The Best of Horror Library: Volumes 1-5

by Bentley Little

  Morro Bay divided its patients into three color coded wards. Green Ward was made up of the self-committed and the homeless. Yellow Ward was low-level criminals with mental health issues who had managed to avoid jail time in exchange for some time on a shrink’s chaise. They were already gone, filed out and moved to the state hospital.

  The violent psychotic incurables of Red Ward were still inside. A whisper echoed in my ear, an earlier voice warning me that some of the inmates had gotten loose in the confusion and that some of the staff were missing.

  The Chief barked out orders, pairing up firemen with local cops. No one hesitated to follow the Chief’s commands. The old man had gone to Korea and Vietnam, neither time on vacation, and his voice carried more authority than the stripes he had earned.

  “You’re with me,” a voice said over my shoulder. I turned and saw Leo McNeiss suiting up. I’d known him since grade school, before he’d moved to the city and become a cop, before scandal had sent him back home to be a small town deputy, before the deep lines in both our faces. We had never been what you would call friends. As a kid Leo hadn’t quite been a bully, but he wasn’t someone you chose as an enemy, either. He pointed to the young volunteer from San Luis Obispo, “Both of you.”

  Shaking, the kid said, “My name’s Fenley. Arno—”

  “I wouldn’t fling a link of monkey shit for your name, son,” Leo said, strapping on his breathing gear. I doubted that he had ever used an oxygen unit before but he didn’t need any instructions. That was just who he was. He handed over a pair of filtration masks. “We go in two minutes.”

  Fenley raced to a truck for more gear. Leo rolled a copper fire extinguisher over to me. Stepping in, he said, “We have a special task. I’m sure you remember the name Otto Weissmuller?”

  I did. Five years ago, Weissmuller had been arrested and tried on seventeen counts of conspiracy to murder. He’d led a cult of drug-addled teens on a rampage through southern California, terrorized the nation, and kept the newspapers in business.

  “This hospital has four wings, not three. The fourth is Black Ward. He’s their star patient. It’s a big secret. They don’t want any of his family to try to bust him out.” Leo cocked his thumb over at Fenley. The boy fumbled with the straps to his oxygen tank. “Don’t want to say anything to him. Would spook him.”

  “He’s already spooked,” I said.

  Leo attached the feed line to his tank. “Then maybe he’s smarter than he looks. When we caught Weissmuller, he was an animal, filthy, long unwashed hair, three inch dirty fingernails—like talons. Barely human. He killed three cops with his bare hands at that roadblock. Bit one patrolman’s eye right out of his skull.”

  “Christ,” I muttered.

  Fenley shuffled back to us as I jumped into my equipment. Inside our suits it must have been ninety degrees, but the kid was shivering. At that point he probably regretted ever volunteering for the Boy Scouts, let alone fire fighting. I wondered if he had caught any of our conversation. No, I decided. He was, after all, still standing.

  We dropped the air masks over our faces and joined the procession of firemen and cops heading toward the Sanitarium’s open front doors. Plumes of black smoke rolled out of the entrance in bursts. It felt like we were walking on a dragon’s tongue toward its open mouth. Leo checked his service revolver and it reminded me that Fenley and I were armed only with fire extinguishers. The kid locked step and stayed close by my side. He did not even glance toward Leo.

  A wave of swirling darkness reached out from the doorway and choked off our vision. We huddled together and pushed inside, walking blind, each of us with our free hand clenching the shoulder of the man ahead. The fire’s fierce growl rumbled louder as our feet hit tile. Timber crackled and snapped. The building’s foundation groaned as it weakened.

  A rush of bristling hot air hit us and cleared out the smoke. A faint light crept in—the fire’s orange glow seeping between shrinking wall panels—and the group separated into teams. Leo headed past the reception desk, walking fast, hands waving away lingering trails of smoke. Fenley and I hurried to stay close on his coattails.

  A thunderous boom shook down from the hospital’s roof and I drew the unsettling image of walking in a cavern deep underground while an earthquake raged in the rock overhead. I jerked my head up quick enough to see a section of the ceiling buckle inward. Grabbing Fenley’s collar, I bolted for the hallway. The reception room’s ceiling collapsed in a black shower of debris. I heard screams but didn’t turn. I kept running, dragging Fenley along, until I caught up with Leo.

