Skull Full of Kisses

by Michael West

  “There’s no mistake,” Koji assured him, keeping his aim steady. “I know her. You treat her like a pet.”

  “I don’t know what spell that thing has you under, what promises it made you, but it lies, brother. It says what it thinks you want to hear, whatever it takes to get you to free it.”

  Jiki squeezed Koji’s hand, whispering softly in his ear. “It’s true. I’ve lied to your brothers, promised them things I never intended to give, anything for my freedom. Would you have done any less if you’d been captured?—held against your will?”

  Koji tightened his grip on the gun. “Takashi, you are my brother, but I will shoot you through the head if you don’t get out of our way.”

  “It belongs to Boss Sokaiya, and I can’t let it leave this room.”

  “Then you force me to kill you.”

  “Why the fuck are you doing this?”

  Koji shrugged. “I love her.”

  “You...?” Takashi’s eyebrows rose. “That thing eats corpses!”

  “Then don’t.”

  Spittle flew from Takashi’s lips. “Drop your fucking gun!”

  They fired at the exact same time.

  Koji’s bullet struck Takashi between the eyes and the back of his head erupted onto the doorframe. He collapsed like a marionette whose strings have been cut, his legs shaking in a death spasm.

  Takashi’s shells tore through Koji’s chest and abdomen. He fell back into Jiki’s waiting arms, his insides burning. When he held his hand up to his wounds, he felt a hot gush against his palm. He looked down at his red fingers and cried out.

  Jiki lowered him to the concrete floor. “Koji?”

  “I’m sorry...Emiko.” He drew in breath with harsh, wet rasps, feeling razorblades in his chest. “It doesn’t look like I can help you anymore.”

  She turned away from him, looking across the room to Takashi’s body. Koji saw her nostrils flare, and then she slicked her lips with her tongue.

  “Emiko...no!” He reached out with bloody fingers and grabbed for her hair. “Not brother!”

  But she wasn’t listening. Instinct had taken over. When she pulled away, Koji found that he was too weak to hold her back. She crawled across the floor, grabbed Takashi by the head, and pulled him toward her mouth. Koji saw his friend’s glazed eyes staring back at him, saw them disappear beneath rows of glistening fangs, saw blood flow, then could watch no more.

  After she had finished him, Jiki returned, lifting Koji off the cold, hard floor. “You gave him the pearls.”

  “The...?”

  She nodded. Her chin was red and shimmering. “The ones you stole. You gave them to Takashi.”

  “They were...a reminder of your death, of my sin.” He tried to draw in breath, but his lungs were full of fluid. He coughed some up, then touched her cheek. “Please,” he gargled, “Emiko...forgive me.”

  She sniffed his fingers, and the corner of her mouth curled into a sly grin. “He gave them to a whore in Tokyo. She wrapped them around his cock during fellatio.”

  “He...?” Koji withdrew his shaking hand from her face. “How...how could you know that?”

  “Takashi knew,” she explained. “And when I consumed him, I knew it too. Just as I knew you pulled the trigger, because I saw it through Boss Yamamoto’s eyes when I swallowed his brain. His daughter wasn’t really pregnant, you know. He made it up. He really didn’t think you would shoot him. But you proved him wrong, didn’t you? You proved both of them wrong.”

  Koji felt suddenly cold.

  “You...stole their memories?” he asked, and then her words from earlier replayed in his groggy mind: The soul does not leave the body immediately. It lingers.

  Jiki said nothing. It just sat there, watching the blood drain from his wounds, waiting.

  The Bridge

  Kim Saunders chewed her lower lip, trying not to let this little field trip bother her. She sat in the passenger’s seat, dressed as Little Red Riding Hood with a small wicker basket resting in her lap. Angela Peter’s party had been totally lame. Bobbing for apples? Did she think they were all still in the fifth grade? Carter Donovan, her boyfriend, drove—his face painted like Brandon Lee’s The Crow. He was a wide receiver on the football team, two years her senior, and incredibly gorgeous even in ghoul make-up. She would’ve gone anywhere he asked her to. And it wasn’t like they were going alone. There were Tony and Tina, Mark and Ellen...three couples crammed into an old station wagon on a dark country road. Safety in numbers, right? There was nothing to be nervous about. Nothing. After all, there were no such things as ghosts... even on Halloween.

