A Haunting of Horrors, Volume 2: A Twenty-Book eBook Bundle of Horror and the Occult

by Brian Hodge

  “Stains was behind the job?” I finally managed to ask, clutching at Quine’s throat.

  “No, no, amigo, no — Stains did the thing. Along with Hawkhurst and Black Jimmy.”

  “You’re telling me Stains did this thing himself with a couple of second floor men?”

  Quine’s eye pulsed. “My hand to the almighty.” He glanced at my stump. “No offense intended.”

  “They still in the HardCity?”

  Quine swallowed dryly. “Cops already got two of ’em, Glory, I swear to you, they’re coming down hard on everybody. Nobody’s moving a thing—”

  “Who’s left?” I tightened my grip. It looked as though Quine’s eyeball was about pop out.

  “Stains — Stains is still running — somewhere north of Blackchappel —”

  I started slamming the back of his head against the jamb, a thin membrane of scarlet drawing down over my vision. “They took one of the naturals! A hand! A right hand! Where the fuck is it?!”

  The words wheezed out of Quine’s turkey neck: “—Stains has it—”

  I hurled the little hoodlum to the floor of the foyer, cracking his skull against the wall. His eyeball flickered and strobed.

  I turned and started toward the north, the vapor lights going red and hazey.

  I barely heard Quine’s slurred speech behind me, a sickly bird singing one last tune.

  “Better hurry, Glory… Stains has already been to the transplant team….”

  The words were barely audible as I began to run.

  Blackchappel was a vast graveyard of decaying, oxidized Quonset huts buried in hardpack like fossilized dinosaurs, their metal spines gleaming in the sodium wash. The air was hotter around here. Toxic. Veined with static electricity. Handi-cabs wouldn’t run this far, and the cops rarely bothered patrolling the place. But as I approached the east bridge on foot, breathing mask-filtered air, lenses down, heart hammering, I saw the commotion a hundred yards away, out by the ancient switchyard.

  Zander and his posse — three squad cruisers in all — inching along the edge of the tracks.

  My invisible fingers were fuses now, lit and crackling hotly, the pain making me crazy, and I started trotting along the shadowy footpath, staying low, moving toward the switchyard, toward those slow-moving cruisers. I was all jigged up on hate and adrenalin, and I was clenching my phantom hand, tasting hot magnesium on my tongue.

  Ahead of me, the cruiser’s jerked to a halt, one by one, their doors springing open, the shadowy figures of Zander and his men piling out, guns raised, infrareds snapped on, search-strobes sweeping the cobalt haze in front of them. And my heart was jittering wildly in my chest as I realized, all at once, just exactly what was going on

  One of the Quonset huts a quarter kilometer away was lit up inside.

  An underground clinic.

  Rupert Stains was in there — I was sure of it now — my missing hand growing on his arm.

  The revelation coursed through me like nitro, all the tiles in the puzzle-box clicking in place in my brain: the son of bitch in that silver warehouse, richer than God, taking the last vestige of sensation from me, taking my hand, my touch, taking it from me and assimilating it like a worm growing segments. And now the rage was erupting in me, all the pain, all the longing, longing to feel something, longing to touch, and before I knew what was happening I was running full bore toward that goddamned Quonset hut with my gun drawn.

  Two hundred meters ahead of me the doors to the Quonset burst open.

  I fumbled the safety off, and I ran as fast as my lab-legs would carry me.

  Zander and his men were already fanning out when they saw me approaching. Zander did a sort of comical double-take, his infrareds whirling toward me, a glint of sodium light catching his eyepiece and blossoming. Almost fell on his big fat ass. “Glory!” His rasp filtered through the pox mask. “What the fuck —?”

  He couldn’t finish his thought because things were happening very quickly now.