  Glancing back, the reception room was gone, buried and smoldering. I understood at that moment the terror that miners must feel from inside a cave-in. A dark cloud hurled down the hallway like a fireball, covering us in soot. Fenley and I crouched down and followed Leo.

  We passed through a set of double doors and the smoke thinned out. The fire lit room flickered evil orange and yellow hues. The nurse’s station seemed to sway with the light, the floor and walls suddenly turned to rubber. My stomach turned as I stepped forward. Illusion or not, it felt like walking on a raft, the constant movement under my feet making each step a challenge.

  We saw the first body as we made the turn into the disturbed ward. A nurse, stripped naked, stretched across the floor. Someone had wrapped her head in medical gauze, but not enough to mask the red stains over her eyes, flattened nose and mouth. In her blood, her killer had drawn a peace symbol between her exposed breasts.

  Fenley took two steps back, pulled off his mask, and vomited.

  Leo stepped over the nurse and continued down the hall. The doors on both sides had been forced open, some torn off their hinges. I caught up with him, careful not to look down as I hurdled the nurse’s body, and peeked into the first room. An inmate sat on a bench against the far wall, his strait-jacket bloodied. He had been decapitated and his head returned to his neck upside down. The deep frown on his face had been carved into a crimson smile with two bloody thumbprints on his chin for eyes.

  Fenley came up behind me, mask still in hand. I turned, blocked his view into the room, and shook my head. I saw his eyes glisten. The kid was close to tears.

  I didn’t look in the other rooms in that first hallway. Leo took the time to poke his head in each, a swift search, before returning to the hall. His face never gave any hint what he saw in those chambers. I shuddered at the thought that he might have seen worse.

  Leo spun on his heels until he faced us, pointed to Fenley with one crooked finger, and barked, “Put the goddamn mask over you face.”

  Fenley obeyed. He brought the mask up to his mouth with shaking hands and rolled the elastic strap over his head.

  Gesturing with the same finger, Leo continued down the hall to a set of double doors. Turning the handles, he found them locked, so he kicked them in. He was a stronger man than he seemed—and no one would have pegged him for a weakling. The doors splintered away from their hinges and collapsed inward. He stepped over the resulting debris into the highest security wing—Black Ward—and, God help us, we trailed along behind him, right down a steep flight of metal stairs.

  Even in the dimming light I could see that Black Ward’s walls were bare, not decorated with art school dropout oil paintings like the rest of the hospital. The hallways were a cinderblock maze, a dungeon. But then, I thought, where else would they keep monsters?

  More of the ceiling collapsed somewhere overhead—a hellish crescendo of splintering lumber, crackling masonry, and the whoosh of fire finding a fresh portal to the night sky. For a moment I feared the whole complex was pancaking down on top of us. I saw the drop ceiling over our heads plummeting down, followed by an avalanche of blackened debris. I raised an arm and ducked down, but the collapse was a trick of light, shadow, and my spinning head conspiring to bring my worst fears into my eyes.

  Fenley’s hand pushed between my shoulder blades, urging me to keep up with Leo and somehow my feet obliged, picking up speed, wandering into the dark.
The last feeble trickle of light dissipated and I was blind. The concrete floor under my feet became a promise that I didn’t dare trust—I expected to plunge down into an abyss with each clumsy footfall. I was shaking every bit as much as Fenley’s hand on my back. All at once, I felt chills and hot flashes, freezing and burning.

  Something was very wrong with me.

  A door opened a dozen feet up the hallway and a flicker of firelight danced over the floor. We ran to Leo, standing in the doorway, gun drawn. As we passed through, I glanced up and saw that the fire had eaten away a corner of the ceiling, giving us that precious tiny light but also bringing the flames closer. I felt waves of blistering heat buffet down and suck the moisture from my pores. I continued to shiver anyway.

  We passed a security checkpoint. The desk had been abandoned in a hurry, a cup of coffee and half a donut left behind in the rush to flee the building.

