Horror For Good - A Charitable Anthology

by Jack Ketchum

Jacques shook his head sadly. He opened his mouth, and began talking in a voice that startled Guillaume, who'd never heard his friend use such a tone in all their years together. It was far deeper and more mellifluous, more refined and colorful than Jacques had ever sounded. Indeed, his voice was that of an entirely different person altogether.

  "You, my dear, shall pay the price for your faithlessness," he said.

  Desirée suddenly grew wild and fought like a tigress, trying to break free from the frightened and puzzled Guillaume. Jacques, again speaking in the new, strange, deep voice, said, "Guillaume, hold her down on the bed."

  Guillaume was nauseated from all he'd just witnessed. "Haven't you done enough, Jacques? Let's just take the money and go."

  "No!" shouted Jacques. "I shall show the same sympathy for my murderers as they did for me!"

  "Your murderers?" asked Guillaume. "What are you talking about?"

  "Desirée knows, don't you, my dear?" asked Jacques, his voice deep and resonant.

  Desirée's eyes grew wide with recognition. "Honore?" she gasped. "It can't be!"

  "Oh, but it is, my dear. You didn't think you could get away with it, did you?"

  "Honore, forgive me," she exclaimed. "Had I known..."

  "Had you known that I would return from death, you wouldn't have killed me, is that it? Well, it is too late for your regrets, Desirée. Your husband is dead. Your lover is dead. Soon you will join both of us. Guillaume," he said, never taking his eyes off Desirée, "hold her down."

  Guillaume hesitated.

  "Guillaume," warned Jacques-who-was-Honore.

  Guillaume released Desirée's wrists, and pushed her to the far corner of the bedroom.

  He shook his head. "No, Jacques, or whoever you are. I won't let you do it."

  Jacques's eyes became cold, almost dead. "You cannot stop me," he said.

  "I can try," said Guillaume. He moved quickly, more quickly than Jacques could counter, and he knocked the knife out of Jacques's hand. Guillaume put his fingers around Jacques's throat, and squeezed as hard as he could.

  Jacques struggled against Guillaume, a strange smile spread across his face. Guillaume felt something cold rush through him, as a river might rush into a sea. Behind his eyes, he could see the face of Marie Laveau. He knew why she was there, and what he must do, and a sense of depraved glee came over him. Guillaume continued to squeeze, and after a long moment, the light went out of Jacques's eyes permanently. Guillaume held him that way for a while longer. Finally, Guillaume released him, and Jacques crumpled to the floor.

  He turned to Desirée. She had covered herself and stood in the corner of the room, the look of terror draining from her face. "Thank you," she said. "Thank you for saving me."

  "It was nothing," he said. He reached into the dead man's pocket and pulled forth a small key, along with a gold coin. He walked to the bedroom door, Desiree following close behind him, anxious to see him gone, and proceeded to unlock and slowly open the door.

  There, waiting just outside was Marie Laveau, who walked inside the bedroom staring all the while at Guillaume, while Desiree, seeing her, instinctively shrank back farther into the room to avoid her, uttering a small cry.

  "Is it done?" Marie asked as she approached the large man.

  Guillaume responded with a smile. In the same deep, resplendent voice that had earlier issued from the mouth of Jacques, Guillaume said, "Yes, mother, it all happened just as we'd planned. Thank you for this gift."

  Marie leaned up and kissed Guillaume on his cheek as she said, "Please, my son, what mother would not protect her beloved child?" She turned her gaze upon her deceitful daughter-in-law, who'd now sunk down upon her knees, and was shaking in fear as her eyes kept flitting back and forth between the room's two other occupants. "Now, what to do with her?"

  Guillaume-who-was-Honore replied as he approached Desiree, "Oh, she's inspired me. I've thought of a number of interesting ideas. Would you care to join me, Mother?"

  As they each took hold of her arms, Desiree began to scream.

  It was a start.

