Bad Little Girls Die Horrible Deaths: And Other Tales of Dark Fantasy

by Connolly, Harry

  Thomas stopped eating. “I’d rather not go into that.”

  “I’m sorry if it’s a painful subject.”

  Thomas picked up a slice of preserved lemon. “When I was just a man, I wondered if I would be graced to see my seventieth birthday. Now that I’m no longer a man, I’ve doubled that. I have survived for quite a spell, but I’m not the same. Me and this lemon are preserved, but preserving us, lengthening our life, has changed us. In my case, into a thing I can’t—couldn’t abide.”

  He laid his hand on the tea pot full of blood and stared at it in silence.

  There was a crash of breaking glass from another room. We jumped from our chairs.

  “Is there someone else here?” Thomas asked.

  “No,” I said, and started toward the noise.

  But Thomas was closer. He shimmered and went flat, sliding under the closed door like a folded piece of paper.

  I rushed after him. I’d spent two years looking for that vampire. He was not powerful enough to face my enemies—if that’s what the noise was—and I needed him alive. So to speak. For Monica’s sake.

  I found Thomas in the den. He stood beside an open window out of direct sunlight. A jar had fallen from the sill.

  “It could have been a cat,” Thomas said.

  “I’m sure you’re right.” There was no sign that someone had entered the house and no one within limits of my sight.

  I led him back to the table. I didn’t mention that we keep our windows shut and our curtains closed. If someone was peeping into my house, it was time to move on. Again.

  Thomas didn’t sit in his chair. “Thank you for the meal, but I don’t think you brought me here for that.”

  I nodded. “Come with me,” I said.

  I led him to the master bedroom. I drew out a heavy knife and, using my considerable strength, managed to pierce my skin. I wiped a spot of blood on the sheet. It vanished even faster than the cut on my arm. “I know you’re tired from the blood and the daylight. When you’ve slept, I’ll be able to explain.” Then I took out the shackle. It had once been an ordinary iron manacle, but I had enhanced it with my magic. “You are a guest in my home,” I told him, “but the woman I love is down the hall—”

  He interrupted me by extending his forearm. I attached the shackle and left.

  Monica had not slept for 24 hours, being extraordinarily nervous about this latest errand, so I put her to bed as well. I laid garlic all around her, despite her assurances that she trusted our new guest. I have lived too long for trust. Not with a prize as precious as her. Not when I have found love again, after so, so long.

  I spent the day cleaning and preparing spells. I also scanned the house with my sight. Thomas did not leave the master bedroom. He lay in the bed all day, next to the other.

  Monica awoke first and joined me in the breakfast nook. We spent an hour talking about small, silly things. I listened to her voice, watched her eyes and was happy.

  After sunset, Thomas joined us. “There is a vampire inside the bed. I met him in my dreams.”

  I smiled. I felt pretty good. “Do you understand now?”

  Thomas nodded. “He’s dying. You need a replacement.”

  “We are offering to share our dreams with you, and a safe place where you can rest undiscovered for centuries. Once inside the bed, you could never leave. You’ll never kill again.”

  “Until I die like the man whose dreams I shared,” Thomas said. “In return, Monica will share my extended life.”

  “She has another 50 years left to her as a human being,” I said “and that is not enough. Not for someone who will live as long as I will. But she will not accept the spells that extend my life.”

  Monica interjected, “I would have to eat meat.”

  “Every day,” I said. “And your condition would force her to consume blood, which she won’t do. But in the bed…”

  “She will only have to feed off of me.”

  Monica jumped at that. I was startled, too. I had not expected him to see it that way. And at that moment, an explosion made the entire house shudder.

  I turned to Thomas. “Take her to the basement.”

  “I’ll guard her with my life.” He led my Monica away, and I went to meet our attackers.

  With my sight, I could see there were two of them, one assassin and her servant. They were a part of a syndicate that had once offered me a choice: Join them or die. So far they had been unable to make either happen.

