The monster before me started to open its mouth as if to speak. I have no idea what kind of filth it was preparing to spew at me, and I had absolutely no intention of finding out.
With instincts honed from years of hunting, I raised the shotgun and settled it firmly against my shoulder to help absorb the recoil. I stared down the barrel; lining up the perfect kill shot. I sucked in a long breath, and slowly released it. As soon as the last trace of air escaped my lips, I gently squeezed the trigger. The sound of the blast was ear shattering in its explosiveness.
My aim was true, and a red mist filled the space where Joan had just been standing. The force of the buckshot had knocked her off her feet, and she was sitting on the floor with her back leaning against the wall. There was a softball sized hole where her left breast should have been.
I pumped the shotgun; ejecting the spent shell, and loading another into the chamber. I was not about to take any chances. I took one step forward, and sighted in another shot. I hesitated in firing for a brief second when I looked into Joan’s eyes. For a moment, the old lustre was back. It was almost as if she was sending me a message thanking me for setting her free. Tears sprang to my own eyes as I fired that last shot, and Joan’s head exploded like an overripe watermelon.
What happened next, I couldn’t really say. From what I have been told, and what I’ve read in reports, my neighbours had called 911 upon hearing the first blasts from the gun. The police arrived seconds before I fired the first shot at Joan. They busted through the front door, and seeing me standing over the bloody remains of what had once been the love of my life brandishing a shotgun, they sprang into action.
I was arrested, booked, and thrown into prison. I tried telling them why I did what I did, but everyone thought I was simply a psycho who murdered his girlfriend. I had a decent lawyer who tried to get me judged legally insane, but I refused. I’m not crazy, and I would not let them dishonour Joan’s death by labelling her a victim of some deranged lunatic. She was a victim alright; a victim of an unspeakable evil.
The courts didn’t see it that way however. It took the jury less than an hour to find me guilty of murder in the first degree and condemn me to death. Little did those poor fools know that by sentencing me to death and silencing me, they were in fact signing their own death warrants. I am the only one that knows the truth, and by shutting me up they could very well be condemning mankind to the same fate. The evil is still out there.
I’ve been rotting away in this cell for two years trying to tell anyone who’d listen. While my lawyer was playing out the melodrama that is the appeals process hoping to somehow save my life, I have been here trying to get someone…anyone to pay attention to me. I would gladly give my life if I knew it meant the evil could be stopped, but those scrunchies from hell are still out there. Who knows what evil they have wrought while I have been locked away?
Ten minutes, that is all the time I have left. They will be coming to get me after that and strap me to a gurney so they can pump chemicals into my body. I’ve been told I will just drift off to sleep like some dog that’s been at the pound too long.
You know, I am actually looking forward to it now that I have found you to believe me. Who knows, maybe I will get to see Joan again. That would be poetic justice I think.
I can hear their footsteps coming for me. It’s time. Finally, maybe I will feel safe. You can carry on the fight now.
Hey . . . wait a minute. What’s wrong with your eyes? They seem duller, lifeless. What’re you doing? Why are you reaching into your pocket? What is that? Oh my God! No! Guards!
‘See, I told ya he was crazy.’
‘Yeah Tom, I guess you were right.’
‘I’ve had to listen to that psycho’s bullshit for two years. Its nut jobs like him that makes our jobs as prison guards unbearable sometimes.’
‘I can’t believe he kept screaming about those stupid hair scrunchies right up to when they dosed him.’
‘I know, as if blowing your girlfriend’s head off with a shotgun wasn’t crazy enough, he has to try and blame it on hair scrunchies. The guy deserved to die if not for murder then for coming up with the lamest excuse known to man.’
‘Yeah, I thought I’d heard them all, but that one was definitely original. If those scrunchies were so bad, why was he carrying one in his pocket?’
‘You’re kidding?’
‘No man, I swear. I saw it in his pocket, when the Doc removed his shirt to hook up the IV’s.’
‘What a waste of space that asshole was. Hey, what was up with that minister? Man, he kind of gave me the creeps.’
