Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

by Cheryl Mullenax (Ed)

  He was silent for a minute, and then offered: “My wife gets, um, excited.”

  “Drop your pants, Tony.”

  She didn’t sound like she’d take an argument, so he stood and undid his belt. His pants slid down immediately, revealing first, that he’d somehow forgotten underwear this morning, and second that the purple bruise led downwards from his belly to the tangle of hair beneath.

  The doctor gasped at the sight. Tony thought she was impressed with his size—he was, of course, still erect. But her eyes did not look lustful, rather, they were disgusted. He focused on the object of her stare and saw that it too was red and purple—and swollen to twice its normal size.

  “Look, Tony. I don’t want to tell you what to do in your bed, but if your wife is responsible for this—I’d consider divorce. I don’t even want to know how this happened, but you’d better rule out sex for the next week or two. I’m going to give you an antibiotic just in case you’ve got that infected.”

  She walked over to the white cabinets across the room and pulled out a tube.

  Instead of a dumpy fortyish woman in an overly long lab coat, Tony saw the bronze muscular buttocks of the goddess crossing the room, the dark lure of the crack between her legs led his hand to his lap. Her stride was lolling, casual. Her hips swayed suggestively, the ripples in her back and across her waist invited his tongue. She looked across her shoulder at him, flipping a mane of bleached hair over her shoulder. Her eyes touched his with electricity and she winked.

  “Come to me, Tony.”

  She turned around to show him all.

  “Cum in me, Tony.”

  * * *

  “God, what is wrong with you?”

  Dr. Regsic stood in front of him, her jaw hanging open.

  “I’m not going to say anything about this Tony, but I am going to recommend a counselor.”

  She reached over and pulled a paper towel from a roll on the wall.

  “Here. Clean yourself up and go home. I’ll leave a prescription of antibiotic for that—you better hope it doesn’t scar—and some ointment as well. Come back tomorrow, I want to see how you’re doing.”

  * * *

  She was there again at 9, just like before.

  “Who are you?” he asked again, as his jeans bunched around his ankles. Still she would not answer, but her hands were hot tonight, full of rhythmic lust. He felt a sticky wetness on his leg. With the rest of himself, he felt only her power. Her fingers blazed trails of ice and fire across him, but it was her mouth that centered her magic. As she pulled him inside her, the pleasure radiated back into his body, a feedback of ecstasy. He knew now the purple trails across his chest were her conduits of pleasure, he could feel every pulling sensation electrify those paths with heat. It could have been the intoxication of the moment, but a dull cobalt illumination seemed to leak from the weave she worked upon him, growing brighter and dimmer with the waxing and waning of her pressure upon him. And as she reached up to carve another channel on his chest, he saw why she insisted on darkness. Her left hand was maimed. The thumb and pinky fingers were whole, their long red-capped nails raked his flesh as any woman’s. But the middle three fingers lacked nails—in fact, they seemed to lack flesh as well. It looked as if she’d dipped her hand into a radiation soup. That would explain the hard coldness he had felt the past three nights as she first cupped and cajoled his loins. With cold bony fingers …

  But her skill made up for any deformities. Again and again she brought him to orgasm, he groaned and begged her to suck him dry once more. And every time she did. Again the night ended with his losing consciousness in the throes of release. Again he awoke to find her gone, and spent the remaining hours tossing in his bed. And the next two nights were the same.

  On Friday Bob put him on report and turned the Web project over to another department. Tony went back to Dr. Regsic.

  She tried to keep the alarm from reaching her voice, while noting that his blood pressure had dipped dangerously low and he’d somehow lost another 10 pounds since Tuesday. But when he removed his clothes, her breath hissed with disgust. The purple bruising covering his torso looked like a gridmap. And it all led to a penis the size of a cucumber. Not an overly healthy looking one at that. She handed him the name of “a good doctor” at the hospital scribbled on her business card.

  “Go there. Now,” was all she said. It was three in the afternoon, but he went.

  Not to the hospital, though, to the hotel.

