by Jeff Gelb
“Please—” Helen begged him.
But the man lifted her head and banged it hard against the concrete. Then he banged it again, and again, until she was half-concussed and she could feel the wetness of blood in her hair.
He took a roll of Saran Wrap out of his coat pocket, and he pulled it out and stretched it over her face. She was so stunned that she couldn’t stop him. She tried to take a breath, but all she managed to do was suck the cling film tighter.
The man wrapped her head around and around. Helen couldn’t move and she couldn’t breathe and she could barely see. The man loomed over her as if he were in a fog.
In spite of her training, she panicked. She thrashed her head from side to side and kicked her legs. But the man opened her coat and dragged up her blue corduroy maternity dress, and then he pulled her pantyhose down around her ankles. Her blood was thumping in her ears, and all she could hear was a deep, distorted echo, as if she were lying at the bottom of a swimming pool.
She couldn’t see the man unbutton his own coat, but she felt him lever her thighs apart. He pushed his way inside her with three grunting thrusts, until he was buried deep. Then he leaned forward and stared at her through the cling film, his face only an inch away from hers. He looked triumphant.
Suddenly, she felt a warm gush of wetness between her thighs. At the same time, there was turmoil inside her stomach, as if the baby were rolling right over. The man screamed like a girl and pushed against her chest.
“Aaagghhh! Christ! Let go of me! Let go of me! For Christ’s sake you witch let go of me!”
Helen felt an agonizing spasm, and then another, and then another. The man kept on screaming and cursing and trying to pull himself out of her. Helen tore at the Saran Wrap covering her face and managed to rip most of it away. She took a deep swallow of air, but then she started screaming too. The pain in her back was more than she could bear. She felt as if she were being cracked in half.
There was a moment when she and the man were locked together in purgatory, both of them shrieking at each other. But then suddenly the man managed to heave himself backward, and Helen felt her baby slither out of her. The man fell onto his side, crying and whimpering, his heels kicking against the concrete.
Helen sat up. She was so stunned that everything looked jumbled and unfocused, but she could see that the man was fighting to pull something away from him.
“Get it off me! Get it off me! Get it off me!”
She held onto the Toyota’s bumper and tried to pull herself up. Gradually, however, her vision began to clear, and what she saw made her slowly sit back down, quaking with horror.
Between the man’s legs, biting his penis right down to the root, was a black bladderlike creature with glistening skin. It was the same size as a newborn baby, but it wasn’t human at all.
The man was slapping it and pulling it, but it was obviously too slippery for him to get any grip, and the thing was stretching and contracting as if it were sucking at him.
“Christ, get this off me!” the man screamed, and it was more of a prayer than a cry for help.
In front of Helen’s eyes, the black bladderlike creature swelled larger and larger, and as it did so, the man’s struggling became weaker and jerkier. After only a few minutes, he gave a epileptic shudder, and his head dropped back, with his neck bulging. But the creature wasn’t finished with him yet. It continued its stretching and contracting for almost twenty minutes more, its formless body growing more and more distended, until it was nearly the same size he was. Then it rolled off him with a wallowing sound like a waterbed and lay beside him, unmoving.
Helen felt another twinge of pain, and another, but after a third contraction her afterbirth slithered out. It was black and warty, unlike any afterbirth she had ever seen before. She kicked it away, underneath a car. If there had been anything in her stomach, she would have vomited.
After what seemed like hours, she managed to stand up. She crept over to the man and looked down at him. He looked like a parody of a man made out of pale brown paper, like a broken hornet’s nest. Even his eyeballs had been drained of all their fluid, so that they were flat.
She sat down again, resting her back against a pillar. What the hell was she going to do now? She could retrieve her cell from the dead man’s body and call Klaus. But how was she going to explain what had happened here?
She looked at the creature. She doubted if it was going to lie there for very much longer, digesting the fluids that it had sucked from its prey. What was she going to do with it if it started moving again?
