She Nailed a Stake Through His Head: Tales of Biblical Terror

by ed. Tim W. Lieder

  A whisper of a breeze comes in from a broken window, and tickles my eardrums: If you had not plowed with my heifer ye had not found out my riddle.

  “Sorry?” I turn, looking for the source of the noise. I expect to see a drunk mumbling to himself, but there is no one. Glancing over at the boys, I wonder if I could have overheard one of them, but they all face the walls, asleep in their ratty bags.

  Now shall I be more blameless than the Philistines, though I do them a displeasure.

  I jump, doing a half-slide on my seat.

  I’ve heard voices before. Oh, most certainly, I might be mad, but I think everyone does at one time or another. The static on the radio or the trickle of water through a radiator transforms into a flock of people all talking at once. Our minds struggle to make sense of nonsense, and so we take order where there is none. But, this voice is different. This sound is distinct and clear; I understand every word. Though I wait patiently, it does not reveal itself as the hum of a heating vent.

  I hug myself on the bench, clutching my purse tightly to my breasts.

  Who hath done this?

  The voice is so loud now, that it sounds as though it’s coming from the overhead speakers. The boys in the corner, however, remain asleep.

  I stand up on shaky knees and walk over to the ticket booth. The man behind the counter is balding, and in the traditional way, he’s combed a few long strands of the remaining hair over his pate. He wears a polyester tie and an equally stiff looking shirt. I ask him, “Did you announce something?”

  The man looks up from the leather-covered book he is reading and regards me. In the harsh light, his eyes reflect light, like a cat’s.

  “If you had not plowed with my heifer...” His voice is measured, even, and completely without county accent. I have heard this voice before.

  I back away slowly, keeping my eyes on the man behind the counter. He stares beatifically. His eyes glow silver, and his face takes on a strange smoothness, as if it is slowly being recast in porcelain. Finally, I can’t take it any more, and turning away, I break into a run.

  My heels click loudly in the nearly empty bus station. Crashing through the swinging doors, I burst outside. The cool evening breeze hits my face like a slap, and I stop to catch my breath. The darkness comforts me, along with the smell of the pavement after rain - familiar, normal. In a few minutes, I convince myself I just imagined the voices. Passing cars hiss on the rain-drenched streets. I reach out a hand to flag down a taxi.

  Headlights pass, but eventually an old-fashioned black taxi stops. The door swings open, and I step gingerly over the puddle in the gutter to sit primly in the back seat. The inside of the cab smells musty and faintly of old cigarette smoke.

  I pull the door shut firmly, and say, “Take me to Dumcree Manor.” I give the address of my father’s estate; I’m going home.

  “That’s a long way out,” the cabby says, looking back as if to check to see if I can afford the ride.

  “I know,” I say, showing him the wad of cash I stuffed into my purse before leaving Morrison’s house. I carry a lot of ‘mad money’ since my life with Morrison is unpredictable.

  Satisfied, the driver turns his attention to the road. I watch the streets of Londonderry roll past. Soon, we leave the city behind for country roads. My heart pounds less frantically in my chest and I think that, perhaps, I am finally free.

  My eyes register movement along the side of the road. Though the clouds have broken, the moonlight makes eerie, ghostly shadows out of the branches of trees. I am not sure, at first, if what moves just ahead of us is man or animal. I decide it must be a hitchhiker, possibly one of the braver foreign boys from the bus station.

  As the taxi passes the figure, I see his pale face. Our eyes meet through the streaked glass of the window, and I feel the old burn of Morrison’s dark glance. I blink, and the figure dissipates into the shadows of the forest, and is gone.

  “Leave me alone,” I whisper, but I doubt God listens to me. Did he listen to Judas or any of those he set up to take the fall? Even his only son was willing to believe him so capricious as to forsake him in the final hour.

