The Best of Horror Library: Volumes 1-5
Page 5
In twenty minutes, a middle-aged man wearing a blue suit and a black overcoat is going to walk into this office and kill everyone. His name is John Newcomb and he’s mad because accounting screwed him on his last check. They were fifteen dollars short. He has a sawed off, twelve-gauge Mossberg tucked beneath his coat. He’s on his way right now. He’s taking the bus. I got in by making an appointment with the manager at G&J Mercantile. In a couple of seconds, I’m going to go into the bathroom and wait out the storm.
When he’s finished killing all the people in the office, he’s going to put the barrel of the shotgun into his own mouth and blow his brains all over the receptionist’s desk. But she won’t notice because she’s one of the first people this gentleman is going to kill.
“Excuse me.”
“Yes?”
“Will it be very long before I can meet with Mr. Howard?”
“Well, he’s kind of busy right now, but he said that he’ll definitely meet with you.”
“Any idea how long?”
“I really can’t say, sir…maybe twenty minutes?”
In twenty minutes you’ll be a stain on the carpet, sweetheart but—
“All right, well, is there a restroom I could use here?”
“Straight down the hall, first door on your left.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
I go into the lavatory, lock the door, sit on the toilet and wait. I check the film in my camera. Fuji Velvia for sharp saturated slides.
I put my ear to the door and listen. The hectic office sounds go on for a while, and then fifteen minutes later chaos erupts.
“Mr. Newcomb,” says the voice of the receptionist. “Can I help you with something…I didn’t know you were…Oh…Oh, my god!”
Boom
The explosion is like a thunderclap. People scream. I hear the sounds of glass shattering and desks overturned. A man screams for help. There’s the sound of plaster breaking apart as the scattered shells rip through the walls.
Boom, boom, boom
Newcomb shoves cartridges into his weapon and blasts away like some possessed robot. The madness goes on for about ten minutes. I hear a woman sobbing before she is cut off by an explosion. I hear the sounds of boots crunching down on broken glass. Some people are moaning and making pathetic gurgling noises.
Silence
There is one more thunderous blast and then a thump—the sound of Newcomb’s broken body crumpling to the floor.
I wait even though I shouldn’t. I have about two minutes before the cops arrive. My hands are shaking and my palms are clammy.
The camera almost slips from my grip.
I open the door.
Carnage
Blood everywhere—staining the walls, all over the desks, all over the carpets. Papers, phones, staplers, and desks are broken and in pieces, strewn about the floor. Bodies are everywhere. Some of them still twitch. There’s a guy draped over a busted copier, which keeps bleeping and spewing out paper.
Another guy is slumped across the desk with the phone still clutched in his hand. Newcomb blew off the top part of his head.
Click, click
The phosphorescent flash of the camera briefly illuminates the office. The receptionist doesn’t have a face anymore. Only a few bloody strands of sinew attach her head to her neck.
Click
Now Newcomb. Another nasty head shot, mouth opened into a perpetual scream. Little pieces of teeth and skull sit in a sticky pool of crimson amidst empty shotgun shells and a pile of paper clips. That’s going to be a good one.
“Shit.”
Sirens
A few more pictures, and then I’m gone, out the back door.
* * *
We’re in a coffee shop in DC. Trendy, white, teenage hipsters sip unpronounceable variations of the mocha blend. Hair and clothes fashionably unkempt, they lounge on the sofas talking about politics and MTV, often using both words in the same sentence.
Meredith carelessly runs a hand through her dark hair and chews on the end of her glasses.
“I’ll give you three hundred for the whole lot of them,” she says.
“Why so much?”
“Clerks going postal isn’t that uncommon nowadays, and some of these pictures are simply too graphic for our publication.”
“That’s what you always say,” I reply, “and then in the next issue, I find every one of those pictures in there.”
“Three hundred,” she says. “Take it, or leave it.”
“Don’t have much of a choice, do I?”
She hands me a check under the table, and then she does something strange.
“Hey,” she says. “How do you get these, anyway?”
This line of questioning is highly irregular. We’ve been working together for almost a year now, and suddenly she’s curious?
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, how do you get there before the cops come. How do you know these things are going to happen?”
“I’m a psychic,” I reply, ready for the usual look of poorly suppressed hilarity, mingled with a healthy dose of contempt and skepticism.
“You don’t look like the Tarot card and crystal type.”
“I’m not.”
“Well, if you’re a psychic, then what am I thinking?”
There’s one I haven’t heard before.
“It doesn’t work that way,” I say.
“Ever see a ghost?”
“No, I don’t think there’s such a thing.”
“Can you talk to the dead?”
“What is this—twenty questions?” I say.
She looks away disappointed.
“Look,” I tell her. “I can’t see things that happen thousands of years later, and so I don’t consider myself some sort of prophet. I can’t look at your palms and see if you’re going to have a happy life, or marry the man of your dreams, and I can’t read your mind. I don’t know whether the world is going to end, and I have no idea whether or not your dead Uncle Harry is happy in the spirit world. Okay?”
