Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 4
Page 12
Jesse moved his hand higher, almost touching my eye with his index finger. “Clever girl,” he said. We were both silent, staring at each other. Then, he roughly grabbed my wrists and pulled them in front of me, wrapped the rope around them tightly until I could feel the blood pool in my hands, and tied the ends. “Show me,” he instructed.
I walked down the hall to the second doorway; the door was open. “The switch is on the left,” I said, and Jesse turned it on. I walked over to the futon mattress and turned to face him, then lifted my arms above my head in resignation. “You’ll have to unbutton me,” I said.
Jesse looked at me for a moment, then ripped the front of my dress shirt open, exposing my bra. I fell backwards onto the mattress and scooted away so that my head was almost hanging off of the other side. I stretched my arms as far back as I could so that my fingers brushed the edge of the old radiator that was sandwiched under the window. “You can tie me to this,” I said.
I watched and held my breath as a smile spread across Jesse’s face. He began to walk around to the other side of the futon, and in that instant, I turned my body onto its side and bent my arms so that I could reach under the bed frame. As Jesse leaned down with his rope to grab my arms, I pulled out the souvenir Pi Beta Phi paddle I had stored beneath my bed, garnered as much strength as I could with my arms bound and from a prone position, and I hit Jesse across the face. The sound of the wood on flesh made a satisfying crack. He pulled back in surprise, and I sat up, managed to swing one knee beneath myself, and tried to wobble to my feet, but Jesse grabbed me by the shoulders and held me in place.
I swung the paddle again, this time aiming the edge against his neck. I slammed the wood directly onto his Adam’s apple and heard a sickening crunch. Jesse let go of me and began clutching at his neck and jaw, his eyes bulging from his face. I pushed myself to my feet and pulled the paddle back far into the air, then brought it down on his head as hard as I could, feeling the skull give way. When I brought the paddle back again, red blood gushed from the wound on his scalp, and where I had made contact, there was an actual dent. I had made a dent in his head—the idea seemed bizarre and unreal—but I had no time to process it, as Jesse lunged for me in pure rage.
I don’t remember exactly what happened for the five or ten or thirty minutes that followed immediately after, but I know what I did. I’ve seen the photographs. The police showed them to me again and again when I was questioned. The psychiatrist that evaluated me showed them to me as well, although I question her motivations in doing so. Perhaps she wanted to see if I’d show any remorse? Any signs of trauma? Lady, you’re wasting your time, I wanted to tell her. You forget what I do for a living. There’s nothing I haven’t seen. In the pictures, there is nothing left of Jesse’s face but some matted, bloody pulp. I think there may have been part of a jaw, some teeth I think, sticking out from where his neck used to be, but no nose, and certainly no eyes. Apparently, I had hit him so hard and so many times in the upper cervical region, that I almost cut his head—or what was left of his head anyway—clean off.
Nothing shocks me anymore.
Of course, when the police discovered Lisa’s body in the trunk of Jesse’s car, they had no choice but to rule my actions as self-defence. When his driver’s license photo hit the news, women were coming out of the woodwork in droves to report incidences of torture and abuse.
I was a lucky lady, the cops said, and I was. Jesse’s name? It comes from the Hebrew word Yishay.
It means “gift.”
Lord of the Mesa
ScÁth Beorh
From Hollow Boy
Independently Published
The world is a predator, yet some places prove friendlier than others. Ireland, for instance, with all of its blood and sorrows, brings a comfort in its woesome gales that I have found the American West never to afford. The lords of the two lands do not know one another, both rising from the places they serve, and remaining constant in those arenas. The kings of Ireland (a green place of wet terror) are made cordial through humble service to the land and its people. The mesa spirits of northern New Mexico rage fierce, and dry, and require an affronting ferocity to appease them—if such strength is available. I was in no way prepared for that which would unfold as these rulers took fresh lie of their land, discovered me, and set forth to challenge my presence.
I had temporarily relocated from my home in Hollywood to Mora, New Mexico, in an effort to escape a vampiric relationship where I had become the selfish aggressor—and to study the shamanism of the Greasy Eye Cavities of the Skull clan of Hopi; the extinct Wikurswungwa. I arrived on a nameless ranch the day after Halloween. The snows had already come—intermittently, but heavy, and wet when they fell.
