years, I knew only failure and regret, until I convinced myself that the only way out was by the fiend’s own hand.

  ___

  There was something troubling about the boy’s voice. Both haunting and familiar, it rumbled above the din of the boisterous pub like an echo in the crag lands. Under the guise of youth, it carried the weight of eternity on sonorous and ethereal wings. Of love and of loss twisted with a sense of despair in some cruel and arcane concoction not birthed of the natural world.

  The pub’s denizens made merry, drowning their earthly worries in the false mirth of fermented barley. Each year, I came here to think, to reflect on the bargain. For thirty years I had come to commemorate the anniversary, finding solace that I still had more time. But today was different. Today, I sensed that the butcher’s bill was due.

  “Logan,” the man-child said, the ken of my name betraying his deception of innocence. There was power in the knowing of names, but that power had long been lost to the kindred of men.

  A storm was brewing outside. The smell presaging the coming of rain wafted into the pub each time another poor soul entered the establishment. If you were old like me, you could feel it in the hollows of your knees. The void of the space betwixt flesh and bone coupled with the creaking pain of age. The hackles on my narrow neck rose in warning to the gathering maelstrom.

  What most didn’t know or realize was that another tempest was brewing. It had been building for three decades. And tonight, it would discharge its vast malevolence.

  Girding for the inevitable, I swigged my whiskey in one last pathetic attempt to preserve my mortality. I then turned to regard my night caller.

  “Can’t say I’m pleased to see you, Adramelech, but I’m sure you understand why.”

  The child nodded in a manner unlike a child. Its smile taunted and tore at my soul. I could feel it rattle inside me like a rat caught in a cage with a serpent.

  “Logan, let us speak of less unpleasant things. It’s true that your soul is now mine to rend. But you still have free will. What if I were to offer you a way to repay your debt that would free you of your obligation?”

  I knew with every fiber of my being not to trust this spawn of the abyss. But hope was a powerful thing. As the autumn of my life fast approached, the horror of harvesting the rotten fruit of a dying tree had become more real.

  “Say on,” I said.

  Adramelech smiled, his eyes conveying an unsettling malice. “All I require is one final task. After that, I will consider your debt paid in full.”

  I took a deep breath, downed my whiskey, and said, “Tell me more.”

  ___

  I didn’t understand why this infernal thing wanted to be encased in the statue, but I was only too happy to oblige. If I could broil the beast inside the boy by burning the boy, I wouldn’t hesitate, especially to save my own soul.

  So, as instructed, I hoisted the child who was not a child into the bronze statue and sealed it. I placed the brazier behind the statue, loaded it with coals, and heated it.

  I thought about my freedom as the heat began to rise and fill the air with the scent of steaming charcoal. I wondered if this doom would forever be my shadow, stalking me to the grave in a life that ultimately offered neither freedom nor security. Would I ever escape Adramelech’s choking grasp?

  I stepped backward as the process of thermal conduction radiated heat throughout the hollow statue.

  The child screamed.

  My gut lurched. A wave of guilt flooded my consciousness, blotting out the influence of my rational mind. Instinct told me Adramelech no longer enthralled the boy, but I couldn’t be sure. And was it really worth my immortal soul?

  I panicked. The entity had made me its agent of evil. This child would suffer and die because of me.

  Wind swirled in the draftless room. I shivered. Ink-dark, the smoky essence slithered through the dank air and hovered before me.

  Adramelech was here.

  A vision of the perverted peacock appeared in my mind’s eye. The thing cackled at me. It had subverted my free will, twisting it to its own maleficent ends.

  “So much for free will,” Adramelech whispered from the space in-between life and death, from a twilight realm where entities beyond the ken of humanity dwelled.

  The child’s earsplitting shrieks became more urgent. The strangely sweet smell of burning flesh made my mouth water, evoking an unsettling feeling as I listened to him howl inside the statue.

  “Do you recognize the child?” Adramelech hissed from the ether.

  I shook my head.

  “He is the orphaned son of the man you threw in the well.”

  What had I done? What kind of a monster had I become?

  And then the idea came to me, a spark of salvation in a sea of suffering. Adramelech had never taken away the power it had granted me.

  So I possessed the boy, shouldering his agony in one final defiant display of free will, completing the circle—master becomes boy, boy becomes master, and master becomes boy again.

  A serpent swallowi
ng its own tail.

  And so I burn.

  <<====>>

  AUTHOR’S STORY NOTE

  “Adramelech” is based on a Mesopotamian sun god akin to Moloch. In its various incarnations, Adramelech has often been depicted as having a human body, a mule’s head, and a peacock’s tail. The demon has been associated with human sacrifice, specifically the practice of burning children in sacrificial rites. Adramelech has appeared in two major catalogs of demons including The Lesser Key of Solomon and The Dictionnaire Infernal. The former was an anonymous grimoire compiled in the mid-seventeenth century from sources several centuries older and consists of five volumes. The first of these, the Ars Goetia, includes descriptions of seventy-two distinct demons. The latter tome is The Dictionnaire Infernal, a book on demonology composed by Jacques Auguste Simon Collin de Plancy and published in 1818. References to Adramelech have also appeared in the Bible (2 Kings 17:31) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

  In crafting this story, I fused many of Adramelech’s attributes referenced in this source material with some of my own additions, particularly Adramelech’s ability to possess others and to grant that power to others. This story is ultimately about whether we truly possess free will and, if so, what one man would be willing to sacrifice in order to preserve it.

  ULTRA

  DANIEL MARC CHANT

  From The Offering:

  Daniel Marc Chant & J.R. Park

  Sinister Horror Company

  ‘Death or glory!’ bellowed the Sergeant Major, a square-jawed, barrel-chested brick outhouse of a man whose volume level never fell below eleven. He was in Wilbur Edgar’s face, filling his vision with tombstone teeth and eyes that bulged so much they looked ready to pop. ‘Ain’t no way you’re coming back from this one, Private Edgar, but at least you’ll die a man.’

  ‘With all due respect, Sergeant Major,’ Wilbur responded. ‘I will come back. I always do.’

  The world dissolved into something resembling multicoloured water being sucked into a vortex. When it had sorted itself out, Wilbur was lying on his stomach, surrounded by rubble and burning buildings.

  Like a penitent sinner, Captain Allen, clasping at his abdomen in a desperate attempt to keep his guts from spilling through a shrapnel wound that had condemned him to a painful and certain death, dropped to his knees in front of Wilbur.’