  As Edna Collings Bridge drew nearer, she found her heart thudding louder in her ears. “Old” places bothered her. It wasn’t that she found them creepy, although she did. If she spent enough time in some buildings, she got physically ill—headaches, nausea, chills. There were even older portions of the school that made her head spin. The doctor chalked it up to a simple mold allergy or mild asthma.

  These breathing problems had made her mother overprotective to the point of smothering. The woman would go crazy whenever Kim got a simple bruise or scrape. More recently, they nearly came to blows over the issue of Kim’s driver’s license. Her Driver’s Ed instructor granted her a waiver, but dear old Mom said she needed more practice. At last her father—

  The voice of reason!

  —stepped in to say she’d earned the right to take the test.

  “Amy, just because she has a license doesn’t mean she can take off whenever she wants,” he reminded her, “We still hold the car keys.”

  Her mother gave him that scolding glare of hers—the one that said, “You always give in to her”—but she finally agreed to let Kim take the test.

  Which I passed, thank you very much!

  And what would Mom think of this late night ride to the middle of nowhere?

  She wouldn’t like it at all, Kim thought with a smile. Which is all the more reason to do it.

  The car entered the gaping maw of the elderly covered bridge. Faint light from the dashboard was all that stood between them and total darkness. Carter drove to the middle of the overpass and stopped.

  “Turn off the motor,” Mark called from the back seat, his voice filtered through the hockey mask he wore. “You gotta turn off the motor.”

  Carter nodded and pulled back on the key. The engine coughed several times, then died. After a moment of uneasy silence, he gave Kim a wink and she smiled in spite of her fears. Slowly, he turned to face the back seat. His letterman jacket made an odd creaking sound. “Has everyone heard the story?” he asked.

  Tony pulled off his ninja hood and grabbed Tina by the shoulders. “She hasn’t.”

  The Hershey’s flag from Tina’s silver kiss costume slapped him across his face. “It’s bullshit, whatever it is.”

  “We’ll see, won’t we?” Carter grinned—a gothic clown with a campfire story for the kiddies. “Back in the 20’s there was this family who would come here for picnics along the stream that runs right under this bridge. They would eat and lounge around, the father would fish, and the little girl would swim in the stream. When it started to get dark, the parents would drive into this covered bridge, turn off their motor, and honk three times. That was the signal for the little girl that it was time to go home.

  One day, when they honked their horn, the girl didn’t come. They looked everywhere for her and, finally, they found her body. She’d drowned.” He paused for effect, his eyes spanning each of their faces before continuing. “They say that if you drive into this bridge at night, turn off your motor, and honk your horn three times—”

  Mark cut him off, “I thought it was five times?”

  “That’s Candyman,” Ellen corrected with a nervous giggle. Kim couldn’t believe her mother let her walk out of the house in that dominatrix outfit.

  Carter went on. “You honk your horn three times, just like her parents did. If you do that...the ghost of that drowned little girl will come get in the car,
ready to go home with you.”

  There was another brief silence, broken by Mark’s mock moaning. Ellen elbowed him and Tony laughed.

  “Shut-up everyone.” Carter placed his hand above the steering wheel, ready to smack the horn. “You guys ready?”

  They nodded.

  He hit the horn...once...twice...three times.

  Kim looked around nervously. She felt something brush her leg and stiffened in her seat. Thankfully, she didn’t shriek. When she looked down, she could barely make out Carter’s hand in the darkness—stroking her thigh.

  “How long is it supposed to take?” Tina asked.

  Tony put a finger to her mouth. “Shhh! You’ll scare away the ghost.”

  There was something coming toward them—a dark shadow blotting out the square of moonlit road on the opposite end of the bridge. Whatever it was, it had wings. Before Kim could say a word, the form collided with the windshield.

  The girls screamed at the loud thud.

  “What the hell was that?” Tony wanted to know.

