The Best of Horror Library: Volumes 1-5

by Bentley Little

  Laura Hoffman agreed to meet Mr. Brunner, and at 4:30 p.m., half an hour after school ended and the rank of yellow buses had wheezed and coughed their way out of the parking lot, she met her son outside Brunner’s office, her own expression much like the principal’s, but with less energy behind it. She said nothing to David, just sat and waited, her hooded eyes on the posters on the wall opposite, each one telling her how to circumvent the latent strains of rebellion that come courtesy of puberty. To the remaining staff that passed her by, she seemed likely to crumble into dust under the weight of Brunner’s words.

  But the meeting was a brief and civil one, with the ordinarily overbearing principal appearing to recognize the delicate state of his guest. He restricted himself to the facts, his tones measured as he informed Laura that her son’s performance in school was growing steadily worse and could not be allowed to degrade further. He proposed that Laura take a more active role in David’s education by keeping in constant communication with the teachers (after it emerged that David had been signing his own report cards) and by encouraging David to focus more on his work at home.

  During the meeting, David spoke little, and indeed seldom was he called on to give his input. Brunner and Laura had convened not to hear his thoughts or feelings on the matter, but so he could hear firsthand what he was going to be made to do, what he would have to do if he intended to stay in school.

  Had they asked, he might have told them that leaving or being expelled would have suited him fine. An intelligent and astute boy, his inability to hold on to the information and recycle it to impress his teachers depressed him. Added to that, he was the target of two bullies, one of whom was a grade higher, the other a boy in his own class. It is unknown whether or not David’s antagonists were aware of each other—though in the microcosm that is high school, it seems likely—and it matters little. Together they presented a tireless and complete assault on his already fragile mind, with one preferring verbal abuse pertaining to David’s dead father, while the other taunted him with threats of physical violence. And though David rarely found himself in a fight with either of them, choosing instead to abide by his father’s wisdom that ignoring the threat was better, there were occasions in which he was discovered crying, bleeding and bruised under the bleachers, his pants and underwear bunched around his ankles, his glasses cracked or broken, his books scattered around him, most of them torn, his backpack missing, taken by his assailant.

  In lieu of a proper school counselor—considered a useless luxury in a school of sound and secure young boys, and therefore vetoed by the school board some years before—the teachers tried to get David to open up to them about his feelings and promised to punish the offenders. The boy refused the former and railed against the latter, claiming it would only exacerbate an already bad situation. For a while, his request was met, until the day he was found sobbing in the boy’s bathroom with a bloody nose and urine all over his clothes. A meeting was promptly held in the auditorium, reminding the students about the consequences of bullying, with severe promises of suspension, expulsion, and perhaps even police involvement if anyone dared ignore the school’s policies on such things.

  For a brief period after the meeting, David was not picked on. Instead, he was avoided. His presence in the hallway was enough to trigger a dramatic parting of the crowd of students as if he had become Moses at the Red Sea. They watched him with contemptuous stares and muttered insults as he walked by, then jeered at him as soon as he was far enough away to be unable to tell from where it had come. Not that it would have made a difference. David had never ‘ratted out’ his tormentors and never would, but the interjection of the principal and teachers, the indication that they had been made aware of something rotten in the state of Denmark High, had been enough. David was made a pariah, outcast further, and he withdrew into himself, became a ghost haunting the high school halls.

  At home, his mother tried to console him and reel him back from the dangerous precipice upon which he seemed to stand, but since her husband’s death, her own resolve had buckled, leaving her ill-equipped to handle even the most rudimentary crises in her own life. The thought of having to counsel her boy out of his misery was overwhelming, and, she thought, beyond her means. Laura did, however, suggest taking him out of Denmark High and relocating him. His response was to shake his head and quote another of his father’s adages: “Nobody ever got anywhere by running.”

