Sasha shrieked and grabbed the hand that Chester still had left, trying to pull him away from the tub.
Something large, soft, and wet slid across Chester’s back. Its tongue?
The drain’s teeth continued to chew on him, sinking in deep but lacking the strength to actually bite him in half. As Sasha pulled him away, they bit repeatedly on his torso, and then his legs, and then he was free.
“Give me the hatchet,” said Sasha, gesturing to the weapon.
Chester did not have the strength to yank the hatchet out of his chest, or even explain this fact to his wife, so he settled for helplessly patting the handle. Sasha wrenched it out, which hurt worse than when it had gone in, howled with primal fury, and slammed the hatchet against the drain mouth, again and again.
I’m pretty sure I’m bleeding to death, Chester mouthed at her, but she was too preoccupied to pay attention.
Soon, the drain was…dead? Did that term apply to a porcelain-and-metal drain monster? If nothing else, its teeth had all been knocked out and it was no longer chewing. Sasha continued to bash away at it. She kept going even after the blade popped off of the hatchet and she was using only the wooden handle.
As Chester realized that it was pretty much over for him, he felt a sense of peace. Yes, he was going to die, and yes, his son was dead, and yes, his wife was almost certainly insane now, but at least there was proof. Perhaps he hadn’t died a hero, but at least people wouldn’t think he was some sick psycho child killer.
Then the mouth changed back to an obliterated bathtub.
Fuck it, thought Chester, as he died.
Jeff Strand once believed that he would achieve true happiness if he had a story published in +Horror Library+ Volume 3. His story did in fact appear in that anthology, and he did indeed achieve true happiness. It was pretty sweet. Unfortunately, when he had a story published in +Horror Library+ Volume 4, his happiness turned into arrogance. He thought he was just soooooo much better than everybody else, and as a result, he stopped being snuggly and lovable. Now, he’s in +Horror Library+ Volume 5, and his descent into darkness is complete. He’s an absolute egomaniacal cretin. Visiting his vile website at www.JeffStrand.com would be unconscionable at this point, so don’t do it.
-The Happiness Toy
by Ray Garton
“Hello, there!” she said in a voice as sweet as her round face. Bright blue eyes perched atop apple cheeks and white teeth glimmered between smiling red lips. Her golden hair was short and bobbed and she wore colorful clothes. She was quite plump, with red nails on her pudgy fingers. “How is your day going?”
Lisbeth felt her brow tense in a slight frown. “I’m…good. Are you selling something?”
“Only happiness.”
Lisbeth nodded. “You come to tell me about Jesus, then?”
The woman’s smile faltered. “Jesus? Oh, no, no, not that. I don’t do religion. No, I meant what I said about happiness.” The smile returned as she lifted the bag and patted it with her hand. “I got it right in here. Do you have a few minutes?”
Lisbeth had no interest in buying anything, whatever it was, but she was tempted to invite the woman in anyway. It would be nice to have a conversation with someone, to hear a voice that wasn’t on the TV or the radio, or that wasn’t Mama’s. But Mama didn’t like having strangers in the house.
“I, um, really don’t think so,” she said apologetically.
“Oh, come on, I won’t take much of your time, I promise. And it’ll be fun.” The woman tipped forward and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Don’tcha wanna see what I got in the bag?”
“Well, I, um…I–I–I–”
The woman looked serious for a moment as she reached out and put her hand on Lisbeth’s shoulder. Lisbeth saw it coming, but the contact still made her jerk. She wasn’t accustomed to being touched. By anyone. “Look, honey, no offense, but I can tell you could use a little happiness.” She dropped her hand. “Besides, I’d appreciate a cold drink. It’s awfully hot out here.”
It wouldn’t hurt to bring the poor woman in out of the miserable August heat for a little while. She stepped aside and said, “Come in.”
“Thank you,” the woman said, entering the house. “I’m Sunny.”
You sure are, Lisbeth thought.