  There are no answers to my question and I’m exhausted. I press the side of my head against the cool glass window. The put-put of the engine and the bumps along the street lull me to sleep. As my consciousness fades, I wonder fleetingly if I can ever truly hide from God’s watchful eye or the long arm of His vengeance.

  ***

  Fields of wheat are ablaze. Olive trees are consumed by fire. Howls of wounded animals assault the night air; the cries are so pitiful they sound like the wails of frightened babies. Morrison stands in the center of the blaze, though the fire doesn’t dare to touch him. Instead, it licks at his heels like a supplicant.

  In one fist, Morrison holds a squirming mass of fur and blood. It takes me a moment to realize he holds living foxes by their tails. In their panic, they tear and claw at each other. With the other hand, he sets their tails on fire. With a laugh, he lets them loose to run, howling, through the countryside. In his eyes I can see the fire...a fire that leaps out to grab me. I can feel its hotness on my skin, the sharp burn, then, the acrid smell of burning hair and flesh. I scream.

  He says: “Now I shall be more blameless than the Philistines shall, though I do them displeasure.”

  I wake up with a start in my childhood bed, the smell of smoke still curling around my nostrils. I rub my nose to banish it, but it lingers like an unwanted guest.

  A month has passed since I left Morrison. I did not expect him to try to find me, and he did not disappoint me in his disinterest. In fact, yesterday the news reported that he has taken up with a whore, some woman crazy about his hair. This, after he handed over the cache of arms, weapons he stole from a British barracks in order to make good on his promise. It seems I have gained nothing by my betrayal. I am still so little to him that he doesn’t even seek retribution.

  A shout comes from the courtyard. A cheer of a crowd follows it. I sit up, yawning. Isn’t it a bit early for polo?

  I get dressed slowly. The sun warms my cheek and pools in my lap. Despite the nightmare, I feel refreshed. Of course, I smile, rubbing the sheets of the bed and smelling sex; that might be because after so long I have finally found a man who touches me, who treats me as something more than furniture. A bore, the Windsor might be, but he is a kind man. I have had my fill of cruel rogues.

  The cries come again. Jumping into slacks, I can no longer resists the urge to see what the noise is about. I pull the curtains all the way open and my heart stops. Men are standing in the courtyard. Each has a can of gasoline, and the man standing in the middle of them on a soapbox holds a lighter.

  They are speaking, and though the voices should be garbled, I hear something of how Morrison wreaked his revenge after all, how he found out about my lover and, in a ‘jealous rage’, bombed an English village.

  I push the window open with shaking palms. The voices that come to me are measured, singsong.

  “Who hath done this?”

  “Samson, the son in law of the Timnite, because he had taken his wife, and given her to his companion.”

  “No,” I whisper, “Just leave me alone.”

  But, I know my plea falls on deaf ears yet again. Though His own hand sealed my fate, I am God’s enemy.

  Touching flame to gasoline, they set the house on fire.

  Swallowed!

  By Stephen M. Wilson

  …I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea…

  “The Call of Cthulhu”

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Chapter IV

  He wakes to the sound of gentle surf and the warm morning sun beating down on his almost bare back. Brushing his long, lank hair from his face, he opens his eyes and sees that he is laying facedown on an alabaster beach. He slowly raises himself to a sitting posit
ion to take in his surroundings. The beach stretches on for several leagues in either direction and on the far inland horizon, he can see the roof tops of a recognizable city. He had tried so hard to avoid this epicurean place, this poison city of madness, and as fate would have it, here he was on its charnel shore.

  He turns his gaze seaward. His jaw drops at what he sees. Lying several yards away, half in the surf and half on the beach, is a grotesque malignancy of fantastic nightmare. The monstrosity is the size of a temple and has gulls picking at its green gelatinous flesh; flesh that is covered with parasites. Its anthropoid outline is simultaneously an octopus, a dragon and a human caricature with a tentacled head surmounted on a grotesque and scaly body - sprouting rudimentary wings. The beast looks like a creature that could only have crawled from the thighs of his own mother. Within the mass of pulpy feelers, its massive mouth is ajar all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. A steaming path of gore putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish and other less describable things oozes from that cavern right to where he sprawls. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed past the polarizing miasma welling out from the sea-soaked perversion. Then memory hits him like a torrent and the last small vestiges of sanity finally leave him.

