The Best of Horror Library: Volumes 1-5

by Bentley Little

  “Look,” I say. “I won’t take any pictures of you. Keep in the shadows and I won’t see your face. I just want to see the bodies. If you don’t want me to do this, I’ll leave right now, and no one will find anything out from me.”

  “Maybe you’d like to join them,” he says.

  “You can kill me, but I’ve got six people waiting for me downstairs. I don’t come back in ten minutes, they’ll come up here, take you down, and then they’ll call the cops. They’ve got guns, and they’ve got pictures of you, so even if you get away, they’ll send your name and information to the police. They’ll be all over you. Like flies on shit.”

  “What kind of sick shit are you into?”

  “Isn’t that sort of a funny question, coming from you?” I ask.

  He stands there and considers this for a moment, and then just like I knew he would, he takes a step back and disappears into the shadows. It’s not because of my threats, which are as hollow and as empty as this man’s soul.

  It’s because he’s proud of his work.

  He wants me to see it.

  I enter the room. Something becomes evident rather quickly. This guy’s not your typical killer. He’s the worst one I’ve seen in years. And I’ve seen some bad ones.

  This guy shows no preference for age, gender, or race. He hates everyone and everything. He has stripped all the bodies of clothing and sliced them from chest to groin. He has pulled their entrails out, eviscerated them, and then stuffed them into their orifices.

  There are teeth marks on the inner thighs of his victims and around the genitalia. He has skinned some of them. And he did it all before they died. How do I know?

  I look down to my right and see the girl bound and gagged, quivering in the corner. I know how she is going to die. I’ve seen every last detail of her death. The vision has haunted me for over a month. It is going to be terrible. He will act out every one of his perverse desires upon her innocent flesh, and when he’s finished she will resemble a shapeless mass of blood and pulp, and he will keep her alive and suffering for as long he can. She looks up at me and pleads for help with her eyes. I aim the camera and snap off the last picture. I turn to the shape in the shadows.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “Anytime.”

  * * *

  We’re in an Italian Restaurant on Fifth Avenue. I’m working on a bowl of fettuccine Alfredo. Meredith is three-quarters of the way through a bottle of red wine.

  “Do you use a digital camera?” she says.

  “No, I’m not into the whole digital camera and camcorder thing. I think a photograph is the most powerful trapped light medium. I use a 35-millimeter that accepts interchangeable lenses and allows manual iris and shutter speed settings. It suits my purposes just fine.”

  “These are awful, by the way,” she says.

  I’ve arranged the pictures in sequential order. The first snaps are of the oldest victims, the ones whose bodies have become unrecognizable due to decay and mutilation.

  Then we go to the fresher corpses and then finally—

  “He just let you take the pictures?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nice guy.”

  “Not quite.”

  “Six hundred,” she offers.

  “Are you kidding?” I say. “The FBI would probably give me more than that for these. By the way, you’re going to have to blur out Blondie’s face. The cops are still looking for her.”

  “Hmm, I don’t think we’ll use that picture.”

  “Probably shouldn’t.”

  She stares at it for a second and then looks up at me. Her face has visibly paled. That one has gotten to her.

  “How do you live with yourself ?” she asks me.

  “How do you?” I say.

  “I drink,” she replied.

  “I see.”

  “Seven hundred and fifty,” she says with a tone of finality.

  “Deal.”

  She downs the rest of her drink and gets up without saying goodbye.

  * * *

  A man named Reginald Collins has just sliced his wrists with a broken shard of mirror glass. He is a paranoid schizophrenic with complex delusions of grandeur.

  “Daemon,” he mutters, rocking back and forth with his hands around his knees.

  He keeps saying that. Daemon. Over and over again, while his life seeps out of his severed arteries and soaks his blue hospital slippers.

  Prior to slitting his wrists, he killed two nurses, three other patients, and an orderly. He locked the door to the ward and pushed a desk in front of it. So now, I’m stuck here with him. The other patients have all hidden away in their rooms or cells or whatever the fuck you call those padded domiciles and are screaming out inanities.

