“He doesn’t look too well. I told Ellen not to hit too hard,” said one of the women.
“He’s still alive. That’s the main thing,” said Mrs Thomas. “Now, Mr Johnson, we’re going to take that gag out of your mouth and untie one hand. Please don’t try any tricks, you really won’t enjoy what happens if you do.”
The woman on her left held up a long, vicious-looking kitchen knife, twisting it as she did so. Johnson stared at it, trying to understand what was happening to him.
Mrs Thomas put the torch on a shelf and knelt down beside him, her fingers pulling at the knots at his wrist. Then she pulled the gag loose, and he winced as the plaster tore free from his skin.
“Give me the water,” she ordered, and one of the women handed her a pink earthenware mug. She held it to his lips and he drank gratefully, trying to wash the foul taste of the flannel out of his mouth.
“Why?” he asked, hesitantly, when he could speak again. “What are you going to do?” But Mrs Thomas set her fingers against his lips and hushed him.
“No talking. You’ll understand very soon. Now, let’s sit you up, you’ll be more comfortable.” She put her hands under his armpits and hauled him up, propping him against the wall. Then she stood and went over to the other women, who produced a plastic shopping bag. From it they took a bowl and a spoon, and then a thermos flask, pouring something from it into the bowl.
“You’ll be hungry, I’m sure,” Mrs Thomas told him. She picked up the bowl and brought it over. “Your hand’s free, you can feed yourself.” She put the food down on the floor beside him and gave him the spoon, then stood back, waiting until he took the first mouthful. It was some kind of porridge, lukewarm, thin and tasteless, but he knew he could not endure the humiliation of being fed.
Once she saw that he was going to eat the gruel, Mrs Thomas turned, picked up the torch and went out of the hut, followed by the others.
“Wait, please,” he called after them. “You can’t leave me here like this!” But the door shut behind them, and he was left with just the candle-light for company.
At first he tried to free his other hand and his feet, but the ropes had been expertly tied and his struggles only left him with torn fingernails and bloody skin. Finally he gave up and leant back against the rough bricks.
“Logic,” he said. “There must be logic to it. Why are they doing this? If I knew that, perhaps I could talk to them . . .”
But the logic refused to come. There was no sense to any of it, no reason except simple lunacy; and, whatever else they were, he was quite sure that Mrs Thomas and her friends were not lunatics.
His head was aching now and the gruel lay heavily on his stomach. Then he heard a low murmur of voices and the door opened again. David’s grandmother stood in the doorway, looking at him.
“Oh thank God!” he said painfully. “Please, you must help me. Tell them to let me go –” But as she moved forward he saw her face more clearly, and knew that even this last hope of sanity had failed him.
“Only a little while now and then you’ll understand it all,” she told him briskly. “It’s a great honour, you know. Normally we use our own, but David is too young yet.”
“Then it’s not – not fatal,” he thought. Whatever “it” was, her look of grandmotherly pride surely ruled out serious damage. But he was not convinced. This was not the sweet old lady of tea-parties and home-made wine. Even in the dim light of the candle he sensed an authority in her, a power, and there was a pattern to it all. If only he could remember. If only he could think clearly . . .
She knelt down beside him and untied the rest of the ropes, then stood back while he slowly pulled himself up.
“Come along now, Ceridwen is waiting,” she told him. “Just take your pants off and then we can begin.”
“My pants?” Johnson stared, and then felt a sudden urge to giggle as he began to realise what the old woman was up to.
“You can’t make the offering with your clothes on,” she insisted. “No need to feel shy, we’ve seen it all before.” Her fingers tugged at his waist band, and he was too weak to push her away.
“It’s for the land,” she told him. “You know that?”
“Of course,” he nodded, humouring her.
Outside the door, a double row of women led away in a silent avenue towards the river, where Ceridwen waited, a naked silver goddess in the moonlight. David’s grandmother stood on his right, and Mrs Thomas fell in on his left; then they began to lead him towards the water’s edge.
