The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13

by Stephen Jones

  ‘No. It would blow you apart. You want the glands, which are in a pair, here. You cut across here – see? – and here. Though I don’t know why I’m telling you as you really shouldn’t try this at home, as it were.’

  ‘As it were.’

  ‘You need a tiny drop of olive oil.’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘Just the tiniest drop to activate the neurotoxin.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Have you got any? Any oil?’

  She crushed the segment she’d extracted from the scorpion and mixed it with a smear of olive oil. Then she asked me for a cigarette. She pinched a little of the tobacco from the end without breaking the paper, popped in her minute mix of God-knows-what and packed that in with the spare tobacco. Then she offered it to me to smoke.

  ‘You must be fucking jesting.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You first.’

  ‘There’s only one pop in it. The thing won’t share.’

  ‘Then you have it.’

  ‘If you insist. I was trying to give you a treat.’

  ‘A treat? What a pretty idea.’

  She shrugged, and made to light up the concoction for herself. She struck a match and some cast to her eye, perhaps a glance of contempt as she looked across the naked flame at me, made me ask, ‘What does it do?’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake. Do you want it or not?’

  I stepped up to her, snatched the cigarette from between her lips, and put it to my own mouth. I could taste her lips on the filter. I grabbed her hand to steady the flame and put it to the tip of the cigarette. Catchlight from the watery moon flared briefly in her eye. I puffed on the cigarette and wiped sweat from my brow.

  ‘Hold it deep in your lungs.’

  I took another draw but nothing happened. Again, and this time something sizzled in the ciggie’s red cone. I got a lungful, held it back; still nothing. Then my head cracked against the moon.

  When I say my head cracked against the moon, I mean that literally. There was a sound like a ten-thousand-decibel mosquito and my brain inflated at unconscionable velocity, rushing outward at the speed of light. My chin banged on the concrete and my skull smacked up against the moon. (Later I was to realize I’d fallen over, but I didn’t know that at the time.) The moon punctured and a shower of milky, resinous light drenched me, forming a brilliant membrane of ectoplasmic light around me, plugging my nostrils, my ears, my mouth. I could barely see through it. I had to hole the membrane to breathe and when I managed to drag the latex shroud off me my ears started popping to the cacophony of night sounds from my garden.

  I heard a million insects and other wildlife excavating the ground under the house. A wave of heat rolled over me and I knew that I was lying on my back on the ground and that Sasha was fellating me. Every time I tried to open my eyes, all I could see was gold and silver flora exploding. After a moment the flora resolved into the shape of Sasha working away at my cock.

  At last she hoisted herself onto my chest, her breasts quivering and I could see that from below her navel she was all scorpion and not woman at all. Half woman, half arachnid. She had human arms in place of the scorpion’s lobster-like claws, but her body trailed eight legs. I shuddered, and gagged. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and smiled at me. Then her venomous sting appeared over her head, quivering slightly, waving from side to side. I made to scream, but no sound would come. The sting dipped, lightly touched my forehead, and I passed out.

  When I came round it was morning and the bright sunlight lancing through the open shutters hurt my eyes. Someone clattered a pot in my patio kitchen. I swung my legs out of bed, and my vision suffered from a slight strobe effect. My dick was rather sore but apart from these things I felt quite well. I started to pull on some jeans that were lying on the floor; then, not wanting to find a scorpion in my tackle I remembered to shake them out. Sasha was outside making coffee. She must have been back to her own place because now she was wearing a simple black dress. She looked a little too much at home amongst my things.

  ‘Come here,’ she said, beckoning me off the patio. ‘Want to show you something.’

  I followed her down the path to the whitewashed breeze-block lavatory. She’d dislodged a stone near the base of the white wall. Two scorpions were locked in apparent combat in the small depression thus exposed. ‘Mating is a dangerous business when you’re a scorpion,’ Sasha said. I looked closer. The creatures had engaged claws and were twitching their tails together. At last they hooked on, each having effectively neutralized the other. Then they proceeded to tug each other back and forth across the stony earth. ‘The rocking makes him leave his seed on the ground and she picks it up on her belly.’

