Horror For Good - A Charitable Anthology

by Jack Ketchum

  Well, that's fucking stupid, he said. Ever heard of ground-fault interrupters? That won't work.

  Your ideas are any better? Bath towels? I mean, Christ, what's he gonna do, dry her to death?

  You know, you're a bitch...and the entire crew knows you're screwing the producer.

  Yeah, well your breath is awful. And I read in the rags that you're gay.

  Suddenly, I was on my feet. The giant soda sloshed to the floor, spilling down the slanted concrete. The popcorn flew in the air.

  The guy in front of me, a lover of superhero films if there ever was one—you know the type, middle-aged, fat, pasty faced—turned and shushed me again.

  I ignored him, lurched out of the row and stumbled down the darkened aisle to the exit.

  As I left, I could hear the two stars still advising me.

  That asshole who's shushing you? Just a short, sharp jab upwards with the heel of your palm against the bridge of his nose. Drive the shards of his nose into his brain.

  I went home and drank about a six-pack. Thankfully, they didn't talk to me, so I went to bed. The voices didn't start in until right as I was drifting to sleep, so I didn't pay any attention to them. Just jammed my head under the pillows and let the beer carry me off to sleep.

  About three in the morning, I woke up about to piss my diddies. Forgetting everything else, I danced over to the bathroom and drained the lizard right before it ended up going down my leg.

  As I stood there in the bathroom, though, they came back.

  Jam me into her mouth and just keep pushing until you hear bone, said the toothbrush.

  What am I here for, anyway? Slit her throat, said my razor.

  Hold her down and force her to eat every fucking pill. Don't induce vomiting and don't call poison control, said the open, super-size bottle of ibuprofen.

  Roll me into a ribbon and strangle her with..., began the towel hanging near the shower, as if it had been to the same fucking movie I saw earlier.

  "SHUT! THE! FUCK! UP!" I screamed, and it was loud enough that I actually hurt my throat.

  Well, from there it was about a solid week of mostly sleeping, taking stuff I had around the house, Darvocet, Percocet, Oxycotin, anything, anything I had to take the edge off, to numb me, to let me sleep in silence.

  Because every time I got out of bed, to take a leak or a shit, to eat something, to scratch my nuts, I heard them. All of them. It was like every fucking thing in the house had suddenly found its voice and wanted to talk to me nonstop.

  I couldn't figure out why, still don't know.

  And I don't know why they were all so fucking angry, so filled with hate.

  So filled with murder.

  I'd get the mail, and the umbrella stand near the door wanted me to run out with an umbrella and shish kabob the mailman.

  I'd get a phone call, and 15 things within earshot were all offering themselves as a way to off the poor bastard who called.

  I'd spot a neighbor when I looked out the window to see what time of day or night it was, and the curtains wanted me to strangle him with them. Or the window wanted me to shatter it and slice the guy up. Or the cord to the blinds wanted me to...

  Get the idea?

  By about day three of this, I was pretty loopy.

  By day seven, I was fucking crazy.

  She came over on day 10.

  Yeah, Stacey. The girlfriend of the moment.

  Yeah, the one on the phone.

  I was still asleep, nice and peaceful, when I heard Max suddenly go ape shit.

  Someone was at the door, knocking.

  Why did I ever give her a key?

  That key, that motherfucking key ruined everything.

  And it never had to say a word.

  Max came bounding into the room just ahead of her, circling and yipping, tail going a mile a minute.

  He was excited.

  She, definitely, was not.

  "Nick!" she yelled at the top of her lungs at the foot of my bed. "What the hell's going on? I've been calling and calling and you don't answer. You don't listen to your messages? You don't return calls?"

  I was awake by then, who wouldn't be with that going off right in your bedroom, but I lay there with my head under the pillow.

  Lay there waiting.

  She smacked the pillow covering my head hard, and I heard her bracelets jangle, her nails claw the pillow case.

  "Nick! Nick? You awake or dead?"

  You know how a southern accent, like from Georgia or Alabama, sounds so hot on a girl, so smooth and silky? Yeah, well, let me tell you that a South Boston accent is just the opposite. It's like fingers on a chalkboard. Especially when they're pissed.

  I took my head from under the pillow.

  "Hey, Stacey..."

  "Don't you 'Hey, Stacey' me, motherfucker," she said. Sweet, ain't she?

  I opened my mouth to reply, but they started.

  All of them.

  Everything in the entire house, all at once.

  Cut her, Nick.

  Bash her, Nick.

  Smotherherstabherdrownherslashherpushherhither.

  I couldn't stand it anymore, you know? It was too much, too much.

  I was tired, freaked, strung out.

  Afraid.

  So, I jumped out of bed and grabbed her.

  To shut them up, you know? Just to shut them up.

  She was too surprised to do anything.

  I wrapped my blankets around her like a cocoon, knocked her to the ground.

  I could hear her screams, muffled, distant, drowned by the other voices.

  I grabbed the...clock radio, I think...and bashed the covered lump of her head until its plastic casing cracked. Tossing it aside, I saw my golf driver leaning next to the closet door.

  A few tee-offs with that, and I dropped it, bent and useless.