  They had forced their way into the library, correctly guessing that it was where I kept most of my weapons. But not all of them. I ran to the kitchen and retrieved a tiny blue box.

  My enemies were ideologues: forbidden to use magics like the one I held in my hand. It was a creature called the Claw-In-Shadow which I had summoned from the Empty Spaces. The assassins advanced into the hall, and I opened the box. Our battle began.

  It would take too long to describe what happened. Much of our fight took place within the Empty Spaces themselves, and the assassins, while limited in their abilities, were dangerous opponents. In the end, I could not kill either one, though I did hurt them enough to drive them away. I, too, was wounded.

  When I returned to my home, all was quiet. The library was still damaged, but there was no yellow police tape. Good. I hated dealing with local authorities.

  A glance at the computer screen confirmed that a full day had passed, and it was now the next evening. I was too drained and injured to use my sight, but I could hear movement upstairs. I went to the master bedroom.

  Thomas was there, chained to the wall with my shackle. He pulled at it, tore at it, trying to free himself. Monica was nowhere to be seen.

  He saw me in the doorway and turned pale. “You’re hurt.”

  My injuries would have killed a normal man. I wasn’t normal. I also wasn’t very healthy at the moment. I tried to use my sight to scan the house for Monica, but my vision was fuzzy, and the effort nearly made me fall over.

  It was then I noticed that Thomas had been injured as well. His face and hands were red and swollen, and sliced cloves of garlic lay all around him. Had syndicate assassins attacked while I was fighting in the Empty Spaces? I panicked.

  “Who did this to you! Where’s Monica?”

  “She’s here,” Thomas said. “She’s the one who did this to me.”

  I stared at him. Monica refused to wear wool because she thought it cruel to shear sheep. I couldn’t imagine her torturing a guest in our home.

  “She loves you,” Thomas said. “She wants to spend centuries with you. But she knew she had to change to do that, and she thought this was the best way. Nathan, she forced me to do it.”

  I noticed a sheet of paper on the coverlet. Her stationary. Her handwriting. I knew what it said before I read it.

  I released Thomas from the shackle. “Take the blood from the refrigerator and get out. I don’t blame you for this, but if I see you again I’m going to destroy you.”

  He left, no doubt to search out blood banks and live a modern life in a world where he no longer had to kill. I turned to the note she had written.

  It read: “Nathan, I love you more than anything in the world, but would you still love me if I changed into something else? And could I bear centuries of killing the man who stood guard over me today?

  “Please understand why I did this, and come share your dreams with me. All My Love, Monica”

  I dropped the paper to the floor and summoned my sight. The effort made me dizzy, but grief and horror gave me power.

  There, inside the bed, I could see two figures. One was dead and already crumbling to dust. The other was the most rare and precious jewel in the world.

  The Home Made Mask

  I suspect this is the story that most readers will read first. If you jumped straight to the back of the book to check out this long-promised Twenty Palaces short story (actually a novelette, but who’s counting?) I hope you’ll sample some of the other fiction, too.

  Anywa
y, Ray and Annalise both appear in this story—as you would expect—but only in small ways. Also, it takes place a day or two after the ending of Circle Of Enemies, and nothing in it could be considered a spoiler for the novels, except for the first eight words of this second paragraph. Just be warned that this isn’t from Ray’s POV.

  –– –- ––

  David wanted to know, once again, how much she loved the desert. He was from Maine, although he’d also lived in Juneau, Charlotte, Brooklyn, and Portland. He always said Brooklyn with special emphasis, as though it was a magic spell to dampen a girl’s panties.

  “How much do you love the desert?” he’d ask every half hour or so. Everything was new to him and he couldn’t stop marveling at it. For Carly, who had grown up in Vegas and still lived here mainly because her nest egg wasn’t large enough for her to flip the bird at the empty sky and scorching heat, it was just scrub and rock and a lot of browns and yellows. Nevada was the color of old bruises.

  “Oh, I love it,” she assured him. “Sometimes I forget how much. It helps to have someone with a new perspective to remind me.”