  A hundred meters ahead of me, the shadows were disgorging three figures, and I sprinted toward them, ignoring the cops off to my right, ignoring the pain in my chest, ignoring Zanny’s warning calls, ignoring everything but the three men fleeing the hot house, and I fixed my iris on the smallest of the three. The little one was dressed in leathers, jackboots and old flying ace goggles. He had broken off from the group and was high-tailing toward the East Sprawl Bridge.

  Stains.

  I fixed my sights on the bridge and made a bee-line, the first tracer shots popping behind me, Zander’s plasma-pellets buzzing over my head, buzzing white-hot, making the darkness flicker and crackle. I stayed low, my gun raised, aimed straight ahead at the little millionaire racing across the bridge fifty meters away.

  Stains was heading toward the far gates, toward the luminous threads of blue laser-light demarcating the outskirts, and as he approached the end of the line, he swam through a pool of chrome-yellow arc light, and I got a momentary glimpse of his right arm… and the pale, pink fingers clutching the tiny vintage Walther PPK handgun.

  My right hand.

  I was about to shriek at the top of my lungs when I saw him skid to a halt, then spin around with the Walther raised, then the four silver florets sparking from the barrel. I dove to the ground just as the dumb bells sizzled above my left shoulder, striking the bridge behind me, chewing through the ancient Teflon span.

  Behind me, pandemonium erupted, the sounds of angry cop voices, and more sirens coming from the distance, and Zander’s men firing off high-V slugs, and I managed to rise to a crouch in a hail of gunfire and squeeze off a half dozen smart-slugs with my stupid left hand. The heat seekers arced out into the darkness and pin-wheeled every which way but it was too late: Stains had crossed over into the SoftCity — a vast restricted area where super bacteria had broken down the cells in the concrete, metal and glass, and now everything was literally soft and waxy — and nobody, I mean nobody, was reckless enough to chase him into that quagmire.

  Except me.

  I crossed the far threshold and plunged into the indigo fog, the blue terminal lasers vibrating all around me, and I descended a steep slope of ashes into the wasteland, my boots sinking ankle deep into the detritus, and I kept the gun raised in case Stains was waiting to ambush me, but I knew I was doomed. My right hand — its natural nerves intact — was far too fast. My right hand was a killer. I could never out-shoot my own right hand.

  The only thing I had going for me was the searing rage pumping through my veins.

  A building rose out of the mist — some sort of gothic ruin from some Twentieth Century train station— and I caught a fleeting glimpse of the millionaire ducking behind a rotting rampart twenty meters away, and I started firing wildly, sapphire flames barking out of my gun, and the smart-bullets curled around the side of the building, puffing through steel girders: needles through pudding.

  And then my gun was empty, and I started toward the building, awkwardly reloading a magazine with my left hand and right stump, my brain fizzing, overloading, a cognitive tape-loop parroting: Why? Why would this son of a bitch with more money than God risk everything for a little taste of the natural touch, a little bit of feeling?

  Why?

  I was approaching the building when the adjacent wall erupted in my face.

  The little rich man was bursting through the softened mortar like a toy through a vacu-form.

  Gunfire exploded all around me as I dove for cover behind a fossilized train engine, and I felt the heat on the top of my skull as the fireworks display swirled over my head, piercing the softened iron of the SkyChief, and I opened my mouth and wailed through my mask, my voice drowned in a hurricane of fire, and I finally managed to look up. Stains was running away across an old decaying trestle.

  Then I saw the world go haywire.

  It happened so quickly I barely had time to focus, my eyes flash-blind and blurry, and I blinked and blinked because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: The ancient iron of the tre
stle turning all rubbery under Stains like a Salvador Dali nightmare.

  Then the walkway dipped and flexed and stretched down into the darkness of the gorge like taffy, and Stains went with it, screaming all the way, his voice drowned by the sound of a gargantuan metal spring uncoiling.

  The bridge finally snapped and Stains landed hard on a slag heap.