“Okay, okay, sorry,” she says. “Sensitive subject, point taken.”
“I don’t mind talking about it,” I say. “Just don’t make it into a joke, all right?”
“Yeah, all right.”
A few people are staring at us. I guess I must have raised my voice a little.
“So where are we meeting next?” she says.
“I don’t know yet.”
“Well, try to get something a little more sensational next time, like a school shooting or something.”
She winks, pats me on the arm and heads out the door.
“Yeah.”
* * *
Hollywood Beach, Florida. I’m on the boardwalk sipping a margarita, watching young girls in bikinis frolic around on the beach. It’s like an episode of Baywatch out here. The sun is resplendent; the sand is white, the water crystal clear.
In fifteen minutes, a gang of Haitian drug dealers are going to come careening down the street in a black van. The cops are going to be after them—they’ve already shot out one of their tires, and one hundred feet away from where I’m standing, the driver is going to lose control of his vehicle.
It will veer out onto the boardwalk, sparks flying from the axle, and roll over one and a half times. Then it will skid into a stoplight, which will come crashing down on top of it.
The van will explode like a landmine sending pieces of burning shrapnel in every direction. But that’s not the worst of it. Two of these gentlemen are going to escape the van and start shooting it out with the cops. When it’s all said and done, there will be at least thirty people dead and twice as many injured.
“Hi.”
“Hey.”
She’s been staring at me for the past ten minutes or so. I’ve been staring back. She has black hair, dark eyes and a deep tan. She’s vaguely familiar.
Cuban chick.
Cute.
I’ve seen her before.
“I’m from everywhere,” I say.
“Here on vacation?”
“Yeah, sort of.”
“With your wife?”
“Not married.”
“Oh.”
Awkward silence.
“So…you come here often?” I ask, immediately realizing what a clichéd, idiotic thing that is to say. But sometimes clichéd, idiotic things are good icebreakers.
She laughs, but it’s not mocking…not exactly.
“Not really,” she says. “I live in South Beach. I’m just visiting my cousin.”
I hear the sirens wailing in the distance. I look at her and she takes an involuntary step backward, probably because of the sudden gravity in my expression. She looks behind her quickly and then turns back to me biting her lower lip in consternation. I’m about to do something highly irregular.
“Look,” I say. “You ought to get out of here right now. You hear those sirens?”
She nods slowly.
“In a few minutes something terrible is going to happen, and if you don’t leave, you’re going to die.”
“What? Are you crazy, man?”
“No, I’m not crazy. Please just listen…”
“Whoa, take it easy, buddy.”
“Look, just get out of here,” I say.
“Jesus, all right, just tell me you’re not interested, spare me the bullshit.”
“I’m not…”
“Whatever, I’m sorry to have bothered you. Adios.”
She walks away and then turns around and stops as she hears the shrieking tires. The van barrels through a fruit stand and skids out of control. She is paralyzed with fear. My head is throbbing.
I yell out to her again, but I can’t hear my own voice because of the sirens and my heartbeat pounding in my ears. People scream and run for their lives, but she just stands there.
The van goes into its roll and is about a quarter-way through the first rotation when it plows into her. Just before it hits her, she looks back at me and our eyes meet. People are screaming and crying, the van is on fire, the cops are yelling out orders, and the sirens howl and shriek like starved wolves. Two men holding submachine guns crawl out from beneath the wreckage. Their eyes are wild and filled with madness.
My headache is gone, and the sheer beauty of the chaos expanding all around me is spellbinding. I’m in the quiet center of a maelstrom. The van explodes and, almost magically, the camera materializes into my hands. The Haitians start shooting.
As do I.
* * *
“People don’t know anything about psychics,” I say.
Meredith thumbs through the photos, wrinkling her nose in disgust at a particularly garish picture of a mangled Haitian crushed to pulp beneath the weight of the van.
We’re in a dimly lit bar in Miami. A television hung over the bar is showing baseball highlights. The place is more or less empty. The bartender is a blonde-haired goddess with low cut pants that tantalizingly reveal the topmost portion of her pink thong. She looks bored. If she is aware that I’m drooling over her, she’s either unaffected by this or playing it cool. I suspect the former.
“My theory is,” I continue, “there are probably a lot of people like me in this world, but they just don’t know how to cope with their talents, and most of them end up in a loony bin. Probably think they’re crazy. They don’t know they’re psychic because the media portrays extra sensory perception all wrong.
“It’s not about moving objects with your mind and reading tarot cards. It’s not that clear cut. It usually comes to you in drips and drabs at first, and then one day it just hits you with astonishing clarity. At least that’s how it works with me anyway—”
“I like this one,” Meredith says.
She’s referring to a picture of my Cuban girl with a hunk of metal sticking through her chest. Her eyes are wide open, vapid, like a fish.
“Horrific incidents,” I say, “circumstances of extreme trauma, bloodshed, mayhem, chaos, death—these are the things my mind seems drawn to. It anticipates situations in which catastrophic incidents will take place, reaches out and then plugs into a wave of collective cognizance—nasty little slices of the human experience. Fleeting glimpses into the time-stream continuum, fragment- by-fragment, piece-by-piece the images form like a puzzle in my mind’s eye, only complete when I arrive at the scene of the carnage.”