  —John Mantooth

  John Mantooth is an award-winning author whose short stories have been recognized in numerous years' best anthologies. His short fiction has been published in Fantasy Magazine, Crime Factory, Thuglit, and the Stoker winning anthology, Haunted Legends (Tor, 2010), among others. His first collection of stories, Shoebox Train Wreck, will be released by Chizine Publications in March of 2012.

  —This Thing That Clawed Itself Into Me

  By John Mantooth

  Back before drugs came to Jefferson City and back when people lived to die of old age and not festering gunshot wounds or drug overdoses or cancer brought on by the gasses from the landfill, back when you could walk along a moonlit path at night and not see broken glass and old syringes nor fear for your life, back in that time there was the bus that rode only at midnight. Its driver was a shadowy man whose face was like a terrible mirror and looking into it would suck your soul right out of your chest and into his.

  I saw the bus many times. It was yellow, nearly faded to white, and it glowed like one of those stars I had stuck to my ceiling, except this glow never faded in the dark. Instead, it pulsed and burned, and hurt your eyes if you stared too long.

  I only saw the driver once.

  The night it came for my grandfather, I stood at the window, watching as Pa Paw stumbled, zombie-like toward the bus. That night, I'd struggled to see the driver through the window, but the glass was fogged, and he was nothing more than a shape, a hunched and darkened blot on the other side of smoke.

  When the door opened, folding in on itself, I shut my eyes tight as I had been taught to do. When I opened them, the bus and Pa Paw were gone.

  The next morning I was surprised when his body still lay in the hallway outside my mother's room. My grandmother stood over him, touching his face, praying.

  "Granny?"

  "Shush."

  I waited. There were certain times my grandmother would not be interrupted. One was while reading the Word. The other was when she was in prayer.

  When she finished her prayers and goodbyes, she turned her face to me. Granny had been kicked by a horse when she was seven and it made her jaw grow wrong, and one of her eyes never stopped moving. You've seen the little dolls with the silly eyes that move when you shake them? This was not unlike my grandmother's eye.

  "I saw the bus come last night, Granny. I saw it take him."

  She nodded. "I saw it too, Mary Louise."

  "Then why is he still here?"

  Granny smiled at me then. I think that's why grandpa married her. She was ugly with her crooked jaw and wiggly eye, but when she smiled, you could see her true beauty, what lay underneath the crookedness.

  "He's not here, Mary Louise. He's on that bus."

  "But—"

  "But nothing. This is just where he lived. An empty house that will rot and decay because there's nobody left to take care of it anymore." She held out her hand for me to help her up. Granny was so old she'd stopped counting birthdays. Her bones creaked, and I thought about the old swing I used to sit in on her front porch, how when the wind blew, the chains groaned and it sounded like it meant something.

  Once on her feet, she put her hand on my shoulder. "You didn't try to look at the driver did you?"

  "No ma'am."

  She nodded, her eye bobbing crazily. "Promise me when I go, you won't look either."

  "I promise."

  "It'll be hard then because me and you have the thickest blood in the family, Mary Louise. Your mama is crazy, your daddy is dead, and now grandpa is too. Your brothers think I'm an old, superstitious fool. That leaves you and me. Our blood is thick. It'll hurt when I go and there'll be a part of you that wants to go with me, but don't dare look in them doors when he flings them open. Don't dare."

  "I promise I won't, Granny."

  ***

  A year later, almost to the date, my granny lay deep in her bed of death. It fe
ll to me to take care of her because my mother had locked herself away in the attic by then, the smell of her waste seeping out of the ceiling, me and Granny wondering what she was eating, how long she'd last.

  The bus was coming for Granny soon, she knew it, and I knew it. I sat by her bed, wiping her face with a wet rag. It was late September, and still hot, but Granny's sweat came from her fever. Something burned inside her and I knew it was her soul looking for a way out, and when she found it, the bus would come clanging up that hill, and I'd have to close my eyes or have my own soul sucked out of my body too.

  Still, I had to wonder if it would be that bad. Mama might not come down again until the bus came for her. My brothers were mean and violent and did not believe in anything except fists, guns, and hard drink. At least I would go with Granny instead of being left behind here.

