I told you, a voice whispers. The best show of your life.
He drops his binoculars. They break on the hard oak floor.
A woman’s voice. Watching, always watching. Never one of us.
He peers back into his darkened cavern of a house. Patsy?
The woman laughs, softly, and her voice is joined by another, and another, a chorus of mockery.
We know all about you now.
Never one of us.
Always watching. Always peeping.
He thinks he hears weeping. He thinks he hears Patsy’s voice, a moan of warning. Something plucks at the hem of his dressing gown.
He cries out and stumbles back, into a host of waiting arms.
Lips press against his ear. Nasty little spy. You will never be one of us.
He’s yelling, Leave me alone, Leave me alone, and struggling against the hands that are all over him, palms sliding across his body, fingers digging in. There are mouths, teeth nipping pinches of flesh.
Never part of us. Simply…apart.
His feet leave the floor.
His gown torn away, his eye patch gone, arms squeezing him, pinning his own arms, fingers probing his mouth, his anus, his blind eye, squeezing his cock, his balls, his throat, grabbing fistfuls of his flab, more fingers grabbing at his tongue to replace the ones he bites through, stuffing his mouth as he tries to plead for mercy.
His joints are being bent the wrong way. The pressure, unrelenting, unbearable.
And the hands tighten their grips to stone-crushing force. And pull until they tear, as joints pop loose, as teeth force themselves through skin.
sixteenth square
As Maria bolts past the fenced-in house where that weird recluse lives, a horrible noise rips from its dark depths, screams fed from a level of pain she’s never encountered in the whole of her life, never even been able to imagine. The very sound makes her want to weep and cover her ears.
When she reaches the treeline, they still haven’t stopped. She’s tuned them out. She has to. And she doesn’t notice at first that there’s another voice, screaming her name.
Her mind is racing far ahead of her wheezing body, thinking about what she needs to do once she’s on the railroad tracks, once she’s off them, who she’ll call and who she’ll recruit, how she’ll get to the apartment where the father of her child lives to snatch Davey up.
She doesn’t understand any of the things she’s seen over the past hour, doesn’t understand what happened to Shaun and Clive and Patsy, doesn’t need to. She knows she can’t go home, knows she can’t leave this town without her son, knows she can’t leave him vulnerable in a place where the pylons of reality have ripped free of the ocean floor.
She’s a survivor. Someone who lands in bad situations and then springs out again under her own power, whether it’s through the possessive clutches of a beefy, jealous boyfriend or through the snags of untrimmed brambles and disease-slimed trees with the mouth of Hell open behind her.
The fence guarding the rail yard has barbed wire strung along the top. Twenty years ago, she would have climbed it without thinking twice. Tonight the sight makes her hesitate, just for a second.
Maria.
And now she can’t mistake the sound.
Maria.
She turns to meet Francene’s green-eyed glare, not three feet away, illuminated by the rail yard lights, peering at her through the crown of a sumac tree, her oval head cross-hatched by the shadows of the compound leaves. Maria doesn’t see a body—she knows Francene’s body isn’t with her head—she can’t tell how Francene’s face is hanging there.
She picks the only obvious option, and flees. The treetops rattle and rock above her as Francene follows. The rustle of the leaves could be thunder.
No more hiding, Francene says.
She lowers down from a cedar that’s directly in Maria’s path.
Not anymore.
Francene’s head with its blond hair once wound back in a tightly braided bun now grins at the tip of a slender twist of flesh that thickens out into a column, a many-limbed worm cobbled together from the still-moving parts of other people. They clamber through the branches with no concern for injury as Francene lowers her head further—there are so many of them, the branches heavy with motion all around her, the coils of the creature winding from trunk to trunk, hands grasping everywhere as the circle tightens.
She’s surrounded. Francene’s head lifts toward her, the mutant head of a caterpillar. Maria wants to laugh.
More rustling of leaves, and she’s confronted with the tail of the serpent. This too sports a face, gasping like a fish. Shaun, Francene’s son.