She heard the sound of a vehicle driving down the ramp. A black panel van came around the corner, its tires squealing, and stopped a few yards away from her, with its headlights full on. The doors opened, and Joachim Hochheimer appeared, closely followed by Richard Vuldus, both wearing long black coats.
“My dear lady,” said Joachim Hochheimer, reaching out his hand to help Helen to her feet. “How are you feeling?”
“How did you know that I was here?” she croaked. Her throat was so dry that she could barely speak.
“We have been following you every day, ever since you became pregnant.”
“I never saw you.”
“Well, let us say that after all of these centuries of persecution, we have learned how not to be noticed.”
Richard Vuldus went straight over to the creature and hunkered down beside it, laying his hand on it with pride and awe.
“We have done it, Joachim! At last we have purified the genes.”
Helen took Joachim Hochheimer’s elbow for support. “What is that disgusting thing?” she asked him. “I thought I was carrying a baby all that time ... not a thing like that. I feel sick to my stomach.”
“You shouldn’t be revolted, Detective. It is not a baby, no, but a horse leech, Hirudo medicinalis. The Vuldus family have been trying for generations to return to their original form, and with your help they have achieved their aim at last. This horse leech will now breed others, with the size and intelligence of humans, but all the qualities of a leech.”
“But how is it going to survive? Where is it going to live?”
“Caesar Creek Lake. It covers two thousand eight hundred acres, and there are dozens of inlets where it can conceal itself and flourish. Richard, you must help me lift it into the van before its skin dries out too much.”
“And what about him?” asked Helen, nodding at the flattened body of Son of Beast.
“Don’t worry ... we will dispose of him for you. He will vanish as if he had never been born.”
Joachim Hochheimer helped Helen to climb into her car, while Richard Vuldus retrieved her keys and her cell from Son of Beast’s coat. He gave her his wallet too. Helen opened it and found six tickets for the roller-coaster ride, and a Kentucky driver’s license in the name of Ronald M. Breen. But there was no doubt that the man in the ID photograph was Henry Clarke, one-time realtor of Smith Road, Norwood.
“You have our deepest gratitude,” said Richard Vuldus.
“Sure,” said Helen. She started the engine and backed up. Richard Vuldus raised one hand to her in salute, but she didn’t wave back. She drove up the ramp, out of the parking lot, and into the afternoon rain.
She drove slowly back home to Walnut Street, with tears streaming down her cheeks.
GIRL WAS “SUCKED DRY” SAYS CORONER
A 17-year-old Waynesville girl whose body was recovered from Caesar Creek Lake early yesterday was said by the Hamilton County Coroner to have been completely drained of all her blood and all bodily fluids.
Dr. Kenneth Deane was at a loss to explain what had happened to her, but said there was evidence that she had been bitten by a “very large aquatic creature with serrated teeth.”
Cincinnati Post, March 17.
About the Authors
TREVOR ANDERSON
Anderson is a retired writer of soft-core sex novels. His Hot Blood story marks the Californian’s triumphant return to the genre he helped to cr
eate in the 1960s.
STEVE ARMISON
A veteran emergency-room doctor, Armison has removed a long list of objects from bodily orifices and knows firsthand how dangerous uncontrolled lust can be. Armison says that men should carry implements in addition to condoms for protection, like a wooden stake, for instance. This is Armison’s first published fiction.
DAVID BENTON
Benton’s work can be seen between the covers of Vintage Moon and on the pages of Red Scream magazine. He currently resides in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
P. D. CACEK
Cacek has published over one hundred short stories ... and still managed to find time to write four novels and a collection. Two more collections are due soon: Eros Interruptus, a collection of her erotic stories, including the Bram Stoker winner “Metalica,” and Sympathy for the Dead, a collection of ghost stories; as well as appearances in Dark Visions 12, Lords of the Razor, The Secret Life of Vampires, Weird Tales, Flesh and Blood, and The Burtarian. She is currently working on her latest novel, Officer of the Dead, and preparing to move into a haunted house.
