Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 2

by Wrath James White

  He began ignoring anything else that came through the mail that wasn’t from the RiverMan, and the disconnected telephone was soon tossed onto the collection of past-due bills and eviction notices piling on the kitchen floor.

  There was a pattern emerging in the evidence, slowly and gradually. He could see it now. The supposedly random murders in ’72 actually showed a geographical progression towards the south, a fact reinforced by the material supplied by the RiverMan. The crooked trail of bodies cut a path leading all the way from the rolling hills of Winter Haven to the historic avenues of Fort Myers. Marilyn seemed to be following the clarion call of wild forces back to a point of origin, like the gods of myth returning to their crowned kingdom atop Olympus. But where was she trying to go, and what home could possibly be waiting for her?

  Inside the RiverMan’s last package was a torn, underlined passage from a volume entitled The Diabolist’s Contagion. The writing of the unnamed author was cryptic, the page shattered with mildew:

  “For where else might the world turn upon the brink of destruction but the birth canal of its first sin, the swamp from where man was formed in the image of his Father with the Red Blade? It is not to the dust we must return, but to the broken black waters of our creation.”

  Suddenly, it all became quite clear. There wasn’t much time left. Using the last bit of his meager savings, the Editor bought the first clunker he spotted on a used car lot and was soaring south on I-95 before the landlord of the duplex and the policeman accompanying him even arrived at the front door.

  The Editor steers the Impala to the edge of the marshy wood just as the radiator sends its last gasping vapors into the air. His fists shake on the wheel. Bloody rapids roar through his brain. He has made it: the blessed empire, the Promised Land …

  The Everglades.

  A million and a half acres of restored wilderness spread across the state’s lower jaw like a primal scar. Even with a history of excessive human tampering, the land retains a remote, sacred quality. It is here in this fetid bestiary that he knows he will find her. His ghost; his witch; his messiah.

  The night envelops him in a damp stranglehold as he steps out of the car. Flesh tingling, he hurtles forward, crashes through the hardwood hummock. He is well out of the national park’s range. There is no well-stamped path or wooden walkway for him to follow here, only the devouring magnetism pulling him ahead, dictating his course.

  Fat mosquitoes swarm in droves, greedily feasting on his exposed skin as he pushes aside the thick, cloying vegetation. He crushes the scrapbook against his chest and runs as fast as his aching legs can carry him across the squelching earth. Sweat pours down his face, soaks the shirt to his back. His breath comes out in short, ragged bursts. A scalding dagger begins to turn in his chest.

  Not now. For God’s sake, not now.

  The fingers gripping the scrapbook are starting to numb when he sees a dazzle of flame behind a stand of slash pine. The ceremonial odor of woodsmoke spurs him on, and when he emerges from the brush into the sawgrass prairie on the other side he witnesses the scene before him in all its black majesty.

  A massive bonfire serves as fierce sun to the swamp’s dank universe. Its dancing light gleams off the ebony bones of the hearses that encircle it, their yawning trunks spilling forth desiccated caskets. Their occupants are now scattered amidst the group of revelers present, cradled in the arms of a dancer, pinned in the tall grass underneath the weight of a passionate lover. Howls of ecstasy and cries of shame rend the air. Sharp-beaked owls battle over tawny ropes of muscle. The movements of the revelers are jagged and ungainly. Through the glare of the fire the Editor sees what clothing they wear, if any, is shredded and burnt, marked with wounds long dried and scabbed, now festering. Underneath the heady odor of spilled blood and brackish water, he detects another smell. It is the unmistakable perfume of rot.

  A hand grasps his shoulder. He turns and stares into the face of a hollow-cheeked old man. The man’s other hand is being held by a young girl in plaid dress and knee-high socks. She wears no shoes, stares blankly into the roaring fire. The circuit of scorch marks on the man’s scalp is complemented by the necklace of dirty fingerprints worn by his escort.

  “Do not fear,” the old man whispers to him. “I am Jesus Christ, and I am here to deliver you unto salvation.”