  Leo pointed to a door at the far end of the short hallway. A clipboard hung under a small, wire-latticed window. Even from a few feet away I recognized the photograph that topped the medical charts and medication schedules. It was Otto Weissmuller, a few years older than the pictures in the newspaper after his arrest, but unmistakable: dark, wide-set eyes, thin, pointed brows, a receding hairline that rose like devil’s horns.

  Leo checked his gun, stepped up, and unlatched the door. I inhaled, held the oxygen in my lungs, and shadowed him inside the cell. My feet and legs had gone completely numb. An unsettling detachment flooded my senses and I watched myself move without feeling the floor under my shoes, or the ache of my bum knee, or the weight of the equipment on my back. It was an obscene freedom; it was sickening.

  Silence greeted us inside the cell, as if even the noise of a collapsing, burning building refused to share space with the lunatic who lived there.

  Otto Weissmuller sat on the corner cot, head down, face curtained by a few scraggly strands of dark hair. He rocked forward and stared at us. “Deputy McNeiss, it’s good of you to visit. Could you perhaps ask the ward nurse to kindly turn down the heat?”

  Leo straightened his arm. His pistol’s aim was locked on Weissmuller’s pointed nose.

  Fenley stumbled into the cell behind me, wobbling.

  “Tell me, Leo,” Weissmuller said. “Why exactly are there two firemen here?”

  Leo lowered his gun and removed his breathing mask. “There was an inconsistency in the police reports. The initial report had you at five foot ten. The booking sheet listed six one.”

  Weissmuller cackled. “I’m six one.”

  Leo nodded, turned, and shot Fenley in the chest twice.

  I scampered back toward the door, but my legs buckled and I fell to the floor. I began to reach for my outstretched legs but my arms went rubbery and dropped to my sides. I couldn’t even raise my head off the concrete. Inside the mask I screamed—just for a moment, until my vocal cords locked up. I couldn’t even blink.

  Unable to turn my head or even shift my pupils, I watched Fenley’s last breath escape his lips. His chest settled and the twin jets of gushing blood slowed to a trickle.

  Leo appeared overhead. He removed my breathing mask, sliding it over my head and letting the elastic tug on my ears before it snapped free. “Sorry, bud. Don’t try to move, you can’t. I injected Pancuronium Bromide into your oxygen filter. It’s a muscle relaxant. The disorientation you’ve been feeling is normal.”

  Weissmuller took my legs, and together they dragged me across the cell and propped me against the cot. Leaning down, Leo whispered into my ear, “His people have my daughter. What was I going to do? I help him escape, I get her back. Sorry you got put into play, man, but even as a kid you were an easy mark.”

  He tore off my clothes, balled them up, and tossed them into the hall.

  Leo stood up. Weissmuller grinned. “You should Picasso up his face now, like my family told you. Just in case the fire leaves some flesh on him.”

  Nodding, Leo pulled back his fist and brought it down. Though paralyzed, I felt the blow, felt warmth spread across my face, felt my skull vibrate, shockwaves fleeing from the epicenter under his knuckles. The second and third blows came just as fast. After that, I lost count, unable to tell when the explosion of pain from one punch ended and the next began. I heard wet slaps. I saw his knuckles glisten with my blood.

  He backed away and Weissmuller bent down and forced my mouth open with his thumbs. Reaching inside, he pried free my loosened teeth until my mouth was empty. Then he stood up, rattling them in his fist like pocket change before emptying his hands into the pocket of Leo’s fire jacket.

  Weissmuller smiled. His mouth was toothless, too. He reached under his pillow, retrieved his own teeth, and forced them into my bloody mouth. Cackling through his words, he said, “Now my dental records are your dental records. Like a gift on your birthday.”

  I wanted to spit his teeth out. I wanted to vomit. But nothing worked. I was an abandoned marionette dummy, a worthless human husk with severed strings.

  As they turned away, Weissmuller pointed to Fenley’s body with both index fingers. “Drag that shit into the hall, wouldn’t you? Hate to have the clean-up crew think I kept a dirty cell.”

