Kinder sires, realizing there might be some residual feelings of humanity left, will perform the first kill for their new offspring. But I was neither kind nor generous. I wanted the preacher man to suffer. To chose his mortal self over his immortal soul. To select one of the children of God he had been trying so desperately to save and suck their life away. But he wouldn’t, he behaved as though the world no longer existed, and I had to intervene.
‘Repentance. Salvation.’ I almost laughed at the wretch he had become broken, dirty, discarded, and kneeling in his own vomit. ‘What price would you pay for it now?’
‘Any.’ His remained firm, but I glimpsed doubt.
‘Does He still answer your call?’ Tasking at his bowed head I feigned sympathy. ‘You who were so devoted stand abandoned. Dying in the gutter.’ I beheld the stifled rage, neatly contained in his eyes and it aroused me. ‘Laid low by some-thing so unworthy.’
‘Leave me alone.’
‘Are you sure that’s what you want?’ I ran my hand through his dirty hair and made him a genuine offer. ‘I can show you a different way. One better than you’ve ever known.’ I loved the smell of his faith, so I allowed my lips to touch his cheek. ‘You served a God. Now, you can be a God.’
‘Get thee behind me Satan.’
‘Kiiii!’ I spat like a cornered tiger. In that moment, I was not afraid of the preacher I was terrified.
‘My life belonged to Him, and my soul still does.’ His head fell back with his mouth wide open as though he meant to swallow the night sky and catch the stars on his tongue. ‘Thank you for reminding me of that.’
‘Fool.’ It was all I could think to say though there was no bite to the word. I abandoned the preacher-man to his fate, whatever he chose to make of it.
I am a demon Lofton made me into that. And I am evil my mother swore to that. I was a Godless creature that only dully feared a deity I had never known. But when the preacher-man, the only true being of faith that I have ever known, hurled his scripture at me, I heard His voice and saw His face. There I was in all my wicked glory, teeth bared, amber eyes reduced to glowing slits and five words pierced my heart as deep as any stake ever will. And now I know that I am truly lost forever.
My mother deemed me evil from the first breath I took, and probably even before that. She named me Lilith in the hopes of warning the world of my wickedness. And it is a frightening cross for me to bear.
Phillip Madden
THE PENDANT
William Medlock had seen nothing in his life worth dying for. He would still be poor and obscure whoever won the war. His only intention was to survive in one piece.
He curled himself into a tight ball as the enemy shell burst in front of him. The ground trembled; shaking him to the core as his ears almost succumbed to the force of the detonation. A wall of earth shot into the air, showering him in dirt. His ears rang from the blast of the explosion; a high pitch whine .He thought he might go deaf. Forever locked into a world of silence. His face crushed into the dirt he could taste the alkaline of the earth. Every muscle was squeezed tight as he waited to be blown apart, sent flying thirty feet into the air in a fountain of blood and torn flesh. He waited for death with a mouthful of earth and a heart thumping away in his chest, like a terrified rabbit.
Suddenly something hard jabbed his shoulder twice and he screamed. Through the buzz in his ears he could make out somebody cursing him, somebody near him. He peered up over his arm and saw a red moustachioed lieutenant scowling down at him.
‘Get up!!’ yelled the officer ‘Stand up and fight!’
All around him he could see his fellow soldiers running towards the enemy as shells rained down on them. Fear was etched on their white, dirt streaked faces. The soldier sprang to his feet.
‘The enemy is that way you whoreson bastard!’ Screamed the lieutenant, pushing the soldier, causing him to trip and fall.
‘That way you . . . ggggghhhhh. .’ The sentence gargled away as a hole appeared in the officer’s throat, a slick crimson stream splashed over the soldier’s face. He made a disgusted grunt as he squirmed out of the blood’s descending path. He could feel it, hot and sticky in his eyes and in his mouth too. A bitter, salt taste which he tried to spit out. He wiped his eyes and blinked up to see the officer crumple to the ground, his bulging eyes filled with a desperate pleading .He stretched out one to Medlock who recoiled further, the other clutched the wound in his throat. Dark blood streamed thick and fast through his fingers, drenching his uniform. The soldier stared rapt with fascination as the officer choked and gargled himself into oblivion. While all around him men ran to their dooms in a shell blasted field.
