The Best of Horror Library: Volumes 1-5

by Bentley Little

  She hears, “Please get under your desks…” as she passes Mr. Thompson’s room; sees a child run out of Mrs. Harrington’s room, eyes wide, as Mrs. Harrington chases after; hears .”..No, Brian, I don’t think this is a terrorist act. Now, plea…” as she passes Mrs. Bowe’s room. The entire building feels as if it is tearing in two.

  Her right foot slides on the waxy surface of the floor and white pain explodes just below her waist. She cries out and almost collapses, catching herself on the cool porcelain of a nearby drinking fountain before falling to the floor. She lifts her eyes. She can see her classroom at the end of the hall. The door is open. Incandescent light is pulsing inside the room. And from within that light, obscene and writhing shadows spill out against the hallway walls.

  She grits her teeth and starts moving again. She is close enough now to recognize the faces behind her student’s screams. She can hear Marissa Potts calling for her mother. The Farley twins sobbing in near unison. Sammie Hayes pleading for help. Just ahead, daytime janitor Terry Bahl emerges from the adjacent hallway. He stops when he sees her. He starts running toward her but she stops him. Shaking her head. Pointing to her classroom.

  “The children,” she screams. “Terry, get to the children!”

  He nods, his face simultaneously determined and heroic, and runs for the pulsing light. Much younger than she, he moves with such vigor that she almost feels relief, as if his youth alone is enough to end whatever harm is coming to her students. The building continues to shake; lockers have opened and their contents pour into the hallway. She sees a flash of orange plastic and recognizes it as Brenden Marshall’s water gun, the one she had ordered him to take home.

  Up ahead, Terry reaches the open door and stops. He stands for a moment, his face a mixture of shock and something else she can’t identify—astonishment, maybe terror. Then he springs into motion, youthful limbs flailing wildly as he runs down the hall, escaping whatever horrors might be lurking inside her room.

  “Terry! Terry!”

  She starts forward and her right foot catches on some of the debris from the lockers. She goes down, crashing onto her left side amidst fluttering papers and scattered, brownbag lunches; there is a loud pop in her hip and the feeling of something foreign floating around in her pelvis. For a moment she is lost, her vision swamped with starry blackness, and she feels nothing but pain and the urge to vomit.

  Her classroom is so very quiet.

  Belinda moans and pulls herself down the hallway, dragging her legs behind her. She can vaguely make out the sounds from other classrooms, teachers consoling children who are both excited and scared. She can hear nothing from her own classroom. She is about to call to her students when Jerrod Steihl walks out into the hallway.

  His shaggy, brown hair is dripping with sweat. His gray sweatshirt holds dark circles beneath each arm. Tiny trickles of blood ooze from the corners of his mouth and his face is blotchy and red. There is a wildness about him, some new and powerful thing lurking just beneath the surface. He is holding Karli Millstein’s paper police badge in his hand.

  “Mrs. Rider,” he says. “I’d like to go home, now.”

  “What’s happened, Jerrod?” She’s still crying and has to speak between sobs.

  His tongue darts out between his lips, then he says, “Spiderman’s the best because he knows when the bad things are about to happen. It’s the Voices, that’s what I think. The Voices telling him to go home.” He shrugs, then winces. “My head really hurts. And my tummy doesn’t feel very good. I don’t care if it’s pizza week. I just want to go home. Can I please just go home?”

  “Tell me what’s happened. Why aren’t they talking, Jerrod? What’s in there?”

  Jerrod’s eyes narrow. “They’re done talking.” Then he turns and walks down the hallway.

  “What’s in there?” she screams after him. He doesn’t stop. She watches the boy until the final strap of his camouflage backpack disappears through the heavy doors that lead outside. Then, pulling herself to the open door way, Belinda looks into her classroom.

  Most of the desks have been turned on their sides and pushed into one corner of the room. The fissure in the floor is wide. The linoleum tiles are like broken teeth around the rim. Belinda blinks once. Twice. Unable to comprehend the giant tree that is occupying her room—the thick, organic trunk rising up from the fissure, the serpentine branches spreading out in every direction. The thorns covering the branches are long and ugly, like claws—and hanging among them like bunches of overripe fruit are her students.