  The voices were louder now, insistent, gleeful, manic.

  A book, a lamp, a knife from the kitchen, a baseball bat, an electrical cord.

  I was sweating, panting when it was over.

  Max was sitting in the corner of the room, watching it all with his dark, dog eyes, confused, wary.

  The voices were dull now, as tired as I felt.

  But still there, like whispers from the row behind you in a dark theater.

  The lump, her lump lay on the floor before me, still wrapped like a mummy in my sheets, in my comforter. There were a lot of tears in the fabric...Jesus...blood, blood soaking through it all.

  She didn't move, no noises.

  I remember swallowing, and it tasted like my tongue took a shit in my mouth.

  I remember hearing a single voice above the others, and I tripped through the house looking for it.

  It was my cigarette lighter.

  It told me what to do.

  And I did it.

  To shut them up.

  That's when it happened, the fucking thing that drove me over the edge, that pushed me right over.

  Yeah, wise ass, I wasn't already over the edge.

  As I stood there, watching my house burn down in front of me, feeling the heat of all of the things inside it press against my face, I felt something rub against my naked ankle.

  I looked, and there was my dog, Max. Good old Max.

  I reached down to absently scratch the top of his head, and as I did, he looked up at me.

  About time, he said to me, tilting his head toward the burning house. He spoke as matter-of-factly as if we talked every day. She was just like all the rest of that shit in there. They just couldn't shut the fuck up, none of them. It got so bad, I couldn't hear myself think.

  Yeah, that's it...that's what did it.

  Having a little chat there in the yard with my dog, with the house burning.

  That's when I fainted.

  I didn't want to hurt her, do you get me? I didn't want to hurt anyone.

  But they wouldn't leave me alone, not for a minute.

  They wouldn't shut up about it, not even after I did it...wh
at they said.

  Eventually even that didn't shut them up, so I burned the fucking house down.

  I just hope to Christ that worked.

  Can we take a stretch now? Can I get a Coke or something? I'm getting a little thirsty from all this talking.

  I haven't talked all that much lately, if you know what I mean. Kind of like the silence.

  Sure, I can sit here by myself for a minute, no problem.

  No, you don't have to worry about me. Go ahead.

  Jesus Jumped-Up Christ!

  Finally, you're back.

  Your goddamn pencil.

  You left it here, on the table when you went out.

  I guess you figured I was handcuffed, what could I do?

  And you were right.

  But you wouldn't believe the shit it said.

  For my friend, T. J. Lewis

  —G.R. Yeates

  G.R. Yeates was born in Rochford, Essex in the UK. He studied Literature & Media at the Colchester Institute and he has lived in China where he taught English as a foreign language. In 2011, he began to self-publish a series of vampire novels set during World War One entitled The Vetala Cycle. He is currently working on three novellas that were originally considered 'too sick and disturbing' for publication. You can find out more about him and what he is up to at www.gryeates.co.uk

  —The Lift

  By G.R. Yeates

  No one used the lift these days, not after the accident, not after the rumours, not after all the blood that was found. That's what they said anyway.

  The office building was a dirty grey lump of forsaken masonry erupting out of the city's concrete and mortar. A carbuncle with cracked glazing for eyes and a narrow aperture overhung by worm-eaten wood for a mouth, or entrance, however you wish to perceive it. Everything about the place was broken and gracelessly ageing. The light bulbs within, depending as eyes might do from the frayed cords of their electrified optical nerves, flickered beige and sepia shadows across the walls. Their low-wattage lives were short and sour, quickly fused by the ancient wiring threading the ceilings like black-rot veins. The computers occupying the splintered desks were white, battered boxes with dust-heavy screens scrolling steady streams of green text over pitch-black backgrounds. Not as ancient as the wiring but, in popular terms, these computers were antiques. Their constant static humming set teeth on edge and made eardrums ache. The heat emanating from these over-worked, out-of-date machines in this cloistered environment created a precipitative atmosphere and the workers of the building blamed this for the stench permeating every single floor. Every face was a sunken, loose mask of slightly yellowed flesh, shoulders were slumped in a permanently defeated attitude and nostrils always twitched, cloggily sniffing. The stench was an all-pervading misery they dutifully endured, but it was not the thing they feared most in the building.

  "No one uses the lift these days. You're best to use the stairs if you want to get up and down to anywhere."

  The speaker was a young woman; strikingly slim, cobalt blue hair and as untouched by the building's oppressive blight as her colleagues were its sure and certain victims. Her eyes were crystal clear and glacial whereas theirs were foggy, threaded with shifting veins of some milky foreign substance. Her skin was as unblemished as theirs was stained and sallow, hanging from their porous bones. Her fingers and toes were finely-sculpted whereas doubtless theirs were stunted, callused clumps of mallow. Her name was Raya and she was showing the new boy the ropes. His name was Stuart and he was as clear-eyed and untainted as she, for now.

  Stuart followed Raya dutifully; the docile beta to her domineering alpha. He wondered at how she had managed to keep herself clean and pure in this diseased environment. Every so often, as she took him from desk to desk, from team to team, explaining the tedious and repetitive work cycles they all observed in the same way as nature observes its seasons; he felt the urge to ask her why she was so different. But, each time, he thought better of it. Nothing had been said, yet there was an air of the inviolate about her—Raya was not to be questioned. She was to be accepted as surely as Athena, Aphrodite, and Freya once were.