  “It was a bird,” Carter told them, his hand left Kim’s thigh—feeling the glass where the animal impacted. “Damn thing smacked right into us.”

  “It wasn’t a bird,” Kim told him, clutching the handle of her basket. “It was a bat.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. This place is old and in the woods.”

  “And haunted,” Mark added with a nervous giggle, puffs of breath rising like smoke signals from his lips.

  “Don’t bats have radar or something?” Ellen asked, then shuddered. “Start the motor again, I’m freezing.”

  “We can’t,” Tony huffed. “The ghost won’t show if the car’s running.”

  “The ghost isn’t gonna show anyway,” Tina assured him, “because there’s no ghost.”

  Behind Kim’s head, the passenger window shattered. An ice storm of glass blew inward, stinging the bare skin of her right arm and leg. Her hair broke free of her hood, blowing across her face like a tattered shroud. Between the strands she saw a figure step from the shadows. It moved closer to her door—a little girl with a blue, wrinkled face, sunken eyes, and green hair matted with sediment.

  “I’m ready to go,” the dead thing said, its voice no louder than a whisper. “Ready to go home.”

  It reached into the car and grabbed Kim by the arm. Its flesh was soft and horribly spongy. She screamed until she thought her throat would rupture, until the sound began to unravel into a hoarse whining. Carter turned on the engine and slammed his foot on the gas. As the car lurched forward, the little girl’s wet grip slipped from Kim’s wrist.

  When they cleared the bridge, Kim slid across the seat, stray slivers of grass carving into her legs. She was still trying to scream as she climbed into Carter’s lap. The car stopped quickly, a cloud of dust rising from the road, and he tried to find out if she was okay. For what seemed like an eternity, she couldn’t speak. Finally, she told him, “It touched me! It touched my arm!”

  Carter Donovan had not seen the dead girl. None of them had. They thought another bat had flown at the station wagon, thought it had brushed against Kim before retreating into the dark. She never told them what really happened. Insurance paid for new glass, Band-Aids covered the cuts she received from the broken shards, but nothing could fix her shattered sense of reality, and nothing could cure her newfound fear of the dark.

  Dogs of War

  This time Raymond Speck had captured one of them alive. It now sat in his kitchen, struggling against the old rope that bound it to the chair. Rivers of shadows flowed across its ashen skin as a hard rain pelted the lone window of the cabin. A fall of matted, raven hair spilled around its horns and stuck to its face—caught in the excretions that slimed its scaly flesh. The creature peered into the dimness, assessing its situation with soulless, predatory eyes. After a moment, it stopped squirming and looked Ray squarely in the face.

  “Please...” the demon moaned across withered lips. Its teeth were rows of sewing needles. “Please let me go. I won’t tell them where you are. I won’t say anything.”

  Ray turned away, afraid it might hypnotize him. Afraid it might make him free it, or worse...make him hurt himself the same way another of its kind had made Denny hurt himself. That had been fourteen years ago. Had he really been on the run for fourteen years?

  He wondered for a moment what would happen if the books he had been reading were just made-up bullshit, and his stomach sank. He saw the knife on the counter, saw his own nervous eyes stare back at him from its shimmering blade. It was too dangerous to keep this thing alive. He should kill it now, pack his things, and move again. But Ray had grown so tired of running. He wanted this nightmare to be over, and for that he needed some answers.

  He upended the Morton Salt canister, creating a snow shower that closed the white circle he had made on the floor. When he shut his eyes and began to pray, the sound of the rain was loud in his ears. It had been raining that night too, the night this all began. Cats and dogs, his mother used to say. Yes, it had been raining cats and dogs when Denny Freeman ran into the bar...

  ***

  “You’ve got to let me stay with you tonight.” Denny had said, his lips quivering like he was about to cry. Ray had never seen a black man that pale. “He...he knows where I live, where I work. I saw him outside just now. He followed me here.”

  If this wild-eyed man had sat down next to anybody else in O’Shay’s Tavern, they probably would have gotten up and left right then, but Ray had served with Denny in the Gulf. Before that, they’d both been weekend warriors—collecting their beer money from Uncle Sam, thoughts of fighting a real war never cropping up. Then their National Guard unit got the call and they kissed their lives good-bye for a cot and sand as far as the eye could see. When you dodge bullets with someone, you get to know who they really are, and Ray trusted Denny with his life. “What’d you see?”