My disgusting son wants to know you from inside, the way my disgusting husband did.
The boy’s voice whimpers. I’m sorry.
The crazy quilt monster of torsos and arms and legs and eyes has closed in on all sides, steadily inching through the branches and brush. Francene’s head nuzzles against her weeping son in a twisted show of affection. My little sweetheart should always get what he wants most.
Everywhere Maria could lunge, arms await.
She kneels. I just want to see my son again. You understand.
Mine wants to see inside you, Francene’s mouth hisses. The coils unite, become a wall, a chimney.
Maria knows Francene’s hatred is just. I never meant to hurt you. I never meant to hurt any of you, she says. I’m so sorry.
Fingers pull at her hair, her clothes. Most of her body goes numb as glowing mites crawl from the monster’s skin onto hers, arrange themselves in orderly rows.
Arms encircle her, lift her shirt as Francene’s face lowers to her navel, pulls one of the bright fasteners loose with her teeth, then another, then another, opening Maria’s belly like a baby doll’s. What’s inside flitters in mind-bending motion.
Shaun’s face disappears inside her as the serpent invades tail-first. She can feel its length folding up inside her, folding and folding, feel the blind eyes along its length flutter open.
the pattern
You are so lucky.
Your life and hers connect in one long worm of memory, and with full understanding hate can only transmute into sadness.
You learn all you ever needed to know about the man you have in common, how he kept feeble ghosts of love alive for both of you, one shade comatose and dying, the other leprous and selfish, based on a stunted waxwork of desire. He never wanted you close enough to have for keeps but never wanted you to stray out of reach. In your shared soul, you see he always wanted you in your proper place, loved you for your usefulness but demanded that you stay out of sight, carry out what you were charged to do without ever getting in the way. And for this empty, manipulative homunculus of a man you’ve waged a war of wills, burrowed into one another in life and after.
You are so lucky.
That her furor, her desire to rend you piecemeal so overwhelmed that she tore away from the great body and found you on her own.
That as she stitches herself into you and fastens you around herself, as the scraps and tatters she dragged with her fuse into you, as that insatiable hunger for the stains of flesh and spirit becomes your hunger, as her mind buttons itself to yours, she understands everything, the web you had lived in together all these years, understands your surrender, your genuine repentance, and loses the willpower to do anything but grieve.
And as she howls, as she curls into herself, you smother her, you swallow her, you unravel the bits that remain and weave her into your new pattern.
You’re a survivor, with a drive, a cause that devours all others.
Your belly closes over the tapestry of horror rolled up inside you. A thousand half-memories loop around your thickening thread, add their feral undercurrents.
You are every goddess that ever wore the skins of her followers. You are every witch that ever stole a man’s damnable shape. You are an innocent girl molested, you are her pathetic, cowardly abuser, you are every docile loved one who ever kept
silent and looked the other way. You are the woman on the side, the woman scorned, the woman bent on murder.
You are a new pattern sheared from the old quilt.
You find what’s left of the weak, mewling man-boy, the one who tried to be the monster and failed, and fold him into nothing, into something even less.
You can feel the great body’s resonance in your weave of nerves, the wonderful agony as it spews and stretches with no end in sight. The slavering delight at finding new patches to absorb, new secrets, new nasties, hunting them as they run through the streets, hide in cellars and closets and clutch their button-eyed dolls under their beds, winding tendrils around the punches they throw, circling fingers around their ankles as they try to climb into their cars.
You could return to it, yes. Perhaps you could become its new nerve center, new master pattern, the quilter who stretches all the layers across the frame and binds them with the strength of living skin.
Or perhaps you’d simply become lost and reabsorbed in its folds. Or perhaps you’ll snip away all you can steal and set out on your own, a new colony.
You have nothing to fear, everything to learn. You go to meet it.
the piece trimmed free
A little girl kneels in the center of a quiet street.
