A scream from upstairs. The fucking kids. When were they back at school? The summer holidays seemed longer every year. He turned the music up a little more, hoping Haydn’s Symphony number 11 in E Flat Major would help sooth his pounding head and drown the little bastards out. It didn’t. They were still at it ten minutes later. If he’d known Peter was going to be this hyperactive the morning after his nocturnal escapades, he’d have used more chloroform. The boy had complained of nightmares, naturally, and Simon had told Germaine that he’d found Peter sleepwalking—“He must have scratched himself on the banister.” Germaine had molly coddled him for a bit, naturally, but when Sally had started teasing, Simon took his breakfast to the cellar and left them to it. His fruit and cereal still sat on his desk. He just didn’t seem to have the stomach for it. He pushed the bowl aside and stalked upstairs.
“Peter! Leave your sister alone,” he hollered through the living room’s open door. The boy had his big sister pinned to the floor. She screamed and thrashed but he wouldn’t relent. Simon smiled. He and his younger brother had been exactly the same at that age.
He drifted through to the kitchen looking for Germaine. He was making for the fridge when he tripped over his wife’s prostrate body and hit the tiles with a thud that almost winded him.
“Fuck!” He scrambled backwards, slipping on the blood-slick floor. Germaine lay in a mangled heap, a huge chunk torn from the soft flesh of her innards, her torso a Rorschachian nightmare of organs, flesh and glistening ribs. Simon was about to throw up when she groaned. Definitely groaned. Particularly disconcerting as her lungs, in plain view, hadn’t moved. His dead wife sat up, glared at Simon with white, pupiless eyes and began to drag herself towards him, growling and drooling.
“Fuck!” Simon jerked himself to his feet and scanned the kitchen for a weapon. He snatched the nearest thing to hand. Germaine was on her feet, lumbering purposefully towards him. He hit her as hard as he could with a Fissler saucepan and she fell to the ground hard. She was struggling to her feet again but Simon managed to make for the hall, grab another golf club, and dash back to the kitchen. Germaine launched herself at him in a frenzied attack, scattering salad bowls and mugs. Simon pushed her back as hard as he could and took an almighty swing. The club connected smartly with the side of her head. A clod of hair, skull, blood and cranial tissue arced across the room splattering the Smeg fridge. His wife went down, groaned and lay still. Simon let the club drop. He was hyperventilating, breathing fast and concentrating hard on not fainting or pissing himself when he felt tiny teeth sinking into his right buttock.
“AAAhhhhg!” He spun round, staggering back. Peter hissed, glaring with those now all-too-familiar sour milk eyes, and gurgled. The boy’s face and t-shirt were thick with gore. Peter’s jaw snapped as he launched himself at his father. Simon’s first swing missed—the shock was beginning to sink in and he could barely control his shaking limbs. The dead boy managed to bite his kneecap this time. In desperation, Simon brought the other knee up sharply and sent his son three feet into the air and sailing across the hallway. Simon had steeled himself by the time his un-dead son had regained his feet. The boy staggered forwards and collided with the doorframe, head lolling backwards, eyes fixed skyward, a stalk of ragged spine protruding from the side of a broken neck. Simon stepped quickly forwards and finished it. Exhausted, he slumped to the floor and the tears began to flow, great sobs wracking his body, so much so that he barely heard the groaning form the living room.
“Sam! No!” he dragged himself to his feet one last time, picked up the gore-caked golf club and made for the living room. His daughter lay on the floor where Peter had left her. She fixed him with dead eyes, belched out a bloodcurdling moan and began to drag herself towards him. As she did, her legs and lower torso were left behind, joined to her upper body by an ever expanding loop of intestine. Simon vomited, clutching at the door frame. If he fainted now it was over. Sam hissed and pulled herself forwards with slow and hideous resolve. With the vestiges of sanity and strength, Simon brought the club down hard on his daughter’s head.
Simon sat in front of the Mac, head in his hands. The little vertical cursor winked needily. He groaned. He was making slow process and doubted Green not mean would ever see the light of day. He was hungry too. He dipped into the Tupperware box on his desk and took a bloody bite. It was good. Something fell onto the pristine white keyboard. He picked it up. One of his ears, grey and rotten. A maggot landed on the Z key and squirmed away. Simon groaned and began to type.