  “Daemon.”

  Yeah.

  This is not good. I don’t know how I’m going to explain this to the cops and the doctors. He hasn’t seen me yet, but I’m not too worried about that. The guy is weak and weakening by the second. I figure this may be my last chance for a photo opportunity. I get a good angle and take his picture.

  His head snaps upward.

  His eyes are sunken and red-rimmed. They widen for an instant, and then something bizarre happens.

  They narrow and I see the recognition in them. It is undeniable.

  This guy thinks he knows me.

  He smiles.

  The lights buzz and flicker and then they go out. They’ve cut the power. It’s not completely dark in here, though. There is another light on somewhere—I can see it down the hall. The loonies are screaming their heads off.

  “I know you,” he whispers.

  “How do you know me?”

  His eyes go blank. His head pitches forward. He forces himself to look back up.

  “There are Daemon in my room,” he says.

  “There’s a daemon in your room?”

  “Not a daemon,” he says. “There is no such thing as a daemon. When they come, they come in legion.”

  I don’t know what the appropriate response for that is, so I keep quiet.

  “You’ll see,” he says.

  I turn around and look for the source of the light. It’s coming from a room down the hall. Collins’s room.

  He says something else, but I can’t quite make it out. In a couple of minutes, he’ll be dead.

  I start walking toward the room without even realizing it. The light draws me in.

  I enter. The first thing that hits me is the smell. Collins has smeared shit all over the walls. Of all the foul places I’ve visited in my lifetime, this is among the worst. This room is like a rat’s warren—a haven for some festering pestilence. It is unbelievably cold in this room. Not imagined cold, but biting, stinging, you can see your breath type cold. Weird little symbols and crude stick figure drawings cover the walls and floors.

  A dim light glows in the corner of the room. The light is colorless and swirling, and as I stare into its depths, I feel this queasiness in my stomach, as if I am standing on a high precipice and staring downward. A numbing fear creeps up from my bowels and holds me there.

  I hear something. Whispering. Not one voice, or two voices, or ten, but hundreds of raspy whispers echoing in my ears, and this wave of nausea rises in my stomach and I can taste the bile.

  Then everything goes black and I feel nothing.

  * * *

  “They took all your film?” she asks.

  We’re in a pub filled with drunken Irishmen singing along to a Garth Brooks song. The cigarette smoke is so thick I can barely make out Meredith’s face.

  “I’m going to be called back as a material witness,” I say.

  “You don’t look too good,” she says. “Was it that bad?”

  I say nothing.

  “If I didn’t know better,” she says, “I’d say you look like you’ve seen a gho…”

  “I don’t know what that thing was,” I reply. “If it was what Collins said it was, then it kind of makes sense that it was there. Certain peo
ple and places draw certain things to them. It’s a magnetic pull, a force of nature, and there really isn’t much you can do about it. The world is not a nice place. It’s a freak show, a fucking carnival. Good is an unquantifiable and abstract concept, and evil in all its multifarious gradations is the only reality.”

  “A little jaded, are we?”

  “Conduct a survey,” I say. “Ask a hundred people if they’ve ever heard of or seen anything that was evil. Then ask the same or a different group of people if they’ve ever seen someone or something that was good—that was entirely devoid of any negative or harmful qualities.

  “Are you aware of the economic theory of Pareto optimality?”

  “No,” she says. “Please enlighten me.”

  “Basically, it is a situation in which you can’t achieve success without in some way taking from or hurting someone else. Every so-called good thing has this quality, from the roses and vegetables whose presence ensures that other plants won’t grow in the garden, to the air filled with innumerable microorganisms which perish every time you draw a breath.

  “Evil—destructive energy—has a variety of forms and gradations, but it’s everywhere, all pervasive, omnipotent, and either you can succumb to it or try to understand its savage beauty. The purpose of my work is to find a manifestation of this cosmic, primordial force in its purest, most unadulterated form and capture it—immortalize it in a picture.”