  He guides the Editor around the bonfire, past the corpulent transvestite hugging his new pair of still-warm breasts to his chest, past the hooded executioner carving his sign into the back of a man shrieking from his bonds.

  “Some of them are not satisfied with the cadavers,” the old man explains. “They require a more dangerous kind of game. Old habits are hard to abandon, even after all this time. Isn’t that right, Gracie?” He shakes the girl’s hand but she doesn’t respond. The old man’s smile fades as he looks back to the Editor. “She cannot speak because I took her tongue. I cut it out of her little mouth with a knife and fried it and ate it all up. Now her voice belongs to me.”

  The girl turns and regards the Editor with her vacant gaze, parts her lips as if to cry out and reveals only a tiny darkness. Head rushing, the Editor stumbles away from them, dropping the scrapbook. He reaches to pick it up, and a stinging arc in his side sends him to his knees. Panting, he grasps feebly after the book. The gentle touch lights on his shoulder again.

  “You’ve been asking yourself the same question your entire life. Are we gods, or monsters? As if the two were any different. My Father was the greatest monster of them all. He stabbed holy needles into my groin and used them to pin me to the cross. He took what He wanted, like He took that tight little Mary. And then He begat me, His little bastard monster, only to kill me. But look at your art, your paintings, your myths. All the great gods devour their young.”

  The Editor tries to escape his companion’s grip but, seeing the old man’s drawn face, follows his gaze out to the prairie ahead. They look upon a great and sweeping void. It is still the prairie in appearance, but there is a coldness teasing the edges of his heart, a thermonuclear charge of pain and longing irradiating all sense of the familiar. In whispering grass and stagnant water he sees gray twists of human carrion rising up from the mud, giving vent to unheeded torments with supplicating hands and gaping maw. The sound they make is the sound of mothers crying over closed caskets, of screaming husbands grown fat on stifled rage at the thought of their ravaged wives, of electronic static drowning out the wild pleas for help that come from the courtyard, the alley, the room down the hall. It is a sound that both fills and empties the air.

  It all washes over him in a ceaseless wave, but the Editor is only vaguely disturbed to find that it leaves no mark. Soon even the teasing cold at his heart is gone. The revelers’ bonfire keeps him comfortably warm. He looks back to the prairie and watches a vision make its way towards him.

  She walks among the rows in the distance, a bloodshot membrane twitching forward at an unnatural pace, a symphony of color: red shroud, white fang, golden eye, a withered lightning bolt in her hair the only concession to time. Tumbles of paper blow across the prairie, catching in snags of dead grass. He realizes that they are MISSING posters, prom queens and store managers and vacationing retirees grinning from old family photos, each one curling with flame as she trods upon them, their ashen deaths eliciting another eruption of cries from the choir of gray phantoms. She comes upon the three of them like a dark angel gracing the manger. Her mouth is a gnawed, unwavering scar; her gimlet eyes and the old man speak for her.

  “You and your fellows have done well so far,” the old man croaks. “But it still falls short. There’s only so much power to be found in your cinema, your novelties, your ceaseless recycling of crimes long shorn of their heat. It isn’t enough. To your generation we remain nothing but fairy tales.” He spits the last two words.

  “What we need is someone to take up the call, to spread the word of our good works.” His palsied claw digs deeper into the Editor’s skin, drawing blood, but the kneeled man does not
flinch. “We need the world to know that we are not history. We need it to know that we live.” The old man shakes with unchecked hunger. “We need its fear.”

  A dry wind sweeps across the prairie, blowing smoke and bits of stubborn anatomy from the bonfire. The revelers surround them now, their stench monstrous, black smiles crowned with maggots. The Editor feels a great weight shift inside of him, a leviathan passing under the vessel of his soul. The vision moves for the first time since favoring him with her presence. The straight razor in her hand catches the light.

  He can hear the smile in the old man’s words. “What we need … is a prophet.”