  I made my way over to edge of the gorge and looked down. I could see Stains lying semi-conscious down there, half buried in the metal mush, and I saw something else that pressed down on my heart and made my blood vibrate in my veins and made my phantom fingers tingle, and even as the sounds of Zander and his men were approaching behind me on the poison winds, I kept staring at that horrible still-life down in the rotting shadows.

  My right hand was down there, all pale and pink, still attached to Stains’s arm, still gripping the Walther PPK.

  It took three days for the boys and girls in the fifth precinct to sort out the whole mess. I was on Zander’s shit-list for meddling; but considering my personal interests, I don’t think he really blamed me.

  At the end of week, they moved Stains to the federal clinic in Eastminster for the transplant.

  I showed up early on Friday morning for the big show, and they ran me through the pre-op procedures. They prepped my stump, got me dressed in surgical robes, started drips, and made me wait forever in a sterile green-tiled room in the bowels of the building. It was well into the afternoon when I finally buzzed for the nurse. Her face flickered across the screen above me, and I told her I was tired of waiting and I wanted to know just where the hell they were keeping my hand.

  She told me the other patient was still with the clinic psychologist, and there would be a slight delay.

  “What delay?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure, sir. Would you like me to call the psychologist?”

  “What the hell’s going on?” I felt a strange twinge, something feathery on my phantom fingers.

  “Sir, it’ll just be a few more minutes —”

  “This guy’s a goddamn thief, he stole my hand, and you’ve got him seeing a shrink?”

  “Sir, if you’d just —”

  “I want to know what the hell’s going on!”

  She sighed, her image flickering for a moment, and then she said, “Look, I’m not supposed to do this, but I think under the circumstances… “

  She reached down and flipped a switch, and the picture on the screen changed.

  The new image was of another room, a stark little lounge in another wing of the building. A table in the center, a couple of chairs, the Venetian blinds drawn. Stains was sitting at the table, dressed in hospital robes. Standing behind him were the shrink and a couple of armed guards.

  Across the table sat a little girl in a cotton jumper and pigtails. She was Stains’s little girl; I had seen pictures of her on the web-news. She couldn’t have been more than six years old, and she was clutching a little stuffed turtle with one hand, holding her daddy’s hand with the other.

  Her daddy’s hot hand.

  My hand.

  I gazed at the screen, my throat drying up, filling with sawdust, my eyes welling, elephants standing on my chest. It was as though I was a ghost caught in some other dimension watching my shadow-self, and I felt the moist warmth of the child’s touch on my phantom fingers, and I watched the screen, transfixed, as the millionaire held his daughter’s delicate little hand one last time.

  And then it occurred to me: This was why Stains had gone to all the trouble.

  To hold his little girl’s hand just once.

  To feel her touch.

  I stared at the screen for as long as I could tolerate the intimacy, memorizing every movement, every gesture, every quiet exchange between the child and the man, and I realized it was my hand that was doing the holding, my hand, God help me, it was my own flesh and blood in there. When I finally looked away I was fighting the tears. “Nurse!” My voice was like metal tearing apart. “Nurse! Nurse!”

  The screen flickered, and the nurse’s placid face came back on. “What is it?”

  “Changed my mind.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “The operation,” I said. “I changed my mind, I don’t want to go through with it.”

  There was a beat of silence. “You what?”

  “I said I don’t want to do the transplant anymore, is that all right with you?”

  There was more silence, and then the nurse finally shook her head. “I’ll get Doctor Burgess on the line, he’ll want to know about this right away.”

  The screen went black.

  I turned away and let the tears come.

  Lately the nights seem to have grown more silent in my little cubicle. The ticking of the air filters above me, the distant muffled drone of the city outside my windows, and the slow, steady pulse of my own heart are the only sounds. I prefer it this way. I haven’t seen Porsche for weeks. Haven’t been in the mood for that noise for a while now. Got too much thinking to do. I read a lot. Started a diary last week, but I forget to write in it sometimes. Mostly I just lay on my contour couch and stare at the Hepa filters embedded in the ceiling, clocking endlessly in the darkness, silent sentinels tirelessly guarding against some lethal strain of mush floating into my space.