  She expected that would please him and it did. What the hell, he was cute and outdoorsy—practically half a McConaughey—and her dating life lately… well, it had been a bit of a desert.

  So here she was in the passenger seat of his rattling old Corolla, driving out to an estate owned by one of David’s buddies where they could hike a secret trail. He’d been in Vegas six months and already had a friend with property who let him drop by unannounced. Carly wasn’t even supposed to visit her mother without calling first.

  Which is how she found herself, an hour later, deep in the desert just after sunrise in the ass end of August, with three liters of water in a Camelbak David loaned her, smearing sunscreen on her arms. “Don’t forget your pretty little fingers,” David said.

  Ugh. “Are you sure this is okay? Who lives here?” She gestured toward the padlocked chain link gate, which had a NO TRESPASSERS sign hung at eye level. In the rural desert, a sign like that was usually backed up by a well-stocked gun cabinet.

  “My friend Bill,” David answered. “He gave me the key, like, two months ago. See?” He held up a little brass key, then jogged over to the gate and unlocked it. “I’ve been here once before by myself, but the view is so incredible that I’m dying to share it.” The gates had to be lifted free of the dirt to swing open; Carly admired David’s long calf muscles as he walked them inward. He was so cut he could have modeled human anatomy. Then, as if he’d forgotten something important, he rushed back to the car and took a blanket from the trunk.

  Please. If David thought he was getting laid out in the desert sun with the snakes and the coyotes—on a friend’s property, no less, when that friend might actually be watching… well, calves or not, the only bush he was going to see was more of this screwbean mesquite.

  “It’s not far, I swear. I have to be at work by one, so I promise it’s not far.”

  Carly glanced down at her pale, stocky legs. Was it so obvious that she wasn’t a hiker? She had muscle there, even if she didn’t have a lot of visible veins and tendons to show them off. Hmf. She swung the borrowed Camelbak onto her shoulder, tossed David his, then marched through the gate.

  David caught up quickly. “The trailhead is right over here.”

  Carly had been on desert trails before, obviously, but they’d been in national parks with trailhead markers, stairs for the very steep parts, and guardrails to warn hikers away from dangerous spots. This was something different; twice they had to scramble up a four-foot tumble of rocks, and once, after the trail had gained them a few dozen feet in altitude, they had to walk along the edge of a narrow cliff. Carly didn’t like the look of it: if the trail collapsed, it wouldn’t be like plummeting off the top of a skyscraper, but breaking your legs in the desert in August was almost as dangerous. A fall like that would still kill you, but it’d take its time about it.

  She took out her phone and checked. No bars. Perfect.

  At about the twenty minute mark, David said they were half-way there. Then he pointed toward a stony outcropping that would give a commanding view of the property in one direction and the desert in the other. I occurred to her that the “incredible” view David was so excited about would probably be utterly typical to her. Still, he was so excited about sharing it that she decided she would pretend to be amazed, for his sake. Why not? It didn’t cost anything.

  Just then, David stopped dead in the trail. He stared into a little cluster of banana yucca, his face utterly blank. “David?” He barely responded to her voice, and the skin on Carly’s neck tingled with dread.

  He quirked his head. “What is that?”

  Carly tried to follow his gaze, tingles running all down her arms. Had he spotted a coyote or a rattlesnake? She squinted against the rising sun but couldn’t see any animals. There was the trail ahead of them, another branching trail that led down into the valley below—possibly out to “Bill’s” house—and a surprisingly tall cluster of yucca plants.

  She was about to ask David what was up, when he pointed toward the base of one of the plants. He was so tense that he pointed with his entire fist; he couldn’t unclench it. “There, at the base near us.”

  It wasn’t the most specific directions Carly had ever heard. She tried to see what was bothering him and, to be honest, was becoming annoyed. There was pair of stones, some withered yucca leaves, and a mound of what looked to be gardening top soil someone had put their laundry into—

  “That’s a dead body,” Carly said. While the conscious part of her mind had been confounded by the color and position of it, her subconscious mind had registered the fingers, the outstretched arms, and the head. There was a secret part of her that lived by its instincts, that raced ahead of her waking mind, and she knew she needed to start trusting that inner self more.