  At night, he wrote stories, thinly veiled fictions based on his own experiences and accompanied by crude illustrations in which larger-than-life adversaries were vanquished in hellish storms of blood, rent limb from limb by equally overdrawn heroes. None resembled David, but all were clearly reflections of how he wished he was: omnipotent, a dealer of destruction, a creature of vengeance. In the margins of the pages, squiggles and scratches told the story of an unfair world forever growing smaller, fiery stars shining in the ragged black sockets of his enemies. Every step, he wrote, brings the end closer.

  Time passed. The bullies, the scoffing students, even the teachers forgot about David Hoffman. He became just another face in the hall, unremarkable, unworthy of note unless he chose to be.

  And at length, of course, he did.

  Because although the boy faded into the mural of high school, he remained intrinsically aware of the mechanisms that had brought him to this point in his life—the hurt, the hate, the pain—and it festered inside him, lurking just beneath his gaunt face and hollow eyes, warring with his restraint and patience, eager to explode in an all-consuming fire of vengeance. But though he permitted himself the odd fantasy (later reproduced and documented in his notebook) of ultra-violent ends for his fellow students and their vapid-faced teachers, he kept a tight rein on his emotions and the venomous threads that stitched them together.

  He could wait, because hatred is patient.

  * * *

  On the 10th of October, 2008 at 8:03 a.m., David Hoffman walked up the steps of Denmark High School. The door was not locked. He entered the building and stood in the cold, empty hallway for some time, perhaps reliving each and every hurtful moment he had endured here, perhaps possessed by a single moment of doubt in which he questioned the purpose of what he was about to do. If so, grim determination and homicidal resolve overruled it, and he carried on, chambering a round into his deceased father’s shotgun—a gun Frank Hoffman had owned but never used—entering each and every classroom and opening fire. The sound was like a cannonade, echoing around the school, rattling pipes and sending vibrations rippling through the floor and walls. Plaster flew, glass shattered, wood exploded. David carried on, until he had visited every classroom, assassinated every vile phantom, by which time the cops were clustered outside, sirens flickering silently, stern voices filtered through megaphones ordering him to come out.

  Only then did he find his way back to the main entrance, where he stood weeping as he looked out on the world. Without his realizing it, it had grown smaller still, trapping him inside the vault of his worst memories, recollections that had not fallen before his gun as they’d been meant to, but snickered and sneered when he turned his back on them.

  The police would later say he looked like a ghost, an ashen figure behind glass so dusty it hardly reflected anything at all. His eyes, they would add, were the same.

  * * *

  And when at last David dropped to the floor and sat so that he could better execute his own suicide, jamming the barrel of the gun beneath his chin and screaming, it was the thing they would remember most: The day a forty-five-year-old man, for no apparent reason, went mad and took his own life in the doorway of a long-abandoned school.

  Attempts would be made to unravel the mystery of David Hoffman’s life, to find answers, because such things cannot be let lie without them in a world as small as ours.

  Consumed

  by Michael Louis Calvillo

  If he learned anything, something, one thing, it was that his teeth were strong as hell. Limb upon limb upon bone upon glan
d, muscle after muscle after tough, tough muscle, slick, slimy nub after nub of indistinguishable biology: through all of it, his choppers held. They showed no signs of wear. They could, would, go on and on and on. Nathan, wide-eyed ever-stare, pictured them gleaming, gnashing, chewing, still in motion long after the gums, tendons, muscles and soft tissues that powered them had shredded away into wet webs of pulpy nothing.

  He closed his eyes, not that it mattered. The bodies were still there. Bodies. Flesh. Blood. Bone. Prickly pieces, salty parts (genitalia he assumed, feared, gagged, choked), coiled, mushy greens and pinks and reds and blacks and here he was, mild-mannered Nathan at the bottom of it all, in the thick of it so to speak, mouth full, spitting decay sideways, refilling and then spitting once again.

  Repeat.

  So very many bodies.

  His body, though gored and grimy, was holding up. Not nearly as well as his teeth, but well enough.