  There is Marissa Potts dangling above Belinda’s desk, the blood seeping from a dozen puncture wounds in her chest and stomach. There is Brenden Marshall, propped up against the base of the tree, his head lulled to one side, bones bulging like a fist through the skin of his neck. Nicki Waters hangs near the ceiling, a particularly long thorn protruding from her gaping mouth. And there are more, so many more—her entire class, up in the branches, their blood raining down. No, not raining. Floating. Like the ash of a great fire. Like snow.

  Belinda tries to back away from the door, screaming, snot and spittle and tears all mixing together in the lower half of her face. A small boy is lying face down just inside the door. His head is turned away, but the purple smudge is there, on the back of his neck. A branch is protruding from the middle of his back, as if it caught him trying to run away. As if he almost made it. Then the bruise moves and she has time to think, My God, he’s still alive, before her mind gives up and her eyes roll back in her head.

  * * *

  Outside, Jerrod Steihl walks across the frost-covered playground toward the yellow-grassed fields on Montgomery Street. He clutches the shoulder straps of his backpack and smiles. He doesn’t think about Mrs. Rider’s third grade class, nor his parents, in their house back on Brisbane, snowing down from a tree of their very own. Beneath the white starkness of the almost-winter sky, the distant mountains are jagged and snow-capped and wonderful. The Voices are still there, and they are calling to him.

  It’s snowing, not enough to stick but just enough to notice. “I told you it might snow a shake,” he says to no one in particular, and his smile widens. He veers from the familiarity of Montgomery and starts across the fields. He is heading for the mountains and the pillar of smoke that maybe no one else can see.

  He is going home.

  The Immolation Scene

  by John F.D. Taff

  “From near his heart, he took a rib.

  All fires have to burn alive to live.”

  “All Fires”—Swan Lake

  Ashes…

  It’s snowing, the flakes are red, like snow in hell, and Corey thinks they taste of cinders. That’s what spills down his throat when they melt, leaves his mouth raw.

  The warehouse before him is in full conflagration, flames leaping from its roof, flicking like reptile tongues from its burst, shattered windows, between the skeletal remains of its façade. He stands apart from the chaos, the twisting hoses, the intent firemen, spinning red lights, far enough to avoid being consumed, close enough to consume it—the roar of the flames, the avid heat, the burning grit.

  He can also smell the rich scent, scummy and thick on the ash-laden air, of boiling human fat. He wonders if anyone else smells it, knows what it is.

  They were here tonight. The Immolation Scene. I can feel it. I’m getting closer to them.

  To her…

  * * *

  Amy.

  She had come to fix his laptop. He’d been typing at home late the night before, trying to finish a report. Nodding off, fire had squirted from his fingers, singeing the Q , W, E and R keys, melting the A, S, D and F keys.

  He was still wondering how he was going to explain it when she came in.

  Amy’s hair was upswept in a ‘40s movie star style. It was red, the unnatural red of crayons, traffic lights and fire engines. She wore a dark, prim skirt and a severely plain, long-sleeved white blouse that revealed tattoos beneath its shifting edges. Each ear
boasted three earrings, and there was a discreet nose piercing that glittered when the fluorescents hit it. Her heavily chewed fingernails were painted dark eggplant.

  Corey was as uncomfortable with her quirky beauty as he was with the fact that he had dated her for a while a few months back. The attraction had been instant, over drinks at a departmental party at a nearby bar. Their relationship was swift, torrid, the chemistry definite and mutual.

  But after six months, most of which Corey thought were pretty good, she abruptly broke it off. There were arguments, tears…so many tears…

  He didn’t understand at the time, still didn’t.

  I love you, he told her. Isn’t that enough?

  Her answer was No.

  You’re not willing to really love, to give yourself to it, let it change you. You’re not willing to let yourself feel anything.

