Vile Things: Extreme Deviations of Horror

by et al. Ramsey Campbell

  Somehow Bryant was outside the door and shoving the bolt home with both hands. His teeth were grinding from the effort to keep his mouth closed, for he didn’t know if he was going to vomit or scream. He reeled along the hall, so dizzy he was almost incapable, into the living-room. He was terrified of seeing her at the window, on her way to cut off his escape. He felt so weak he wasn’t sure of reaching the kitchen window before she did.

  Although he couldn’t focus on the living-room, as if it wasn’t really there, it seemed to take him minutes to cross. He’d stumbled at last into the front hall when he realised that he needed something on which to stand to reach the transom. He seized the small table, hurling the last of the contact magazines to the floor, and staggered toward the kitchen with it, almost wedging it in the doorway. As he struggled with it, he was almost paralysed by the fear that she would be waiting at the kitchen window.

  She wasn’t there. She must still be on her way around the outside of the house. As he dropped the table beneath the window, Bryant saw the broken key in the mortise lock. Had someone else—perhaps the bearded man—broken it while trying to escape? It didn’t matter, he mustn’t start thinking of escapes that had failed. But it looked as if he would have to, for he could see at once that he couldn’t reach the transom.

  He tried once, desperately, to be sure. The table was too low, the narrow sill was too high. Though he could wedge one foot on the sill, the angle was wrong for him to squeeze his shoulders through the window. He would certainly be stuck when she came to find him. Perhaps if he dragged a chair through from the living-room—but he had only just stepped down, almost falling to his knees, when he heard her opening the front door with the key she had had all the time.

  His fury at being trapped was so intense that it nearly blotted out his panic. She had only wanted to trick him into the house. By God, he’d fight her for the key if he had to, especially now that she was relocking the front door. All at once he was stumbling wildly toward the hall, for he was terrified that she would unbolt the bedroom and let out the thing in the bed. But when he threw open the kitchen door, what confronted him was far worse.

  She stood in the living-room doorway, waiting for him. Her caftan lay crumpled on the hall floor. She was naked, and at last he could see how grey and shrivelled she was—just like the bearded man. She was no longer troubling to brush off the flies, a couple of which were crawling in and out of her mouth. At last, too late, he realised that her perfume had not been attracting the flies at all. It had been meant to conceal the smell that was attracting them—the smell of death.

  She flung the key behind her, a new move in her game. He would have died rather than try to retrieve it, for then he would have had to touch her. He backed into the kitchen, looking frantically for something he could use to smash the window. Perhaps he was incapable of seeing it, for his mind seemed paralysed by the sight of her. Now she was moving as fast as he was, coming after him with her long arms outstretched, her grey breasts flapping. She was licking her lips as best she could, relishing his terror. Of course, that was why she’d made him go through the entire house. He knew that her energy came from her hunger for him.

  It was a fly—the only one in the kitchen that hadn’t alighted on her—that drew his gaze to the empty bottles on the windowsill. He’d known all the time they were there, but panic was dulling his mind. He grabbed the nearest bottle, though his sweat and the slime of milk made it almost too slippery to hold. At least it felt reassuringly solid, if anything could be reassuring now. He swung it with all his force at the centre of the window. But it was the bottle which broke.

  He could hear himself screaming—he didn’t know if it was with rage or terror—as he rushed toward her, brandishing the remains of the bottle to keep her away until he reached the door. Her smile, distorted but gleeful, had robbed him of the last traces of restraint, and there was only the instinct to survive. But her smile widened as she saw the jagged glass—indeed, her smile looked quite capable of collapsing her face. She lurched straight into his path, her arms wide.

  He closed his eyes and stabbed. Though her skin was tougher than he’d expected, he felt it puncture drily, again and again. She was thrusting herself onto the glass, panting and squealing like a pig. He was slashing desperately now, for the smell was growing worse.

  All at once she fell, rattling on the linoleum. For a moment he was terrified that she would seize his legs and drag him down on her. He fled, kicking out blindly, before he dared open his eyes. The key—where was the key? He hadn’t seen where she had thrown it. He was almost weeping as he dodged about the living-room, for he could hear her moving feebly in the kitchen. But there was the key, almost concealed down the side of a chair.

