Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 2

by Wrath James White

  CARRY-OUT CONFESSIONAL

  The man at the counter looked at me strange. He asked if I was planning on killing someone, and I smiled as I looked down at the rope and the gasoline, at the shovel and the nails. I told him not today, and he laughed as he handed me my receipt. Tomorrow is another day.

  PSYCHODRAMA

  There’s an unspoken competition between psychos, a silent battle that’s similar to the fights of most teenage boys. Everyone wants their knife to be bigger than their friend’s, and in the end, most of them just lie to impress the others, to live out a fantasy. In fact, most of them have barely even killed.

  THE TAILOR

  I’ve been watching you, and I can see that you’re the type of person I could wear. Your skin, it’s soft, subtle, more enticing every time you walk past me. I find myself mentally sizing your chest, counting the inches between your shoulders, the centimeters between your thighs. You’re going to be a perfect fit.

  UNDERWATER WARDROBE

  My wardrobe is a pair of cement shoes and a pocket full of change. I should have listened. A fish sucks on my nose but you can’t see my tears, not in this garbage heap of an ocean where bodies decompose and all my prayers are wet. I would have preferred the severed horse head.

  SELF-CANNIBALISM

  Last night I dreamt that I didn’t have any legs, that I pulled my half-severed corpse around the apartment like a zombie when my stomach started to growl. When I made it to the refrigerator, there were two legs of meat on the shelf. Thighs were always my favorite, even when they were my own.

  ORAL FIXATION

  Sometimes I think about eating my teeth, but I’m not a dentist, so I’m not sure how to extract them so they won’t lose their gritty taste. I called around, but no professional would willingly remove 32 healthy fangs, so I ripped them out myself. My blood acted as a nice Merlot with my meal.

  DIAMONDS ARE A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND

  The rain sounded like diamonds falling against my window. I opened the door and walked outside, eager to bathe in the crystal waters, but the droplets cut my skin like sharpened teardrops. The gems dug their way inside me and I stood there, shining like a fallen star as I bled rubies over the yard.

  FEEDING THE GARDEN

  I noticed a new flower in my garden yesterday. It was purple and yellow and it smelled like lilac and honeysuckle. When I bent down to touch it, it bit me, each petal full of a hundred mouths and a thousand teeth. I smiled and fed my garden, my blood turning its yellows to oranges.

  MY GIRLFRIEND WANTED TO SCISSOR

  My girlfriend wanted to scissor, so I took off her pants and pushed the blades up her slit. She screamed, and she always screamed when she liked it, so I kept pumping her full of metal until she came in waves of cherry and tears. Afterwards, she slept like a baby. I wore her out.

  BLOOD BATH

  The sky rained cherry-sized droplets that stabbed my eyes when I woke up this morning. I slept outside because I liked the coldness of the ground. It chilled the heat running through my body, and the red clouds that hung above me made me thankful that I wasn’t the only one painted crimson that day.

  WOMEN ARE TAUGHT TO BE SILENT

  He told me we couldn’t talk for two months, and I nodded my head. Bit my lip. I went in my bedroom and opened the wooden box I kept on my dresser. I took out the needle and I sewed my lips together so I could practice being silent, because effort is attractive in relationships.

  THE ANGELS ARE GONE

  Night-time is the worst. My demons speak loudest then, convincing my heart that I’m alone while my mind battles to tell me I’m in good company, but the truth is, my angels left long ago. They dragged me into the sea, like Annabel Lee, and every night I jump off of cliffs when I sleep.

  PHANTOM PAIN

  Sometimes I like to imagine that I’m dead, that no one can see me here, that the pain I feel is akin to an amputee’s agony over a phantom limb. I try to imagine myself without a heart, try to become a sociopath in the off-hours when the world is asleep and I’m still living.

  THE NEW FLESH

  It’s cold in my apartment tonight, but that’s what happens when you take off your skin suit. You freeze. You shake, tremble. It’s therapeutic. Hydrotherapy without the water. I tore it all off a week ago. Threw it in the trash. Since then, I haven’t touched anyone. And most importantly, no one has touched me.

  MY SOUL BELONGS IN HELL

  There’s a distance there that goes beyond miles, and my mind wanders lost highways and off-road sites while I look for you even though I already know where you are. It’s a devil’s game, a crossroads, and I sell my soul for a chance at love even though I’ve damned myself to hell twice before.