  Huffing, Leo bent down and wrapped his hands around the young firefighter’s ankles. Still hunched over, he dragged the body out through the doorway. Weissmuller turned, flashed me dual peace symbols like Richard Nixon, and ducked out of the cell.

  I listened to their footsteps travel down the hall.

  A black spot grew on the ceiling as the fire burnt its way down. Grains of ash trickled down like fine black raindrops, building up like an anthill on the tile floor.

  Four quick gunshot blasts echoed in the hall, close together—desperate, frightened, wild shots. Then there were screams, like wailing pigs, shrieks of absolute panic.

  And then silence.

  The anthill of ash grew into a small hill. The cell darkened. At first I thought I was passing out, but no, the padded walls were wilting from the heat.

  I lay there waiting for a rain of fire to snake down through the hole in the ceiling and devour my flesh. So strange to panic when your heartbeat cannot quicken.

  I heard the clatter of running feet and for a moment feared that Leo and Weissmuller were returning to torment me even more. But there was too much noise, too many feet.

  They appeared in the doorway, twitching, heads jerking. Six men dressed in blue shirts and matching pants, each speckled with blood. I saw fear and frenzy in their eyes, but also hate and vengeance. I knew beyond question that these were patients from Red Ward.

  Moving like an ape with his arms swinging, one of the men bounced over to me and smiled a wild, uneven grin. He had braces, and bits of red stuck in the metalwork. Reaching down, he picked up my hand and shook it.

  Another of the madmen pushed him away and knelt down beside me. He never made eye contact, instead choosing to watch the mountain of ash growing beside us. “I wanted to meet you for a long time, Otto, and here we are, like synchronicity. Looks like they messed up your face real good, shit, but we took care of them. Jimmy, m’man, he bashed in that cop’s head with a metal chair leg. So he ain’t gonna hurt you no more, not with his head bashed in like that.”

  The room darkened more, but this time it wasn’t the walls. It was me.

  * * *

  When I awoke we were in a van headed south. I don’t remember being carried out of the hospital, but I do have a few hazy memories of the Red Ward boys carjacking the van. I don’t know where we’re headed, but I know that wherever they take me, I’ll have to answer to the name Otto Weissmuller. I’d hate to think what they’d do if I told them any different.

  Ghosts Under Glass

  by Tracie McBride

  Corey had discovered the first ghosts in a parked car near the bridge they usually slept under. David had run back to the stash of “treasures” he kept in a pilfered shopping trolley and had returned with a huge glass jar with a screw top lid. It was the kind of jar that look
ed like it should have a pickled fetus floating in it. “I’m gonna catch me one of those,” he had said, patting the jar under his arm, “and keep it as a pet.” They soon found more of them, all imprisoned within buildings or vehicles, but David had yet to get brave enough to see what would happen if he opened a door and let one out.

  They walked past McDonald’s, and Corey imagined he could smell fries cooking. He hesitated at the door. For no apparent reason, David started to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” asked Julia, but Corey could tell that she didn’t really care what the answer was. She was too busy eyeballing the ghosts tapping on the window.

  A couple of the ghosts began to fling themselves against the door with all the strength they could muster, which was completely absent, and Corey took a step back. The ghost of a teenaged boy, his cap on backward, mouthed obscenities at Julia and gave her the finger. Julia reached out her hand and spread her fingertips against the glass. The ghosts flew into a frenzy, swarming across the window in a futile attempt to break through.

  “Cool,” said Julia. “Like one of those lightning plasma ball thingies.” Her eyes shone in the light from the crackling ectoplasm. Corey couldn’t stand to look at them for more than a few seconds at a time; they made him feel nauseous. He slapped her hand away.

  “Don’t tease them,” he said.

  “Why not?” said David. “We know they can’t get out. It’s the only thing we do know. That, and the fact that we’d better figure out where we’re gonna find some food without having to tangle with those.” He nodded in the direction of the ghosts and hefted his jar nervously from side to side.

  “There’s always vending machines…” said Corey.

  “Glass,” said Julia abruptly. “They’re all behind glass. Could be the vending machines are haunted too.”