He went with them unresisting. The silent women gave the procession a ceremonial, even a ritual quality that did away with embarrassment or protest. And Ceridwen – she was standing on a stone in the middle of the water, her hands held out to him. He stepped forward quickly, looking up at her, one foot on the bank, the other on a log that thrust out into the stream. And then the pattern came together, and he knew, and opened his mouth to cry out in terror.
At his side the old woman brought her hand up, the blade of the sickle striking cold fire from the moonlight in the second before she drew it across his throat.
And then he saw nothing but the dark stain of blood, spreading slowly from bank to bank; and heard nothing but the soft patter of rain on the sheltering leaves as the women began to wail.
STEVE RASNIC TEM & MELANIE TEM
Safe at Home
MELANIE TEM has been described by Dan Simmons as “the literary successor to Shirley Jackson and destined to become the new queen of high-quality psychologically disturbing horror fiction.” Her work has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best New Horror 2, Women of Darkness, Women of the West, Skin of the Soul, The Anthology of Fantasy & the Supernatural, Dark Voices: The Pan Book of Horror, The Mammoth Book of Vampires, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Grue, Cemetery Dance and Snow White Blood Red.
Her debut novel Prodigal, which won the 1992 Bram Stoker Award, was followed by Blood Moon, Wilding, Revenant and Desmodis, and with Nancy Holder she is co-writing the multi-volume ‘Demon Lover’ series, with Making Love and Witch-Light already completed.
She has recently collaborated with her husband Steve Rasnic Tem (who appears solo elsewhere in this volume) on a number of stories in such anthologies as Post Mortem, Chilled to the Bone, The Ultimate Dracula and Hottest Blood, as well as the chapbook Beautiful Strangers.
MINDY.
“Touch me. Here. Like this.
“You like to touch me, don’t you?
“That’s a good girl. Oh, that’s right.”
Charlie was incredulous. “You want me to take you to another horror movie? But you hate that stuff.”
“The monster in this one has long sticky tentacles that come up out of a dark pool.” Melinda squinted at the newspaper ad and gave a short, brittle laugh.
“Let me guess: It has a particular affinity for pretty young women.” Charlie’s laugh was easier, fuller than hers.
“Don’t they all?” she said.
Charlie took her to the movie because she wanted to go, and also because he knew there was a good possibility of sex afterward. She didn’t begrudge him that. Charlie was a good guy, and Melinda felt bad about using his baser instincts to get what she wanted. But it worked. It had always worked.
She didn’t love Charlie, not yet. And he didn’t love her. She hoped he didn’t love her.
“I love you, Mindy. You’re my favorite niece, did you know that?
“You want to make your uncle Pat happy, don’t you? Let me show you how to make me happy.
“Oh, you are such a good girl.”
Charlie was a tender, considerate lover. He went slow. He’d never hurt her. She knew he thought what they did together in bed was beautiful.
It made her want to throw up.
Monsters made it possible for her to throw up. Monsters in horror movies especially, with sticky appendages or gaping maws or formless bodies that oozed from everywhere and never went away.
At some point du
ring every show she’d get up and hurry to the ladies’ room, hoping there wouldn’t be a line. She’d crouch over a toilet and vomit for a long time. If she’d been able to force herself to eat any popcorn or candy, it would come out of her in recognizable chunks, but everything else being expelled from her body was whitish and viscous, like semen. For a while then – sometimes minutes, sometimes the rest of the night – she wouldn’t be sick to her stomach.
“Oh, no, Mindy, this isn’t wrong. We love each other, so how could anything we do together be wrong?
“Show me that you love me, Mindy.
“That’s right. That’s my girl.”
She hated having to chew and swallow in front of people. Sometimes she caught herself imagining that if she opened her mouth too wide a sticky, sinewy monster would slide out and wriggle into the darkness under the house, under the streets, under the world.