  Well enough?

  Yes, well enough, considering: hands bound behind his back, tight, thick, razor wire about the wrists and ankles. Zero cooperation. Miraculously, his limbs still functioned on his behalf. However, they bore no autonomy. Instead, they moved as one giant muscle. His mouth (more importantly his teeth) chewed away what it could, his head tossed the vile meat aside, and then his body jerked and bucked and wriggled its way upward. The process was slow and impossible, but Nathan pushed on, human worm, slug, a maggot with a good set of teeth and the unfortunate ability to ponder destiny, how he got here, and where he was going…If ever you find yourself abroad, tropical diversion, plushness so plush that the world looks soft, American antidote in the land of the ever present sun, thong back bikinis and alcoholic concoctions that taste like angel urine, if ever you find yourself here, appreciate the contentment you have situated yourself within. Appreciate and ignore the dizzy tickle in your nose, the futile thought that this could be better, that things can always be better. Ignore, ignore, ignore. Remind yourself that you are already high, that things don’t get much better. This is a land of beauty. This is unreal. This isn’t the cutthroat, cocksure, dog-eat-dog, rat race of the cliché-ridden Americas. This is paradise. Using cocaine here would be an exercise in redundancy.

  Listen to yourself.

  Never engage the natives.

  Never solicit them for drugs.

  Never exude American ego, pride. Never head off into the rainforest with a Carlos or a Juan or a Hector. Never do these things or you might find yourself bound, forced to line up with others—men, women, children you’ve never seen before—at the edge of a deep, deep pit. Shots are fired, you are shot, or just startled by the blast, unhit, amazingly missed, falling anyway, feigning dead, plotting your escape. But the plan keeps getting tougher and tougher to realize because group after group of hysterical prisoners are being lined up, shot and dropped on top of you.

  When the carnage is over and your murderers have started their jeeps and roared away, you are buried deep, oh so deep, in death.

  Desensitized entirely.

  Skinbilepusblood. The retching passes after a few hours. The smell becomes, for lack of a better word, familiar. Nathan adapts and eats because he must. Must. He closes his eyes and tries to invoke memory, tries to go inward and get free. He tries to place himself in the board room, AC on full blast, his associates looking at him with envy as Boss man pats him on the back and compliments him on his deal-sealing smile. He tries for recollection; respite in the cool center of his brain, but no matter how hard he flexes and strains for cerebration he can’t escape the tactility of the pit.

  It’s nearly impossible to get past a world that impresses itself upon you so forcefully. Imagine the pressures of everyday life manifest, made real, physical, woven into hunks and chunks of flesh and bone. Imagine them poking and prodding and penetrating every inch of your skin. Nathan shifts and the world shifts back: haggard female torso beneath, fleshy breasts and bony ribs supporting his weight, a gaggle of stiff children flanking his left and right, lips blue, hands frozen like claws. And so it goes: above and below, on and on and on: anatomy without discernible structure: pink-brown-red, strands of dark, matted hair, bone, a thousand eyes, filmy, dead, staring, inviting him to eat and eat and eat, to rise refreshed, reinvigorated, reborn.

  And when free? What then? What of where he has been? What of the flesh? How can he ever look at another human being in the same way again?

  He can’t, no way, not now, not ever, and this horrible thought stops him, gives the worm act pause and freezes his teeth. What would freedom, escape, a lung full of fresh air, do to his brain? Would it surge, effervescent lightning, animating him, plunging him, full force into the ecstasy of being?

  Or would it burn?

  Would it atomize, destroy, sear, melt?

  Would it drive him backward, hungry for the pit, hungry for death, burrowing downward, mouth wide, black-heart open, soul dilated, ready, waiting, burning to eat and eat and eat?

  Would it accelerate the rot?

  The rot manifest. The rot eternal. The rot evident.