  “You have a rather idealized view of your work,” she says.

  “You’re just another voyeur, and one day you’re going to look back on your life with sadness and regret.”

  She pauses to guzzle her beer. She wipes the fizz off her face, and then looks up at me triumphantly.

  “So,” she says, “is it safe to say that you and I are through working together?”

  The jukebox has gone on to play some U2 song. The Irishmen are going nuts. One of them gets on top of the bar. He’s so drunk he can’t even stand without swaying. In a few seconds, he’s going to come crashing down on top of it, maybe break his arm, and his comrades seem to be eagerly anticipating this, nudging each other and pointing up at him.

  “If I have one regret in my life,” I say, “it has to do with that thing in the psychiatric ward—that hoary light infesting Reginald Collins’s disheveled, shit-smeared cell.”

  “Yeah? And what’s that?”

  I peer at her through the veil of smoke, and I don’t turn my head even as the crash of a heavy body and broken beer bottles resounds above the din of noise and music. Everyone in the bar roars with laughter.

  “I wish I had taken its picture.”

  Apple

  by Marc Paoletti

  The airport was the perfect place to kill her. In the crush of people, she’d never see it coming.

  Was he worried the country was at Threat Level Orange? Are you kidding? Fuck Homeland Security, you could throw all the money in the world at technology, but if you had losers running the chem-sniffers and X-ray machines and face recognition software, you were screwed, and at JFK, you couldn’t throw a Filet-o-Fish three fucking feet without hitting a loser. These twelve-dollar-an-hour ghetto kids barely old enough to drive and white-trash remainders who couldn’t hack the postal exam were given uniforms and were all that stood between passengers and total catastrophe.

  John Doe knew this and watched the black woman walk toward him through the international terminal. She’d flown all the way from Ethiopia and was the mayor of some tiny province, like the title she held there meant anything real over here. The U.N. was having a summit, about what, who gave a shit? The U.N. liked to pander, got off on making countries they raped for raw materials feel like they had clout, go ahead, give us your opinion, we’re interested, really, say all you have to say, because later you’d better lay back and relax and act like you enjoy what we’re doing to you.

  So he didn’t know exactly where she was from or what she stood for, not that it mattered. All he knew was the faceless guy who’d left a suitcase full of cash behind the Bald Eagle strip joint on Court Street wanted her dead.

  She wasn’t close yet, but she was within a clear line of sight. She wore some glorified housedress with white tribal markings on it that hung to her ankles and swirled around her body as she walked. She moved with the carefree recklessness of someone who thought she had nothing to fear. He looked at her clinically as he looked at everyone and all things when he was on a job. People were simply that—man, woman, boy, girl. Things, they were just things, even if they posed a threat. The clinical distance allowed him to keep focus and react appropriately with ruthless precision, had allowed him to rack up the best win/loss ratio in the business.

  Around the African woman a throng kept pace, ninety people, maybe more, all disembarked from the same transoceanic airliner, all heading for customs: A gaunt woman wearing a sheer sweater the color of menstrual blood; a man in an ash three-piece suit; a gaggle of tittering Asian girls with pigtails and fine clean bones, all wearing white blouses and blue skirts; a boy no taller than three feet with a smiley-face watch around one wrist and string tied around the other that led up to a green helium balloon that bobbed with every step. Plenty of others made up the human herd, all shapes and sizes and colors, a seething mass of bodies, nobody visible or in the same place for very long except the woman’s bodyguards. Let’s not forget them. Two men, marching on either side of her like movable walls of muscle, skin the color of pitch, wearing navy suits and mirrored sunglasses. Their jackets bulged at the right breast. Obviously, they’d been cleared to carry weapons.

  He didn’t give a rat’s ass. They could carry fucking Stinger missiles for all he cared. The woman would still die. All he had to do was wait for the beep.

  * * *

  His father was a teacher, and starting at seven years old, he watched his father work. He was home schooled and traveled with his father to a different country every year. This year it was Bolivia. Last year it was Sudan.