She watched Charlie eat. She wanted to see what his teeth did to the food, how his tongue rolled and humped to get the food down. Sometimes in the middle of a meal she’d reach over and very lightly rest her fingertips on the hinge of his jaw, where she could feel the bones and muscles, sinews and tendons, all working together in one building rhythm.
“You’re weird,” Charlie said the first time she was brave enough to do that. Mouth full of spaghetti, he leaned across the table and kissed her.
Melinda had thought he was going to say he loved her. He’d had that tender, passionate, self-absorbed look on his face that had nothing to do with her. Relieved that he’d said something else, she didn’t pull away.
She tried hard not to imagine the spaghetti in his mouth. For some reason it scared her.
Then she gave up and set herself to imagining it as vividly as she could. Whitish sticky tendrils, viscous sauce. Charlie’s mouth caressing it, taking everything from it, the inside of a kiss.
“Sweet,” Charlie said, still looking at her more intently than she liked. “And very beautiful. But definitely weird.”
“Your mommy and daddy didn’t mean me. I’m your daddy’s brother.
“They asked me to babysit this weekend, remember? They asked me to take care of you while they were gone. Don’t you think they must trust me a lot to let me take care of their precious little girl?
“So you can trust me, too.
“Come here, Mindy. Come to Uncle Pat.”
After the movie they often rode the bus across town to Charlie’s house. When she rode the bus alone, Melinda watched all the men waiting for her, in the other seats, at stops, on street corners, on billboards, and on movie posters. During heavy rains there were so many people in doorways that she couldn’t tell which ones were waiting for just her, and in the wet shadows she usually couldn’t see their hands. There ought to be a law requiring men to keep their hands exposed at all times in the presence of females. Especially girls. Especially little girls.
A man with a narrow face, or maybe with only a penis for a face, stared at her from a narrow passageway when the bus stopped for a light. His long pale tongue slid out of the shadows and down his coat, down one leg and across the sidewalk, leaving a slick, steaming trail. The tongue was wiggling its way toward her when the bus pulled into the intersection. Charlie hugged her and whispered a soft alien language into her ear.
In Charlie’s bedroom she took off her clothes, forcing herself to move slowly, holding her breath, hoping the bile in her stomach wouldn’t rise into her throat. Charlie watched her adoringly. “You are so beautiful,” he kept saying, and Melinda flinched that he would say such a thing out loud. “You are so beautiful.”
Melinda could barely let herself hear such nice things about her body, but she liked hearing them, was relieved each time that he didn’t say how ugly she was, how pale, how skinny or how fat, how wormlike smooth or how hairy. If she didn’t trim her bikini line her pubic hair would just keep growing, would spill out of her crotch and rise above the waistband of her shorts, would wrap itself like monkey tails up and down her limbs.
A woman was never safe. Like all women, Melinda had a wet, hairy hole in the middle of her body. A hole in the middle of her life. Where awful things might enter.
Charlie invited her to stay the night. Melinda said no, she wasn’t ready, and Charlie didn’t push. He insisted on accompanying her on the bus all the way home. He was so sweet. Gratefully, she kissed him goodbye at her door, although she really didn’t want to touch him anymore. She didn’t ask him in.
Alone in her apartment, she sat naked in the dark, all the bedclothes pushed well away from her. Cloth would burn her; her bare flesh was already aching with nothing touching it at all. It hurt her to be exposed like this; it would hurt more to try to cover herself up.
Then she waited until she was too tired to wait anymore. She waited, as she did every night, for something to break her door down or to seep in under it. For something to drag her or coax her into the sticky dark outside.
Safe. Safe at home.
“Mindy, Mindy, you are so beautiful.”
That July the annual invasion of miller moths was the worst anybody could remember. They bred somewhere in the South and would go up into the mountains to die, Melinda read, or maybe it was the other way around; when she was afraid of something she tried to find out as much about it as she could, but often she had trouble keeping her facts straight, and that just made her more afraid. It didn’t matter anyway; the truth was, they came from everywhere, bred everywhere, and they would never die.
