A Comet Press Book
First Comet Press Trade Paperback Edition October 2011
Trade Paperback ISBN 13: 978-1-936964-52-9
Necro Files © 2011 by Comet Press All Rights Reserved.
Cover Illustration by Guilherme “RazGriz”
This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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Acknowledgements
“Meathouse Man” © Damon Knight, 1976, copyright renewed in 2004. © 2004 by George R.R. Martin. Originally published in Orbit 18, 1976. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Night They Missed the Horror Show” © Joe R. Lansdale, 1988. Originally published in Silver Scream, 1988. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Diary” © Ronald Kelly, 1990. Originally published in Cemetery Dance #3, 1990. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Abed” © Elizabeth Massie, 1992. Originally published in Still Dead, 1992. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“I am He that Liveth and was Dead … & Have the Keys of Hell & Death” (an excerpt from Duet for the Devil, 2000) © Randy Chandler and t. Winter-Damon, 1992. Originally published in Grue No. 14, Summer 1992. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Xipe” © Edward Lee, 1993. Originally published in The Barrelhouse: Excursions into the Unknown, Winter 1993. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Bait” © Ray Garton, 1993. Originally published in Cemetery Dance, Fall 1993, Volume 5 Number 3/4. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Painfreak” © Gerard Houarner, 1994. Originally published in Into the Darkness #1, April 1994. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Lover Doll” © Wayne Allen Sallee, 1994. Originally published in Little Deaths, 1994. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Spirit Wolves” © Charlee Jacob, 1995. Originally published in Into the Darkness #4, 1995. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Godflesh” © Brian Hodge, 1995. Originally published in The Hot Blood Series: Stranger By Night, 1995. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Every Last Drop” © John Everson, 1998. Originally published in Bloodsongs, Spring 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Blind in the House of the Headsman” © Mehitobel Wilson, 2001. Originally published in Brainbox 2: Son of Brainbox, 2001. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“An Experiment in Human Nature” © Monica J. O’Rourke, 2001. Originally published in The Rare Anthology, 2001. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Burgers of Calais” © Graham Masterton, 2002. Originally published in Dark Terrors 6, The Gollancz Book of Horror, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Ecstasy” © Nancy Kilpatrick, 2004. Originally published in Master/Slave, Venus Books, 2004. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Pop Star in the Ugly Bar” © Bentley Little, 2005. Originally published in Outsiders: 22 All-New Stories From the Edge, 2005. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Sooner They Learn” © Wrath James White, 2005. Originally published in The Book Of A Thousand Sins, 2005. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Addict” © J.F. Gonzalez, 2006. Originally published in Insidious Reflections #5, January 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Meathouse Man by George R.R. Martin
Night They Missed the Horror Show by Joe R. Lansdale
Diary by Ronald Kelly
Abed by Elizabeth Massie
I am He that Liveth and was Dead … & Have the Keys of Hell & Death by Randy Chandler and t. Winter-Damon
Xipe by Edward Lee
Bait by Ray Garton
Painfreak by Gerard Houarner
Lover Doll by Wayne Allen Sallee
The Spirit Wolves by Charlee Jacob
Godflesh by Brian Hodge
Every Last Drop by John Everson
Blind in the House of the Headsman by Mehitobel Wilson
An Experiment in Human Nature by Monica J. O’Rourke
The Burgers of Calais by Graham Masterton
Ecstasy by Nancy Kilpatrick
Pop Star in the Ugly Bar by Bentley Little
The Sooner They Learn by Wrath James White
Addict by J.F. Gonzalez
Horror Fiction Titles by Comet Press
Introduction
* * *
Cannibalism, necrophilia, aberrant sex, gore, murder, serial killers, mutilation, torture, child abductions, even werewolves and zombies are all common themes of extreme horror and in this book. But often more than anything it gives us a frightening glimpse into the dark side of humanity, and sometimes even closely reflects true events. We like to be scared, and while the supernatural is very scary, reality is downright disturbing. We are fascinated by mysterious things, and nothing is more mysterious than the unspeakable mayhem and horrors that humans are capable of. Heinous, motiveless crimes fill us with fear and revulsion, yet we are overwhelmingly compelled to read about them. Maybe it is a fear of what may lie dormant within us as well, or perhaps provides an outlet for our own dark thoughts. The media is very aware of this innate human trait and feeds us increasingly over-the-top descriptions of violent crimes and graphic images. And the recent rise in popularity of so-called "torture porn" films like Saw and Hostel underscores this compulsion to experience our violent side from a safe distance.