  Constant. A dead spot in his eyes, a foul taste in his throat. The impetus of all desire, natural and unnatural, made big and shiny and evil, armor plating his brain, twisting his every thought toward darkness.

  Nathan’s physicality has been tainted; his physiology stained. The process of living, really a process of dying, would now arch and turn, forever changed, forever exemplifying decay, forever focusing, honing in on and centering upon death. If he actually made it, rolling up and out, on his back, searching the night skies, begging to be blinded and consumed by starlight, Nathan feared that the constellations and their exquisite beauty, their sacred glow, would be forever lost to him. Something inside told him that he would only be able to focus on the dark and limitless black that surrounded the world. Should he ever emerge from the pit, he was convinced his actuality would become one of shadows.

  Cocooned within this temple of flesh, Nathan has become nameless.

  Topside, priorities would shift. Snorting, spending, conversing, loving, logging on, clocking out, all of these things no longer possessed meaning.

  Curbside, awash in a sea of people, the smell of hair gel, sweat, perfume, laptops, commerce, there would be no way to stop staring. No way to shelve this awareness, this understanding of the continual, constant internalizing, thinking thoughts like mold and for what? Everybody tastes the same. Everybody is the same inside: wet and funky and raw. Nothing more than intelligent fruit, genius vegetable, rational plant.

  The point here then, is that there is no point. None. Beauty is organic, biological, it’s blood and sperm and pus and sweat and bile and marrow, it’s that cool, damp, nothing space in the very center of all things, its electricity and fire. It’s everything but thought. Thought, that by which we became gods and superiors, is nothing but a senseless waste of energy. Thought does nothing but slow Nathan down.

  Repeat.

  Back to it.

  Return of the worm.

  The violence of Nathan’s motion shifted the dead pit entire. He sank ever so slightly, crushing the torso beneath him, losing ground. Getting his teeth around what he figured to be either a hand or a foot, he readied himself. Closing his eyes tightly, he began working his jaw, jerking his body, intent on carving a bloody path upward, ascension, striving for some sort of pit-side enlightenment and the cool, unlit kiss of destiny.

  Guarded

  by Michael A. Arnzen

  The security gate swallows you.

  An alarm blares, louder than you expected, jangling your nerves. For just a second, everyone at the checkpoint around you freezes and time seems to halt while the horn rapidly bleats like the high notes from the Psycho soundtrack. Then three Transportation Security officers in starched white uniforms step forward and form a phalanx that blocks your path. The one on the left, a black woman whose jaws grind on a piece of Juicy Fruit, manages to lift a smile on one side of her face before asking you to step back. The white bread guy on your right wear
s his uniform like it’s his nicest suit, and he primly steps forward, raising an eyebrow to dare you to resist as he pats the end of his metal detector wand in an open palm, a high tech billy club. The third has his hand open like a talon above his holster. “Step back,” he repeats, Schwarzenegger-style.

  You blush and apologize, exiting the gate while you check your pockets, avoiding the glares of the people in line behind you. The alarm finally switches off and you can hear some of them grumble and curse. Your hand hits something cold and metallic and you realize how stupid you’ve been. You drop your keys and a cigarette lighter into a plastic tub, and one of the officers shakes it around as if panning for gold as you step back through the gate.

  The alarm blares again, annoying more than alerting—loud enough to erase your brain. The guards’ eyes fix on you and you shrug your shoulders. “Maybe it’s my belt buckle?”

  White Bread waves you over with his wand. “Step over here, sir.”

  You walk over to a table behind a wall of clear, but thick, glass. The phalanx encircles you the entire way and two more guards join them, militarily alert. Your risk level apparently just went up a notch.

  “Arms out,” the woman says, chewing her gum between her big teeth.

  You stand scarecrow stiff as they wand your limbs like you were radioactive. You watch as others pass through the gate. A few of the people who were in line behind you toss angry glances your way; others avoid looking at you, as if eye contact might set off the alarm again.