  As he pulled into the parking lot—for the first time in daylight—he saw how truly decrepit the place was. Weeds sprouted everywhere through cracks in the asphalt. A “For Sale” sign was tacked on below the big Redroom Hotel placard above the main office door—which was boarded shut. Apparently the Gentech Government Laboratories, whose fence butted up to the back of the hotel property, weren’t bringing in enough business to support a hotel. Or maybe after the outcry a few years ago about GGL’s genetic testing program, they had steered business away. The hotel windows that weren’t covered in graffitied plywood were broken, ragged glass massaged gently by shredding curtains in the low breeze. Yes, this hotel had been closed for awhile, he supposed. So how had there been lights on in some rooms the other nights? And how long had She been there? This was probably a prostitution pit even when it was open for legitimate business, he guessed, wondering if his goddess had plied her strange trade here even then. Were there others like her in the other rooms? Could the cold blue lights he had seen night after night have been the flares of others undergoing the same consuming pleasures as himself, not the glow of cathode ray tubes? He found that he no longer cared, and strode unerringly towards 112. Closed or not, he knew of one room that had a vacancy.

  The room was a lot creepier in the daylight than hidden in the moist shadows of night. The paint, a dull, putrid green, was peeling away from the walls, especially in the corners where water damage had left brown stains on the cinderblock the paint was separating from. The carpet was once charcoal grey, but now was pockmarked with circles of brown and black stains. Portions of it were frayed and pulled up. Spiderwebs crisscrossed the corners, and something scuttled under the unsheeted bed when he stepped towards it. The mattress looked too dirty to sit on, let alone sleep on. Now he knew another reason she said to come after 9. It would be hard to get off knowing that you were likely taking rats, spiders, or any number of vermin along for the ride.

  “Hello. Anybody home?” he called into the silence that seemed to hang around him like a breath taken and held.

  Something rustled nearby.

  “I know I’m early, but I couldn’t wait.”

  She came out of the bathroom, her skeleton legs joining neat as knickers with golden skinned thighs and a blonde tuft of pubic hair. Her belly button was exquisite, a hollow darkness on a flat planed bed of sensual muscle that promised both pleasure and mystery. Her breasts were as tan and supple as her belly, full, alert and capped by the lightest shade of pink areolas. He saw now that both her hands were incomplete, but each by only two fingers—which was puzzling because he knew he’d seen three skeletal tips on one last night. But white-boned calves, feet, and fingers were not a turnoff to him now. And she could have hidden these odd deformities if she’d wanted to, he thought. Her face was the real problem. A lipless mouth showed the white teeth within glittering savagely against a gash of wet crimson. He could see her cheekbone jutting through pink flesh on one side, while the other half of her face seemed nearly complete, and as coppery brown as the rest of her fleshed body. Her eyes were piercing sapphires, but on the visible cheekbone side the eye was lidless, and the white line of her skull seemed to poke through above it. The lightly kinked, wind-blown blonde hair that turned him on so much ringed her face and draped across her shoulders. She held her arms out in offering.

  “Is this what you want?” she asked. Her voice was gentle as a girl’s, yet somehow throaty, wanton. But despite the velvet of her tone, without the cushion of lips, her words revealed themselves l
ike daggers plied from carving meat.

  “Yes,” he said without hesitation. “But, what are you?”

  She smiled with her eyes. Her ivory teeth ground cruelly.

  “I’m your dream lover. Come to me, Tony. They designed me to be filled up by men. And it’s really been too long.”

  He started towards her. She moved past him to the bed and laid down. He could see dots of scarlet and curdled cream on the bones that were her legs, and on her feet, tiny red lines that looked like unsheathed capillaries. She wiggled her toes and they clinked together invitingly. She spread her legs and he saw the heaven he’d thirsted for all week long. She was his dream lover. She was the girl from the porno vid. He could see it in the eyes now, in the perfect breasts, in the pinkness that glistened so invitingly. His crotch throbbed painfully while his head ached with fear and longing.

  “Cum in me, Tony. Let me suck you down to make me whole.”