  THE PUNISHMENT OF ABSTINENCE

  My body is a festival of sin. That’s why he won’t touch me. He knows, knows that I am walking filth, a culmination of lust and regret. My flesh, tortured with invisible scars, weeps under the blankets at night. I wrap my arms around my chest. Every time he doesn’t touch me, the Devil laughs.

  WHATEVER HELPS YOU SLEEP AT NIGHT

  Every night at 2:37 a.m., I walk outside my apartment complex, naked, and I stand in the middle of the road and scream. I scream loud enough to wake up my neighbors, long enough that my voice goes hoarse. One time, I almost got hit by a car. I slept better than usual that night.

  GIRLS WATCH THEMSELVES CRY

  When I cry, I like to watch myself in the mirror to see if I look pretty. Sometimes I look tragic and beautiful while the mascara runs down my face and my cheeks turn red. Other times, I look ugly. Defeated. So I practice—so I cry—every day until I get it for you.

  HOMEMADE BOTTLE FULL OF VOODOO

  There’s a bottle of red wine that sits on my shelf buried behind books I haven’t read. It’s filled with pins and needles, with rosemary and sage. I sealed it with the wax that I dripped from a lit red candle as I whispered wishes and prayers, curses and hate. I like knowing it’s there.

  I DO NOT

  When I wake up in the morning, I hear your voice telling me all the words I’ve been waiting to hear. You tell me you’re sorry, that you should have tried harder, loved more. But my tongue is sandpaper and I choke on the marriage proposal that I’ve been practicing in my bedroom every night.

  NAME-CALLING IS BODY TRAUMA

  I scratch words on my arms to remind me of who I am: monster, child, victim. I look at them every day while I stand naked in front of the mirror wondering how to dress my pain. My identity is my body, but my body is a canvas of your words. Speak kindly to me.

  THE OTHER ME

  I disassociate when it gets dark. My Hyde takes over my Jekyll, and I, myself, become a different person. This other girl, she’s better. Her eyes are dead, her lips blue, but she is confident, unafraid. I like her more than the version of myself that walks during the day. I wish it was night.

  THAT NIGHT ON REPEAT

  I try to sleep but the nightmares come faster than usual. I drink valerian root in my tea, rub lavender on my temples. Nothing helps. I can still see the house, still feel your breath. Sometimes, when God is feeling exceptionally cruel, I can hear your voice as if you’re sitting right next to me.

  INSIDE MY DESK DRAWER

  I keep a notebook of all my bad memories. It helps me write poetry, and it keeps the pain fresh, makes the hurt still feel real—as if I could ever fake it—and I’ve noticed, lately, that it’s dangerously full, so I made a notebook of blessings instead. God laughed. I threw it away.

  I-71 NORTH

  I drive until my head starts to shake, until my eyes twitch, until I see the dead girl on the side of the road. It’s 1:00 a.m. I’ve been going for two and a half hours, but she’s been here much longer than me. Usually, she watches me drive by. Tonight, she extends her hand.

  A EULOGY FOR MYSELF, NOT YET DEAD

  This is me telling you goodbye. This is me leaving. This is me walking away, saying farewell, wishing you the best as you move on with life. Except this isn’t me disappea
ring. I’m imprinting myself in your memory, committing myself to this page. I live forever in ink, in the black letters of this eulogy.

  <<====>>

  AUTHOR’S STORY NOTE

  Blood. Body Dysmorphia. Amputation. I’m fascinated by the beautiful grotesque, by the welcoming of pain, by the imperfections of self and what that means in regards to the human body and mind, and as such, my work tends to writhe along the sidelines of cuts and bruises, hack-jobs and botched surgeries. I’m fascinated by anatomy, a fictional female-Frankenstein if you will, and despite centuries of doctors searching for ways to heal our meat sacks, both physically and mentally, it is my job to peal back the flesh and show you what lies beneath the body suit when we can’t, or prefer not to, stitch ourselves back together again. I ask readers, what is really living inside the rotted, damaged parts of our brain? What happens when compulsion and phantom pain become too much to bear, or when a broken heart starts to peek through the skin? Madness is an illusive awareness, a heightened state of fear and worry, and it is my pleasure to guide you through it on this side of bloodletting.