  Which meant she was never going to sleep with David. Not ever. Oh well.

  “We should go,” David said.

  That he’d suggested leaving urged her forward. “Do you think that’s your friend Bill?”

  “No, it… Maybe. He hasn’t been into the store in a few weeks. At least, not during my shifts. But I think that body’s been there a long time. It’s really dried out. Like, mummified.”

  Mummified? That she had to see. David had promised to show her something incredible, hadn’t he? How many chances would she get to see a dead body without becoming a cop or something? She took a few more steps down the slope of loose stones, wary of the thought that she might be clumsy enough to lose her balance and spear herself with a yucca leaf. “Don’t worry,” she said, when David made a gutteral noise of protest. “I won’t get close.”

  The body looked papery, like an abandoned wasp’s nest. It was wearing a teal Rail Riders nylon shirt, men’s long tan shorts, and hiking boots that must have cost three times what Carly had paid for hers. That was a guy lying dead down there, a guy with money but no taste. She tried to see if there was a bullet hole in it or something, but it was impossible to tell. Could snake venom have done this?

  The thought of snakes was enough to dissuade her from going any closer, but she had a prey’s sudden certainty that it was already too late.

  The mummified arms bent at the elbow and the head lifted off the ground. Carly gasped and David screamed. The thing moved toward her and this couldn’t be a prank, not if David was going to scream like that, not unless it was his friend Bill behind this freaky oh my god!

  Prank or not, Carly scrambled backward up the hill. The corpse—God, it looked like a real honest-to-shit corpse—pushed itself to its knees and scrambled toward her. Its head was a fire-blackened skull with no eyes. Thin grasping fingers reached for her… it would have been a good time to scream if she’d had the breath for it and it would have been a perfect time for David to come help her right fucking now—

  The dead not-a-prank man grabbed hold of her wrist. Before Carly could even try to break free, a bout of vertigo
threw her off-balance. The whole world seemed to spin around and around, the sky, the earth, the wind, the stars, the emptiness between the stars, so vast, so burning sour, so much darkness, so much light, so many muddled thoughts, so much raw, ferocious hunger for life and time… Everything felt so huge yet she could have swallowed it all and gone hunting for more more more more…

  Then she pitched forward onto the stony slope, which hurt her knees terribly, and she was looking at the thing, but now she was the one holding it.

  Carly let go instantly. Somehow, the thing looked just like her. Somehow it had stolen her shape, but at the moment she released it, it began to turn the color of used paper coffee filters, then even darker than that. The thing screamed, and Carly wanted to scream too, but her throat was so dry.

  But so was the thing. It shriveled up again like an old wasp nest and fell onto the trail at David’s feet, having become a corpse again, except it now mimicked her.

  She’d beaten it. She’d broken the connection between them and it had shriveled up before it could finish copying her. She’d won. She’d won and lived!

  “You asshole!” She turned to David, who stared at her in wide-eyed horror. “You were completely useless, you completely-useless-piece-of-shit asshole!” He stepped back as though he had some reason to be afraid of her, then turned and sprinted back down the trail, those fine calf muscles on full display.

  “God, what an asshole.” Carly needed a moment to get her bearings. The cluster of banana yucca was behind her. The corpse of that weird mummified thing was between her and the trail, and—oh, shit, it was wearing her clothes.

  Her white UNLV tee was right there, on that dried up corpse, and so were the tight hiking shorts that showed off her ass muscles. She stepped forward again and felt her feet moving inside too large boots and she knew, even before she looked down, that she was wearing those expensive men’s boots along with the Rail Rider outfit.

  Shit! Had David drugged her or something, then switched her clothes? She pulled the shirt away from her body and, to her horror, saw that the inside was crusted with dry ashy skin.