  It had been uncomfortable for a while, after the split, working at the same company. But the office was large enough that they didn’t see too much of each other.

  “Umm…hi. Someone’s computer not playing nice?” she said, standing in the entry to his cubicle. She carried a small gray case before her, slung around the corner of his desk, holding it before her like a shield.

  “That’d be mine, I guess,” he said, blocking her view of the keyboard.

  “Mind if I take the captain’s seat?” she said, flicking her gaze across him.

  “Sure,” and he leapt to his feet. They stood face to face for a moment; he looked into her eyes, eyes that he still saw in his dreams, eyes that were a beautiful, deep violet…the Technicolor of Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes in old photos, or of bruises, of twilight.

  Then she was sitting and he was shuffling behind her, gritting his teeth wanting her to say something. “Usually I get Devon,” he said, as much to fill the silence as to offer a silent thanks to the Gods of IT for sending her instead of Devon (of the too-tight pants and the body odor that smelled of equal parts Big Mac and Axe body spray).

  “Well, it looks as if you fell asleep smoking at the keyboard, which is generally considered a bad thing. Not as bad, I guess, as falling asleep in bed smoking, but…”

  “You know I don’t smoke,” he said awkwardly.

  “Ummm…well, that’s good, actually, because the company pretty much frowns on employees who burn up their laptops while smoking menthols. I’d probably have to report you or something.”

  Corey realized that she seemed more nervous than he felt. He saw she was rolling up the right sleeve of her blouse, doing so conspicuously, as if wanting him to notice it and not her words. A magician’s misdirection in reverse.

  Her arm was thin and gracile, lovely. The skin was smooth and pale, freckled with moles. Corey was a sucker for moles and freckles.

  Then he saw them, and he froze. His mouth went dry and he felt it…that feeling he got when it came…when the fire came…

  It was a tingling, a little ticklish buzz just beneath the skin, like the first electric pulse you feel on your lips before you get a cold sore.

  She had a few small, red, circular welts across the smooth inner flesh of her forearm, grouped like crop circles.

  You might think they were cigarette burns, especially given her hair, the tattoos, the piercings. And you might not be altogether surprised.

  But he knew her, knew what he was looking at.

  And he was surprised.

  He had seen every inch of her closely, carefully. Why had he never seen these before?

  Corey grabbed his own arm, felt the first pulse of fire push outward from his skin, singe the hairs there, felt its heat push against the cotton sleeve of his own shirt.

  He saw her take notice, watch a small brown pinprick of heat scorch the fabric.

  Grabbing the computer, she stood, almost frantically, stepped away.

  “I’ll have to replace this,” she blurted, pushing past him. “I’ll move your files to the new one. I can get it to you in about an hour or two, if that’s okay…well, even if it’s not okay.”

  Moving into the hallway, she turned, eyed him uneasily.

  He slapped at his arm, patting the flame out, patting the flame back into his body.

  “I’ll call when it’s ready.”

  Corey watched her walk to the elevators, his laptop clamped under the arm still exposed by her rolled-up sleeve.

  Corey waited, but she didn’t return.

  He went home and sat on the couch, picked at the toppings on his frozen pizza. In his peripheral vision, the images on the television jumped and bucked, shifting colors, shifting lights.

  Numb.

  On his arm, he coaxed a small flame into being—crisp blue at its base, yellow-white at its flickering tip. He watched it bob and weave there, a tiny dancing wraith, burning his skin, tickling his mind, pleasant and unpleasant.

  He thought of her, the burn marks pocking her arm.

  Why hadn’t she said anything before?

  When he looked back, his entire forearm was ablaze. He saw the skin turning pink beneath the gaseous blue sheet of flame that engulfed it. He stared at the fire in awe for a moment, never having let it come out this far before. He felt the delicious hotness of it atop his skin, beneath it…

  …in it.

  It was burning him, devouring his flesh, crisping the fine hairs.

  He leapt to his feet, waving his arm over his head as if dispelling a cloud of bees. Slowly, the flames sputtered, faded.