As Lisbeth led her toward the kitchen, she noticed Sunny looking around the room with an arched brow. They never had guests, so it seldom occurred to Lisbeth how odd and even creepy the decor was–all the crucifixes and pictures of a dying Jesus, especially the big one over the fireplace with all its bloody, gory details.
“I hope I didn’t offend you when I said I don’t do religion,” Sunny said as they entered the kitchen. “Because someone here obviously does.”
“No, you didn’t offend me. Would you like some ice tea?”
“That would be wonderful!”
Nodding toward the table, Lisbeth said, “Have a seat.”
They were soon facing each other at the table over tall glasses of ice tea.
“Mama’s pretty religious.”
“Your mother lives with you?”
“Well, it’s more like…I live with her. She’s old and pretty sick. I take care of her and…everything else around here.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
Lisbeth paused to listen for the sound of Mama moving around. She had a habit of quietly leaving her room, hobbling through the halls and sneaking up on Lisbeth when she least expected it. When she heard nothing, she lowered her voice and said, “What’s not wrong with her? It’s a long list. She’s old. She had me pretty late in life, and I was…unexpected.”
“I’m sorry. Like I said, you could use some happiness, darlin’.” She winked, reached down and opened her bag on the floor. “You don’t have a boyfriend.”
Lisbeth sniffed, sipped her tea, then shook her head briefly.
“And you don’t date much.”
She stared down at her drink, not sure how to respond. She didn’t want to come off as pathetic. But it was probably too late for that. When she was a teenager, the girl who lived next door used to say that Lisbeth had a “cloud of pathetic” floating around her, like the dust that followed Pigpen everywhere in the Peanuts cartoons. The other neighbor kids always had a laugh at that.
“I know, I know. You’ve never been on a date.” Sunny reached across the table and patted Lisbeth’s forearm comfortingly. “That’s okay, honey.”
Lisbeth began to feel uncomfortable. These weren’t questions. She glanced at Sunny, wondering if perhaps they’d met, if they knew each other from somewhere.
“Know what I sell? Toys. For grown-ups. Do you know what I mean?”
Lisbeth frowned, squinted slightly and shook her head again.
Sunny giggled and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Sex toys.”
Lisbeth’s frown deepened as she tried to imagine what a “sex toy” would be. She knew it was something that would send Mama into a rage because it included the word “sex,” but beyond that, she was at a loss.
Sunny said, “You know…dildos? Vibrators?”
Lisbeth’s frown did not waver. She slowly turned her head from side to side.
“You’re not familiar with sex toys? At all?”
“No, I’m afraid not. And if Mama wakes up and decides to come out of her room, you’ll have to go, because if she hears us talking about sex, she’ll get really upset.”
“Don’t worry about Mama, honey. This is none of her business. This is just for you.” She sipped her tea, then locked her hands together on the table and her thumbs fidgeted with one another. Finally, she said, “You’re 31, right?”
“How’d you know?”
“I’m very perceptive.” Her eyes moved over Lisbeth’s face and upper body.
It made her self-conscious. She knew what she looked like. Depending on her mood, what she saw when she looked in the mirror fell somewhere on the spectrum between plain and hideous. Since Lisbeth had been a teenager, Mama often
said, “It’s good that you’re ugly. Salvation will be easier if you’re ugly. Beauty brings temptations. Pretty women are sinful women. God did you a favor when he gave you that cleft palate at birth. The scar it left behind will keep the men away. And that’s as good as keepin’ the sin away.”
Sunny said, “Have you…well, ever had a boyfriend?”
Lisbeth shook her head.
“Not even in high school or college?”
“I was home-schooled. And I didn’t go to college.”
Sunny pressed her lips together as her eyebrows rose. “Well. I won’t bother with my usual spiel then. We’ll just get straight to the hard stuff.” She chuckled. “So to speak.” She set her drink aside and lifted the black bag onto the table. “I don’t show this to everyone. I’m very…intuitive, you might say. I know–I just know–who needs what I’m selling.” She reached into the bag and fished around. “And this…is what you need.”
