Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 4

by Cheryl Mullenax

  A half dozen owls began calling in rounds from tree to tree, startling Lowell, as the sprightly band of trespassers advanced, heedless of stones and grass burrs. Many had exposed feet, breasts or buttocks. Lowell had no time to dwell on how or when they had entered the park undetected. He was busy wondering where in hell they were bound. Their present course would take them straight into the marsh.

  Only then did Lowell notice what they carried with them. The armored types bore an assortment of swords, maces and war hammers. Some might have been wooden or plastic but most appeared genuine, catching the scant light the way only metallic weapons could. Others carried small personal watercraft. Lowell saw three kayaks, toted overhead or pulled by ropes. One couple had a proper canoe. He also spotted a wakeboard, a couple of pool loungers and a two-seater inflatable shark. The owls continued hooting, agitated by the approaching strangers. Probably Lowell imagined it, but their calls seemed to interlace with the tunes of the bizarro minstrels.

  He had no intention of announcing himself, but he knew several excellent reasons for a group of costumed and probably stoned individuals to avoid playing in the marsh. Gross environmental disturbance was not even in the top five. He watched in bewildered silence as one by one they waded into the reedy muck, moving toward the middle so others could follow. Lowell was surprised at the wetness of the morass, which he had expected to be thick as cake frosting. The waders and swimmers and sailors did not glide quickly, even those without much on, but there was plenty of water for them to navigate.

  The sounds of nocturnal wildlife, remarkably absent before, came alive like a stereo switched on. Frogs and insects thrummed. Owls, more and more of them, kept a melody going. Lowell could hear different species joining his barred pals. A Great Horned carried the bass part while screech owls did their screeching thing. The dark shapes of them circled above, a discordant choir of night fliers. Lowell took some for bats, their shrill tones almost beyond his hearing. Far off, a pack of hungry-sounding coyotes yowled the blues. Everything made its own queer shriek of music. Somewhere underneath it all was a deeper pulse, a raw rhythm forming from the chaos of noise.

  Lowell suspended his exasperation over the hijacked weekend. His chin sagged loose near his Adam’s apple. He alternated between the night scope and the binoculars, unmindful of whether moths might be flying in and out of his gaping mouth. Wildlife watching had been one goal of his getaway, and more wildlife was out than he could have imagined. He had expected some of what came next, but when the revelers began disrobing they did not merely rub in saucy fashion against each other. All necessary foreplay had been fulfilled by their procession, and by their anticipation of stirring the fetid marsh. Spontaneous copulation broke out in several places at once. Black-green silt made spatters and tiger stripes on bare waxy skin. Not all of them were actively boning, but everyone had some kind of moan or song or chant going. Two tall knights, wading hip deep, began a duel of very real blades despite their waterlogged chain mail. The wood nymph capsized the canoe with surprising power, leaving its owners to founder or fornicate while she and the bagpiper climbed aboard to dance an impromptu jig. The flabby dandy, mounting his woman against a piling of the central observation deck, twirled a mace while getting his yuks in the French fashion. Lowell, despite his halted academic career, was not unschooled in the ironies of history. The phrase Norman conquest dangled in his mind. The lord was drowning his lady as much as pleasuring her, but the promise of gastric giardia from swallowed marsh water seemed to be just the trick for getting her off.

  New dark shapes crept from the woods, making for the water. The second wave, not human this time, had a range of size and gait including possums, raccoons, feral pigs, a pair of skunks and even a few curious coyotes. To Lowell’s amazement they began diving into the marsh with the same purposeful speed as the orgy-makers. Bullfrogs leapt in behind their mammal counterparts. Lowell felt his stomach turn at the telltale ripple of a big water moccasin that paced a furiously paddling cottontail rabbit. There were other forms, lumpy and indistinct, which he took for animals but could not identify. He nearly caught one turning its features his way, but the battery on his night vision went dead. He had no time to rummage for a spare, as the rapid approach of hooves compelled him to hit the dirt. A healthy ten-point buck vaulted directly over him from behind, coming down close enough for Lowell to grab its tail before it bounded straight for the gathering. Lowell did not have to be his old man to see that in season and off the grounds of a state park, it would have been a primo shooter. A coyote sent up a shivering howl, glad at the arrival of fine meat.