  ‘Know a lot about scorpions, don’t you?’ I said, scratching the back of my neck.

  ‘Sure do.’

  We went back up to the patio. She poured coffee and offered me a cigarette. I looked at it doubtfully.

  ‘There’s nothing in it. You don’t trust me an inch, do you?’

  An inch? I didn’t trust her the width of a brain synapse. Speaking of which, parts of my own brain were still tingling in aftershock. I found myself studying her surreptitiously, trying to see evidence of her nocturnal carapace. Though I will say she made decent coffee.

  Sasha was content to hang around all day, sunbathing topless on the apron of grass between my house and the sea, sipping my ouzo and flicking through my magazines. She swam, later trying to wash off the salt water under the ramshackle shower, but the water drum on the roof was empty and I wasn’t going to fill it up for her. No need – she did it herself, filling the bucket from the pump and climbing the ladder to empty the bucket into the drum. After showering she went around the place with a woman’s fixing-up eye. She tidied my kitchen and rearranged my hanging system for my pots and pans. She swept out the room. I didn’t like it one bit, but all I could do was growl into the encyclopaedia I was reading and feel the unwanted erection fattening inside my shorts.

  ‘Encyclopaedia? You read encyclopaedias?’

  ‘No. I read one encyclopaedia. This one.’

  She leaned over me, her nipple an inch from my mouth, like the swollen pip of a pomegranate. ‘You’re only on C!’ I don’t know why she was surprised. It was a large encyclopaedia. ‘What will you do when you get to the end?’

  ‘I’ll start again. Now leave me alone.’

  ‘What’s the last entry? Let’s go straight to the end.’

  ‘No.’

  But Sasha wouldn’t leave it. She teased and nudged me and tried to grab the book. At last I banged the encyclopaedia shut and grabbed her by the wrist, dragging her squealing from the patio into the room. Once inside I bent her over the bed and lifted her black dress over her head. Underneath she was nude. Though she pretended to resist, as I loosened my shorts she spread her legs. Released, my cock bobbed angrily and, with the startling quickness of a ferret into a rabbit hole, buried itself deep inside her. She gasped. And laughed.

  I tend to fall asleep after the act. I understand this is supposed to make me a lousy lay. But when I came to moments later, she had massaged me to erection all over again. I couldn’t seem to get enough of her, and this pattern was repeated over and over throughout the rest of the afternoon and evening. Just the smell of her inflamed me, and she in turn was determined to suck me dry.

  At some point in the evening I got up to grab us something to eat. She followed me outside. We stood nude on the patio as the twilight settled on the water. She stood behind me with her arms around my waist as we watched a night fisherman glide silently by in silhouette, a lantern on the prow of his rowing boat. ‘Know what I like about you?’ she said. ‘Your anger. I like it. Why are you so angry?’

  I shook my head and struck a match to light the gas stove.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to say. In fact it’s better not to. I understand perfectly. Because I’m angry, too.’

  Stars were winking awake. Orion, huge in the sky and hanging
low. We stood looking out on the darkening ocean and with the ghostly fisherman gliding through the water, and with her hand stroking my belly, for a moment I felt truly happy. After we’d eaten she gave me something to smoke. I remember stumbling into bed in a daze, and her climbing in after me.

  When I awoke it was in the hour just before dawn. She was gone from my side. The shutters were open and a buttery moon-light spilled into the room. Something on the wall moved, but at the periphery of my vision.

  I turned my head very slowly. It was Sasha, clinging to the wall. Her eyes were half-closed in self-communion. Hanging on the whitewashed wall, she defied gravity. I was paralysed with fright. I pissed the bed. Huge boils of sweat erupted from my skin.

  Sasha was nude and as I strained, trembling, to see how she clung to the wall I saw, faintly pulsating, like a brown shadow, the scorpion abdomen superimposed over her lower body. My teeth chattered, giving me away. Sasha slowly turned her gaze on me. Then she dropped from the wall and onto my bed with the lightness of a bug. As she crept towards me, her sting appeared from behind her head, wavering before it touched me lightly just below my left temple, and I passed out again.