  As he reached the front door he had a last terrible thought. Suppose this key broke too? Suppose that was part of her game? He forced himself to insert it carefully, though his fingers were shaking so badly he could hardly keep hold of it at all. It wouldn’t turn. It would—he had been trying to turn it the wrong way. One easy turn, and the door swung open. He was so insanely grateful that he almost neglected to lock it behind him.

  He flung the key as far as he could and stood in the overgrown garden, retching for breath. He’d forgotten that there were such things as trees, flowers, fields, the open sky. Yet just now the scent of flowers was sickening, and he couldn’t bear the sound of flies. He had to get away from the bungalow and then from the countryside—but there wasn’t a road in sight, and the only path he knew led back toward the Wirral Way. He wasn’t concerned about returning to the nature trail, but the route back would lead him past the kitchen window. It took him a long time to move, and then it was because he was more afraid to linger near the house.

  When he reached the window, he tried to run while tiptoeing. If only he dared turn his face away! He was almost past before he heard a scrabbling beyond the window. The remains of her hands appeared on the sill, and then her head lolled into view. Her eyes gleamed brightly as the shards of glass that protruded from her face. She gazed up at him, smiling raggedly and pleading. As he backed away, floundering through the undergrowth, he saw that she was mouthing jerkily. “Again,” she said.

  Maggots

  Tim Curran

  * * *

  THE FEW BLAZING STICKS in the shallow pit did little to dispel the frigid winds that howled through the winter dead forest. The trees were snow-heaped sculptures, the landscape blasted white with drift. Francois Jarny sat there, shivering, teeth chattering, hugging his greatcoat to him for all the good it did. His knapsack was empty and had been empty for days, still he pawed through it with frostbitten fingers, hoping for a stray crumb of biscuit that he might have missed.

  But there was nothing.

  Jarny had been hungry for weeks it seemed, at least since the Grand Armee had retreated from Smolensk, harassed by Cossacks and filthy peasants the entire way. Smolensk was a plague city, thousands smitten with typhus fever. So many dead that the locals were throwing corpses out into the streets.

  That long? Jarny wondered. Has it been that long since I ate some decent food?

  Studying his gnawed leather belt, he knew it was true. There had been a few crumbs of stale bread since, a thin soup of rotting turnip tops at a farmhouse, and, ah yes, the fine meal of roasted dog in Dorogobouche. A starving, slat-thin hound, they had savored its juices and meat, gnawing bones and sucking out the marrow, making a soup from the poor thing’s thin blood.

  To taste of the meat. To eat of it.

  Around him, huddled by the small flickering fires, Jarny could hear men moaning and crying out, many dying from infected battlefield wounds, many more from fever and starvation. Each day there were fewer that moved on. Less soldiers. Less stragglers. Frozen corpses were iced to trees, standing upright.

  Footsteps crunched through the snow. “Friend Jarny … what a terrible sight you are,” said a voice.

  It was Henri Boulille, his greatcoat hanging open, his blue tunic beneath streaked wit
h dirt and dried blood. He grinned with yellow teeth. Jarny ignored him, knowing who and what he was.

  Boulille squatted by the fire, warming his fingers as the snow fell in frigid sheets. “Why is it, friend Jarny, that you shiver with cold and hunger when there is food to be had? When there is meat that will fill you and keep you strong.”

  Jarny stared at him with narrow eyes. “I do not care for your meat.”

  Boulille laughed. “Oh … tsk, tsk, Jarny … you wish to die in the Russian winter? You wish to never see the warm green hills of France again? How terrible. How very terrible.” He looked around. There were two other soldiers at the fire. One had fallen over, freezing to death. The other was delirious, speaking at length with his mother.

  Boulille brought his foul, seamed face in closer. “What is it you think I eat, Francois? Do you think I chew upon corpses in the snow? That I gnaw upon their leathery flesh? Oh, but how mistaken you are! How terribly mistaken!”