  His pants were so loose now they slid to the floor with no unbuckling. He realized briefly that however he’d written off his previous indiscretions with this woman, this was, unalterably, adultery. He knew somewhere in his head that Loni would be back Tuesday, and he should put himself back together by then. And he knew he wouldn’t. Couldn’t. And he didn’t care.

  He straddled her unfinished body and bypassed foreplay. She was visibly ready, and her hands now raked at his back as they had all week on his chest. He felt as though he were being diced and licked at the same time. Her tongue snaked out of her lipless mouth and teased and moistened his eyes, nose and neck. She bit him hard on the shoulder and then caressed his lips with her tongue. Her eyes sucked him into another world, her vagina was a utopian tunnel. He was making love like he never had before, bucking and pumping like a male hound on a bitch. Then she rolled atop him, the bones of her toes scratching at his calves, sounding like nails on hollow wood as they met the bones beneath his muscle. Yet he didn’t howl; he could feel nothing but her forcefed ecstasy. And she drove him on, harder and harder, the trails in his flesh burned and froze in alternate coursings. He could see them glow with power released. And when at last he answered her plea and came, he knew with fatalistic certainty that it would never stop.

  She laughed as he came and came and the skin on her cheek grew thick and tan and her lips went from baby pink flesh to full pouting sex teases.

  … And he came and felt her legs pressed upon his own growing, the red and white seeds of flesh drawing the essence of him to her, nursing, nourishing their growth.

  … And he came and as her shinbones ceased clicking together he heard his own begin to clatter. He felt light, empty, but trapped in some sick, twisted compulsion as his hips smacked against hers of their own accord.

  … And he came and she laughed and pressed her arms upon his chest. Her fingers were perfect and whole and she said in that husky girl voice, “take me again, stud,” and laughed when he did and she bent to kiss him and his tongue was caught in a vacuum; his cheeks sagged, receded. She lifted his arm in passion and he saw the white bones protruding from the unraveled skin of his fingers.

  … And still he came and the night came and the morning too before she pushed his trembling bones away from her flesh.

  She stood then, and stretched, a lithe cat of a woman. Running her fingers across supple, muscular skin, she drank in herself inch by inch in a shard of mirror across the room. Her body was whole, tan, California style—no lines. Her lips were shiny pink, an erotic complement to the nipples of her perfectly brown breasts. She flipped a strand of sand-blonde hair away from her face, ice-blue eyes flashing with abating lust, sweat drying on her forehead, lips pursed in humorous consideration. Gazing back at the bed, she saw the eyeballs in Tony’s meatless cranium staring back at her, still with a longing, and, she felt, appreciation of her new form. She’d best finish the job.

  She sighed and bent over him, tongue lasciviously ready. When she rose the skull was sightless, the bones no longer vibrated on the floor. A long transparent tube of skin trailed between his femurs. She pulled it off with a rip and swallowed it. “Every last drop,” she murmured and licked her lips.

  She pulled on his jeans, cinching the belt to its furthest hole. It left her thighs baggy and ill-defined, but it would do for now. She fastened one button of the short-sleeved blue cotton shirt, and tied the rest across her belly, leaving her midriff and much of her chest exposed. She pulled at the uncomfortable weight on her behind and came up with his wallet. Thumbing through $20s and $10s, her white canines flashed hungrily. Good. She didn’t relish hanging around this dump any longer. As she went to flip the wallet closed, a snapshot of a woman caught her eye. She was raven-haired, dark-eyed, with high cheekbones and an intense look of vibrance in her mouth. The woman was hot. Just looking at the photo made her mouth dry, and even after its recent use, her groin ached with desire. Probably his wife, she speculated, checking his license to find an address. She knew where this house was, she realized, as Tony’s cannibalized cells merged and shared their knowledge with her own. It had taken her too long to find a host after the Gentech engineer had abandoned her here to wither away. She laughed, thinking of his reward if she could track him down. Sex goddesses were hard to find—or make! And she intended to feed regularly to keep her full goddess form from now on. Maybe he could be one of her snacks.

  Kicking the sated bones under the moldering bed, she wondered, in the meantime, if Tony’s wife liked blondes. Opening the door to step with anticipation into daylight, she resolved to find out.