  AUTHOR BIOS

  MICHAEL ARNZEN is an award-winning author of horror and dark suspense fiction, a poet, and an English professor. His trophy case includes four Bram Stoker Awards and an International Horror Guild Award for his often funny, always disturbing stories. The best of these appear in the Bram Stoker Award-winning career-length retrospective, Proverbs for Monsters, which Dread Central called “a guided tour of insanity and the macabre, with a few moments of touching grace combined with repulsive terror … [which] serves to document the evolution of a great writer.”

  Arnzen holds a PhD in English from the University of Oregon (where he researched his non-fiction book, The Popular Uncanny) and he is presently a Professor at Seton Hill University, where he teaches horror and suspense fiction in the country’s only graduate program in Writing Popular Fiction (http://fiction.setonhill.edu).

  Arnzen resides near Pittsburgh, PA, with his wife of many years, Renate, and a brood of deranged cats. His website is http://gorelets.com

  JASPER BARK is infectious—and there’s no known cure. If you’re reading this then you’re already at risk of contamination. The symptoms will begin to manifest any moment now. There’s nothing you can do about it. There’s no itching or unfortunate rashes, but you’ll become obsessed with his books, from the award winning collections Dead Air and Stuck on You and Other Prime Cuts, to cult novels like The Final Cut and acclaimed graphic novels such as Bloodfellas and Beyond Lovecraft.

  Soon you’ll want to tweet, post and blog about his work until thousands of others fall under its viral spell. We’re afraid there’s no way to avoid this, these words contain a power you are hopeless to resist. You’re already in their thrall and have from the moment you clicked onto this page. Even now you find yourself itching to read the rest of his work. Don’t fight it, embrace the urge and wear your obsession with pride!

  MARVIN BROWN is the author of suspense novels Jigsaw Man and Covet, as well as the nonfiction work The House the Lord Built. He is a regular contributor to Insomnia & Obsession magazine. Marvin lives in Akron, Ohio, with his wife and two daughters. Visit his website, www.marvincbrown.com, for book excerpts, blog essays and book reviews. Marvin’s movie reviews are available on the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com). Follow him on Twitter: marvbrown9 and Instagram: marvincbrown

  CHRISTA CARMEN’s short fiction has appeared in WolfSinger Publications’ Just Desserts, the DreamFusion Press anthology, The Book of the Macabre, Devolution Z Horror Magazine, The J.J. Outré Review, Jitter Press, Literally Stories, Fiction on the Web, Corner Bar Magazine, pennyshorts, and Dark Fire Fiction. “Four Souls of Eve” was published by Frith Books as a standalone eBook, and is soon to appear in their All Hallows’ anthology, and “The One Who Answers the Door” took Best in Genre for Thriller/Horror in wordhaus’ Trick or Treat Fall Story Contest. Additional work is forthcoming in the Mad Scientist Journal and the speculative fiction ezine, Anotherealm. Christa works at Pfizer in Clinical Trial Packaging, and at a local hospital as a mental health clinician. She lives in Rhode Island with her husband and a beagle who rivals her in stubbornness.

  ADAM CESARE is a New Yorker who lives in Philadelphia. His books include Mercy House, Video Night, The Summer Job, and Tribesmen. His work has been praised by Fangoria, Rue Morgue, Publishers Weekly, Bloody Disgusting, and more. His titles have appeared on “Year’s Best” lists from outlets like Complex and FearNet. He writes a monthly column for Cemetery Dance Online.

  MATTHEW CHABIN is a writer from Portland Oregon. He worked as a journalist in the US Navy and studied literature and philosophy at Southern Oregon University. His work has appeared in Gravel: A Literary Journal, Southern Pacific Review, and O-Dark Thirty: A Veteran’s Writing Project. He currently lives in Nagano Prefecture of Japan with his wife and two cats.

  His story, Father of Dread, originally appeared in Cthulhu Lies Dreaming, an anthology from Ghostwoods Books.

  JOSE CRUZ is an author and freelance writer whose work has appeared in print and online venues such as Nightscript, Turn to Ash, bare•bones e-zine, The Terror Trap, Classic-Horror, and Paracinema Magazine. He lives in southwest Florida with his wife and a very furry child.