She removed from the bag a smooth, flesh-pink tube of floppy rubber that was flat at one end, rounded at the other. It was about six or seven inches long. Even though she wasn’t in the room with them, Lisbeth could hear what Mama would say:
Get that thing out of here! That’s a phallus! That’s the root of all evil, not money or the love of it! Put it away right this second!
“Now, I bet you can guess what this is for,” Sunny said, smiling playfully as she held the ersatz organ in her fist and flopped it back and forth.
Lisbeth could imagine. But the very thought made her face feel hot and her chest tighten with guilt.
“You masturbate, right?” Sunny said.
Lisbeth averted her eyes.
Sunny giggled. “Darlin’, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. We all masturbate. Even the people who say they don’t. That includes your mama, believe it or not.”
Lisbeth already knew that. In the last year, she’d caught Mama playing with herself a few times. She blamed it on Mama’s worsening dementia. Lisbeth had been masturbating since she was a girl. Discussing it bothered her far more than actually doing it. She found it difficult to feel guilty about something that felt so good. It made no sense that God would condemn feeling that way when he’d included it in the physical design of His creations. But then, a lot of things about God didn’t make sense, so Lisbeth just didn’t think about them.
“This is a dildo, and it’s for masturbation,” Sunny said, offering it to Lisbeth. “But–it’s unlike any other dildo ever made.”
Frowning, she hesitantly took it in her left hand. Its surface was smooth and featureless.
Sunny reached into her bag again, removed a small plastic bottle, unscrewed the cap and offered it to Lisbeth. “Put a few drops on the dildo, then rub it all over.”
“What is it?”
“Just plain old lube. Any lubricant will work.”
Lisbeth tipped the little bottle and dribbled some of the clear, thick fluid onto the dildo, then put the bottle down.
“Go ahead, rub it on,” Sunny said.
Wincing slightly, Lisbeth spread the liquid over the soft surface, closed her fingers around the dildo and rubbed the length of it until it glistened. Then she gasped and jerked her hand away as if she’d been burned.
She’d felt the shaft begin to stiffen and swell.
Sunny grinned. “Don’t stop. Keep rubbing it.”
As Lisbeth kept stroking it, the phallus continued to harden, thicken and even lengthen. The flesh-pink tone darkened gradually as veins rose just under the surface. She made a whimpering sound because it was–
“Exciting,” Sunny said. “Isn’t it?”
Lisbeth didn’t take her eyes from the dildo as she continued to stroke. Her breathing changed as her heart rate increased. She tucked her lower lip between her teeth and rubbed it with the tip of her tongue as she felt the penis throb in her hand. It actually throbbed. It had become so warm, hard, and fat. She imagined feeling that swelling and throbbing inside her…as she had imagined so many times…with such bitter frustration and need. For so many years, she’d yearned to have something inside her…to slide luxuriously…to pound her mercilessly. Not her fingers, not the handle of a hairbrush, but something hard and fat wrapped in flesh. A man.
This wasn’t a man. But it was flesh. It was impossible, of course, but that was what she felt as she slid her hand up and down. It was longer now, harder, and it was, however impossible, flesh.
“Like I said,” Sunny whispered, “it’s not like other dildos. I call it the Happiness Toy. Because that’s what it brings. You can’t buy it anywhere else. Only from me. Honey, that thing will give you the best orgasm of your life, but it does so much more.”
Lisbeth barely heard her over the sound of her own heartbeat in her ears as a moist burning grew between her legs.
“When you use it…it changes you, Lisbeth.”
“How?”
“In wonderful ways.” She chuckled. “It would be useless to try to explain it. You wouldn’t believe me. You’d just have to…experience it. For yourself.”
She imagined how it would feel…in there…moving in and out, as it grew hotter and harder…
“Lisbeth! Liiisbeth!” Mama’s shrill voice cut through all of it like a gnarled talon. Even though she was in her bedroom at the other end of the house, it felt to Lisbeth as if she were screaming in her ear.
