Halloween Chillers: A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense

by Douglas Clegg

  Jane opened her mouth, but barely a sound emerged. Meritt put his finger to his lips. “In a little while. They used it to stun the monkeys. What that bread is dipped in. It’s a drug called hanu and does very little harm, although you may experience a hangover. The reason for the secrecy? I needed to meet you, Miss Boone, before you met me. You’re not the first person to come looking for me. But you’re different from the others that arrived here.”

  He stepped farther into the light, and she saw that he was naked.

  His skin glistened with grease, and his body was clean-shaven except for his scalp, from which grew long dark hair.

  Jane managed a whisper. “What about me? I don’t understand. Different? Others?”

  “Oh,” he said, a smile growing on his face. “You are capable of much suffering, Miss Boone. That is a rare talent in human beings. Some are weak and murder their souls and bodies, and some die too soon in pain. Your friend Rex suffers much, but he’s of the garden variety. I have already played with him. Don’t be upset. He had his needles and his drugs. In return, he gave me that rare gift, that…”

  Meritt’s nostrils flared, inhaling, as if recalling some wonderful perfume, “That moment of mastery. It’s like nothing else, believe me. I used to skin children, you know, but they die too soon, they whine and cry. They don’t understand, and the pleasure they offer…”

  “Please stop,” Jane said.

  She felt strength seeping back into her muscles and joints. She knew she could run, but would not know to what exit, or where it would take her. She had heard about the temple having an underground labyrinth, and she didn’t wish to lose herself within it.

  But more than that, she felt no physical threat from Nathan Meritt.

  “You’re so young,” she said.“You look like you’re twenty. I never would’ve believed in magic, but…”

  He laughed. When he spoke again, it was in the measured cadences of Mary-Rose. “Skin? Flesh? It is our clothing, Miss Jane Boone, it is the tent that shelters us from the reality of life. This is not my skin, see.”

  He reached up and drew back a section of his face from the left side of his nose to his left ear, and it came up like damp leaves, and beneath it, the chalk white of bone. “It may conform to my bones, but it is another’s. It’s what I learned from her, from the Y-Cha. Neither do I have blood, Miss Boone. When you prick me, I don’t spill.”

  He seemed almost friendly and came closer to sit beside her.

  “You mustn’t be scared of me,” he said in a rigid British accent. “We’re two halves of the same coin.”

  Jane Boone looked in his eyes and saw Greer there, a smiling, gentle Greer. The Greer who had funded her trip to White Chapel, the Greer who had politely revealed what a monster he was and how he accept his own horror.

  “I met them both in Tibet, Greer and Lucy,” Meritt said, resuming his American accent. “He wanted children. We had that in common, although his interests, oddly enough, had more to do with mechanics than with intimacy. I got him his children, and he paid his price with flesh. Two days of exquisite suffering, Jane, along the banks of a lovely river. Greer did not quite expect it. I had some children with me, bought in Bangkok at one hundred dollars each. I let them do the honors. Layers of skin, peeled back, like some exotic rind. The fruit within was for me. Then the children, for they had already suffered much at Greer’s own hands. I can’t bear to watch children suffer more than a few hours. It’s not yet an art for them. They’re too natural.”

  “And Lucy?”

  He grinned. “Ah, Lucy. I could crawl into Greer’s skin, but I enjoyed the game. But poor little Lucy couldn’t tell the difference because she didn’t give a fuck about him or anyone. Our whole trip down the river, only Jim knew that I was within Greer. Old Jim’s a true believer. Sweet Lucy, the most dreadful woman from Manchester – and that’s saying a lot. I’ll dispose of her soon, though, but she won’t be much fun. Her life is her torture—anything else is redundant.”

  Jane wasn’t sure how much of this monologue to believe.

  She said, “And me? What do you intend to do?”

  Unexpectedly, he leaned into her, brushing his lips against hers but not kissing. His breath was like jasmine flowers floating on cool water. He looked into her eyes as if he needed something that only she could give him.