“Have you ever tried to stop it?” she asks, sipping at her gin and tonic.
“What do you mean?”
“Have you ever tried to prevent these things from happening?”
Pause.
“Well?” she presses.
“Yes.”
“And?”
“Let’s just say that there are a lot of people who believe in free will, just like there are a lot of kids who believe in Santa Claus. Sometimes it’s nice to comfortably slip into a delusion, especially if many other people, who may pretend to share your views, are there to validate your false belief system. But it’s all bullshit, and on some level, everybody knows it.”
“Why do you do this anyway?” she says. “I know it’s not for the money.”
“You really want to know?”
“Try me.”
“It’s for the same reason people read your magazine,” I say. “I like it. It is always violent, it is always bloody, and it’s always breathtakingly beautiful. It’s for the rush I get—the moment of anticipation mingled with the absolute knowledge of what will occur, yet it always shocks me, there is always something I did not foresee, some implication that my mind did not fully grasp. Human beings find a sublime beauty in death and in chaos and wanton destruction, though most people would never admit this to themselves at the risk of seeming like sadists or unmentionable bastards.
“But ask any of these people why they like action movies so much, and why the newspapers and media are only interested in stories of a violent and graphic nature. Why? Because people like it. They like to watch it. America is a country full of voyeuristic perverts. Don’t believe me? Turn on the television and thumb through any of the fifty or so reality programs circulating the networks at any given time. Hell, turn to any news station. It’s just a cataloguing of violent events occurring within a proximate position of your current location. And you can call me a bastard if you want, I know what I am, and I know what I’m not. It’s all for the art, you see…all for the art. Everything else is secondary.”
“You’re a bastard,” she says. “But then, what does that make me?”
“A bitch?” I offer.
“You’re funny.”
“I’ve always thought so.”
“I’ll give you five hundred for these,” she says as she polishes off the rest of her drink.
“I guess so,” I say.
“You know what I think?” she says.
“That I’m starting to look more attractive with each drink?”
“Some psychic you are. I think that one day you’re gonna see something so bad it’ll make you want to stop doing this.”
“I’ve seen it all, sweetheart.”
“You’ve never seen a ghost. My friend is a psychic—she says that real mediums can see ghosts.”
“Does she happen to have a one-eight-hundred number?”
She gives me the finger and then smiles good-naturedly. She hands me the check and then gets up to leave.
“I’ll see you when I see you,” she says. And then she’s gone.
* * *
I’ve been having these nasty little visions lately. I’ve been seeing them for almost a month now. That’s a long time for me. I have a horrible headache, worse one I’ve had in years. Today is the day when the proverbial shit will hit the fan.
I walk down a few blocks, and a moron cab driver almost runs me over as I cross the street. I turn left down Fortieth an
d come upon it shortly. Nasty looking piece of work—real run down and decrepit. Only a matter of time before the city does away with it…
…A woman bound and gagged, long blonde hair, bright blue eyes. She’s naked. The silver gleam of a steak knife. Wide, filthy room; scurrying rats, boarded up windows, grime and soot-covered walls and floors. Bodies hung upside down like cattle in a slaughterhouse. The woman’s eyes widen in terror. A dark silhouetted figure…
“Jesus.”
My headache borders upon mythic proportions.
I see the building looming above me.
Here we go.
I walk up the stairs and enter. There’s a stench like blood and rat feces. I startle a couple of pigeons, and the sound of their wings flapping almost makes me jump out of my skin.
Thick layers of dust coat every inch of the foundation’s crumbling brick and mortar structure. I find a stairwell and start ascending. It’s on the top floor.
It’s as cold in here as it is outside, but I’m sweating like a hick virgin alone with a drunk uncle. I reach the top floor and he’s there.
He’s standing with his back to me.
There are five bodies hanging upside down, gently swaying back and forth like piñatas. Only a few rays of light penetrate the darkness, leaking in through holes in the wooden planks that cover the windows. It’s not exactly pitch black in here, and the lens I’m using will work in this poor lighting. The stench is unbearable. I wonder how long these bodies have been up here quietly moldering.
I take a step forward and he spins around. I can’t make out his features from where I’m standing.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I know who you are. I’m not here to interfere with your work, and I’m not gonna call the cops.”
I can hear his heavy breathing. He takes a faltering step forward.
“I’m an artist,” I say. “Like you. I’m an admirer of your work.”
He stops moving forward and lowers the knife. I raise my camera.
“Do you mind?” I ask.
He stares at me for a long time. I stand there motionless, waiting for some sort of reply.
“How did you find this place?” he says. His voice is high-pitched, nasally. Though I can’t see his face now, I’ve seen it before. He is a small, nervous-looking young man with thick glasses and acne scars covering his forehead. He is young, hasn’t even graduated high school yet. If the police profilers only knew how off the mark they were.