CHRISTINE CROOKS
Crooks lives in Southern California, where she writes speculative fiction, romance, and horror. Her racing romance novel, Thrill of the Chase, is now available. Her shorter work has appeared in Sinisteria, Chimeraworld #4, and Aoife’s Kiss.
W. D. GAGLIANI
Gagliani has published fiction and nonfiction since 1986 His Bram Stoker Award-nominated novel Wolf’s Trap appeared in 2006. His erotica has appeared in Gallery magazine, the web-zine 1000 Delights, and the anthology The Black Spiral: Twisted Tales of Terror, and other stories have been published in anthologies such as Robert Bloch’s Psychos, The Asylum 2, Extremes 3 and 4, Small Bites, and Wicked Karnival Halloween Horror, among others. His book reviews appear in Cemetery Dance, Hellnotes, Chizine.com, Crimespree, Flesh & Blood, and others. He lives and writes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Visit him at www.williamdgagliani.com.
JEFF GELB
Gelb is trying to reconcile his love of Judaism and the Torah with his passion for writing and editing sexy horror stories. Someday maybe he’ll figure out how to do both without suffering major Jewish guilt.
CODY GOODFELLOW
Goodfellow composed soundtracks for pornos in college and has been going downhill ever since. His novels, Radiant Dawn and Ravenous Dusk, are a two-part epic of modern Lovecraftian horror. His stories have appeared in the anthologies Horrors Beyond, Hardboiled Cthulhu, Daikaiju, and Wastelands Within, as well as the magazines Cemetery Dance, Third Alternative, Book of Dark Wisdom, and Red Scream. He lives in San Diego.
ED GORMAN
Gorman has written books in several genres, but suspense fiction remains his favorite. In novels such as The Autumn Dead and A Cry of Shadows, Gorman has demonstrated that he is “one of the most original crime writers around” (Kirkus). Gorman has published more than one hundred short stories, with which he has filled out six collections of his work. His novel The Poker Club was filmed in 2006.
ROBERTA LANNES
Lannes is a native of Southern California, where she has been teaching high-school English and fine and digital art for thirty-three years. Her first horror story was written and sold in Dennis Etchison’s UCLA extension course in Writing Horror Fiction and appeared in his The Cutting Edge in 1985. Since then she has been much published in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres, including Alien Sex, Best New Horror, Splatterpunks, Bradbury Chronicles, and Dark Delicacies. Her website is www.lannes-sealey.com.
GARYLOVISI
Lovisi is a Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award-nominated author (2005) who has been writing for as long as he can remember. Lovisi is the founder of Gryphon Books and editor of Paperback Parade and Hardboiled magazines, and sponsor of an annual book collector show in New York City. To find out more about him, his work, or Gryphon Books, visit his website at www.gryphonbooks.com.
GRAHAM MASTERTON
It has been thirty years since the release of The Manitou, Masterton’s first feature film (now reissued on DVD), but now Ritual was filmed by Italian director Mariano Baino for release in 2006. Since his return from a four-year sojourn in Cork, Ireland, Masterton has been busy with a fourth Manitou novel, Manitou Blood; a novel based on the Beltway snipers, Touchy & Feely; a fourth Night Warriors novel, Night Wars; a vampire novel set in the 1950s, Descendant; a Wendigo novel, Edgewise; and a collection of new short stories, Festival of Fear. Masterton has recently toured Greece and Poland, where his name is engraved on the celebrity plaque in the lobby of the Bristol Hotel, Warsaw, alongside Mick Jagger and Margaret Thatcher.
LISA MORTON
Morton is a Bram Stoker award-winner who has written screenplays (most recently the vampire thriller Blood Angels), animation (Van-Pires), and two books of nonfiction (The Cinema of Tsui Hark and The Halloween Encyclopedia). Her short stories have most recently appeared in Dark Delicacies, Mondo Zombie, and Cemetery Dance magazine. She lives in the San Fernando Valley with actor Richard Grove and can be found online at www.lisamorton.com.