  One of my brothers, Leroy Jake, came in hollering about being hungry and why wouldn't I cook him some supper.

  I kissed Granny and met him out in the kitchen. "Why should I cook for you, LJ? Cook for yourself."

  He made like he was going to slap me but stopped. The last time he'd tried that, I'd snuck into his room when he was asleep and bitten his ear so hard there were still teeth marks.

  "You're a girl. Girls cook."

  I was about to ask him where he'd found that written down when Granny cried out.

  "That bus will be coming soon," I told him. "You best hit the woods."

  "I don't believe in no phantom school buses."

  I ignored this last and went back to Granny. I held her hand as she began to squirm and kick, and I knew it was her soul trying to find a way out.

  An hour later, I heard it.

  First it was just on the wind, a distant sound like the cry of a coyote from up in the hills, but gradually it came closer, the straining engine, the clanking, grinding gears, the crunch crunch of tires on the gravel road.

  I went to the window and pulled back the curtains. I switched off the lamp and sat in the darkness, holding Granny's hand, watching the space right below the live oak in our front yard. It's just where it parked when it took Grandpa, and probably where it'll park when it takes me.

  Unless I go tonight.

  As if she read my mind, Granny sat up suddenly and pulled me to her. I hugged what felt like a dry sack of bones and something else, something barely alive, beating miserably inside.

  "Don't look," she said or maybe she didn't say a word. Maybe it's only what I thought I heard. Doesn't matter. It's what she wanted me to know.

  Then the bus was outside. The low hanging branches of the live oak scraped the roof as it pulled to a stop

  I felt her hand loosen on mine and then I saw her stand up, but not all of her. Just her soul. She left the house behind, laying broken in the bed and walked silently across the hardwoods, her feet not even a whisper against the dusty floor, and out through the window, never pausing, only walking through it like it was a wall of thin smoke.

  I watched, leaning forward, intent on seeing her all the way, and maybe further. I confess, I did not yet know what I would do when the door folded in and revealed the driver. I felt a powerful urge to see him, to test Granny's words, I also wanted him to take me just like she said, to suck my soul out of my chest and leave my body here with Granny's.

  That's when I heard LJ screaming. Like my other brothers, he never believed the stories of the bus. He'd been asleep when Grandpa went, but now he was awake, and I knew he was looking out the kitchen window, watching a woman who had not been able to stand for the last three months, walk with a startling kind of grace toward a glowing school bus.

  The door began its slow fold inward and I leaned forward, dropping Granny's hand, my breath forming a mist on the window.

  What I saw is still frozen in my memory today. I might try to shake it, I might try to forget it, but it still comes back in my dreams.

  His body was slight, thin like a sapling grown in the shade. His neck long and crooked, but his face was handsome and young, and smiling. It was the smile—a death grin—that held me. I felt struck, slayed as Granny used to say, in the spirit. My soul was half out of my chest and I felt the other things trying to come in, wedging their way beneath my fingernails and seeping inside my ears, the very pores of my skin prickling with their probing fingers.

  I fought it as hard as I could, my fists clenched so tight, the next morning, I found the marks of my nails fresh and deep in the fat of my palms. Even though I fought, I still felt a part of me open up, and things slipped out of me, even as others clawed their way in. They were dying things, sad things, the things that no man could fully understand, much less any young girl.

  And all the while it was happening, I couldn't stop looking at the driver, and he did not stop smiling at me.

  At last the door unfolded itself like a bat's wing and filled the cavernous doorway of the bus, blotting out the night and sending my soul flying back into my chest.

  Have you ever been punched hard in the gut, punched so hard, the wind was knocked out of you and you knew your lungs were stuck, sealed up tight forever until they weren't, and you were breathing again, thankful for air you'd always taken for granted?

  This was what it felt like when my soul was returned to me. It landed with a slap that rattled my ribcage. I was slammed back against the wall, and I lay there for a long time wondering if I would ever breathe again.