As below, so above. Asphalt washed by streetlamps. A bright moon muffled by clouds. All the same gray.
Empty houses stand to either side of her, dead sentinels, skulls of concrete and plaster picked clean of all human parasites. The girl has never seen any of these houses before. She still doesn’t see them. She stares at the ground between her hands, posed as if she plans to puke, as if she’s pressed her hands to the plate glass above a view into the craw of Hell, and she can’t stop watching, no matter how much she wants to.
Around her the neighborhood lies silent. In the distance, somewhere well out of sight of this deserted cul-de-sac, a brief scream, a sound that could belong to anything, human or animal.
Off to one side, in the front yard of one of the abandoned houses, a woman rises from the grass. In the gray ambiance her hair flows black as strokes of ink, her skin dusky, her eyes glistening pits. Every bit of her is alive, flesh, clothing, layers sliding over one another as might snakes in a nest, before she settles into one shape.
She steps onto the road, walks to the girl, who doesn’t move, doesn’t look up.
Maria stoops beside the girl, cups a hand under her chin, forces her to raise her head. She whispers the girl’s name. Maddy. She speaks in another woman’s voice.
The girl who was Maddy stares at nothing, starts to shudder.
When Maria speaks again, it’s with a voice akin to her own. She whispers in the girl’s ear. You don’t belong in here.
Maddy sings softly, without melody. She swallowed the spider. To catch the fly.
I gave you back everything I could.
She swallowed the fly. I don’t know why. Maybe she’ll die.
You’ll have to find the rest on your own.
Maddy’s mouth moves but makes no more sounds. Maria stands and backs away. Now her eyes are star-bright. Maybe I’ll see you again. When you’re older.
When Maria drives away, the little girl is still hunched in the road, neither laughing nor crying as she speaks. Funny, Mommy. It was so funny. Mommy, don’t you think it was funny?
the scrap left over
Mom, what’s going on?
Davey stands at the end of the dark hallway, his silhouette ludicrously tall and wide for a boy of ten, especially one as sedentary as he is, but these days that’s how they grow them.
Maria has just stepped out of his father’s bedroom, carrying a bulky juggernaut of a purse that’s packed to the point of overflow.
She pushes past her son and sets her bag down on the breakfast bar that delineates the kitchenette. Its handles flop to one side and its contents take a while to settle, stirring quite a bit of noise as they rattle about.
Jeez, Mom, you got mice in there?
She laughs. In the background, the voice on the TV changes. The panicked newscasters have actually stopped hogging the airways long enough to let that hunky weatherman talk about the thunderstorm sweeping in ahead of the cold front.
Davey bites his lip as he peers down the hall again. Where’s dad?
Oh, he’s still here. He just can’t see you right now.
Huh?
He’s not feeling well.
Oh. He wanders over to the TV, but he’s still eying his mom. Did Marcie know you were coming over? You know how she gets, if you come over without telling her first.
A smirk. Oh, she knows I’m here.
And now his mother grows thoughtful.
Davey, remember that story we were talking about the other day, that thing you read?
More specifics, Mom?
That story about the harpist.
Orpheus?
Yeah, that’s the guy.
How he couldn’t stop from looking back and left his wife in Hades forever?
No, no, there was something else. About his head.
Oh, that. I told you, these women who were like demons tore off his head, but he was immortal, so he couldn’t die, and when they threw his head in the river it was still singing, and it floated away.
Yes, that exactly, she says. I really like that part of the story. I think it’s my favorite. I was wondering if it could work in real life.
The contents of the purse shift. There’s a noise inside, like a hiss of air, a gasp.
Her son cocks his head, but his mother seems to take no notice. Instead she snatches the handles. I need you to wait here just for an hour or so, okay. Just stay put. Play a game or something.
Where you going?
Don’t worry about it. I’ll be back for you soon.
And she totes her burden out the door.