  Funny thing is, I’ve never been this happy, going through the motions each day, playing detective, then coming home each night, alone.

  So much quiet time.

  I can feel her touch every few days. It’s fading now, but it’s still there. It’ll always be there. That warm, moist, powdery touch against my ghost-fingers. The sweet, delicate hand of a little girl nestled in my own phantom palm. She’ll always be there.

  Always.

  VI. NOVELLAS

  “Reality is wrong. Dreams are for real.”

  - Tupac Shakur

  THE BUTCHER’S KINGDOM

  * A STORY *

  Excerpted from:

  “ALAN PINKERTON’S GUIDE TO GOOD AND EVIL”

  A CONTINUING SERIES

  CONTAINING NUMEROUS EXAMPLES

  OF HUMAN AND INHUMAN EVIL

  AND THE APPREHENSION THEREOF

  AS TOLD TO

  J. R. BONANSINGA

  From the Secret Files

  of

  A. PINKERTON

  A TECHNICAL NOTE: Much what follows was extrapolated from a series of dictations made on an Edison wax phonograph machine by a Mr. A.L. Fricke, retired administrative manager for the late and fabled crime fighter, Allan Pinkerton. The recordings were made between July 12th and the 17th, 1899, at the Pinkerton mansion on the west side of Chicago, Illinois. Mr. Fricke, a Cook County sheriff’s deputy during the events related here, supplied invaluable insights into Mr. Pinkerton’s unorthodox and colorful methods. For legal purposes, this is a work of “embellishment,” and all those prone to skepticism should be mindful of the old saw

  CAVEAT EMPTOR.

  - JRB

  PROLOGUE

  “FROM THE DEPTHS OF THE GLEN”

  “The city… does not care at all. It is not conscious. The passing of so small an organism as that of a man or a woman is nothing to it.”

  - Theodore Dreiser,

  Sister Carrie

  Near Chicago, Illinois

  1848

  Vengeance came from the southwest that Spring. It came from the vast sea of shadows that comprised the wooded marsh beyond the stockyards. Like a wraith in the night, silent and implacable, a force of nature creeping through the mist, weaving through twisted skeletons of black oak and sycamore, it came with a singular purpose.

  As it neared the outskirts of the primeval town — the wheezing, smoking, stinking source of all injustice and pain – Vengeance paused and crouched on a crown of granite overlooking the desecrated land. Visible in the distance were the greasy canals, gleaming in the moonlight, cut through the sacred ground like bloody wounds. Hellish tendrils of wood smoke and bone dust rose into the dirty night sky as far as Vengeance could see. Low, scorc
hed buildings stretched beyond the horizon, pulsating with sacrilegious commerce. Vengeance lifted its face to the black heavens and let out a howl. Its minions joined in with an infernal chorus.

  The hour had finally come. After eighteen years of embryonic pain in the wilderness, it was time to bring Death to this parasite they called a town.

  Time to come home.

  1.

  “THE DISCOVERY OF THE BLOOD MORAINE”

  The Stockyard Territories

  39th and The Road to Widow Brown’s

  On that moonless Tuesday evening on the 3rd of March, Big Sean O’Haloran was out on 39th Street, working by the light of a gas lamp in the Ashland packing house, when he heard something odd just beneath the chorus of shrieking. Alas… a fellow who works in the stockyards quickly becomes inured to the constant, shrill, metallic music of the abattoir — the screaming of hogs on-the-hook — and O’Haloran was no exception. At first he thought his ears were playing tricks. He reckoned he had imagined the incongruous noise, and simply shrugged his broad shoulders and went back to the business of thrusting his greasy blade into the girth of another pig.

  Blood bubbled and oozed down his arm, flecked his leather apron. Steam rose from the swine’s innards. O’Haloran peeled back the rind, then sent another one on its way to its maker (and the next station in the slaughterhouse).