Explosions and screams filled the air of that grim winter afternoon .Some shrill and harrowing, others deep and dark, full of rage .The soldier paid no heed. He gazed at the dead man who stared at him from a pool of his own blood .It was then that he noticed what was in the dead man’s fist. Wrapped around the fingers was some kind of chain. Staying low on his belly he slid over to the corpse .he tried to avoid the face that was wearing a fixed grin, it hadn’t seemed like that before. The fingers were beginning to stiffen and he had to pull on them with some force. He heard them snap as they finally gave in to the pressure and he took his prize. He held it up in front of his face and saw it was a medallion on a thick silver chain. He examined the pendant which seemed to be made of silver .But it was the medallion itself which capture his attention.
It was a burning pyre; bodies piled one on top of the other, hands reaching up through the flames.
Medlock looked at it once more before hastily pocketing it. He looked at the dead man who even in death was still staring at him before making his way back to his place. He gazed at the officer and thought about the pendant .He could still taste blood in his mouth.
He stayed like that until the light began to fail and a chill grew in the air. It was then that he realised that the battle was over, but he could not say when it had ended. He blinked a few times and the looked around him, as though waking from strange and lucid dream. He began to crawl back to his own lines, where he startled a couple of sentries who saw a pair of intense blue eyes in a mask of blood creeping towards them in the falling gloom.
He woke up shivering and alone, surrounded by cold darkness.
Medlock reached for his soiled overcoat and hurriedly put it on.
Suddenly his body was racked by a series of dry coughs. His chest tightened in a spasm of pain as he fought to control himself. The coughing subsided and he wiped his mouth. A chilled finger of fear stabbed his heart as he thought that he might die without the world never having known his name. That he might never be able to paint the world according to his vision of what the future should be .He needed to stand up and decided to go outside and breathe some fresh air. He remembered the pendant in his pocket and took it out. He looked at it once more; the image of burning death seemed to fit his mood now. He appreciated its form. An impulse took him, and being a creature of impulse he could not refuse, he put the chain around his neck.
Melancholy hung in the air.
He looked at the sky and saw it was dotted with stars, bright and hard. Each world with its own light, its own possibilities .One lost amongst so many others, each fighting to be recognised as unique.
‘You like stars as much as you like day dreams’ said a voice behind him.
He spun round, surprised at the voice and looked into a pair of eyes that seemed to capture his soul in a grip. Eyes that were depth less, that carried anyone who looked into them through the floor of history. Looking into those fathomless eyes was like falling down a deep dark well, soundlessly falling forever.
‘Who are you?’ demanded Medlock.
He was no convalescing solider for sure .He wore a long black robe that covered his head in a hood .It gave him the appearance of a monk. He could make out smooth features under the hood but he struggled to give an age to that face .Maybe it was the poor light but the face seemed to dance
in and out of looking young and then old. As though the river of history flowed across that face. But it was the eyes that really commanded his attention. They seemed to flicker and dance in the light, like flames in a slowly burning fire. Suffering played there .Something moved in those eyes, he peered into them and saw something lean closer. He pulled back, horrified when he saw his own grinning visage looking back at him from the fire of those eyes
The figure only chuckled harsh and deep which caused unease to ripple through the soldiers innards.
Fear held him, he was frozen to the spot, captured like a rabbit in a car's headlights, mesmerised by those eyes that sucked everything in, that saw everything.
‘Look, look at the stars.’ whispered the hooded figure.
Medlock looked up and gasped. He saw grim faced merchants of death and brutality each wearing a black uniform, marching across the sky. He saw them swaggering under the over a map of Europe. He watched them swarm into Russia like a murdering host of death locusts, a scene of bloodied snow and raped peasant girls, bellies growing big sowed with the invaders seed. Entire villages burned to the ground, children are lined up to be shot in front of their screaming parents. He saw the sky ripped open and a shower of dark crimson blood rain on the earth. Staining the soil a deep, dark red. For a thousand years anything that grows there will taste of salt and blood .The dragon consumed the world and it lives in the hot belly of the beast.