‘I know what ya mean. I think it was his eyes. It was like nobody was home.’
‘Yeah man, they were lifeless.’
‘You know, come to think of it, the minister had one of those scrunchies around his wrist like a bracelet.’
‘What?’
‘I’m serious dude, I saw it.’
‘That’s kind of weird.’
‘Hey, you don’t think…’
Rachel Kendall
WRECKED
Last night's sleeping pill has left its silt in my throat, a metallic dirge like I've been tonguing the zipper on my winter coat. The taste of a cut lip. Or perhaps I really was picking that whistling blade between my teeth and it wasn't just a dream. Whatever. I am awake now. My eyes are open against their will. The clock beats 3:43 . . . 3:44. Shit. I pull myself out of bed, like pulling myself from a pool of water, weighted down by my own humours. Ha, yeah. It's funny, how I'm awake and despite the pill, I must have been asleep all of two minutes. I remember tossing and turning for days of hours and how my legs ache, as they do every morning, as though I have flu or I have run a mile in my sleep. The scent of my sweat and the stickiness on my skin might be the reason for my being awake right now instead of nodding as I should be. I drag my heavy body over to the kitchen. Just two more days of work to get through, then the weekend. No rest for the wicked I expect but at least I'll be able to stay tucked up in bed all weekend if I want. The cold water is soothing as I let it trickle over my fingertips and into the glass. I am holding on tightly to a half-sleep as I let the cold rim linger on my dry lips, when the loud woo-woo of a bird call shatters me from my temporary oblivion and the glass falls to the floor with a smash. An Argus pheasant, I think. So loud. As though it were in my own back yard. I peek through the blinds, nothing there. Just a cat fight I think. Just the reasonably normal sound of one cat toying with another. As I bend to pick up the shards of glass, I wonder what an Argus pheasant is, as the thudding begins again in my ears.
There is a sheet of ice on the pavement slicker and blacker than oil that tries to grip me as I struggle with the car door. The thing is covered in snow that has frozen to hard crystals overnight and my hands are chapped blotchy red from the cold. I can’t get my key in the lock which is frozen solid. I am unable to summon up the energy to go back inside to boil some water. I decide to get the bus instead and begin my slow walk to the bus stop. The houses are muddled, pooling into the street, sliding on the ice and the people around me walk deliberately and painfully, determined not to slip. There is noise and a twilight dark and I wrap my coat closer around me, feeling the scratch of its fibres on my chin. My breath blows coffee perfume and there is a scent of cold compact winter all around me. But underlying it is something else, something rancid, familiar, like bad eggs. It is not overwhelming, but is enough to make me cup my hands around my nose and mouth. It doesn’t get any less. The streetlights are still on. I am being pushed backwards and every step to the main road where the traffic noise speaks of normality is like pushing myself through a wall of water.
I hear the scream before I hear the screech of brakes. It comes from the gut, wrenched out from a stuck place, sucked out against its will and it warms my insides as my skin is still pricked with tiny shards of ice. I turn a corner onto the main road and see a group of people huddled together. Someone is shouting but my head feels groggy and sound has become alien,
an uncomfortable contrast to the thrumming that is constantly with me. The crowd stand close together as if the need for warmth and the shared emotion of tragedy has made them forget about personal space. A woman covers her mouth with a gloved hand, another’s eyes dart wildly this way and that, white, wet eyeballs that roll to and fro like golf balls, bigger than they should be. I watch from a few feet away, seeing nothing but the crowd in its small semi-circle. I watch as a little girl pushes her way out through the wall of bodies to scratch her stubby fingernails into the crumbling wall of the post office, where ghostly faces peer out through windows and speak in rapid silenced machine gun fire.
‘Cara,’ a woman’s voice ruptures the crowd. ‘Get back here.’