  And when I did, I lay there even longer, wondering why.

  ***

  LJ wasn't so lucky. To this day, I don't know if I fought harder than him or if those dying things just wanted him more, but he wasn't ever the same after that night. We found him the next morning, still standing over the sink, his face slammed hard against the kitchen window, mouth open slack. The other brothers proclaimed him dead, but I went up and put my arms around him and walked him to his bedroom where he slept with his eyes open for days.

  When he came out of his room, we pretended things were normal for awhile, but there's only so much pretending that a person can do when their brother doesn't remember his name, or how to run a trot line, or skin a deer.

  He wasn't evil, and I suppose that was a true blessing because of the things I felt clawing to get inside of me, at least half of them were downright wicked. LJ was just off, almost empty, but I've come to believe that certain kinds of emptiness are worse than evil. It's true that LJ's strength did grow, and some of my other brothers were amazed by this. He lifted a dead deer carcass by himself and swung it up into the bed of Henry's truck. He swung an axe with such force it became permanently wedged inside a birch tree, and once, he single-handedly pushed Daddy's old truck out of the mud.

  I changed too. I often wonder if one of those evil spirits clawed its way inside me after all. I still felt the same about most things, but I didn't feel any of them as deeply as before. I felt like I was a pond without rain and gradually, I grew more shallow, more callous and dry in the sun.

  It was an emptiness too.

  I was thankful that I had my soul, that it hadn't gone on that bus with Granny, but I hated the new space inside me, and wished I could kick it out of me and feel the old things again, and oftentimes my brothers found me bent over in the grass, coughing and hacking, trying to send it back out.

  —Stephen Bacon

  Stephen Bacon lives in the UK, with his wife and two sons. His short stories have been published in magazines like Black Static, Shadows & Tall Trees and The Willows, and in the anthologies Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds, The Horror Library Volume 2, Where the Heart Is, several editions of The Black Books of Horror, Dark Horizons, The Journal of the British Fantasy Society, and the final three editions of Nemonymous. His debut collection, Peel Back the Sky, was published by Gray Friar Press in 2012. You can visit him at www.stephenbacon.co.uk

  —Somewhere On Sebastian Street

  By Stephen Bacon

  Somewhere on Sebastian Street lies a place that isn't governed by the usual laws of nature; a place w
here the walls of reality are at their thinnest, and darkness occasionally bleeds through from beyond, tainting the people and objects it touches. Somewhere on Sebastian Street exists a portal between worlds.

  The residents of Sebastian Street once dreamed of life and distance and time, bearing witness to sights that no one should ever see. Unspeakable acts. Their presence has long since faded from within the walls. But houses dream, too, and sometimes those dreams become nightmares.

  ***

  I'm nearly finishing my second pint by the time I spot Gary enter the pub, threading his way between lunchtime workers and the ubiquitous assortment of regulars. He winks as he draws close to my table. He hasn't changed a bit in the five years since I last saw him; the sparkle in his eyes is still present, the brush of red hair lending his face a good-humoured appearance.

  We shake hands and he asks what I'm drinking, then ventures to the bar. I watch his flirting fail to impress the barmaid. He returns a minute later with my pint and a Coke for him. I make some comment about how his drinking habits have definitely changed, and he laughs enthusiastically, pointing out that he's working. We deal with the pleasantries.

  "So what're you doing back here? You said on the phone you needed help with access to a site?"

  I nod. "The old Swinston estate."

  He frowns. "There's nothing there now, mate. The last row of houses was knocked down last year."

  "I know. I read about it on the internet. How come it took so long?"

  Gary shrugs. "Some fuck-up between the council and the property developers. The demolition started back in the nineties when it was just used by rent-boys and junkies. The last row was delayed 'cause of some administrative cock-up—that's Leeds-fucking-Council for you. Anyway, finally the courts decided they could knock the lot down."

  "Right. Well, I just need half an hour. Only to take some photos, soak up the atmosphere." I take a puff on my inhaler, feeling like my nerves are betraying me.