Coquettrice
Angel Leigh McCoy
* * *
THE COCKATRICE clucked its tongue and sniffed the steam rising off the eviscerated corpse. It narrowed its eyes. Gently, it pushed its hands through the coils of intestine and the lumpy organs to savor the dissipating heat.
A sound at the end of the alley alerted the cockatrice to the intruder. It lifted its head and peered through the darkness with black-amber eyes. Those eyes tracked the man as he faced a wall and opened his clothing to piss upon the brick. The cockatrice stood slowly, unfolding its long, lean body. It swayed there seductively. Its bare skin reflected what little luminescence lingered in the twilight of the man’s life.
Even intoxicated, the man sensed something. In mid-stream, member in hand, he turned sharply toward the cockatrice. He looked confused, shocked even, and the cockatrice smiled. In a heartbeat, his last, the cockatrice struck.
There was no warning, that morning, in the subtle shift of nebulae across the sky. I entered the bus, as usual, riding the same line to the same stop. The same dull faces shared my commute. The same inane conversations grumbled at the periphery of my consciousness.
And then, “Hi,” she said. “Mind if I sit here?” It was such a simple opening to such a complex story. At the time, I didn’t hear the weight in her request. Remembering back, I don’t see how I could have missed it. Her smile alone, so sweet, should have made me wary.
I looked her over: high breasts, flat stomach, jeans tight enough to camel-toe in her fleshy crotch, long legs, pretty face and that smile.
Momentarily, “Sure,” I replied and moved my books off the seat, holding them in my lap with the spines facing her so she could see the titles.
She looked.
“Oh. You’re a doctor?” They all asked that once they’d seen the clues and always with that same feminine squeak of interest in their voices.
I gave my customary chuckle and response, “Soon. I start my internship this fall.” Offer the hand. Smile. “Name’s William. What’s yours?” Tip the head with interest and look straight into the eyes. My choreography worked every time.
“Tiffani.” She turned toward me and slid her hand into mine. I noticed how soft it was, how frail and light. The kind of hand a man loves to have stroking him.
I got her phone number and called her after my last class. I asked her out. She agreed. Readily. Dinner and a walk along the river led us back to my place.
I rubbed my fingertips in lazy circles at the base of her spine, naked with her upon the stain of our union. Her hand languidly coaxed me up from the languor into which I had drifted.
“What are you doing?” I asked dreamily.
“Playing.”
“Playing? Are you having fun?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Good. Me too.”
“Good.”
I realized that this was a woman I could love.
The German shepherd growled and bared its teeth, so the cockatrice twisted its head off. Afterward, the monster looked up at the house, holding the decapitation by an ear. Blood and other fluids drained from the dog’s neck onto the lawn. Stepping over the twitching body, the cockatrice rounded the corner of the house and peered through a window. It purred deep in its throat at what it saw. It cut through the screen with one, sharp claw and crawled inside. Television noise came from another room. The cockatrice quietly shut the nursery door. It walked to the crib and held up the dog’s head for approval, bobbing
it above the railing like a puppet with a ribbon tongue and blank, button eyes. The child giggled. For several minutes, the cockatrice amused itself, making the baby laugh. Predatory peek-a-boo pleased it for awhile, but not forever. The sour-sweet aroma of infant-meat made its mouth water.
An idyllic summer, spent in the arms of my sunny-tressed Tiffani, turned into a cruel autumn. The leaves gathered age-spots; they cringed, dried up and died. Tiffani and I moved in together. I started my internship and began my decline.
Indian summer they called it, but that only brought images of hatchets and scalpings—blond hair clutched in my fist. She wasn’t home when I returned. It wasn’t the first time. Tiffani said she got bored while I was on duty. She went out with friends.
At first, I believed her. I waited with a book, pretending to read between glances at the clock, the door, the window. My mind buzzed with questions that grew more and more urgent, more and more bitter with each passing minute. Finally, the key turned in the lock, and I was up and at the bedroom doorway in a second. I watched her sneak into the darkened apartment and saw her surprise as she caught my eyes upon her.
“Hi, William,” she said with that smile.
“Where have you been?” I accused.
“Out.”
“Out where? Who were you with?”