  He said softly, “That will be up to you. You have come to me. I am your servant.”

  He pulled away, stood, and turned his back to her. He went to the wall and lifted a monkey skull candle up. He held the light along the yellow wall.

  “You think from what I’ve done that I’m a monster, Miss Boone. You think I thrive on cruelty, but it’s not that way. Even Greer, in his last moments, thanked me for what I did. Even the children, their life forces wavering while stains along their scalps spread darker juices over their eyes…Why, they whispered praise with their final breaths that I had led them to that place.”

  He held a light up to the papers stuck to the wall. His shadow seemed enormous and twisted as he moved the light in circles. He didn’t look back at her, but moved from petition to petition.

  “These are all blessings and praises and prayers from the locals, the believers in Y-Cha,” he said. “And I, Miss Boone, I am her sworn consort, and her keeper, too. It was Nathan Meritt and no other, the Man Who Skinned A Thousand Faces, who is her most beloved and to whom she has submitted herself, my prisoner. Come, I will take you to the throne of Y-Cha.”

  Jane followed Nathan down winding corridors, their walls covered with dried animal skins.

  * * *

  They arrived to a pool of water, a perfect circle, filled with koi and turtles, at the center of a chamber. The area itself was poorly lit, but there was a fire in a hearth at its far end. She heard the sound of rushing water just beyond the walls.

  “The river,” Nathan said. “We’re beneath it. She needs the moisture, always. She has not been well for hundreds of years.”

  He stepped ahead, toward a small cot.

  Jane followed, walking around thin bones that lay scattered across the stones.

  There, on the bed, head resting on straw, was Lucy.

  Fruit had been stuffed into her mouth, and flowers in the empty sockets of her eyes.

  She was naked, and her skin had been brutally tattooed until the blood had caked around the lines: drawings of monkeys.

  Jane began to scream, and knew that she had, but could not even hear herself.

  When she stopped, she managed, “You bastard, you said you hadn’t hurt her. You said she was still alive.”

  He touched her arm, almost lovingly. “That’s not what I told you. She did this to herself. Even the flowers. She’s not even dead, not yet. She’s no longer Lucy.”

  He squatted beside the cot, and combed his fingers through her hair. “She’s the prison of Y-Cha, at least as long as she breathes. Monkey God is a weak god, in the flesh, and she needs it, she needs skin, because she’s not much different than you or me, Jane, she wants to experience life, feel blood, feel skin and bones and travel and love and kill, all the things animals take for granted, but the gods know, Jane. Oh, my baby,” he pressed his face against the flowers, “the beauty, the sanctity of life, Jane, it’s not in joy or happiness, it’s in suffering in flesh.”

  He kissed the berry-stained lips, slipping his tongue into Lucy’s mouth.

  With his left hand, he reached back and grasped Jane’s hand before she could step away. His grip was tight, and he pulled her toward the cot, to her knees.

  He kissed from Lucy to her, and back, and she tasted the berries and sweet pear.

  She could not resist—it was as if her flesh required her to do this, and she began to know what the others had known, the woman with the scraped face, the children, Greer, even Rex, all who must worship

  Y-Cha.

  Nathan’s penis grew erect and dripping and she touched it with her hand, instinctively.

  The petals on the flower quivered.

&n
bsp; Nathan pressed his lips to Lucy’s left nipple and licked it like he was a pup suckling and playing. He turned to Jane, his face smeared with Lucy’s blood, and kissed her, slipping a soaked tongue, copper taste, into the back of her throat.

  She felt the light pressure of his fingers exploring between her legs, then watched as he brought her juices up to his mouth.

  He spread Lucy’s legs apart, and applied a light pressure to the back of Jane’s head.

  For an instant, she tried to resist.

  But the tattoos of monkeys played there, along the thatch of hair, like some unexplored patch of jungle, and she found herself wanting to lap at the small withered lips that Nathan parted with his fingers.

  Beneath her mouth, the body began to move.