She dropped the dildo onto the table and her chair scraped over the tile floor as her legs stiffened reflexively, pushing it back. Her breasts rose and fell as she panted. She looked at the clock on the wall. It was time for Mama’s afternoon pills. If she didn’t take a glass of apple juice in there right away, Mama would be hobbling through the house in no time.
“Do you want to see what she wants?” Sunny said. “Then we can–”
“No, you’ll have to go. But…but…”
“Yes?”
“How much is it?” Lisbeth whispered.
“Well, if you’re going to buy it, we need to discuss what it’ll do when you–”
“Lisbeth! Time for my pills!”
Lisbeth’s voice was tremulous with fear as she said, “No, I don’t have time. I’ve got some money hidden away. Tell me how much. Then you have to go.”
* * *
She handed Mama the glass of apple juice and waited as she took her pills.
It was hard to believe the powerful voice that carried through the entire house came from such a scrawny, bent old woman. Her arms and legs were knobby sticks, her torso a narrow, ribbed tube, and her wrinkled, sagging skin covered only bones, with no sign of any muscle tissue. As she watched Mama go through the painstaking process of swallowing each one of her pills with apple juice, Lisbeth wondered how they got down that skinny neck without becoming hopelessly lodged.
Mama sat up with her back against a pile of pillows. A nasal cannula rested above her upper lip and the large, thick glasses on her nose made her eyes look huge and distorted. Her toothless mouth was a withered hole in her face. Wiry hair the color of old bones spiked in all directions on her head. She had her large-print bible on her lap, which she read occasionally. Usually, though, she preferred to have Lisbeth read it aloud to her, interrupting her now and then to say, “Amen!” or, “Yes, Father!” or to tell Lisbeth what a wretched sinner she was.
“Have you had a man in the house?” Mama said after taking her last pill. She always spoke at a level near a shout, her voice scratchy and harsh, and now, as usual, her entire face was pulled toward the center in a deep, bitter frown of suspicion and disapproval.
“Of course not.”
“I heard the doorbell.”
She couldn’t hear half of what Lisbeth said while standing directly in front of her, but she could hear the doorbell while closed up in her bedroom in the back of the house.
“It didn’t ring,” Lisbeth said, ignoring the pang of guilt that blossomed in her chest at the lie.
“I heard it.”
“No one’s been here.”
Mama’s enormous eyes squinted at
her through the thick lenses. “Well. Guess not. What man would come to see you?” She laughed, but it sounded like she was coughing. “No man would come see you. Unless he was blind.”
She took the empty glass from Mama. “Can I get you anything else?”
“Let the cat in.”
“Missy’s gone, Mama.”
“She ran away again?”
“She died.”
“When?”
“Three years ago.”
“What about Lulu?”
Lulu had been their collie. “Last year. She got hit by a car and died.”
And now it’s your turn, Lisbeth felt another pang. But the guilt wasn’t as strong as it had been when she’d begun thinking such thoughts. She was waiting for Mama to die, even looking forward to it. Lisbeth had made peace with that. But she didn’t know what she would do with her life once Mama was gone, only that she finally would be able to do something with it.
Something besides taking care of Mama–feeding her, bathing her, changing her diapers and constantly being available to do her bidding. She left the house only to take Mama to the doctor or go to the grocery store or pharmacy. Whenever she went out on her own, the temptation not to go back home was always powerful.
But her anticipation of Mama’s death was not entirely self-serving. After all, Mama was miserable and was steadily losing her mind. Death would be a relief for her. That was what Lisbeth told herself, anyway, to soothe that pang in her chest.
Mama considered the deaths of Missy and Lulu, which were always news to her. “Do we have any pets?”
“Not anymore.”
“We should get a cat. Go get a cat, Lisbeth.”
“I’m not going to go get a cat, Mama.”
“Then tell your father to go get one!”
“Daddy left when I was eight, Mama. Remember?”
Lisbeth went to the door, then turned back and said, “You don’t need to shout for me, Mama. Use the intercom. Just push the button and I’ll come.”
Horror Library, Volume 5 Page 21