Producing a new race of dark, narrow eyed sulphur eaters. Each with fire swimming in his eyes
Then the vision changed before him he saw a city where bombs were raining from the sky, houses burning and people sleeping in underground railway stations, mothers trying to comfort crying children while the old folk tell stories.
He saw camps filled with starved bodies, piled high one on top of the other, he saw blue eyed youths marching on the skulls of the destroyed, making way for the Master race raised on sulphur and smoke.
As for him he felt the agony of a thousand flames licking his soul into oblivion, but not with haste, slowly and delicately, paying attention to his agony and responding delicately, stretching it forever and ever..
And it left him there transfixed, wrestling with the power of his imagination and the consequences it held for posterity...
He gasped in freezing air and looked about him. He was standing outside the barrack room in the cold December night before him was the hooded character, looking at him oddly.
'What have you done to me?' he croaked, his fierce blue eyes, wide with shock and outrage.
'I have shown you the future.’
‘The future? But. .the war will never end?
‘This war will.’ Answered the figure but then he opened his hands and shrugged
The soldier swallowed hard and liked his lips.
‘Who are you? And where did you come from?
The figure grinned, displaying teeth as thin and sharp as icicles and pointed at the pendant around the soldier’s neck.
Without warning a bolt of agony shot through his chest. He screamed in pain and looked down to see the pendant glowing white hot. Smoke was rising from where it touched his uniform and he could smell his skin charring. He grabbed the chain and screamed once more as he felt the flesh of his palms melt and fuse with the white heat of the metal .He fell to his knees
‘Make it stop’ he sobbed at the figure ‘Please’
As soon as it had started it had finished .Relief flooded over him as he felt the waves of agony disappear. He looked at his hands and was baffled to see they were intact ,he touched the pendant and saw that it was now back to its original red gold colour, and was cool to the touch. Lost and bewildered he could only stare at the figure in front of me.
‘I am part The Unnameable, The Djinn, The Sulphur Eaters’ he hissed in a low voice. ‘And you are now ours. William Medlock’
The soldier raised his head in shock
‘How did you know my name?’
The figure carried on smiling, maliciously.
What do you want from me?’ sobbed Medlock
‘The Guardian gave you the pendant when he died.’
He remembered the dying officer on the battlefield .His outstretched arm offering him the pendant.
‘Now you are The Guardian .Our link with this plain.’
Medlock’s head whirled in a maelstrom of confusion.
‘I don’t understand. . . ’ he trailed off.
‘We ,The Djinn, need a scout in this plane ,or we can lose ourselves .Your job ,as The Pendant holder is to keep the doorway open and our path ,too and from it ,clear’
I have gone mad .thought the soldier.
The Djinn glared at him.
‘I will show you how real I am ‘
He can read my mind! thought a shocked Medlock
The solider looked as the figure transformed before his eyes into a sleek military figure wearing a black uniform. On his gap was a sliver badge in the shape of a skull and crossbones .On his lapels were two lightning strikes which both looked like the letter S .In his gloved hands he held a pair of pliers which he tapped playfully in his palm. He smiled at the solider coldly.
He marched towards him.
The solider tried to stand up but a strong hand grabbed a fistful of his hair.
He yelled in pain as his head was jerked back. He heard the creek of the leather gloves.
The demon looked down at him.
He could see fire swimming in those eyes.
Without a word he stuck the pliers into the soldier’s mouth, his cry of protest muffled by the cold metal in his mouth.
The pliers closed around a molar.
The soldier tried to say ‘No’ but could only make an inarticulate moan.
With one hard pull the tooth came free of the gum sending blood spouting up through the hole and filling his mouth .The demon laughed and showed the tooth to the soldier .The long root pointing at him as if some point was being embellished .His mouth was full of blood and he spat out long, crimson drools onto his chin and uniform.