  Corey breathed heavily, shocked at how far he’d let the fire go. The skin was unbroken, mildly red as if sunburned. He smelled something acrid in the air, saw that all of the hair on his forearm was gone, burned away.

  Quietly he went into the bathroom, let cold water run over the scalded skin, then applied a daub of burn ointment from his medicine chest.

  When he went to bed that evening, that skin—new and pink and sensitive, burned to life by destroying the older layer above it—felt everything.

  * * *

  The coffee from the café downstairs sloshed out of the Styrofoam cup. He grabbed a few napkins to keep it from touching the new laptop that sat in the middle of his cluttered desk. Mopping the coffee away, he noticed a small white envelope addressed to him in a loopy, girlish hand.

  Corey took the envelope and, impulsively, smelled it. A faint air of flowers hung about it, made his skin tingle. A small card tipped into his palm when he ripped the envelope open.

  If you’re still interested…and I am…meet at this address Friday at 9 p.m. We can talk more.—Amy.

  Without realizing, he rubbed the new skin of his arm beneath the sleeve of his business shirt.

  It was going to be a long week getting to Friday.

  * * *

  Corey steered through a section of the city he’d never been in before. It was almost 9 p.m., and the streets were lit only by the orange glow of dusk-to-dawns perched high above the pavement.

  A figure stood beside the closed door of the building that matched the address on the card. The man barely looked at him as Corey pushed the heavy door open, stepped inside…

  …a carnival, for that is what it seemed.

  The space was enormous, industrial, dark. It seemed to recede into shadows that were moving, punctuated by lurid, red bursts of light. People filled the space, easily 100 or more, men and women of all ages, races, and shapes.

  And the smell…the smell he would associate forever with them, the Immolation Scene. Like any bar, it smelled of close bodies, stale beer, the tang of lemons and limes, cigarettes. But there was something more, something at the back of all this, behind it, yet looming in its presence.

  It was heavy on the air the way a campfire or fireplace is if you’re sitting too close; piney and vaporous, as if you were inhaling the soul of what had burned, a thing too tenuous to carry with it an actual aroma, only a hint.

  Below this, the scum, the oily smear of something…

  To his left stretched a bar, slick wood and dirty brass. She was there, at the bar, draped over a se
at. He noticed her bare arms atop the slick, dark bar, noticed the numerous small dots of red that freckled her flesh.

  Her violet eyes sparkled like amethysts.

  “You came,” she said, and it sounded to Corey less like surprise than a simple acknowledgment.

  “Sure,” he said, sidling up to her. “You thought I’d stand you up?”

  “No,” she said, her smile enigmatic. “I knew you’d come.”

  “How’s that?”

  She said nothing, reached to him, took his arm in her two pale hands. He shivered a little as her nails touched the skin of his wrist, undid the button of his shirt cuff, peeled it back to reveal the skin of his arm, still raw, red from the other night.

  Exposed, he could feel the goose bumps she raised with her breath, the dangerous sharpness of her nails as they raked his flesh. She ran her fingers in a slow, looping curve up the swell of his forearm, and Corey nearly gasped in pleasure.

  His arm twitched, and she giggled, letting loose of it so slowly, so gently he almost felt as if she were reluctantly passing its ownership back to him. He blinked, rolled the shirtsleeve back down.

  “How’s that?”

  A hand drifted up, pushed at a curl of hair near her temple, toyed with it in that most common of flirtations. Corey smelled the hint of her perfume, violets perhaps…or roses, gentle on the air in the narrowness between them.

  He chose to believe, for no other reason than the color of her dense purple eyes, that it was violets.

  “How come you never told me…never said anything?”

  She considered that for a moment, toyed with a drink on a coaster, sighed. “How come you didn’t?”

  A thousand answers flashed through his mind. Instead, he asked, “So, how did you know?”

  Amy stirred at the slumped, yellowed ice in her glass. “Not too difficult, really. Just look for melted laptops. It’s a sure sign. Besides, there were those flames on your sleeve.” She nodded toward his arm. “It feels a whole lot better if you do it with someone else. Believe me, I know.”