Mora is not particularly known better than any other place for Hopi shamanism. It is, however, one of the more silent places of the continent, where bloodshed cries out in its meek way still, but the whir and stir of humanity is altogether absent. This is the land of the mesas verde—the great, green tables once mountains in times not remembered. An unparalleled climate for sustained academic research, and potential healing of the heart and mind.
“Here today, gone to Mora,” I said to no one as I popped the lock on the heavy front door of my log house and entered the dark main room that smelled of cinnamon and pine. I laughed at myself, then said the phrase again as I rolled the ‘r,’ and adopted it as my motto. I soon had the hearth roaring and inviting, and a cast iron pot of curried lentils bubbling away on the wood-burning stove.
* * *
After a restful third night’s sleep, I arose at dawn, dressed in warm clothing, and hiked the five miles to the abandoned monastery where the bravest of the Spanish monks had crucified themselves in the attempt to make the Hopi and other local natives understand their message. During this épouvante, hundreds of Indians were baptized into the Faith. Because of this, it was thought that the monks were being effective in the sharing of their religion…until it was discovered, some years later, that the long-awaited Hopi savior, Bahana, comparable to the Aztec Ehecatl, was a crucified sun-god who had required no human sacrifice—and that the Indians believed the monks to be emissaries of their beloved lord. Nevertheless, the Catholic authorities continued with their missionary work, heathen salvation not their actual goal, but power through land and populace ownership. The natives made good, humble slaves in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
* * *
It began with the chimney swifts. I noticed them flocking in unusual numbers to the ranch. At the same time, blustery currents of air, warmer than the November temperatures, commenced. I knew, though, that these New Mexican chinooks were animated with something more than air currents.
After the winds began in earnest, at night I would recline on my longsettle near the fireplace, done with my studies for the day, and listen to them howling down from the nearest mesa like feral creatures on the hunt. Too often I allowed myself to fall beneath their enchantment, and became so unnerved that warm milk infused with valerian extract was all that would calm me.
I began finding the glassy-eyed bodies of the swifts, untouched by hawks and unmolested by beetles and other scavengers, their wings fully outstretched. There were dead swifts by the river. I also found them scattered around the barn garret, behind my house near the generator, inside the outhouse, and, yes, in the chimney (when suddenly the flue wasn’t working properly). Each bird died in the shape of a cross, with a worm in its mouth—the international icon of the sun god…the eagle with the serpent in its beak.
One crisp morning, just after a new snow, I fueled up on ‘cowboy coffee’ and rock-hopped across the greenish-clear river to get a better look at an ancient juniper clawing the sky like a severed hand.
There is something about the way the pinon-juniper landscape smells after it has been moistened. It comes to life—all the fresh conifers and red earth activated by water. Zesty might best describe it, like sea spray or sitting by a waterfall—a secret of the high desert only u
nlocked by a cold rain, or wet snow.
When I stepped from the river into the fresh snowfall, with no warning my legs turned to rubber, and breathing became difficult, as if the wind had been knocked out of me. The brisk, sunny day became overcast as if gargantuan fingers covered it, and the mesa spirits, who had previously come with their most forcible antics after dusk, began to roar down from the heights with such velocity that I was forced to lean into them to stay upright.
As I fought for balance with my newborn legs, fallow earth surrounding the old juniper began to rupture and push upward, shifting and swirling, forming a maelstrom of stinging sand, snow, and natural debris. From the loosened, flying dirt emerged carrion talons, and human digits, and undersea feelers, and waving antennae.
Then, breaking the surface of the land, around and around the juniper as if swimming, or drowning, moved creatures dead, and dying, and things of bone—howling like starving felines as they swam. The lacerated heads of those still wearing flesh oozed, open and raw—and as they moved in a quickly increasing diameter, they reached for my feet with their appendages.
One gruesome humanoid, smelling of rotten meat and trailing a matted, black mane behind him, leered at me with yellow lemur eyes as he passed. I was struck by his evil gaze, crumbled, and went down. I was then yanked into the hideous multitude by a corvusian deathling trailing my vascanian assailant.