  Slowly at first, then more swiftly, bucking against her lips, against her teeth, the monkey drawings chattered and spun.

  She felt Nathan’s teeth come down on her shoulder as she licked the woman.

  He began shredding her skin, and the pain would’ve been unbearable, except she felt herself opening up below, for him, for the trembling woman beneath her, and the pain slowed as she heard her flesh rip beneath Nathan’s teeth, she was part of it, too, eating the dying woman who shook with orgasm, and the blood like a river.

  A glimpse of her, not Lucy.

  Not Lucy.

  But Monkey God.

  Y-Cha.

  You suffer greatly. You suffer and do not die. Y-Cha may leave her prison.

  She could not tell where Nathan left off and where she began, and seemed beyond the threshold of any pain she had ever imagined in the whole of creation.

  She ripped flesh, devouring, blood coursing across her chin, down her breasts, Nathan inside her now, more than inside her, rocking within her, complete love through the flesh, through the blood, through the wilderness of frenzy, through the small hole between her legs, into the cavern of her body, and Y-Cha, united with her lover through the suffering of a woman whose identity as Jane Boone was quickly dissolving.

  Her consciousness: taste, hurt, feel, spit, bite, love.

  5

  In the morning, the saint slept.

  His attendant, Sunil, came through the entrance to the chamber with a plate of steamed vegetables. He set them down on the table and went to get a broom to sweep up the broken pitcher.

  When he returned, the saint awoke.

  The servant stared at his master’s face as if he were seeing the most horrifying image ever in existence.

  The saint took his hand to calm him, and placed his palm against the fresh wounds and newly formed scars.

  Sunil gasped, because he was trying to fight how good it felt, as all men did when they encountered Y-Cha.

  His mouth opened in a small o of pleasure.

  Already, his body moved. He thrust, gently, at first. He longed to be consort to Y-Cha.

  He would beg for what he feared most, he would cry out for pain beyond his imagining, just to spill his more personal pain, the pain of life in the flesh.

  It was the greatest gift of humans, their flesh, their blood, their memories. Their suffering. It was all they had, in the end, to give, for all else was mere vanity.

  Words scrawled in human suffering on a yellow wall:

  Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood

  I delight in your offering

  Make of your heart a lotus of burning

  Make of your loins a pleasure dome

  I will consecrate the bread of your bones

  And make of you a living temple to Monkey God.

  The servant opened himself to the god and the god enjoyed the flesh as she hadn’t for many days – the flesh and blood and beauty — for it was known among the gods that a man was most beautiful as he lay dying.

  The gift of suffering was offered slowly, with equal parts delight and torment, and as she watched his pain, she could not contain her jealousy for what the man possessed.

  O, Rare and Most Exquisite

  “What is human love?” I have heard my mother ask this when she was sick or when she was weary from the wood-rotted dams of marriage and children.

  It’s a question that haunts my every waking hour.

  I, myself, never experienced love. I once learned about it secondhand.

  When I was seventeen, I worked in a retirement home, in the cafeteria, and on my afternoons off I went up to the third floor.

  * * *

  This was the nursing facility, and I suppose I went there to feel needed; all the elderly patients begged for attention, often someone to just sit with them, hold their hand, watch the sun as it stretched down across the far-off trees heavy with summer green.

  I don’t know why I was so taken with the older people, but I felt more comfortable around them than I often did around my peers.

  One day, an old man was shouting from his bed, “O, rare and most exquisite. O, God, O God, O, rare and most exquisite creation! Why hast thou forsaken me?”

  His voice was strong and echoed down the slick corridor; his neighbors, in adjacent beds, cried out for relief from his moans and groans. Since the orderlies ignored all this, routinely, I went to his room to find out what the trouble was about.

  He was a ruffian.

  Bastards always lived the longest, it was a rule of thumb on the nursing floor.

  This man was a prince among bastards.

  Something about the lizard leather of his skin, and the grease of his hair, and the way his forehead dug into his eyebrows as if he were trying to close his translucent blue eyes by forcing the thick skin down over them. He had no kindness in him; but I sat down on the edge of his bed, patted his hand, which shook, and asked him what the matter was.

