Horror Library, Volume 5

by Boyd E. Harris R. J. Cavender

  “All right!” he cried out suddenly. Rose’s screams had penetrated through the invisible walls he’d put up. Because he’d never before grown frustrated with her, she responded to his panicked tone by frowning deeply and wailing. Jeff held her, her heart beating with his. “I’ll go out and get your formula, okay, but you’re not coming little girl.”

  Before he could talk himself out of it, he carried Rose to the closet, put her in a sitting position under a few old lady coats hanging there. There was no lock, so he grabbed a high back chair from the table and tucked it under the handle, just in case she figured out the knob. She was particularly quiet, which concerned him. Better get moving before you traumatize her, asshole.

  Shotgun over his arm, Jeff went outside. The can of formula was in sight, along with a sleeping bag and some other stuff he grabbed in his terror. As he made his way over, he caught sight of something moving in the night. Jeff opened his eyes to their limit, tried to soak up the darkness, process it, read the evil in it. The vulture was there. It was picking at the blanket covering the dead tortoise.

  He took each stair, careful not to make a sound. He had to get close enough. His brother had taken him out to the fields to shoot before. Jeff hadn’t liked it at the time, but now he felt the experience had served him well. Closer, he went on, the vulture scuttling a bit to the side, perhaps aware of him. Jeff took his chance. He aimed at the feathered thing. He squeezed the trigger. The kick sent him back a few steps and a stinging bruise instantly formed in his armpit. Thankfully the earplugs saved his hearing.

  Darkness spread out in front of him. He hurried to see if he’d hit it. There was a wash of blackness around the heap of blanket. Hopefully there were scattered feathers and blood. Jeff approached and peered over the side of the tortoise’s shape. Something shattered in the cabin. Three stabs of pain went from his bicep to his neck. The vulture had landed on his shoulder, its beak parted, black tongue clucking inside, the alien chants rolling out with lethal swiftness. Toptoptoptop-teep-toptoptop-teep-toptoptop. His earplugs hardened and burst and the hideous stream of words ran into his soul, just as that doctor’s voice had that night when Kim left him. That which had denied him a part of his life was doing it again. So deadly and familiar.

  He snatched the bird by its throat, and swung it over his shoulder, slamming it to the dirt. There was a loud snap of bone, and a half-squawk, and the vulture went silent. His reaction surprised him but the result didn’t satisfy him. He’d dropped his shotgun in the struggle, but now he ripped it up from the ground, desert dirt coming with it in his hand. He drove the stock down into the tiny head, three wet times. The air smelled like a barnyard of forged copper, moist feathers, and standing blood.

  The cabin window suddenly exploded in yellowed, brittle shards, like glass from the window of a long dead cathedral. Dark shapes flapped up through the jagged opening. His mind reeled. He ran. The word no beat into his brain. He couldn’t think to breathe but his body needed it. The coughing fit tasted bloody. The taste didn’t register.

  Two obese vultures hunkered at the closet. One stuck its beak down at the bottom of the door, chanting…chanting…chanting. This one’s voice a bit deeper. Topetopetope-toop-toop-topetopetope. He didn’t want to think about how the words sounded like tumors growing, as though that could even have a sound. Not just tumors. All cells, every cell. The expansion made him want to scream until he blacked out. The other vulture suddenly pulled at the stuck chair at the closet with its fine, flesh-tearing beak.

  Jeff yelled through the chanting words but the strength of their cadence overwhelmed any sounds that came from his throat. Each syllable ripped something away from his spirit. He took aim.

  The first shot simultaneously killed the closest bird and maimed the other, sending it backward on a feathery surf of gore. It squawked and thrashed, grounded for life, on the way to its death. It opened its beak, teeeeeep–buckshot blew it apart, peppering the wooden stairwell. Jeff took another shell from his pocket. Filled the barrel. Finished the other vulture.

  The second shot rang loud in his naked ears. A woman’s scream peeled out from the closet. The gun thumped on the wooden floor and he choked on his terror. The sound of the scream overwhelmed him. His stomach turned over. She made incomprehensible sounds, the mewling of a trapped animal.