  The first thing ANDREW DARLINGTON had published was the poem “Anthem For A Lost Cause” in Barnsley-based “underground”-arts magazine Sad Traffic (no.5, May 1971). It was also the first poem he’d ever written. It name-checks Homer’s Odysseus, and the Edgar Rice Burroughs Martian Tales establishing the recurring technique of using the trash Junk Culture of cheap pulp SF (and loud Rock ‘n’ Roll) to reference personal issues—the “lost cause”, of course, being himself! Over 3,000 published items follow, extending across a widthband from Music Journalism to Erotica, from closely-researched historico-features on Science Fiction to interviews with culture icons William Burroughs, the Kinks, Kurt Vonnegut, Stone Roses, Byrds, Craig Charles, Peter Green (Fleetwood Mac), Robert Plant (Led Zeppelin), Cabaret Voltaire, Carolyn Cassady (Kerouac’s lover), EC Tubb, Jack Dee, and many more (a selection collected into I Was Elvis Presley’s Bastard Lovechild, Headpress, 2001).

  He was born 18th September 1947—to coincide with the Roswell UFO Incident in New Mexico, and pubesced through the fantastic graphic-strip exploits of “Jet-Ace Logan” (a SFictional hero he later scripted for). Fiction was the first form—in New English Libraries Stopwatch anthology (editor: George Hay, January 1975) through multiple magazine and hard/softback appearances around the world (including German and Flemish translations) to the 2015 The Mammoth Book Of Sherlock Holmes Abroad (editor: Simon Clark, 2015). In fact, space restrictions mean that elaboration of the Alternative Cabaret “Stand-Up Poet” work, the vinyl records as part of UV Pop, editing Ludds Mill alternative-arts magazine, the Don’t Call Me Nigger: Sly Stone & Black Power biography (Leaky Boot Press, 2014), new fiction collection A Saucerful Of Secrets now available from Parallel Universe Publ. and poetry collection The Poet’s Deliberation On The State Of The Nation (Penniless Press http://www.pennilesspress.co.uk/books/poetdeliberation.htm). His website is: www.andrewdarlington.blogspot.com

  PAOLO DI ORAZIO, born in Rome, Italy, in 1966, is a writer, painter, drummer, and an HWA active member. He has published short novels, long fiction and comic books since 1987 in Italy. The very first splatterpunk author of his country, his first book raised a Parliamentarian scandal in 1990—for instigation of murder (My Early Crimes, Raven’s Head Press, 2015).

  In English, he published stories for Heavy Metal (2000-01), and Kipple (Dark Gates, with Bram Stoker Award Alessandro Manzetti, in 2014. The Monster, The Bad And The Ugly, anthology). His short novel Hell was recommended by Ellen Datlow in The Best Horror Of The Year Vol.7 (2014).

  STEFANIE ELRICK is a writer, artist and performer from Manchester. She’s toured fantasy stage shows with Hawkwind, The Levellers, The Age of Glass, Peaches Christ and others as well as devising the immersive LABOLIS theatre series. As a perf
ormance artist she’s blood-lined poetry into her skin, been strapped to a 12-foot spinning timepiece and escaped Houdini like out of mod-roc cocoons. Her written work has been published in Cthulhusattva: Tales of the Black Gnosis and she has lectured at Manchester University and Wimbledon Art College. She’s particularly fascinated by hybrids, shape-shifting and magic. www.stefanieelrick.com

  WILLIAM GRABOWSKI is the author of 9 books (ghostwriter of more), most recently the techno-thriller Infinity Point, media tie-in Castro’s Cadillac (from the screenplay by Michael Sayles, optioned for filming on September 12, 2016 by CuffLink Productions), Amazon bestseller Black Light: Perspectives on Mysterious Phenomena, and Traces of Oblivion—a collection of best short stories including his 2004 novel The Untold—a conspiracy thriller. Five years with World Fantasy Award-winner The Horror Show earned Grabowski a Best Writer nomination from SPWAO. Over 350 of his articles, essays, interviews and reviews have appeared on Forbes dot com, Philadelphia Business Journal digital edition, Hellnotes and elsewhere; in magazines Cemetery Dance, Beware the Dark, NPR-associated Wireless and others. He’s a popular guest on radio and podcasts, and a contributing editor with Library Journal, Metaphysical Circus Press’s See the Elephant, and JournalStone Publishing.