  Blind in the House of the Headsman

  Mehitobel Wilson

  * * *

  “Blind in the House of the Headsman” first appeared in Brainbox 2: Son of Brainbox, edited by Steve Eller, 2001.

  ‡

  Mehitobel Wilson has been publishing horror fiction since 1998. She is a Bram Stoker Award nominee, and many of her stories have been granted Honorable Mentions in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series. Recent stories appear in Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues, Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead, Sins of the Sirens, Damned: An Anthology of the Lost, and Dead But Dreaming: New Excursions in the Lovecraftian Universe, and selected stories have been collected in Dangerous Red. If you can’t pronounce her name, call her “Bel.”

  * * *

  May was inside the wall, and her eyes were open. Better on her back than on her knees; the shards of paneling would cut her throat, and her bruised knees couldn’t take her own weight anymore, much less his.

  Maybe, baby, Maybe, she heard, his name for her.

  Maybe, baby. She blinked and stared at the clean studs, still fragrant, packed with nubby gray insulation that puffed lint into her eyes with each Maybe thrust. The back of the paneling was satiny and printed with blue letters, the closest ones clear, the rest shadowed. The few she could read ran through her head, AST, and she tongued her palate, chanting the letters silently.

  Maybe. Maybe he had punched through her face instead, and her brain’s best guess at peace was this space inside the wall. Maybe she was vibrating on the verge of death, the stabbing at her nape the last sparks of her spinal conduit. When death came, she would no longer remember him looming redfaced over her as she crabbed back onto the pillows, pressing her head against the wall, pulling his fist back and slamming it beside her face, catching one of her curls and tearing it from her skull as he punched through the paneling. Maybe, baby, maybe he hadn’t gnawed her jawbone, steered her bloodied skull into the hole with a sustained bruise of a kiss, bitten her trachea and pressed her chin back with his hardboned face, shoved her head through, let the hole’s edges score her forehead, her neck.

  Maybe, baby, gusted the breath that powered his bloodstreaked cock, and she knew she was only in the wall.

  May felt the cool glass of his ashtray settle on her sternum and knew this would take a long time. Her headless body lay before him. He would smoke an extra few cigarettes, she knew, and savor this. Her body was outside the wall. It was his.

  A
ST AST AST ticked against the backs of her teeth, matching the rhythm. She felt the soft and dusty press, withdraw, press of insulation on her crown.

  Her head was her own.

  He owned the rest. In surgery, a wall of blue fabric had blocked her view of her own opened flesh. Sacs of saline were tucked beneath her pectoral muscles. He had used her vagina so thoroughly that it was as stretched as that of a mother thrice over. Dildos, fists, implements inspired by those he’d seen used in black-market Japanese films. He paid for her cunt to be tightened. Skin cultured in sheets from the cells of discarded foreskins, skin meant to reconstruct the features of burn victims, was trimmed into a new hymen and sewn to bridge her bruised soft walls. Nipped and tucked to be ripped and fucked. Again. All that lay on the far side of the sheet, and May, conscious, examined the warp and weft of the fabric, memorized the blue, called it cornflower, and felt none of the things they were doing to his body.

  Two years later, he had undone all the work he’d bought between her legs, and had cultivated new tastes. Soon she would be on the table again, the saline sacs would be dragged from the muscles that had scarred around them, the natural tissue of her breasts would be scooped free and dropped into a Biohazard vat, and crescents of skin would be cut away, leaving her with the flat and aching chest of an adolescent. He’d tighten her again, of course, and he’d pay for electrolysis, leaving her mons bald as a child’s.

  For now, nothing beyond the wood was hers. May read the cornflower letters branded on the pressboard. She didn’t feel it when he pulled his cock from her, didn’t hear the foil tear or the latex snap, didn’t hear the tink of his class ring against the bottle of Tabasco sauce, didn’t feel the nuclear conflagration when his cock seared into her again. She ticked AST, still, against her teeth.

  She let him have the body and the head knew nothing of it. May, behind the wall, thought of guillotines, of revolt and freedom. She tasted fiberglass on her smile.