It’s not safe away from the soft tissue of strange bodies. Or perhaps it is a spectacle she ought not to miss. These people are revelling in this, whatever this trauma might be. The fear and shock that shows on their faces is testimony to how alive they feel. It’s like sitting in an armchair watching TV, comfortable in the beauty of carnality, comfortable in the shared existence with these strangers, the shared excitement; the elite who caught the whole of the show, who know their lives will be more interesting now, with stories to tell and elaborate on. I am guilty of it myself, wanting to see, but at the same time, not wanting to be ‘one of them’. I am not a part of any group and that won’t change.
I tug at the sleeve of the newspaper boy who has called a halt to his rounds to watch the show.
‘What happened?’ I breathe at him and he is glad to be the one to tell me.
‘A girl got knocked down,’ he says. ‘Just came out of that shop over there and ran out into the road without looking. I think she wanted to catch that bus.’
Now I see the bus at a standstill, people gawking, unable to carry on its route because of the traffic jammed at all angles in the road. I see what happened as I look about me left to right, and then I spot a shoe, on the pavement. A single black court shoe flung from a foot as the woman rolled over the warm bonnet of the car.
The grass is wet. I feel it soaking through my dress. The longer plants scratch at my face and the others are flattened beneath my body as I am dragged along. My arms ache, my wrists burn from the rope and his thick hands. I no longer thrash wildly from side to side or kick my legs out to the two men who walk after me. Not that I am resolved to my fate but it is sheer exhaustion now that leaves me inert and soiled with urine and mud and purple bruises from every small rock my body jars over. My shoe comes loose and falls from my foot, one of the men kicks it out of his way and it is left behind in the forest that smells of fear and sweat. My face is wet with tears, my nostrils bunged up with snot and my mouth throbbing. Maybe it bleeds. The bit they made me wear and they kept on asking me questions even though their forged apparatus gagged me and made my tongue burn and swell.
The forest floor is so densely green. I never noticed before. The dark and the light of leaf and stem.
I am aware of the solid floor beneath me, the cold wet of the ice beginning to soak through my coat and the layers of clothing beneath.
‘You okay love?’ A vaguely troubled voice asks me. There are faces, blurry and looming. I struggle to sit and a pair of hands grabs me by the armpits and helps me. I don’t like the feel of their touch.
‘Bit of a shock that, was it?’
The traffic is moving in a solid line. His voice is concerned, but the other four faces look a little disappointed, or belligerent because they think I fainted at the sight of blood on the floor and white mangled flesh, which I didn’t even see, but which I can smell all the same, even if it is only in my imagination. I would be embarrassed if I had fainted, my suffering a paltry shadow from the spotlight of the broken girl in the street. But she is no longer there. Nobody is there, only these straggling spectators waiting for the next show. And a single black shoe.
I lever myself to my feet and quietly decline the offer of a body to lean on. I hate this, being the centre of attention, the penny attraction. I limp my way home, my body stiff and cold and my head pounding like the warnings of a migraine. Slam the front door hard behind me.
I notice the smell again as soon as I walk into the living room. It grabs me by the throat and I double over, coughing saliva fine like clotting baby hair from my throat. It smells like death, rotting slabs of meat and bones thick with marrow, severed limbs in sun-baked deserts, carrion food, blood-splattered walls…
And then it is gone.
I pour a smooth large shot of whisky and phone work to explain my absence today, tomorrow. I will return soon, I say, when I feel better. On Monday I expect, when this flu has finished its job. I climb into bed, the soft quilt pulled up to my chin and soothing like contentment, and I wait to see if the whisky will have the desired effect.
It is the noise in my head that has kept me from sleeping soundly this past month. The pulsating rhythm, steady as blood-rush that leaves me agitated and stressed, resulting in a raw red kind of eczema around my wrists.
At first I thought it was my own heartbeat. I remember, as a child, being fascinated by the sound. Perhaps it was the way the edge of the pink pillow nestled against my jugular, or cushioned my ears flat to the sound of my own body. Existing, despite a lack of understanding. As I got older it became more of an irritation than a thing of wonder. Nervous as a child matured into stress as an adult and any situation beyond my control – heavy traffic making me late, supermarket queues and squawking babies, doctor’s waiting rooms full of germs – caused my heart to race beyond all measure. But lately this gentle thudding has become an oceanic roar, an elephant’s deep growl. I don’t only hear it at night now but at work, while I watch TV, as I eat my bowl of bran, as I lie in the bath and remember being touched. It got so loud two days ago that I made the mistake of asking Roy at work if he could hear the sound.