  Denny nodded, then looked at the mug of Bud Light on the coaster in front of Ray. “How many you had?”

  “This is my first.” He paused a moment, then asked the question that had been gnawing at his lips since his friend ran in from the storm, “How many you had?”

  “I ain’t touched a drop.” Denny’s words carried no defensiveness. They were hollow, like his cheeks. “It started about a week ago, when I left here. I went down onto the subway platform and I saw something moving in the shadows. At first, I thought it was the rats. I could hear ‘em back there, squeakin’ and shit. The train was runnin’ late and I just kept lookin’ over there into the dark. After a while, I could see something else—something big.

  “I don’t know why I walked over there, but I did. I walked over to the edge of the station—where it disappears into the big tunnel—and I see him. He looked kinda like a man at first, but then I could see his fingers were too long and his nails...his nails were like claws. And his face was...he had horns.”

  Ray wondered what kind of horns. Why, he didn’t know. What difference did it make, right? But Denny said they were long and black. He said the ends were white, like they’d been stuck in a pencil sharpener.

  “That’s how I knew it was the devil,” Denny went on to say. “He was just sitting there, watching me. I was about to run away when he actually spoke.”

  “What did he say?” It was all Ray could think to ask.

  Denny’s eyes did not belong in his weathered, ebony face. They were eyes that should have been bulging from a six-year-old boy, alone in the dark and afraid of his open closet. “It said, ‘I know you.’”

  “Anyway, the train came and I ran like hell. I thought maybe I’d just had too much to drink, maybe I dreamed the whole thing, but I saw him again on my way to work. He tried to hide in an alley next to the bank, but I could still see him. You ever seen pictures of those old carnivals? The dog-faced boy? That’s what this thing was. His skin was whiter than yours and his eyes...at first; I didn’t think he had any eyes. They were there, though, like two black marbles shoved into his face. When
I went outside at lunch, he was still there. He’s been there every day this week, watching me. I think he’s waiting for me to be alone.

  “Tonight, I walked into my building and saw him hiding under the stairs. This cockroach ran across the floor and he reached out and grabbed it. He grabbed it and ate it. I just turned and ran. I think I ran all the way here. I’m just about to open the door when I hear this bottle rolling on the concrete and I looked up. I couldn’t help it. Reflexes, y’know? Wanna guess what I saw? “

  There was something moving in Ray’s gut and he drowned it with the rest of my beer.

  “I saw him coming at me,” Denny said. “His mouth was open and I could look right down his fuckin’ throat, and the smell...smelled like...smelled like death itself.”

  “So why you?” Ray had to ask.

  “I’ve been thinking ‘bout that,” he said with hesitation. “And don’t ask me why, but I keep thinking it’s got something to do with the war. My grandfather used to tell me stories about marching in Alabama. He said they had these dogs trained to just maul the black folks. Couldn’t have you white sons-o’-bitches getting torn apart with all those television cameras. Saddam... maybe he’s got this thing trained too. Hell, with all those weapons labs out there, maybe he had some mad scientist make it. All I know is this thing wasn’t after me before we went to war.” Denny actually snickered a bit and added, “Or maybe it really is the Devil. Maybe it’s the Rapture and we’re all goin’ to Hell.”

  The bartender brought another drink and Ray began nursing it. Part of him was waiting on Denny to add more to the tale, another part wanted him to say it was April Fools or Candid Camera or something, but he didn’t. He just sat there. Maybe he was waiting for Ray to tell him he was crazy in the head. They’d both heard the stories. Guys came back from the desert with all kinds of weird symptoms. Some were going blind. Some couldn’t even get out of bed in the morning. Some had rare cancers and kids born... wrong. “Gulf War Syndrome” they were calling it, but no one knew what it was. They blew up those weapons dumps, all those labs, sent shit billowing up into the air, and no one knew what it would do to them. Nobody knew what they’d all been exposed to over there—what they’d brought back with them.