  Examining myself in my cracked shaving mirror the following morning, I found a sizeable lesion on the side of my head. Sasha was already up, frying eggs and bacon in the large skillet. She had tied a tiny apron round her waist as a precaution against the sizzling fat.

  ‘Shouldn’t you put some clothes on? Someone might come by.’ As I spoke I noticed three scorpion carapaces scattered on the concrete patio. Either Aspro the cat had had a good night’s hunting or Sasha had a gland-extraction factory going.

  ‘Good morning, Ryan. And no one comes by here. Sleep well?’

  ‘Actually I didn’t.’

  ‘Kind of grouchy today, aren’t you?’ She looked up from the chuckling, spitting frying pan. ‘What’s that on your head?’ When I fingered the sore spot, she set the pan aside from the flame and came to look. ‘Mosquito bite?’ She went back to the eggs.

  I sat down at the table. ‘That stuff you gave me to smoke the other day. Do you think it could have after-effects?’

  ‘Sure.’ She served up the bacon and eggs. ‘You can get flash-backs for days. Come and eat.’

  ‘Not hungry.’

  Whipping off her apron she straddled me, settling herself on my lap. ‘If you’re going to keep fucking me seven times a day, you’re going to have to keep your strength up.’ Then she kissed me, but I resisted. ‘What’s wrong? Tired of me already?’

  ‘I don’t feel good.’

  She put a hand on my forehead, squinting at me doubtfully. ‘You seem a little hot. Why don’t you take a swim? You’ll feel better.’

  I picked up a towel and padded through the scorched grass down to the beach. I didn’t want a swim, but I wanted to get away from her. Why couldn’t I just kick her out? Just send her packing? I waded in the water up to my calf muscles, steadying myself against the boat to avoid stepping on the sea urchins. Looking back I saw Sasha hunkered over the table, not eating but engrossed in some new activity.

  I returned to the house very quietly, coming up behind her while she thought I was still swimming. Over her shoulder I could see she was rolling another long joint. The papers were pasted together and the mixture of tobacco and resin was laid out on the paper. In her right hand was a syringe. Her left hand reached behind her head, lifting her hair as her fumbling fingers located a spot behind her ear at the base of her skull. In a shocking movement she jabbed the needle of the syringe into her neck and sharply upwards towards the region of the cerebellum. She jolted. I gagged, but she didn’t seem to notice me behind her. Slowly she drained off some dark fluid into the syringe.

  When she was done she made as if to squirt the fluid from the syringe onto the contents of the joint.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I gasped.

  Turning to me slowly, she smiled. The brilliant Aegean sunlight fizzed in her eyes. She dropped the syringe and picked up the reefer, lasciviously rolling her tongue along the sticky paper edge as she proceeded to turn a neat, crafted joint. ‘I’m gonna look after you,’ she chuckled.

  My feverish gaze swept the table. ‘Where’s that needle? The syringe, where is it?’

  ‘What?’

  The syringe was gone. I looked on the floor. Nothing. There was some cutlery on the table but that was all. ‘I saw a syringe. In your hand.’

  She picked up a stainless steel knife. ‘I was just hot-knifing the resin. Give it a crumble. Say, you really are burning up, aren’t you?’

  I was perspiring insanely, and my temperature was rocketing, it was true. Sasha coaxed me back inside the house, her voice gentle, wheedling. ‘I know what you want,’ she said. ‘I told you I’m going to take care of you.’ Pushing me back onto the bed she whipped off my shorts and closed her mouth around my cock, sucking me to the point of orgasm. I lay back with my eyes closed, unable to resist. At the instant I ejaculated into her mouth she produced the syringe from somewhere and, bringing it down hard from above her head before swinging it round in a curving thrust, jammed it into my buttock.

  I was still screaming when the hit came.

  The first thing that happened was that I felt a scorching heat and my body crackled like cellophane in a fire. I was flung up in the air and out of the house. The roof blew outwards in a million tiny fragments. A golden wind shrieked in my ears as I went up and up, and my skin rippled and rolled with the g-force.