  Later in the afternoon, villagers begin to gather on the beach to gape at the leviathan.

  They have come to revel in the spectacle of your misery, taunts a familiar voice.

  Yet the spectators avoid contact with the sallow bedraggled man who wanders amongst them; maybe it is the fetid smell of vomit and rot that wafts from his body or maybe it is his physical deformities, the twitching third arm barely covered by strips of filthy cloth that dangles from the middle of his chest and the crimson scrotum that is swollen to the size of a pomegranate; whatever the reason, they turn away when he approaches. He is unaware that he looks nothing like the handsome, statuesque man who had started this journey only weeks earlier.

  He wanders away from the crowd and toward the city that awaits him - towards his destiny.

  For over a month, a month of strange days, he wanders the streets of the city raving in delirium.

  The end is near, you filthy, diseased heathens, the vile voice insinuates from within.

  "The end is near, you filthy, diseased heathens!" The man repeats, at the top of his lungs.

  He notices a queerness about the people of the city, whose predominant color is a grayish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid; while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four; their baying voices croaking and jabbering in some hateful guttural patois.

  One night he wanders into a dark alley and almost trips over the spread legs of a whore, who sits in the shadows on a mound of ash. She looks up at the man and grins, exposing diseased gums where teeth once hung.

  "Honey for my honey," she cackles.

  She is in a state of filth that rivals his own; topless, with small breasts that resemble shriveled figs. Her skirt is hiked up around her waist, and with both hands she morbidly and spasmodically claws in epileptic madness at her sex like a mongoose digging in the earth for snakes.

  "Manna, for that special hunger," she moans luridly while spreading her outer labia to expose the moist interior of her body; offering it up to the man. She cackles again.

  He starts to make his retreat from the alley, uninterested in the offer. One last comment from the harlot follows him.

  "Come to mother."

  Suddenly something snaps and an old familiar rage boils up inside forcing him to turn back towards the filthy whore.

  "That's it, sweetheart; all yours," she croons.

  For a brief moment, he sees not the Jezebel, but instead the creamy skin of his mother.

  He approaches her.

  “That’s it my darling,” she whispers through crimson lips, “You know how to please mommy.” She winks at him and is once more the harlot.

  He bends over her and embraces her head with his two normal hands, turning it upwards to face him. She closes her eyes and licks the pus from her scabby lips in expectation. He then swiftly shoves the fist of his third arm up into the waiting maw of her ravenous vulva. It is swallowed all the way to the elbow. She gasps and her eyes fly open.

  "Oh, you like it rough," she murmurs. "Give it to momma rough. Come on."

  He opens the fist that is buried inside of the woman's dank cave and grabs onto something that feels like a nest of sleeping snakes. His three arms work in unison and in one swift motion; he breaks the whore's neck and withdraws his arm from her wetness, his fist filled with her steaming still pulsating entrails.

  Fleas, lice, and all other manner of parasites exit the dying body, avoiding the sizzling blood and acrid urine that spews from her dehiscent cunt, making way for new insects that will soon take their place and make the corpse their home.

  He covers her with a piece of nearby tattered sackcloth and walks away.

  Another day dawns.

  It is time to leave this place, the voice orders him and he turns from her, making his way out of the city to a queer dark precipitous hill a few leagues to its east.

  There is no vegetation of any kind on that broad expanse, but only a fine gray dust of ash which no wind seems ever to blow about. The trees near it are sickly and stunted, and many dead trunks stand or lay rotting.