‘It’s just the rain,’ he said. I knew he couldn’t hear it.
It no longer sounds internal. Now it is like a honing device, something following me, pouring its poison into my ears.
Still, at least the drink muffles it somewhat…
We have stopped. He lets go of me and my bound hands drop, a pain shooting up the length of each arm from the sudden change in position. I look about but I am not sure where we are. Not near the swamps, maybe near the lake. Just a few feet away I see through red-beaten eyes an amorphophallus titanum in full bloom; smell its sulphurous sex scent through snot-bunged nostrils. Clever, clever. I’ve never seen it in bloom before, never thought I’d smell that disgusting odour. They speak. I am back in Sumatra. It is 1865. My name is Aadab. I know this much. I know too that I am being condemned for something beyond my control and I am hoping for a last reprieve, or at least to have some fight left in me with my last breath. The two men behind me talk rapidly in Dutch. I don’t understand. He doesn’t join in their conversation. His breathing is too laboured and I think how heavy a weight I must be with the extra few pounds sitting inside.
Terror clenches its fist inside my gut and I don’t know what to be most afraid of, the monkeys who watch from the trees, stopped mid way through their play to watch with shining brown eyes, my thirst which strips my throat of moisture and sound, or the wooden box beside me.
The men grab my ankles and wrists and now I begin to scream until I think blood will rise with bile and I will vomit again. There is energy in my fear, unbounded, and I manage to kick out at the men, once in the jaw for which he hits me square in the face. It quietens me for a moment and I sob. They lay me in the box.
‘Whore,’ he says. ‘This is a fine punishment for a woman like you. Possessed. Ill-fitting.’
I would scream rape at him, if I knew the word. I know too few words but have tried to explain so many times today. I can only spit at him but don’t have the strength to project the saliva outwards so it lands smoothly onto my own bloodied chin. I had no choice, I told them time and time again. I was bound, I was forced. But to them, there is no such thing. I gave myself freely and have the extr
a person inside to prove it.
‘You will both rot in here,’ he says, and he nods to the men. They disappear from my view and I struggle as he inserts his fingers between my legs. ‘A coin, to pay your way,’ he says and the metal, warmed by his fingers, sits hard and round inside me. The lid of the box comes into view and the sky turns from blue to black.
My screams are nothing. Only the hammering of the nails into the wood has any sound. I scratch my nails on the underside of the lid, feel splinters ease into the pads of my fingers. I scratch and scratch until I bleed and only when I hear the men walk away do I begin to moan and hammer tap tap tap with my knuckles.
I wake with a jolt, a sob. Not quite a scream. Though I can still hear screaming in my head. Screaming and pain and the hammering in my ears. I run to the bathroom and pour myself over the toilet where I am violently sick and the blood from my torn nails leaves its oily stain on white porcelain.
Is this what it feels like to go mad? Questions have been running round and round in my heavy head since it happened this afternoon and I’m sick of running up and down one-way streets, circling back on myself, a snaky moebius strip eating its own rancid tail.
I am exhausted. I just want to go to sleep. I lean back against the wall and let the dreams take their hold of me.
Andy Echevarria
THE JUDGEMENT
The girl.
He remembered dreaming of her. Or perhaps he'd seen her - in this existence or another. One point was valid, however: she held an importance, either now or before, which he could not dismiss.
`Mr. Leroy?'
`Yes?' He sat motionless in his chair in what seemed to be like a precinct office though what could very well have been Hell.
`Anything you have to say?' The cop looked at his watch, and then sighed. `We've been here for exactly forty-five minutes. I'm tired of dickering around.'
Horror Express Volume Two Page 13