  The Editor feels the steel blade work its way into his mouth, stab into his gums.

  The old man leans in close, rank breath curdling his ear. “We’ve made the call. Will you answer; will you open the door?”

  In that moment a kaleidoscopic reel of images flickers across the Editor’s memory: black and white TV demons; scripture in the closet; virgin mother’s lashing; pillaged copies of Carnage Nation; the nonbeliever running from his room; photos whispering darkroom promises, loving him, holding him …

  A single tear whispers across the Editor’s cheek. He closes his eyes, and nods.

  There is no pain in the marking. His body buckles with orgasm as the razor spreads him open. The heat from the fire surges through the slits of his new mouth; he smiles as warm wine flows down his chin, spatters his chest. He cups his hand to it, strains the blood onto his head, a scarlet baptism.

  The Editor picks the scrapbook up from the ground, marking the paperboard cover with a gory handprint. It is as fitting a talisman as any for this new Bible.

  The revelers coo and hum as the Editor walks through their moldering ranks, a priest amongst lepers. Blessings pass from his wet lips to their bowed heads. He holds the scrapbook aloft and an ugly cheer rises up from the congregation. She is at his side now, smiling her approval, the razor glimmering red under the cloudy moon.

  The little girl steps alongside the old man, her eyes two charcoal smears. Though tongueless, she makes an idiot whimper that the Editor recognizes. He knows all too well the sound of cries for mother going unanswered, and he suddenly despises her for her weakness. The old man beams at him from across the fire; his jubilant grin is runny with slick juices.

  In the distance, skeletal hands pound on drumheads of taut skin. The revelers take up their knives, their cudgels, their barbwire garrotes and turn back to the victims by the fire. They advance slowly, savoring every step. The victims try dragging themselves to the safety of the woods, moaning quietly. The Editor can’t help laughing to himself. He knows they will not get away. None of them will.

  The Editor will not record the names of the victims. Their lives are unimportant, and history has never favored the conquered. Turning to a fresh page, he prepares to write down his testament in blood. A requiem of screams shudders from the throat of the prairie as the new gods raise their weapons. The Editor watches what comes next.

  He does not look away.

  <<====>>

  AUTHOR’S STORY NOTE

  This story was written in response to a call for submissions to MP Johnson’s and Sam Richard’s second tribute anthology from Weirdpunk Books, Hybrid Moments. It gave me the opportunity to reunite with the music of the Misfits and listen to the songs as closely as I did during my first exposure to them. I shuffled through their discography trying to find the track that would serve as the main inspiration for my piece. I was surprised when songs that I initially thought would instantly jog a story in my head, songs like “Last Caress” or “Ghouls Night Out,” only left me with dim impressions. Nothing concrete, nothing that I could see shaping into a narrative.

  It was with some further surprise that I found myself tuning into “American Nightmare,” the final track on the band’s Legacy of Brutality album, and seeing the pieces starting to lock into Tetris formations in my head. For starters, I just liked that phrase: American nightmare. White picket fences mounted in grounds soaked with blood. Very Lynchian. While the serial killer is by no means an American invention, the cult of the serial killer is something that has always seemed to me to be a homegrown movement. We can’t seem to get enough of them; just seeing that phrase on the cover of People Magazine the other week made its potency all too clear. It still has taboo-power, is still mythic. What does our fascination with murderers say about us? And where might it lead if we were to follow it? If you listen to the lyrics of Danzig’s rockabilly murder ballad, you might have an idea. Those three inverted nines don’t lie.

  MOTHER’S NATURE

  STEfANIE ELRICK

  From Cthulhusattva: Tales of the Black Gnosis

  Editor: Scott R Jones

  Publisher: Martian Migraine Press

  ______

  The man in the limousine wore a white Egyptian cotton shirt.

  It was the first clean thing I’d seen in a home saturated with slaughter and mud. No one came near my Uncle’s farm, not if they could help it, hence the reason I’d sat amongst the shattered parts of man and beast for so long. Pain was a chord that hummed through the air there, the bellowing of the animals heard for miles around.