  The comparison to goddess might seem excessive, but Stuart could see it in the eyes of the people they passed as they awkwardly shuffled to their feet to shake his hand with their clammy paws. Their well-worn faces seemed to be long past the point of exhibiting feeling, even incapable of showing the stronger emotions for fear of what it might do to the atrophied muscles beneath the skin.

  And that was it.

  Fear.

  A sparkle of it, a mote, a light in the dull, bovine darkness of their eyes. It was there whenever Raya came close, whenever she was near enough to touch. These people were tentative enough after their years of drudgery but, in her presence, they became positively meek in their submissiveness.

  Stuart was sure there was the faintest hint of a smile, thin with calculated meanness, pulling at the corners of her mouth whenever Raya witnessed this occurring.

  ***

  It was later and the tour of the offices was done.

  Not that there was much to see in terms of variety, there was just a lot of the same-old same-old, stacked up high, floor upon floor. The thrumming office cubicles of disintegrating wood and over-heated plastic were much of a muchness. All leading into and out of one another, creating a colossal labyrinth of mouldy, muttering faces, rustling stacks of poor-quality printouts and the ever-flickering off-colour light bulbs that, unshaded, swung as elderly eyeballs from overhead. The stench, he could taste it, overripe, on his tongue, feel it burrowing into the moist cells clustering at the back of his throat. He felt sure he could take a bite out of it if he had a mind to.

  "Doesn't the air conditioning work in here?" he asked.

  "No, the Directors wouldn't let us install a system. They said it would spoil the building's character."

  "The character's pretty well spoilt already if you ask me."

  She did not laugh.

  "We have other candidates for this role, Mr Williams. You don't have to be here."

  "I was only joking."

  She looked him up and down, curtly dismissive, wrinkling her pert nose as if she had finally caught a whiff of the stench that seemed to touch and sicken everybody else except for her.

  "Look, I'm sorry, I really need this job. I apologise, it was a stupid joke."

  She snapped a smile at him, "Yes, it was."

  They walked on through the maze of shuffling paperwork, teetering file-mountains and peering puckered visages for some time. The only sounds passing between them being the klakt-klakt of her stilettos on the grubby tiles of the floor and the duller snap-snap of his laceless patent leather shoes. They came to the lift, passing it not for the first time, but this time it arrested Stuart's attention, "You said no one uses the lift these days."

  "That's right."

  "Why not? Is it broken?"

  "No, we just don't use it anymore."

  "But that makes no sense. All these stairs, all these floors in the building, surely using the lift would make life a lot easier."

  She stopped walking, turned sharply to face him, "We don't use the lift. The Directors decided it was to be considered closed after the accident."

  "What accident?"

  This time her smile was not a snap but a long, slow development across her lips tapering out to just below her incisive cheekbones, "There was a boy, a new starter, just like you. He asked too many questions, was too curious, too ambitious, too keen."

  "What happened to him?"

  "Like I said, there was an accident. So don't use the lift, don't make jokes and don't ask questions, always say yes, never say no and you'll be fine, just like everybody else here."

  She spread her arm out, encompassing the nearest ninety degrees of nullity, ambulatory depression and washed-out, wheezing despair. Stuart nodded dutifully. There was a recession on, the world was crumbling financially, he had no choice when it came to answering her inevitable question. The job would pa
y well, he couldn't complain.

  "When can you start?"

  ***

  Stuart was finishing late.

  Over the days, weeks and months that he had been here, he tried to keep to his contracted schedule. Work in the morning, break for lunch, work in the afternoon, leave by early evening. Though it was the season for the nights to be drawing in, he still should have been leaving when there was some light in the sky, a trace of amethyst, the slightest turquoise smear. No, he was still here, working later and later and his lunch breaks were gradually growing shorter and shorter with no end to the accumulating piles of printouts strewn across his desk.

  What on earth was the purpose of it all?

  The interview process had made the job out to be administrative support at a senior level with considerable training built in and advancement options, horizontal and vertical. But, as far as Stuart could see, all he did was printing, photocopying, filing, stamping, hole-punching and clipping papers into place. It all swam before his eyes, becoming no clearer, making no sense other than a very disturbingly empty nonsense. The few colleagues he spoke to could tell him nothing, which told him everything. There were no prospects, there was no training programme, only people shuffling reams of paper and the ceaseless drone of dying machinery.

  But it paid well, so he couldn't complain.

  Or could he?

  ***

  As the days went by, after he made his complaint, Stuart thinned and found that he was growing a little yellow like the other workers in the building. His hair began to come out, first lone strands, then as clotted lumps going grey and brittle at the roots, virtually snapping off like strings of glass. His skin absorbed moisturiser and heavy smears of foundation make-up as a desert drinks away water, leaving his flesh starting to sag away from its bones, just like the other workers. And his little flat, whenever he sat in it alone for a while, was beginning to bear the tell-tale odour of the stench.