Necro Files is a collection spanning over twenty years, from the early formative years of extreme horror to the recent past, by twenty great masters and modern authors who have broken down the barriers of traditional horror to explore the most sinister and controversial topics that both challenge and offend our sensibilities. You'll find here an author's first steps into the realm of the extreme, stories that were banned by the publisher, stories based on true events, and many include a quote or comment by the author. Most were first published in the small press, and nowadays, luckily, it's much easier to get a hold of extreme horror, largely thanks to the wider availability of small press books. And what you have now in your hands is an ungodly collection of edgy, unrestrained terrors that delve into the dark recesses of the mind and ultimately satisfy your primal instinct.
Enjoy the ride into hell.
Cheryl Mullenax
Meathouse Man
George R.R. Martin
* * *
“Meathouse Man” was originally published in Orbit 18, by Harper & Row in 1976.
‡
George R.R. Martin was born September 20, 1948 in Bayonne, New Jersey. He became a comic book fan and collector in high school, and began to write fiction for comic fanzines. Martin’s first professional sale was made in 1970 at age 21: “The Hero,” sold to Galaxy, published in February, 1971 issue. Since then he has published more than seventy pieces of short fiction, edited thirty anthologies, and written screenplays, teleplays, comic books, and eleven novels. He is best known for his best-selling epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, the basis for the hit HBO television series, Game of Thrones.
Martin’s present home is Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives happily with his wife Parris and four cats.
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br /> * * *
I
In the Meathouse
They came straight from the ore-fields that first time, Trager with the others, the older boys, the almost-men who worked their corpses next to his. Cox was the oldest of the group, and he’d been around the most, and he said that Trager had to come even if he didn’t want to. Then one of the others laughed and said that Trager wouldn’t even know what to do, but Cox the kind-of leader shoved him until he was quiet. And when payday came, Trager trailed the rest to the meathouse, scared but somehow eager, and he paid his money to a man downstairs and got a room key. He came into the dim room trembling, nervous. The others had gone to other rooms, had left him alone with her (no, it, not her but it, he reminded himself, and promptly forgot again). In a shabby gray cubicle with a single smoky light.
He stank of sweat and sulfur, like all who walked the streets of Skrakky, but there was no help for that. It would be better if he could bathe first, but the room did not have a bath. Just a sink, double bed with sheets that looked dirty even in the dimness, a corpse.
She lay there naked, staring at nothing, breathing shallow breaths. Her legs were spread, ready. Was she always that way, Trager wondered, or had the man before him arranged her like that? He didn’t know. He knew how to do it (he did, he did, he’d read the books Cox gave him, and there were films you could see, and all sorts of things), but he didn’t know much of anything else. Except maybe how to handle corpses. That he was good at, the youngest handler on Skrakky, but he had to be. They had forced him into the handlers’ school when his mother died, and they made him learn, so that was the thing he did. This, this he had never done (but he knew how, yes, yes, he did); it was his first time.
He came to the bed slowly and sat to a chorus of creaking springs. He touched her and the flesh was warm. Of course. She was not a corpse, not really, no; the body was alive enough, a heartbeat under the heavy white breasts, she breathed. Only the brain was gone, ripped from her, replaced with a deadman’s synthabrain. She was meat now, an extra body for a corpsehandler to control, just like the crew he worked each day under sulfur skies. She was not a woman. So it did not matter that Trager was just a boy, a jowly frog-faced boy who smelled of Skrakky. She (no it, remember?) would not care, could not care.
Emboldened, aroused and hard, the boy stripped off his corpsehandler’s clothing and climbed in bed with the female meat. He was very excited; his hands shook as he stroked her, studied her. Her skin was very white, her hair dark and long, but even the boy could not call her pretty. Her face was too flat and wide, her mouth hung open, and her limbs were loose and sagging with fat.
On her huge breasts, all around the fat dark nipples, the last customer had left tooth-marks where he’d chewed her. Trager touched the marks tentatively, traced them with a finger. Then, sheepish about his hesitations, he grabbed one breast, squeezed it hard, pinched the nipple until he imagined a real girl would squeal with pain. The corpse did not move. Still squeezing, he rolled over on her and took the other breast into his mouth.
And the corpse responded.
She thrust up at him, hard, and meaty arms wrapped around his pimpled back to pull him to her. Trager groaned and reached down between her legs. She was hot, wet, excited. He trembled. How did they do that? Could she really get excited without a mind, or did they have lubricating tubes stuck into her, or what?
Then he stopped caring. He fumbled, found his penis, put it into her, thrust. The corpse hooked her legs around him and thrust back. It felt good, real good, better than anything he’d ever done to himself, and in some obscure way he felt proud that she was so wet and excited.
It only took a few strokes; he was too new, too young, too eager to last long. A few strokes was all he needed—but it was all she needed too. They came together, a red flush washing over her skin as she arched against him and shook soundlessly.
Afterwards she lay again like a corpse.