  It was 8 a.m. sharp, and at seven years old, the toes of his Adidas barely scraped the floor as he sat in the elbow desk. The classroom was crescent-shaped and antiseptic smelling with a stage placed up front and a white tiled floor that sloped toward a center drain the size of a 45 rpm record. Florescent lights hummed. The brown-faced men sitting around him that first day, dressed in khaki uniforms with small colored ribbons on the lapels and shiny black holsters at the hips, patted his head and called him asesino pequeño.

  His father stood before the officers, wearing his blue powdered surgeon’s gloves and a white lab coat over a charcoal business suit. Next to him on a metal table, angled up so the whole class could see, was a naked man, strapped down spread-eagle by his wrists and ankles. The man was very thin and his flesh was the color of sun-damaged leather. There was a patch of brown hair covering his chest between the nipples that mirrored a patch at his groin. Thick black-rubber dental stoppers had been wedged between his teeth and kept his mouth stretched open. The man whined softly, and the noise reminded John of when he’d come upon a dog once that had been struck by a car and lay in the middle of the street with its hindquarters crushed. The dog made the same noise that the man was making, and listening to it made John squirm. Didn’t the man want to be here? Was the man afraid?

  His father pressed a button on his jeweled watch—beep—and then said to the class, Let us begin. There was a rustle of paper as the officers opened notebooks and readied pens. John watched his father produce a long-necked plastic bottle from the pocket of his lab coat. The bottle was filled with a liquid that glimmered like diamonds in the greenish fluorescent light. When his father stepped toward the table with the bottle, the naked man began to scream through his fixed-open mouth. The sounds were panting and hollow, like gusts of wind through a rusted chimney flue, and then his father pushed the long neck of the bottle deep into the man’s throat, causing him to gag violently, a hard grating sound that made John jump in his chair.

  John expected the man to cough the bottle free from hi
s throat like he coughed up aspirin sometimes when he didn’t swallow right, but his father held the bottle fast, making the naked man gag harder and then swallow, swallow, swallow. John watched the level of glittering liquid in the bottle sink lower and lower in jerks and starts as the knot in his stomach drew tighter. His thoughts were a jumble. Did his father know he was hurting the man? Daddy, he began, voice tiny and overshadowed by the spectacle, Daddy, he tried again, a mouse, tiny in his seat, no use.

  His father held the bottle in place, and when it was empty, he pulled it free, the tip trailing thick mucus, and then stepped back. Please, the naked man said, voice garbled by the dental stoppers. Please. John counted twenty-two pleases before bloody vomit exploded from between the man’s lips. The man vomited so much and so hard that the stoppers sloshed free and his body and the table and the white-tiled floor around him became coated and dripping. The officers around John leaned forward, eyes feeding on the red.

  All leaned forward, that is, except one, John noticed. He had dark thin eyebrows and yellow teeth, and he turned his head away from the man on the table and kept it turned away while the others watched and scribbled in their notebooks. John thought he should help the man on the table, but the adults weren’t doing anything, so he sat absolutely still and tried to will his stomach ache to go away as the officer with thin black eyebrows stared at the wall.

  Please, the naked man said, word bubbling crimson, and his father held up a second bottle filled with blue liquid. Tell us what we want to know, he told the man, and this will stop the pain and heal the damage. The man did. The man spat out a stream of words and bloody spittle and after he was done, his father pressed the button on his watch again—beep—and then slipped the bottle back into his lab coat and watched the man vomit black and purple this time and die.

  That’s how it’s done quick, his father said, locking eyes with John, and then went on to explain to the class that the first bottle contained salt water and ground glass, and the second bottle had water and food coloring only, no magic elixir, just a ruse to offer the prisoner hope and produce the desired result. His father pressed a wall buzzer, and two uniformed men thick with muscle emerged from a side door and took the dead man away, then returned moments later with another naked man who they strapped struggling to the table.