  When he came, all was silent except for the soft purr of the engine as it approached. Generations of butchery had made my family more inbred than the cattle, now their limbs mingled indiscriminately with the livestock’s. No one else had heard the screams, mine or theirs; of that I was certain.

  He emerged from the backseat with a cool, fluid grace. Black sun-kissed skin and wide burnished eyes. The menthol freshness of the vehicle’s interior hit me even from a distance, a synthetic tang that stung my nostrils and made me raise my gaze from the pattern I was tracing in the dust. Entrails squelched underneath designer shoes yet he seemed indifferent to the scene. I’d never seen anyone so beautiful. Spotless. Immaculate. He seemed to gleam. Lifting my taut little body up with long strong arms he placed me in the car. I curled like a clenched fist into its viscid leather and slept for the first time in days.

  It’s difficult to remember exactly what happened after leaving the farm. I have flashes of remembering, things that collide and combine in gusts of red and green, moments resistant to coherence. We traveled for days, or hours, and when I woke I was in a doll-filled room that smelt like antiseptic. Clamping my chin he pushed green mush past my lips and the mess I made resisting irritated him. He scrubbed at the stains on my chest ‘til my skin was red raw and I wailed like a baby. He never spoke a word. Trauma ricocheted through my system still and I fought like a cat held in a bucket. I’d resigned myself to death days earlier, so eating seemed like a meaningless task, another invasion of my will.

  I do remember that he bathed me, holding me down in a high backed copper tub ‘til I stopped struggling and calmed down. He cared for my body and quieted my chattering mind in all the practical ways a person can. Eventually his silent resilience put me at ease. I let him scrub away the years of neglect.

  Finally sitting still, resigned not to kick or bite anymore, I noticed that I was bleeding, heavily, not from a wound but from my womb. I watched the haemoglobin snaking from my body, mingling delicately with the fresh clean water. How much finer it was than the lurid splatters that streaked the barn. None of us were squeamish, my cousins included, but when they’d seen my Uncle splayed open like an autopsy, wriggling in Its grip, they’d bolted like heifers.

  I roughly pushed my fingers inside the soft mounds of my labia, deliberately not thinking of their blood but my own. He continued to wash the gore from my hair as aspic strands of jellyfish tendrils hung from my fingers. All that blood, all that death, and nobody had survived but me.

  When I slept that night I wove a patchwork of dreams. My mother came to me, covered in mildew and smiling through a mouthful of foam. She’d been sharpening her fingertips with a whetstone and grit and I marveled at her cleverness, eagerly doing the same. We sat in silence, honing our bones to pointed pins, threading our hands with muscle st
ripped from her thighs. Overhead the sky was dying, brown oil slicks spreading across its surface. Time to start again. She promised me that nothing ever goes to waste and we stitched oceans to oceans as the clouds dropped like bombs. Floundering monsters opened heavy lids, then clambered on the land like babies learning to walk, dragging blankets of crimson waves behind them. Every gill-less thing that ever was suffocated under that mantle and we sat patiently, watching them sink, our fingers twitching in anticipation.

  The next time I woke he took me to his workshop, a large room with small windows high above my head, covered with collages of animals and people. A sink and metal table stood in the corner with various knives and tools nailed to the wall, above piles of uncut leather. Jars of murky embalmed things filled long shelves. A velvet curtain separated the studio from a shop, dimly lit and full of golden oval mirrors. A distinct white circle with arrows spiked from its perimeter was painted on the floor and adorned the window that overlooked a busy street, idyllically flanked by oak trees. Mannequins stood in rows with stuffed animal heads perched on willowy plastic necks. Clothing hung from their gaunt physiques at dramatic angles, garnished with pearlescent gemstones. The shop felt more like a museum than a boutique.

  “Do you know what this is?” he asked, taking my hand and ignoring my flinches as he ran it over a coat.

  I shook my head, as startled by his question as the sudden grip of his hand.