Fire and ice tore into my right kidney, and then my left, soon filling my flanks with molten agony. Feeling as if I were being torn asunder by the monsters that were now punctured children, now quivering hags in their death throes, I writhed and screamed and kicked, but my aggression only caused more of them to sidle toward me, grab me, and pull me into the cold, disturbed earth. My mouth filled with sand and gore. I choked, and purged. The lemur-eyed thing mounted me then, gyrating as we bathed in the whirling charnel. The undulating ground then opened, and I plummeted with those ministers of horror into a dank, pitch blackness.
* * *
I awoke dazed. As I held my throbbing head, I saw that I lay alone in a room of indiscernible size, as the place was illuminated by one candle set in an earthenware dish three paces away. Panicking, I checked myself over to see how badly I had been clawed, and bitten. My fingers pushed into a thick death-smelling seepage that I knew was not my own, and I gagged. Relieved that my unwanted companions had deserted me, I pulled to my feet, stumbled, took up the candle, and began a slow exploration.
I had not crept far into the gloam of the building when I knew that I was, indeed, underground. Twisted tree roots pushing down from above decorated the walls like heathen serpentine icons. Water dripping from them formed intricate webbing designs as it trailed away to the floor. Was I in a kiva of some sort? Though not as cleanly designed as those I had witnessed before, soon enough I saw that the place was something akin to the kiva—the underground ceremonial room of the Hopi—for to my right I discovered a wooden table whereupon three kachina dolls had been displayed: a Wiharu, a Soyoko, and a Nata-aska. Oddly enough, this display disturbed me as deeply as had my convulsions beneath the juniper, for these are the evil spirits of the Hopi.
“Taaqa.”
I jumped backward at the voice, inadvertently blowing out my candle. My spine iced over. I could see nothing—not even my fingers which I brought up only centimeters from my eyes.
“Taaqa.”
The voice was addressing me in Hopi, as man.
“Taaqa!”
“I…I don’t speak…I…”
“Taaqa.”
“I don’t speak Hopi…I maybe should, but I…”
“Well, you speak something, you filthy dog!”
I clamored sideways, searching for where the root-covered wall to my left had been. It was not where I remembered. I fell, cracking my wrist on the solid clay floor. The pain was excruciating. I knew I had fractured my ulna.
“Taaqa. Welcome to Flesh-House.”
I froze, not knowing how to answer the voice. I patted the immediate area for my candle, but it was gone. I then felt something warm, and wet, and reached around me to see what I had fallen into. I didn’t know until I lifted my fingers to my face. The metallic scent of new menstrual blood.
I rolled away, only to thump against something solid, yet soft. Knowing intuitively what I had hit, I screamed, and as I did so, as if my voice were some kind of light switch, a yellow glow interrupted the darkness, and I saw my verbal assailant: a baboon.
I screeched like a child on a playground. Survival instinct alive and electric, I threw myself behind the body.
No. Could it be? At first I saw it to be Miriam, the woman I had been with in Hollywood, her large violet eyes unmistakable. She was bloodless and dying, and beckoning to me with her full lips, yet no sound came from them. Then I saw her to be a beautiful Indian girl who had been tortured by having her hands cut off. Or had they been gnawed away? I could not tell. I vomited my breakfast over her shoulder and long raven hair, wiped it away from her face, told her I was sorry, and collapsed, hanging over her waist, spent and laughing. I laughed so hard. I laughed, and then I wept, and then I laughed again. A voice from inside me said I was losing my mind, but I didn’t care. The scene was horribly hilarious; deliciously demented.
Then my thoughts turned downward. Should I strip the girl and gloat upon her obvious loveliness? Should I penetrate her (with my abrupt, throbbing erection) and so give my soul fully to all that is debased in the world? Should I then eat her after our thanatophilia? Bite off her nipples? Chew at her pudendum filled with my salty gift? I didn’t know. I climbed upon her and pushed on her solar plexus. She expectorated blood, which I kissed away from her before I roared horrified, a madman now. A lunatic. I lay there thrilled, and revolted, and terrified. I felt my core temperature cooling, my body shaking. I was freezing to death. I was dying. In Hell.