Miller moths were monsters, and she was terrified of them. They swarmed so thickly around the lamp on her bedside stand or the hoodlight on her stove that they looked like clots of curly hair. They got stuck in her food, drowned in her coffee. They flew into her face, into her mouth, into the hole in the middle of her body, leaving everywhere the dust from their wings. The dust from their wings was poisonous. It was also what enabled them to breed.
They were in her bed. When Charlie wasn’t there she felt them all night long, flicking against the back of her neck, kissing the insides of her thighs, crawling into her vagina.
Finally, after three virtually sleepless nights, Melinda danced around her bedroom in a frenzy, with a rolled-up newspaper in one hand and a flyswatter in the other. She smashed every moth she saw or thought she saw, until the paper was tattered and the flyswatter was covered with pulpy wing dust and she was faint with exertion and fear. But in the end she was helpless against them. There were miller moths everywhere.
And they would get their revenge. They would pass stories on from one generation to the next about what she’d done to their family, or tried to do, and someday when she thought she was safe at home – in the winter, say, when there weren’t supposed to be any moths – one or a dozen or a million of them would lay their eggs inside her.
Monsters were everywhere. Great hairy things with eyes and teeth, miller moths with poisonous wings, squirmy creatures with tentacles that caught and held. All the monsters communicated with all the other monsters – the moths with the beasts, the caterpillars with the men. They spoke a language Melinda frequently understood but could not quite use herself. They talked about her. They watched her every minute of every day and night.
Everything was a monster, monstrous and magical. Everything was family but her. Everything talked.
“If you tell, they won’t understand.”
“If you tell, they’ll be mad at me. And at you.”
“If you tell, you’ll get us both in big trouble.”
“If you tell, you’ll tear our family apart.”
“If you tell, Mindy, I’ll go to jail, and then I won’t love you anymore.”
Charlie lay back in her arms. He was so sweet, so patient and good to her.
He was watching her. He watched her all the time. Even when they made love he didn’t close his eyes; she’d open hers during a long, breathtaking kiss and find him looking at her, his eyes so close they didn’t look like eyes anymore but like dark pools out of which anything might rise. Even w
hen she let him spend the night (at her place, at home, never at his, where she wouldn’t know where the monsters had bred in the night) and she woke up from her habitually fitful sleep, she knew he was watching her in his dreams. Every minute of every day and night.
“Sometimes you’re such a little girl,” he observed. “Like when we go to horror shows and you get so scared you have to run to the bathroom and throw up.”
Melinda hadn’t realized he knew about that. She felt her face and neck go hot.
“And other times,” he persisted, “you’re like a beautiful, wise old woman. No, not old – ageless. Like you’ve been alive forever. That’s how you seem when we make love.”
“Sex is older than we are,” Melinda said. “It’s older than anybody. It’s so old and so powerful it’s like a god, or a monster. People will do anything, tell themselves anything, to make what they do all right, just so they can hold onto it for a split second.”
She saw Charlie’s eyes widen, heard him catch his breath, saw an appendage with a searching eye and clinging membranes slither toward her as he started to say, “Love’s like that, too, you know.”
She stopped him with a kiss. The tentacle went into her mouth, into her throat. She sucked. The hole in the middle of her body filled up with viscous whitish fluid, and she ran to the bathroom to vomit it away.
“You’re growing up now. You’re becoming a woman.
“Why do you treat me like this? Why do you hate me?
“I don’t understand why you want to hurt me. We’ve been so close.
“I don’t understand.
“I love you.”
Charlie sneaked up on her. They were in her bed and she was relaxing in his arms, feeling pleasantly hungry, thinking that even if that furry shadow in the corner of the ceiling was a moth it wouldn’t hurt her, that it was as afraid of her as she was of it, when Charlie said before she saw it coming, “I love you.”
She was going to throw up. She struggled to get up, to free herself of him, but he wouldn’t let her go.
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