  “Rose,” he breathed, his body quivering. He kneeled before the closet and dropped his forehead against the door. Some of the coats in the closet screeched on their hangers as Rose backed away from the sound. Jeff mumbled and sobbed and fought with his own mind. It took him a long time to gain control.

  Sometime late that night, Jeff limped to the closet and let the woman out.

  Benjamin Kane Ethridge is the Bram Stoker Award® winning author of the novels Black & Orange, Bottled Abyss, and several other novels. For his master’s thesis he wrote, “Causes of Unease: The Rhetoric of Horror Fiction and Film.” Available in an ivory tower near you. When Benjamin isn’t writing, he’s defending California’s waterways from pollution.

  -Activate

  by Boyd E. Harris

  It’s everywhere.

  It’s in your car wash, your grocery store, your gym. It works the parking garage pay booth, collects the weekly contents of your recycle bin. It gives you the daily weather forecast on Channel 42, drives the Canyon Terrace bus on the late afternoon shift. It refills the toner in the copy room, trims the shrubs in the Wittingtons’ yard. It glares at you from the park bench while you pass the corner of Dampier and Exposition. It peers at you through the window of the FedEx store, but turns away when you glance up from your coffee.

  It seethes. It plans. It waits. It uses no pattern or cycle. It boils up, then explodes. Gets to the brink, then stalls. Sometimes it strikes early, other times it festers for years. You’ve seen adolescents fly off at the first sign of strain, old men break down after enduring a lifetime of its persistent push. You’re uncertain how long they have before it takes them, but it always does. Eventually something clicks. A biological activation takes place inside. Circuitry in the frontal lobe shorts out and a new program is installed. They hand over the keys and something else takes the wheel.

  * * *

  Erick could tell that Mindy was not happy moving Amber to a new daycare, so he made it clear to her how important it was to him. When he knew things, he couldn’t just explain them–or maybe he could, but he’d chosen early in their relationship to tiptoe around all the horrible truths about his insights–and so he would hold her elbows and look into her eyes, and repeat what he felt they should or should not do. And she learned to trust him. Mainly because he knew things.

  The Gingerbread House had been wrong; he could tell she understood that. He’d told her the management was sloppy, the staff unsupervised. But that was his way of saying that somebody who worked there was becoming a danger to their little girl.

  And so they enrolled Amber at Katerpillar Kids. It was a fun place. The adults gave off good vibes. No weak genes, no bad cores. Inside, it was one big room, a giant space full of activity that at first kept Amber hiding behind her daddy. From the entrance desk, he could see every child and every adult, and the center bustled with energy. Good energy, and with a little encouragement from her parents, Amber soon smiled and followed the care teacher into the festivities.

  Katerpillar Kids remained safe and sound for more than a month. That was, until the fifth week, when a new staff member arrived. It seemed to everyone that Robert Wise was a great choice. He had a good work history, was a clean-cut guy, and appeared to be nice and pleasant. The staff welcomed him with open arms.

  But the guy had it, was crawling with it. The fierce malevolence had rooted itself inside, and it was teetering. Erick felt this from the first moment he brought Amber through the door that morning. He followed Wise with his eyes while the schoolmaster led Amber to meet the man. The new team member, in his late twenties perhaps, caught Erick’s stare. Erick felt a familiar disharmony building in his gut. The daycare worker w
ould be around Amber all day, and that was not good.

  * * *

  It slips through tight places like a rodent squeezing under a damaged doorstop, swirls around in open spaces like a vapor defying gravity, and when it’s strong enough, you see the radiance, the specters of neon glowing from its growth.

  It works different subjects in different ways. One beats his kids, another burns down buildings he’s never been in. One engages in sex with pubescent students, another tortures homeless people in dark alleys. Sometimes it comes in spurts, other times it advances with each assault. But it always progresses…always.