  But Jarny did not think he was mistaken. For he had heard the stories of Boulille and the others. He had seen them dragging frozen corpses from the drifts. And as he squeezed his eyes shut and pretended not to hear, he had heard the sound of knives and bayonets working the carcasses of men. There was a word for what Boulille and the others were, but Jarny would not let himself think it.

  Boulille continued to speak, but Jarny would not listen. He could smell death upon his breath.

  But to taste of the meat. To eat of it.

  He was so hungry, so terribly hungry.

  It had only been six weeks now, six weeks since Napoleon’s Grand Armee had marched into Moscow, fresh from their valiant victory at Borodino. 100,000 men. They marched into the city unopposed only to find that the Russians had fled. The city was burning. Even miles out on the steppe, the sky had been blotted out by a black haze of smoke. The Russians had deliberately set their beloved city afire, then evacuated en masse. Those that remained were either insane or infected with typhus and dysentery, rat-bite fever. There was no food in the city. The water was contaminated. Two-thirds of Moscow was blazing, the air congested with smoke and ash.

  But even there, in the hollowed, smoldering corpse of the city, Boulille had proven himself an apt survivor. The troops were starving and Napoleon himself ordered immediate withdrawal. On the way out, Boulille had gathered the emaciated around him and led them into the ruins of a medical school. The only meat in the city was in specimen jars there in the dissection rooms. Boulille, no stranger to eating men by that point, had organized a feast. The men ate what they found pickled in jars. Organs, limbs, diseased masses of tissue. They fished meat from vats. They feasted, glutting themselves on white, bloated carrion.

  Within days, most were dead from formaldehyde poisoning.

  But not Boulille. He was fit. He was strong. A ghoul with chattering yellow teeth sharpened on bones, his eyes black lusterless shoe buttons betraying a void of seething madness in his brain.

  And now, here he was, making obscene offers of meat to Jarny. He, full and fat and rosy-cheeked, while Jarny, half his age, was a stick-thin, trembling thing with mad eyes and hollow cheeks, the skin bitten off his lips, his leather belt well-chewed, ribs thrusting out beneath his lice-infested tunic which hung on him like a winding sheet.

  He was so terribly hungry.

  But one taste … one taste and you will never be a man again. You will be a thing of graves and gallows.

  But to taste of the meat. To eat of it.

  How it came to be, Jarny could not say. But his next awareness was stumbling through the snow on broomstick limbs, Boulille supporting him, holding him up like a father with a favored child. They moved among the dead and dying. Men crying out. Men boiling with typhus fever, steam rising from them in a mist of pestilence. Corpses jutting from the snow, dead-white faces sparkling with frost. The meat stripped from throats and gouged from bellies.

  “Come, friend Jarny,” Boulille said, grinning at the death around him here in this fine kitchen of hell with abundant foodstuffs laid out upon the cutting boards of ice. “Walk with me. Soon you will know strength … and wisdom.”

  Jarny had some delusional half-memory of being deposited in the snow before a blazing fire. His eyesight was blurred from starvation. He could barely move his limbs or think a coherent thought. Men around him. Soldiers he knew. Brave men. Cowards. Officers. Enlisted rabble. Yes, circled around him, all grinning like desert-picked skulls, faces streaked with grime, eyes huge and black and empty, grease glistening on chins, gore hanging from mouths.

  “Eat, friend Jarny, good friend Francois Jarny,” they said. “Fill yourself.”

  Jarny, dangling somewhere between dream and waking, nightmare and harsh reality, remembered Dorogobouche. The Grand Armee, tattered from malnutrition, disease, and exposure, fought a rear-guard action out of the city as the Russians reclaimed it. The streets were clogged with the mangled carcasses of horses and human corpses frozen in stiff white heaps, both of which had been flayed before death by ravaging gangs of cannibals that haunted the bones of the city. Everywhere, smoke and flames from shelled buildings, burning powder wagons. Naked peasants huddled around fires, yellow-faced and pockmarked from typhus fever and rat-bite, dancing madly until they dropped and were ground underfoot by their fellows. And through it all, the hunters of men skulked in cellars and ruins, waiting to rush out and claim the wounded. To roast them on crude spits. And it was no fable, for Jarny had seen it. Seen their firepits. Seen their smooth white faces and glistening hungry eyes peering from pockets of shadow.