STEVE NILES
Niles is one of the writers responsible for bringing horror comics back to prominence and was recently named by Fangoria magazine as one of its “13 rising talents who promise to keep us terrified for the next 25 years.” In 2002, the success of 30 Days of Night sparked renewed interest in the horror genre; it is being developed as a major motion picture with Spider-Man’s Sam Raimi producing and David Slade directing. In June 2005, Niles and actor Thomas Jane (The Punisher) formed the production company Raw Entertainment, which has a first-look deal with Lions Gate Films. Niles and his Bigfoot co-creator, rocker Rob Zombie, have sold the film rights to Paramount Pictures. Niles will be handling script duties. Also in development are adaptations of Wake The Dead, Hyde, Aleister Arcane, and Criminal Macabre. Niles is currently working for the four top American comic publishers—Marvel, DC, Image, and Dark Horse. Niles resides in Los Angeles with his wife, Nikki, and their three black cats.
DAVID J. SCHOW
Schow is a short-story writer, novelist, screenwriter (teleplays and features), columnist, essayist, editor, photographer, and winner of the World Fantasy and International Horror Guild awards (for short fiction and nonfiction, respectively). Peripherally he has written everything from CD liner notes to book introductions to catalogue copy for monster toys. As expert witness, he appears in many genre-related documentaries, has traveled from New Zealand to Shanghai to Mexico City for same, and recently turned to producing/writing/directing DVD supplements. He lives in a house on a hill in Los Angeles. Website: www.davidjschow.com.
D. LYNN SMITH
Smith has spent the last fifteen years writing and producing such television shows as Murder, She Wrote; Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman; and Touched By An Angel. Her short stories have appeared in After Hours, PanGaia, and Dark Delicacies. She has also published nonfiction articles in the Dark Shadows Almanac and Fangoria. Smith is currently working on a science fiction novel, The Shaman’s Gene. Her website is dlynnsmith.com.
THOMAS TESSIER
Tessier is the author of several novels of terror and suspense, including The Nightwalker, Phantom, Finishing Touches, Secret Strangers, and Father Panic’s Opera Macabre. His novel Fog Heart was cited by Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of the year, was a Bram Stoker Award Finalist, and received the International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel. His first book of short fiction, Ghost Music and Other Tales, received the International Horror Guild Award for Best Collection. Tessier lives in Connecticut and is finishing a new novel and a new collection of short stories.
STEVE VERNON
Vernon’s stories have appeared in The Horror Show, Cemetery Dance, Karl Edward Wagner’s Year’s Best Horror, Horror Garage, Flesh & Blood, Corpse Blossoms, and many other magazines and anthologies. His novella “Long Horn, Big Shaggy—A Tale of Wild West Terror and Reanimated Buffalo” can be ordered at any bookstore. His new collection, Nothing To Lose, was published in 2006. Vern
on’s latest, Four Ride Out, a four-novella collection of weird western horror starring Brian Keene, Tim Lebbon, Tim Curran, and Vernon, will be out in 2007.
RICHARD WILKEY
Wilkey first published erotic horror in several men’s magazines back in the mid-80s. Following that, he focused on personally experiencing some of the acts he’d been writing about. Fortunately, he survived his admittedly bizarre behavioral streak and has returned to the safety of writing about the darker side of sex rather than experiencing it directly. “Taking matters into my own hand, so to speak, should be much safer,” Wilkey says with a grin.
CHELSEA QUINN YARBRO
A professional writer for more than thirty-eight years, Yarbro has sold seventy-nine books and more than eighty works of short fiction and essays. She lives in her hometown—Berkeley, California—with two autocratic cats. In 2003, the World Horror Association presented her with a Grand Master award.
DAVID ZELTSERMAN
Zeltserman writes mostly dark crime fiction and has had short stories appear in a number of magazines, including Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock. His first psychotic dark crime novel, Fast Lane, was published in 2004. Two more dark crime novels, Small Crimes and Bad Thoughts, are due to be published in 2007. Zeltserman is a veteran of Hot Blood who lives and writes in Boston and insists that only part of his Hot Blood story is autobiographical.
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