  It’s largely genetic, passed on from father to daughter, mother to son. But even in an infected family line, it’s just a lottery, who’s tainted and who’s not. Who’s got it, and who’s got it bad. All you see is the gene. You wish you didn’t, but you do. It’s a gift, but it’s also a curse. A dangerous one. They see that you see it inside them. They stare, because they know that you know. You are a threat to them as much as they are to you.

  They look upon each other in the same way. They saunter around the malls, the marketplaces, the sidewalks, their eyes peeled for each other, anxious, but not sure why. Intense vibrations echo through these places, building like feedback in a guitar amp.

  The energy swells around its subjects, collecting and mixing until the rage intensifies into a cacophony of harsh emotions, taking each of them to the extreme edge of self-control. You feel their pain, their desire to harm, to destroy, to inflict their own misery onto someone else. You feel their need to take pleasure in it. You can stand only so much, then you run. Public places are not for you.

  Despite this baggage, you maintain the front. This is your secret, yours alone. Mindy must be kept outside. The terror is just too deep and there is too much to risk. You are a pillar, and things must stay this way. Your family comes first.

  * * *

  It was no coincidence that Erick worked as a driver’s license records supervisor at the Iscariot Falls field office for the State Highway Patrol. He needed access to know about people. A person’s record could sometimes serve as a pointer to his or her inner identity.

  Tuesday mornings were slow at the office. This was when Erick would hunker over his desk to take up personal research. With security clearance to view everything, including reports or citations dropped in court, and even misdemeanors paid and cleared, he could pull up anyone’s criminal record, their history of bounced checks, unpaid parking tickets, and even classified details on civil cases.

  Robert Wise’s official police record was as clean as a whistle, but in the detailed one there was dirt. The man had been charged with assault in Cedar Bluff three years earlier. An Allison Herron, probably a girlfriend, had reported that he’d deliberately burned her seven-year-old son with a cigarette, then smacked her across the face when she accused him of it. Like in so many cases, Herron later dropped the charges. A child protective agency had made a stink, but without proof, or the girlfriend’s support, Wise had been cleared.

  Erick considered three choices: He could give a copy of this unofficial report to the owner of Katerpillar Kids the next morning, hoping he could trust her with it. This was a dangerous option, because she could report Erick for it. Not only would he likely lose his job, but he would be subject to slander litigation, and could even face criminal charges. He could send an anonymous letter to her, hoping she’d take it to heart and find a way to get rid of the new staff member, but this could also work to antagonize her, bringing her to defend Wise, and meanwhile have folks on alert for the person who’d sent it.

  Or he could do the other thing, and Erick preferred this option. It offered him the most control.

  Erick waited for Wise, hiding behind a car in the parking lot outside the daycare worker’s apartment. He held an unblemished crowbar, which sported an orange barcode sticker on its throat. He’d bought it earlier in the evening for this specific encounter. Wise eased into his assigned slot, classic rock emitting through his cracked windows. The sounds of the engine ceased in unison with the radio. He got out and climbed the steps to his front door, then spotted Erick. The keys slipped from his fingers and hit the ground with a jangle. He looked down at them. Realizing there was no time to unlock the door and duck inside, the wiry youth turned to face his visitor. Erick stood in the sidewalk entrance, blocking any direct escape and holding his weapon up for the frightened man to see.

  Wise cowered, hands out front. “What do you want?” he muttered, his voice shaking through each syllable.

  Erick stepped into range, his crowbar held high. The familiar heat of altercation swelled in his head. It unfurled inside him like the fronds of a young fern, stretching out to greet the sun. First the warmth burned in his chest, then it grew into his neck and cheeks, until his crew-cut tingled with sweat.

  “You remember me. How dare you threaten my child?”

  Wise slouched. “Your child?” Erick saw the confusion.

  “Don’t patronize me, Wise,” Erick answered. “I know what you are capable of. I know everything about you. I know about your run-in with the law down in Cedar Bluff, and I have records that disclose every address where you’ve ever lived.”

  The metal bar gyrated from above Erick’s shoulder. “You stay away from her. You hear me?”