Mike Allen is the editor of the magazine Mythic Delirium and the Clockwork Phoenix anthologies. His horror story “The Button Bin” was a finalist for the Nebula Award, and his debut collection of short stories, Unseaming , was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award. His other books include novel The Black Fire Concerto and collection The Spider Tapestries: Seven Strange Stories . His poems and stories have appeared or will appear in places like Weird Tales , Best Horror of the Year Volume One , Cthulhu’s Reign , Beneath Ceaseless Skies , Tomorrow’s Cthulhu , Transmissions from Punktown, and The Leaves of a Necronomicon .
* * *
Masked
But the worst thing is that she has no update cloud. As in none. by Rich Larson | 3028 words
3,100 Words
It’s been a whole month since anyone’s seen Vera, and the circumstances of us finally seeing her this weekend are going to be ultra grody-odd, so I deliberate forever doing my Face. In the end I decide to go subtle: an airbrushed conglom of three of my most flattering private snaps, plus Holly Rexroat-Carrow’s lips and Sofia Lawless’ cheekbones from that Vogue shoot she did on the Moon. Nothing too recent, nothing that’ll make Vera feel like she is way, way unsynched and missing out on all kinds of hot shit. Which she has been, obviously.
I do the rest of my Face the same way, kind of sous radar. I set my wardrobe to cycle four or five outfits, one of which includes the Chanel inside-out jacket Vera gifted me a week before the accident. It is now kind of gauche, so she better appreciate the gesture like whoa. Boob-wise I go small, because obviously Aline is going to be there, too, and she always goes chesty and is way way more than welcome to the unsolicited profile taps, thanks.
Lastly, I prune the digital cloud of updates shuffling around my shoulders. A few instant-regret purchases, plus the many many snaps of me and Aline and Estelle wearing our wetsuits in Venice, disappear in a drizzle of code. The result looks a little barren. But barren can also be construed as, like, minimalist, which may or may not be coming back now.
Either way, I am not going to be rubbing Vera’s nose in the fact that a viral strike took her Face offline and she is stuck hiding from the worl
d for at least another week according to technicians. Aline probably will, but whatever.
§
Vera’s parents are really fucking rich, if I didn’t mention that. As in, rich enough to rent a reefhouse on some secluded beach for Vera’s first weekend out of neural recovery, and also send me and Aline there in a big black shiny autocab to spend it with her. When said cab pulls up outside my house, Aline leans out the open door with Curacao in a martini glass, because she likes to pretend she’s an alcoholic, and welcomes me to her chariot.
“Yeah, strump, okay, strump,” I say, but when I climb in and see the chiller bar and the curved screen and the plush upholstery and all, I sort of have to agree. Me and Aline swap kisses. Her Face looks total wattage, as usual, wearing a high concept summer dress that is entirely foaming water, and keeping with the theme our Venice vacay snaps are ribboning off her in big graceful arcs.
Which I think is like, whoa, spinal cringe, because Vera’s parents bought us the sub-orbital tickets, and Vera had been wanting to dive Venice for-fucking-ever, and I felt somewhat Judas doing it without her.
“Are you sure you want to be, like, shouting those vacay snaps at her?” I say. “She might be suicidal enough already.”
“Bessandra. We are going to be there to support her.” Aline’s facial is painful pretty—between you and me, I think it’s a full model blend, like, none of her in it at all—and her Naufrage Blue TM eyes are full of sympathy. “But we are not responsible for her highbrowsing on deep webs and getting fucked up by some grody-odd virus. That was just straight-up unclutch of her to do right before we were supposed to go to Venice.”
But Aline wasn’t chatting her that night, so she doesn’t really know the extent of this grody-odd virus shit. I was.
§
The reefhouse is made of slick purple coral and looks like a big twisty conch, grown from a designer geneprint and way way chic, but me and Aline are both a bit quiet when we get out of the cab. Instead of, you know, being watted out of our minds to be weekending in a reefhouse with our dearly missed best/second-best friend.
Apex Magazine - January 2017 Page 15