“Leave the girl, taaqa,” the baboon yelled as he blinked sightless grey eyes. “Leave her or do your desires, you foul thing. This is Flesh-House. Your will is your command.”
My will is my command? What did he mean?
“Frig the girl, flay the girl, or flee the girl,” the beast said with a grunt as he ambled over, took one of her stumps in his hands and pushed it between his lips and sucked. “This is Flesh-House. Your will is your command. Get up. Stop being so indulgent, or you’ll die where you lay, taaqa.”
Of a sudden I was sane again, or so I thought. I knew that I was warm again. I stood, the blind baboon turned, and we walked together toward the source of the egg-yellow light.
* * *
I awoke in my bed crying out for Miriam, wet with sweat though the night outside had grown frigid.
“My god, what a nightmare,” I remember moaning, and all day long I was disturbed by the infernal visions remaining fresh in my memory. As before, valerian root tea was the only thing I found to sufficiently calm me for sleep again that night.
* * *
“You’ve returned, my fiend,” greeted the benighted monster. “This is good. Let us continue our walk, will we?”
I screamed, thrashed about in my bed, and clawed at my eyes, trying to gouge them out.
“You silly little taaqa. Believing blindness to be a deterrent to the visions. Keep your eyesight. You are already damned. This is Flesh-House. Follow me.”
I followed the beast, who moved as if sighted, and as we walked, he somehow became the dead girl. I was ashamed, and held back. She sought to gather me to her, to help me along, but her bleeding stumps could only grab me like kitchen tongs. I pulled away from her, mewing like a kitten, which only further shamed me. She held me tighter, yanking me toward her. She then kissed the corner of my mouth, her pretty upturned nose brushing mine, her big black eyes wet and shining.
“You are mortified by your base thoughts toward me?”
“Yes, Miriam,” I replied, but I knew she wasn’t Miriam.
“Have power over your mind. You are its lord and king. Ready yourself now. We enter the Hall of Pleasures.”
“You have an iniquitous soul,” she observed as we pushed through the tight corridor. “You would sleep with your own mother, and beg her to call you daddy.”
I said nothing in reply, but I flushed with shame and went rigid with horror and anger. I shut my eyes against the fresh knowledge of my deviant lechery. When I opened them again, we were in a room reminding me of a hospital ward, but the beds were stone slabs carved with deep blood-catches and serpentine drains, like those found at Peruvian Wari sacrificial sites.
“What is this place?” I heard myself ask. The Indian girl pushed a bleeding limb to my lips and held it there until I wretched. As I wiped my mouth on my shirtsleeve, before us, on the dozen tables, there appeared apparitions of sacrifice victims. I turned to the girl, questioning this scene. I wish I had not, for behind her loomed a coven of translucent, hollow-eyed things.
“What…” was all I could say. She turned.
“Oh. Those are the Old Seers. They are the most potent humans on Earth. Or at least they were. Their abode is Flesh-House, and from here they move outward, to usurp energy from those unaware. Their time of gleaning is dusk. Only the impeccable warrior can defeat them.”
Forgetting—or not caring—that my guide was hideous without her hands, I pulled close to her. Hot tears streamed down my face.
“They will not harm you while I am here, sick little man. Look.” She pointed a ragged wrist to the row of slabs.
I turned away from the Old Seers, and as I watched, the vague shapes of the sacrifice victims took on bone, and then flesh, and soon lay whole and shuddering in the cold of the evil room.
Then from the plant roots crawling down the walls slithered black vipers that, as they came to the floor, morphed into endowed nude priests wielding curved knives of obsidian. Nodding to me as if I were somehow part of their ceremony; each of them then climbed upon the slab and penetrated his prey with his engorged equine-like phallus. I stood aghast, unable to turn away from the debauchery as the orgy reached a heightened frenzy. The moment each pair climaxed together, the priest plunged his knife into the abdomen of his partner, twisted it, and laid his mouth upon that of his lover—I assume in order to catch all of the escaping life essence.