Trager was drained and satisfied, but he had more time left, and he was determined to get his money’s worth. He explored her thoroughly, sticking his fingers everywhere they would go, touching her everywhere, rolling it over, looking at everything. The corpse moved like dead meat.
He left her as he’d found her, lying face up on the bed with her legs apart. Meathouse courtesy.
* * *
The horizon was a wall of factories, all factories, vast belching factories that sent red shadows to flick against the sulfur-dark skies. The boy saw but hardly noticed. He was strapped in place high atop his automill, two stories up on a monster machine of corroding yellow-painted metal with savage teeth of diamond and duralloy, and his eyes were blurred with triple images. Clear and strong and hard he saw the control panel before him, the wheel, the fuel-feed, the bright handle of the ore-scoops, the banks of light that would tell of trouble in the refinery under his feet, the brake and emergency brake. But that was not all he saw. Dimly, faintly, there were echoes; overlaid images of two other control cabs, almost identical to his, where corpse hands moved clumsily over the instruments.
Trager moved those hands, slow and careful, while another part of his mind held his own hands, his real hands, very still. The corpse controller hummed thinly on his belt.
On either side of him, the other two automills moved into flanking positions. The corpse hands squeezed the brakes; the machines rumbled to a halt. On the edge of the great sloping pit, they stood in a row, shabby pitted juggernauts ready to descend into the gloom. The pit was growing steadily larger; each day new layers of rock and ore were stripped away.
Once a mountain range had stood here, but Trager did not remember that.
The rest was easy. The automills were aligned now. To move the crew in unison was a cinch, any decent handler could do that. It was only when you had to keep several corpses busy at several different tasks that things got tricky. But a good corpsehandler could do that too. Eight-crews were not unknown to veterans; eight bodies linked to a single corpse controller moved by a single mind and eight synthabrains. The deadmen were each tuned to one controller, and only one; the handler who wore that controller and thought corpse-thoughts in its proximity field could move those deadmen like secondary bodies. Or like his own body. If he was good enough.
Trager checked his filtermask and earplugs quickly, then touched the fuel-feed, engaged, flicked on the laser-knives and the drills. His corpses echoed his moves, and pulses of light spit through the twilight of Skrakky. Even through his plugs he could hear the awful whine as the ore-scoops revved up and lowered. The rock-eating maw of an automill was even wider than the machine was tall.
Rumbling and screeching, in perfect formation, Trager and his corpse crew descended into the pit. Before they reached the factories on the far side of the plain, tons of metal would have been torn from the earth, melted and refined and processed, while the worthless rock was reduced to powder and blown out into the already unbreathable air. He would deliver finished steel at dusk, on the horizon.
He was a good handler, Trager thought as the automills started down. But the handler in the meathouse—now, she must be an artist. He imagined her down in the cellar somewhere, watching each of her corpses through holos and psi circuits, humping them all to please her patrons. Was it just a fluke, then, that his fuck had been so perfect? Or was she always that good? But how, how, to move a dozen corpses without even being near them, to have them doing different things, to keep them all excited, to match the needs and rhythm of each customer so exactly?
The air behind him was black and choked by rock-dust, his ears were full of screams, and the far horizon was a glowering red wall beneath which yellow ants crawled and ate rock. But Trager kept his hard-on all across the plain as the automill shook beneath him.
* * *
The corpses were company owned; they stayed in the company deadman depot. But Trager had a room, a slice of the space that was his own in a steel-and-concrete warehouse with a thousand other slices. He only knew a handful of his neighbors, but he
knew all of them too; they were corpsehandlers. It was a world of silent shadowed corridors and endless closed doors. The lobby-lounge, all air and plastic, was a dusty deserted place where none of the tenants ever gathered.
The evenings were long there, the nights eternal. Trager had bought extra light-panels for his particular cube, and when all of them were on they burned so bright that his infrequent visitors blinked and complained about the glare. But always there came a time when he could read no more, and then he had to turn them out, and the darkness returned once more.
His father, long gone and barely remembered, had left a wealth of books and tapes, and Trager kept them still. The room was lined with them, and others stood in great piles against the foot of the bed and on either side of the bathroom door. Infrequently he went out with Cox and the others, to drink and joke and prowl for real women. He imitated them as best he could, but he always felt out of place. So most of his nights were spent at home, reading and listening to the music, remembering and thinking.
That week he thought long after he’d faded his light panels into black, and his thoughts were a frightened jumble. Payday was coming again, and Cox would be after him to return to the meathouse, and yes, yes, he wanted to. It had been good, exciting; for once he had felt confident and virile. But it was so easy, cheap, dirty. There had to be more, didn’t there? Love, whatever that was? It had to be better with a real woman, had to, and he wouldn’t find one of those in a meathouse. He’d never found one outside, either, but then he’d never really had the courage to try. But he had to try, had to, or what sort of live would he ever have?
Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror Page 1