  Wise trembled, his lips and face washed white.

  “Do you hear me?”

  Wise answered with a tenuous nod.

  A fire swirled about Erick’s head and his clammy hands tightened around the weapon. He stood, frozen in tremendous rage. Without moving or speaking, he lowered the weapon and backed away.

  Wise nodded again and Erick pointed the bar at him once more. He turned and hustled off, leaving the man shuddering at his doorstep.

  Erick himself shivered as he climbed into his own car, not confident that he’d achieved anything good.

  * * *

  The violence gene, MAOA, is a factor. There is a type 1 and a type 2. Type 1 is a strong gene, one that allows its subject to remain stable at times of stress, pressure, and depression. A person with an MAOA-1 is more likely to overcome tough times, even over the long haul. This person usually lives a grounded life.

  An individual with the MAOA-2 gene carries a buckling weight on his shoulders throughout his life. This person is weak, but may not show it. He will often appear to be fine for years, and then one morning the next-door neighbor will be quoted in the Times Herald, saying, “I never thought he’d be capable of this kind of thing.” A person with type 2, no matter how peaceful a life he or she has lived, is a time bomb.

  But there is more. The gene is not the trigger. It is not the core of evil that emanates from these stricken people. You see not only the gene, but that which has embedded itself within. You see It, and It lurks there, preparing for the perfect moment to activate its host.

  The underlying purpose of your study is to identify how and when an infected will be triggered. A man like Robert Wise, for instance, is ready to activate at any moment, but may go another twenty or thirty years without cracking.

  There is one other thing, and this bothers you more than anything else. When you stare at them and when they stare back, and then when you see what they’ve done on the ten o’clock news a day later, what is it inside you that knew that yesterday would be the day? And why is it that you let it happen? So often you get up, search the paper, the T.V. reports, expecting to read about them. You dig until you find their handiwork. It’s your own demon, foreseeing these things. Collecting knowledge and finding a way to stop it will be your only salvation.

  These are questions that no file, no expert can answer. You’ll have to take your research into the field.

  * * *

  Erick had picked his subject, Garrett Simon Bradley. This guy dwarfed Robert Wise. Erick saw right to the man’s core. Its pulsing, throbbing, threatening disposition. It ravaged the length of his every vein. He’d been activated some time ago, and he’d become a seasoned veteran of evil. Eric
k had never seen It fester like it did in this man.

  But what really made Bradley dangerous was his composed, cool demeanor. He interacted well in his world. People liked him, girls flocked to him. He was a perfect case, because he was not like the others. Not at all a time bomb. It completely owned him, and yet let him carry on with his life.

  Bradley worked at Clearline Mobile Communications, and had just received a promotion. Erick bumped into him by chance in the state comptroller’s building while updating his car registration. Bradley didn’t see Erick, but he sensed him. He turned, scanned the lobby. Erick took a ticket from the number spool, B-29, and went outside. He wasn’t a smoker, but he bummed a cigarette, lit it up, then perched at the corner of the building behind a large thicket of well-maintained bougainvilleas. When Bradley came out, Erick peered at him through the gap between two flowery branches. Bradley turned and looked Erick’s way. Erick ducked but kept in a position to view the man. Bradley spied the corner, then the doorway, then across the street, then back to the corner of the building. Losing patience, he turned and strutted down the block, taking up speed, glancing back every so often for his tail. He crisscrossed the intersection, clicked his alarm deactivator and a Ford Excursion’s parking lights flashed twice. He opened the vehicle’s door and climbed in.

  Someone came out of the building behind Erick, and through the open door Erick heard a raspy voice call “Number 29” over the PA system. Instead of completing his official business, Erick rushed to the street to catch a passing cab. He jumped in and asked the driver to wait in front of the state building for a blue Excursion to exit from the parking lot across the intersection.

  The cabbie quarreled with the instruction, but Erick fumbled through his wallet and pulled out two twenties. The scruffy bearded driver snatched the bills and clicked his meter.