  “Love,” he said. “All my life, I pursued nothing but love. And look where it’s gotten me.”

  He was a rasping old crow, the kind my brother used to shoot at in trees.

  “Did you have lunch yet?” I asked. The patients could become irritable if they hadn’t eaten.

  “I will not eat this raw sewage you call food.”

  “You can have roast beef, if you want. And pie.”

  “I will not eat.”

  He closed his eyes. I figured he was about to go to sleep so I began to get up off the bed.

  “Bring me the box under the bed,” he whispered.

  I did as he asked.

  I drew out a cheap strongbox that could be bought in a dime store. When I set it beside him, he reached under the blankets to retrieve a small key.

  “Open it for me.” He passed the key over to me.

  I put the key in the hole, turned it and brought the lid up.

  The box was filled with sand.

  “Reach in,” he said.

  I stuck my hands down deep and felt what seemed to be a stick or perhaps a quill. I took it out.

  It was a dried flower with only a few petals remaining.

  “Do you know about love?” he asked me.

  I grinned. “Sure.”

  “You’re too young,” he said, shaking his head.

  He took the dried flower from my hand and brought it up to his nose. Dust from the petals fell across his upper lip.

  “You think love is about kindness and dedication and caring. But it is not. It is about tearing flesh with hot pincers.”

  I wondered if he was sane; many of the patients were not.

  “This is the most rare flower that has ever existed,” he said. “It is more than sixty years old. It is the most valuable thing I own. I am going to die soon, boy. Smell it. Smell it.”

  He pressed the withered blossom into the palm of my hand, and cupped his shaking fingers under mine. “Smell it.”

  I lifted it up to my nose.

  For just a second, I imagined the scent of a distant sea, and island breezes of blossoming fruit trees and perfumes. Then, nothing but the rubbing alcohol and urine of the nursing floor.

  “I will give this to you,” he said. “to keep, if you promise to take care of it.”

&nbs
p; Without thinking, I said, “It’s dead.”

  He shook his head, a rage flaring behind his eyes, a life in him I wouldn’t have expected. “You don’t know about love,” he grabbed my arm, and his grip was hard as stone, “and you’ll live just like I did, boy, unless you listen good, and life will give you its own whipping so that one day you’ll end up in this bed smelling like this and crying out to the god of death just for escape from this idiot skin so that the pain of memory will stop.”

  To calm him, because now I knew he was crazy, I said, “Okay. Tell me.”

  “Love,” he said, “is the darkest gift. It takes all that you are, and it destroys you.”

  And he told me about the flower of his youth.

  * * *

  His name was Gus, and he was a gardener at a house that overlooked the Hudson River.

  The year was 1925, and his employer was an invalid in his fifties, with a young wife. The wife’s name was Jo, and she was from a poor family, but she had made a good marriage, for the house and grounds occupied a hundred acres. As head gardener, Gus had a staff of six beneath him. Jo would come out in the mornings, bringing coffee to the workers. She was from a family of laborers, so she understood their needs, and she encouraged their familiarity. Her husband barely noticed her, and if he did, he wouldn’t approve of her mixing with the staff.

  One morning she came down to Gus where he stood in the maze of roses, with the dew barely settled upon them, and she kissed him lightly on the cheek. He wasn’t sure how to take this. She was wearing her robe, as she always did when she brought the coffee out to the men, although it revealed nothing of her figure. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, with thick dark hair, worn long and out of fashion, a throwback to the long Victorian tresses of his mother’s generation. She had almond-shaped eyes, and skin like olives soaked in brandy.

  He had never seen a woman this exotic in his hometown of Wappingers Falls.

  She smelled of oil and rosewater, and she did not greet him, ever, without something sweet on her lips, so that her breath was a pleasure to feel against his skin. She drew back from him, and with her heavy accent, said, “Gus, my handsome boy of flowers, what will you find for me today?”