  I remember corrosive sunlight stinging my eyes as I was sucked high above the clouds, up, up, up. I went ripping up through the stratosphere, through night-shining clouds and then on up into a sable darkness, passing through rises and falls of temperature until finally I passed through an exit zone of the atmosphere itself and into space, and although I knew it to be freezing, the raging inner heat of my body was keeping me alive. I was flung in a vertiginous trajectory, yoked by speed and feeling my bones cracking and resetting until I was reconfigured in a sequence of gleaming stars, major novae pulsating in a pattern almost cruciform, spine and forelimbs, while minor stellar bodies glittered superbly to complete a geometric form, pincers, legs, over-hanging tail loaded with brilliant venom, set among the heavens in a place outside the curve of time.

  All that of course was hallucination. None of it happened.

  It was some time before I came to my senses, to find myself back in my beach house. Sasha was still there, patiently awaiting my return. And I was glad she was there. My distaste for her presence had been resolved, and some of the rage inside me had been drained, or at least transformed.

  We spend our days together quietly. Often we don’t even feel the need to speak, enjoying the companionable silence of old couples. I feel my eyes glaze over and almost in a slumber I am prepared to let the days pass without event. We keep late hours.

  Sasha is generous. Should a juicy black spider pop its head from between the cracks in the brickwork, she will let me have first strike as I hone my skills. Sometimes I glance up from my place on the wall to Sasha’s place on the wall, and I have almost forgotten to marvel at how easy it is, with the extra limbs, to maintain my grip on the perpendicular. Aspro the cat had to go, of course. Sasha doesn’t like cats and we had to chase Aspro away.

  We wait for someone else to take over the house. It has been a long time and no one has come, though patience is a virtue that Sasha has been able to teach me.

  Though for some reason I do miss the cat.

  DONALD R. BURLESON

  Pump Jack

  DONALD R. BURLESON IS THE AUTHOR of the novels Flute Song (reprinted as The Roswell Crewman and a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award in 1996), Arroyo and A Roswell Christmas Carol. He has also had more than 100 short stories published in such magazines as Twilight Zone, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Deathrealm, Wicked Mystic, Terminal Fright, as well as in dozens of anthologies, including The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Dark Terrors 4, Post Mortem, MetaHorror, 100 Creepy Little Cre
ature Stories, 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, 100 Vicious Little Vampire Stories, The Cthulhu Cycle, The Azathoth Cycle, Return to Lovecraft Country, Made in Goats-wood and others.

  He is the author of the short-story collections Lemon Drops and Other Horrors, Four Shadowings and Beyond the Lamplight, as well as the non-fiction study The Golden Age of UFOs. Burleson is the director of a college computer laboratory in Roswell, New Mexico, and is a field investigator and research consultant to MUFON – the Mutual UFO Network – of which he is State Director for New Mexico.

  About the following story, the author explains: ‘In the American Southwest oil wells are of course a common sight to travellers, standing against the desert sunset and nodding at the earth. While my wife Mollie and I have always found that there is something serene about these pump jacks, there is something creepy about them too, in an odd insectoid kind of way. And I guess that’s all it takes for a diseased fancy . . .’

  IT WAS STRANGE, BEING BACK in the desert.

  That’s what this land was, all right, however stubbornly a half-dozen generations of sheep ranchers had struggled to carve a living out of this sandy, mesquite-dotted soil.

  Cal Withers pulled his rental car over to the side of the lonely road and got out and sniffed the air. After the clamorous squalor of city life, he wasn’t used to all this space, all this quiet, and it tended almost to make him nervous. But the limitless deep blue sky was delectable, no denying that, especially when one was used to cramped city skies stained an ugly grey by skyscrapers.

  All these years, back East, he had thought of the desert lands of southeastern New Mexico as a kind of childhood dream. This yellow prairie land had been his home for the first seven years of his life, till his dad, weary of farming, had found a new job and moved them all to the frozen northlands, leaving the old farmhouse in the dubious hands of Uncle Bill and Aunt Clara. Growing up in Boston on the banks of the Charles River, Cal had found it easy just to stay there, settle into life there, grow older there. But now he wondered whether he had made a mistake, never coming back here till now.