  Boulille had fed quite well in Dorogobouche.

  But even then, starving, Jarny would not even think it.

  But to taste of the meat. To eat of it.

  Yes, through foul mists of fever, he remembered, remembered as the fresh corpse of a soldier was laid in the snow before him, charred and crisping from the flames. And it was the bayonet in his hands that split the pig open until the redolent, hungry smell of fine, juicy meat roasted on a spit rose up before him, enveloping him in a hot, salty cloud of appetite.

  After that … they all feasted. Knives and bayonets hacking. Slabs of steaming, dripping meat shoved into greedy mouths. Faces glistening with grease and yellow fat grinning up at the moon. Lunatics luminous with profane delight. Bellies filled. Fingers licked. Entrails divided. Bones gnawed of scraps and sucked of marrow. Then nothing left in the snow but that blackened, rent carcass, broken and scattered in all directions.

  Jarny had never felt so strong or so deathless.

  Months later, Paris.

  Warm, sultry.

  Jarny, more dead than alive, searching for food. For the dead.

  There were few cemeteries in Paris by that point, most having been banned because of the foul odors and seeping rot that began to contaminate the air and streets and cellars of nearby neighborhoods. By the late 18th century, the miasmic stench of putrefaction could be smelled across the city where it hung in a pestilential haze and was thought to be the cause of one epidemic after another. The cemeteries were closed. The largest of which, the Cimetière des Innocents had been shut down in 1786.

  The Cimetière des Innocents had once been the central burial ground for Paris. Located next to Les Halles, the central Parisian market, on the corner of rue Saint-Denis and rue Berger, the dead had been heaped here since the Gallo-Roman days. In 1786, when it was closed down with all the other smaller graveyards, the dead were taken to the newly opened catacombs at Denfert-Rochereau, far south of the city. Jarny knew this well, for his father had been one of the laborers. Night after eerie night, a grim procession transferred the draped remains from the Paris cemeteries to the catacombs.

  All that remained now were St. Parnasse, le Cimetière du nord Montmartre, and the Cimetière de l’est, known as the Père Lachaise cemetery. And this is where Jarny went. To his favorite hunting grounds at the junction of rue des Rondeaux and avenue du Père-Lachaise. Standing at the cemetery gates, heart palpitating with strange desire, driven by deprave
d forces that had long since driven him mad with absolute horror, he listened for watchmen. His teeth were chattering. But it was not from the chill evening air, but hunger.

  Quiet, you must be quiet, he told himself.

  Yes, what was to be done was secret. How clever he had been this night as every night. All of Paris in an incensed uproar because some skulking ghoul was violating the tombs of their dead, yet he, Francois Jarny, had slipped out of the sleeping barracks with a shovel in his hand, right past the guards with their drawn bayonets and breech-loaders. Now he stood before the cemetery gates, panting and delusional, a cold and sour-smelling sweat beading his face. He stood there with his hands wrapped around the uprights of the fence, trying to fight what was inside him, what slithered and shifted in his belly making an insatiable hunger roll through him in queasy waves.

  Some worn shred of humanity in him would not allow it. Not again. This time he would not give into it. This time he would be master of his own flesh. He would not weaken, he would not lose control.

  “I’ll kill myself if I have to,” he said under his breath. “I’ll do whatever it takes … do you hear me? You won’t make me do this, you won’t … make me do it …”

  And that’s when the pain came. It brought him to his knees, squeezing tears from his eyes and making his mind spin until he could do nothing but moan and thrash on the concrete. The pain was like razors sliding through his belly, needles bursting his stomach, nails and tacks filling his entrails until he begged for it to stop. Dear God, anything, anything just make it stop, just please make it stop.

  And then it did.

  Jarny lay there, dripping wet with perspiration, the agony slowly subsiding until he could breathe again and his heart stopped hammering. He was being taught a lesson and knew it. Just a lesson. He had to learn not to ignore the hunger, not to fight against it.

  He coughed out a black, oily mass of phlegm and then felt better.