  There, under the instructions of the voice, he spends the morning gathering the dead branches with which he builds himself a rough shanty that faces the city. Then, like a true eremite, he plants himself in its shade and spends the remainder of the afternoon begging the voice to leave him alone; let him die.

  At dusk, he lies down and falls asleep. When he awakes he notices that, overnight, a kikayon has grown from one of the dead branches at the top of his shabby booth. He eats the gourd, which is filled with bitterness and sickness, even the smallest bite inducing disgust. But he knows that it is poison and death will be a boon. He grays and turns brittle then perishes in the night. Within days, he is crawling with worms.

  Chapter III

  The tempestuous sea swallows him swiftly with its whirling and churning - its weeds wrapping around his calves and wrists and head, pulling him down into its abysmal darkness. He sees bizarre and disturbing objects in the surging water. A smile passes across his face as he starts to lose consciousness because, for once, the voice is quiet.

  Thank you, he thinks, and then everything goes black.

  As he slowly regains consciousness, the first sensation that he becomes aware of is a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand open graves. In his childhood, back before the voice had come to rule his life, he had come upon a leper on the side of the road while returning from Joppa with a pot of fresh water.

  The man had been curled up in a fetal position wearing only a filthy scrap of cloth around his mid-section. The rest of his naked, exposed body had been covered in scabrous, oozing sores. The boy had stood there a moment, staring at the gaunt man in horrified fascination, wondering if he was dead or alive. He had then set down the clay pot and had snapped a twig off of a nearby bush to prod the bundle of diseased bones. When he had gotten within a foot of the leper and started to poke him, a small sound had escaped what was left of his lips. Thinking the man had spoken, the boy had leaned closer - mere inches - to the man's mouth to better hear what he was saying. Suddenly a loud belch had escaped the depths of the man's gut and erupted right into his face. He had jerked away, but not in time to escape the stench of rot and death that assaulted him. He had thrown up violently and ran home, the pot of water forgotten. In hindsight, he had figured out that the leper had been dead and what had happened that day was no more than the natural gas of decomposition.

  The od
or he now wakes to is something like that, yet much worse, mixed with the stench of rotting fish and just as he did on that long ago day, he retches several times; bringing up hot, chunky bile and seawater. This purging session goes on for several moments until he is finally reduced to dry heaves. Then the realization strikes him that he is in complete darkness.

  He begins moving his fingers along the surface where his aching body lies. What they encounter make no sense to him. Every surface that he touches feels hot, wet and fleshy and there is a broad impression of vast angles, the geometry abnormal and loathsome, something redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. It pulsates beneath his touch as if alive.

  He sits up and starts groping the dark space in front of him, leaning to the left and then the right, his hand once again encounters the fleshy surface - a wall of it. He drags his hand tentatively along the bumpy, pulsating wall dumbfounded. Then he begins to cry, for recollection is returning; he had been thrown into the raging sea. He remembers. Then he realizes that he must be dead and this, his hell.

  How long the hot tears chased each other down his dirty face; it could have been minutes or days. What finally dries them is the revelation that for once he is alone, truly alone; ever since he had been tossed overboard, the voice has been silent. With this solace, he curls up into a little ball and falls asleep, a sleep wrought with nightmarish memories.

  He is seven years old. He wakes from a peaceful sleep. It is the middle of the night. He wanders the house trying to discern the origin of the noise. He stops and listens. He hears it again, a faint, drawn-out moan. It is coming from his mother's room. He walks in that direction. He peeks into the room. His mother is naked and straddling a man who lies on his back. The man’s eyes are closed in ecstasy. His mother, who is bouncing ecstatically up and down on the prone man, turns to him. She grins. She licks her crimson lips and winks. He watches as the man tightens his grip on his mother’s hips and begins to convulse. A long moan of pleasure escapes his lips. It is his last, for the boy’s mother leans forward and rips the man’s throat out with her teeth. The dream shifts. He is five. He is playing in the back of the house. He falls asleep beneath a great olive tree west of the hut near the black swamp.