“Shopping, silly.” Tiffani set her packages aside and slithered up to me. She pressed her cold hands against my cheeks. Her lips grazed mine, and her tongue flickered to taste me.
My gut sensed another man, but I wanted desperately to believe her. I kissed her deeply, searching for hope. That night, we made love like never before. I had something to prove: my manhood, my love, my ownership. I proudly chained her to me with three solid orgasms. Foolish as I was, I thought that would be enough, enough to keep her satisfied and tied to my bed.
The pretenses helped for awhile. Tiffani and I discussed the weather. We made love. We did our weekly shopping. We curled up on the couch to watch movies. We kissed hello and good-bye. We ate, and we slept, but time and again, I came home to an empty apartment. I found bus tickets to odd parts of town. I smelled cigarettes on her clothes and in her hair, and I overheard quickly-ended phone conversations, “No. Don’t worry. He doesn’t suspect a thing. I have to go.”
On a Sunday, a strange woman came to the door saying her name was Debora and claiming to be a friend of Tiffani’s. I let her in. Tiffani was dressing in the bedroom.
“So,” Debora said with a conspiratorial wink, “you’re the cock?”
“What?”
Debora looked past my shoulder, her face suddenly pinched with guilty secrets. I looked too.
Tiffani stood there. I caught the tail-end of her head shaking, her eyes hard with warning, then she showered me with one of her pearlescent smiles.
I left them to their lame excuses and isolated myself in the bedroom. The cock. The Cock. That’s what they called him. My beautiful Tiffani was screwing the Cock. The crudeness of it turned my stomach.
Over the next couple weeks, I noticed dark clouds gathering under my eyes. I lost my appetite for food. My clothes irritated me, and finally, my libido left me. Tiffani swore it didn’t matter, but I could feel the chains weakening.
My suspicions haunted me. The hallways of the hospital echoed with her name. Thoughts of her breezy, frail hands stalked me as I inserted catheters. Images of her thighs, spread wide, plagued me as I drove needles through the walls of veins. I saw her mouth open and willing as I threaded tubes down throats. The specters of her sexuality, however, had lost their eroticism. They bedded in betrayal.
October was coming to an end, burying the corpse of autumn in the grave of winter. Anyone who ever said winter didn’t start until December had never lived in Minneapolis. The season cheated there. It snuck in early. It double-dealt doubt and dread throughout the city long before its victims admitted that it had arrived.
I remember the date: October 29. Tiffani wasn’t home when I got off work. I pretended to read until midnight. From midnight to two, I paced. By two-thirty, I was cursing her and the Cock, raging and swearing. By four, I was in bed. She came home, and I pretended to be asleep.
With dawn came a new understanding of what I had to do. I climbed carefully out of bed. I showered, shaved and brushed my teeth. I dressed in my usual work clothes. I left the apartment at the usual time and walked to the usual bus stop. I got on the usual bus.
I got off again at the very next stop and sneaked back to spy.
Despite everything, despite her lies, and despite her slip-ups, a part of me still wanted to believe her. That hope-filled morsel stirred up enough doubt that I had to find out for sure. I couldn’t just leave her. I’d wonder for the rest of my life whether I’d been wrong. Maybe she really had been telling the truth. Maybe ‘the Cock’ was just her pet name for me, as unflattering as it was. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Too many maybes.
For two long hours I stood on the street, in the cold, waiting for Tiffani to leave the apartment. Following her was a lot easier than I’d expected. She didn’t take a bus or a taxi. Her destination was a three-story brownstone only five blocks from where we lived. The front door of the building opened with a squeak as I followed her inside. It startled me. Guilt stirred in my brain-stem, but I was beyond listening to my feeble conscience.
Tiffani’s footsteps echoed in the staircase that spiraled squarely overhead. I could just make out the edge of her coat as she ascended. She was on the second floor, turning to climb to the third. Her slim hand wrapped delicately over the railing, gliding along as she went.
I tracked her with my eyes to the third floor. She knocked. I could tell the sound came from the rear of the building, but I couldn’t tell which apartment. Cautiously, I climbed halfway to the second story, peering upward, and heard a door open on the third. I froze.
“Hi,” Tiffani said. Simple, straightforward: that was her way.