‘I would clean myself up if I were you.’ Chuckled the dark uniformed figure.
'We will meet again in the cold and the dark. And you will be aware of your duty by then. More of us will visit you and you will learn your responsibility quickly.'
‘But I don’t want it!!’ he screamed.
‘The Djinn shrugged ‘Then give it someone else ‘and then he smiled, a cold deathly smile ‘But you will have to die’
It left the soldier on his knees, spitting out blood and fighting not to cry.
He had been defenceless against the presence of whatever had confronted him.
Shocked with the ease of how the Thing had dominated him. Chilled him with fear to his very core.
He had no option but to surrender.
Then he remembered the vision he had been shown.
The Guardian The Keeper of the Pendant. He tried the words out in his mind.
He had been a failure, never being able to rise above the poverty and manual labour he had been born into. Success and riches had eluded him.
Then the Kings and Kaisers had started this damned war, men running from one shell blasted side of the field to another. Only to end up a pile of bloody, fleshy rags. If he survived there would be nothing for him to go back to, only more drudgery.
But now.
Now he had the chance to be something. A Guardian of the gate.
He held the pendant in his hand and stared at the pattern of cooking humanity for some time.
He stayed on his knees for some time, oblivious to the cold which was penetrating his body. When he did finally look up he was smiling. An odd twisted smile on his bloody lips that gave his eyes an intense, steel look. A smile that would make little children seeks their mother’s arms.
A storm rumbled on the horizon, making its dark presence felt.
Glenn James
ATTERCOP
‘Do Spiders go to heaven?’ my little niece said to me suddenly, across the
top of a half Cornett, in the blistering August sunshine.
‘Well, I suppose so. I haven’t really thought about it....’
‘What about the ones who get really badly squished?’ she persisted, with a remorseless child’s interrogation.
‘Oh yes! Definitely; even the ones that get splatted with telephone directories.’
She frowned, ‘And do they have ghosts?’
This refinement on her question really chilled me, and I stuttered slightly, ‘What?’
‘I said, do spiders have ghosts?’ she insisted.
For some reason this really made me feel like there was someone walking over my grave. ‘I really don’t know, Lottie...’
And she frowned now, with wisdom one hundred and fifty years older than her five-year-olds face, ‘I bet they do. And I bet they must be really cross....’
Looking at it this way, I had technically committed murder that morning, by crushing a large White-Cross spider, which had somehow spun a web right across the alleyway at the side of the house, and I did not like the idea of it having a soul at all....
It hung there in that sinister way of theirs, in all defiance of the natural laws, hovering in space on those vile silken threads, and I damn nearly walked right into it at eye level. I had a REALLY close up view of it far too suddenly, just suddenly right in front of my face, its tiny malignant eyes shining like bright little ice crystals, and it frightened me very badly. It seemed the size of the face-hugger in those old ‘Alien’ films, all stretching arms and bloated body.
I have been scared of those damn things ever since early childhood, and I lashed out wildly. It flew to the ground about ten feet away, and before it could move I finished it off with my heel. There wasn’t much left, I should judge, to be bought forth from the tomb when the final trumpet sounds, and thinking about it my little nieces question disturbed me badly. Can such a thing have a soul, I wondered? Or feelings?
It had never crossed my mind before, and how many have I killed by now.
‘If you want to live and thrive, let the spider run alive’. Isn’t that the old saying? Not in my book. Flatten the little swine’s with a shoe before they get too close, that’s what I always said. Or better still; torch them with some hairspray and a lighter. I know it’s only their exoskeleton bursting as they fry, but there’s something about the escaping air which sounds unnervingly like a scream as they burn . . . and on a few occasions I feel sure I have heard them screech an accusation in their own lisping tongue as they die. Rubbish I know, but Lottie’s little question made me wonder. Yes, it’s stupid, utterly stupid, but I have always wondered if the evil damn little vampires can speak . . .
Horror Express Volume Two Page 17