I strained my ears, but heard no response aside from the eventual closing of the door and the slide of a deadbolt. I don’t know how long I stood there on the landing between the first and second floor. My heart raced, and my head pounded. I considered leaving, forgetting the whole thing, but I couldn’t. My need to know rooted me. I stared at the wall’s chipped plaster and flaking paint. I imagined Tiffani upstairs in some other man’s arms. Before I could change my mind, I climbed the rest of the stairs.
The light fixture on the third floor cast a jaundiced glow. Two apartments sheltered at the back of the building, numbers 11 and 12. One was fronted by a flowered mat. I discounted that one and turned to inspect the other. A Halloween decoration hung on the door, but not the usual cutesy witch or jangling skeleton. An oil painting, approximately five by seven inches, it flaunted the kind of imagination I would never possess and triggered a sort of morbid fascination that escalated as I studied it. A taxidermied snake framed the painting. The creature’s markings were a subtle pattern of brown and black diamonds. Its skin flaked in places and its tail tucked neatly into its mouth at the top.
Upon the canvas, the artist had rendered the profile of a rooster, just the head. Its feathers were a bruised black-and-blue, iridescent. Its comb was swollen and ruddy; its visible eye was dark and dirty amber with a circular iris. As I examined it, I realized that the rooster’s beak purposely resembled a penis, erect with a natural, downward curve. Its wattle hung below like wrinkled, scarlet testicles. The image disgusted me. Whoever this guy was, he was sick.
This guy was the Cock. The connection fired in my brain like a flare and left behind the acrid taste of fury. Of course.
I glared at the painting.
The rooster stared back at me, unblinking.
Tiffani’s laughter whispered out to me—yes, she was in there. I raised my fist to knock, but hesitated. The hackles at the back of my neck tickled and gave me a violent shiver. I tried to rub the feeling away.
The rooster stared at me.
Suddenly, I lost the courage to go on. I realized abruptly that if I k
nocked it would end my relationship with Tiffani, whether she was guilty or not. Defeated, I turned to leave.
A man stood at the top of the stairs behind me. I hadn’t heard him approach. He wore all black: trenchcoat, shirt and twilled-cotton trousers. His head was ragged and scruffy, despite the clean lines of his body and the penetrating sharpness of his ice-blue eyes. I waved my hand negligently at the painting and muttered some pseudo-excuse for loitering in the hall, then tried to hurry past him. He stopped me with a hand on my arm. I bristled.
“Beware the Basilisk,” he uttered, his voice full of apocalyptic melodrama. He nodded toward number 12.
“What?” I was flustered. The man stood several inches taller than me and was built for a boxing ring. Something about him regressed me into a child caught in a misdemeanor.
The man scrutinized my guilt. He said nothing more, but withdrew a flyer from his pocket and thrust it into my hand.
I watched him walk to number 11, unlock the door, wipe his feet on the flowered mat and disappear inside. I shoved the brochure into my coat pocket and hurried back down the stairs. In the foyer, I paused only long enough to read the name on mailbox number 12: ‘P.J. Price’. I repeated it to myself, several times, and then I rushed out the front door. The cold air hit my cheeks like water on embers.
Through the peephole at apartment number 11, Father Matthew watched the young intern flee. Previously, he had only seen William in pictures taken by a local priest to document the coven and the people connected to it. Immediately, Father Matthew had recognized William’s innocence. How could he have missed the brush-strokes of embarrassment upon William’s cheeks and the pain in his eyes?
Humming a simple hymn, Matthew crossed his meagerly-furnished apartment and hung his coat in the closet. He made tea and plain toast for dinner, gave a short prayer of thanks for the meal, then ate in silence. When finished, he pushed aside his plate and settled in to study. First, he picked up the file on the intern, William Jason Leake. It included the young man’s birth certificate, baptism certificate, I.Q. test scores, grade school report, high school transcript, university transcript, credit report, residential history, medical records, gun license, psychological evaluation, and finally, the report on William’s habits and internship. Matthew had already memorized nearly everything in it, but he knew the value of thoroughness. Browsing through the pages, Matthew wished he could do more to help William, but he had more to worry about than a young man who was going to walk away with only a broken heart.
Vile Things: Extreme Deviations of Horror Page 11