  Even before the animals began mixing in the fray, the medieval gangbang took a turn. The mud-streaked fat man thunked his mace into the neck of a hairy cherub. His curvaceous partner, yelling Anglo-Saxon profanities at the peak of her passion, clawed the mask and part of the face off a passing harlequin. The burlier of the knights delivered buckling punches to his opponent’s faceplate, while he with the crumpled helmet made wild chops at his attacker’s shoulders with a dagger. The fate of their swords was a mystery, until Lowell spied a floating canine varmint impaled on two long blades. Coyote of the Lake. The winged archangel, fully aroused from the look of his clinging trousers, whirled a dwarven hammer into the spine of the amorous fat man. The blow finished the lover, and seemed to finish his good woman in an altogether different sense.

  By that time, most of the animals had reached the center of the marsh. They had not come for the rut, only for the violence. The largest raccoon scrabbled up on the wakeboard and tore at the belly of the court jester stretched on it. Crying out in pain but also in something like surprised glee, the fool seized the animal by the throat and they rolled into the water together to wrestle. The knight with the dagger slashed an approaching possum while two squirrels insinuated themselves under his broken breastplate and began to gnaw at what they found within. The wood nymph sank her brilliant white teeth into the bagpiper’s throat while he struggled to finish blowing a spirited reel. Bristly black hogs threw themselves across the gunwales of a kayak. The nude woman on board managed to stun one with her paddle, but two others upset the bow with their snouts and spilled her into the sludge. The chap with the ukulele batted a bullfrog halfway back to shore before a family of cottonmouths dug into him. He twirled like a Highland dancer. The snakes looked like black ribbons tied to his wrists and flanks.

  Lowell was vaguely aware of a larger distortion in the landscape. Trees and brush were swaying as if a storm had blown in, though the western breeze had long since died. The stench of whipped-up marsh hung with nowhere to dissipate. A bright stink of blood was creeping into it, mingling. Somewhere between the two odors it was evident that one or both skunks had released their fury. Rocks appeared to roll and jump small distances without any cause. Lowell came to sudden attention, catching himself halfway out across the open grass. Only by stubbing his toe on a moving stone had he snapped into clarity. He had no memory of breaking cover, yet he had abandoned his shirt and his pants were half-down in preparation for the plunge. In his right hand he gripped his good skinning knife, the one tipped with a mean gut hook for extra fun. He felt another blade, no telling which one, clutched between his teeth. Despite his consternation at the massacre playing out before him, some wild and insidious thrill had called him to dance.

  Blacking out might have been enough in itself to frighten him off, but that was also the moment the alligators chose to surface. They had hunkered on the far bank, watching for the proper pitch of activity before slipping up under the fracas to join in. The wood nymph shouted something unintelligible but full of meaning as powerful jaws nabbed her thigh down to the very human bone, dragging her under with a scream of bubbles. She surfaced again, the death roll having torn the leg free, and she paddled for her life with true fear on her painted face. A second gator got her by the torso and she vanished underwater for good.

  The arrival of hungry alligators was plenty to account for the carnage, but the water roiled so viol
ently that there might have been a shoal of piranha thrown in for good measure. The screams were no longer jubilant. Fright and agony turned them rusty. The owls cackled at the shift from rapture to meat-grinding horror. Lowell pounded black earth in the opposite direction, his personal effects forgotten except the binoculars bouncing painfully on a strap against his naked chest. He could not resist looking back once more before reaching the fence, not caring if some prankster god turned him to a pillar of pigshit.

  Even with the finest budget optics made in China, the distance limited Lowell’s view. His imagination shaded in various details of the horrific silhouette. He thought he saw the buck with the priapic angel astride it, wresting its horns from side to side in hopes of snapping its muscled neck. An alligator had the deer by one foreleg, tugging the limb loose at the ragged shoulder joint. Another gator had the angel’s opposite leg, ready to whip it off as the sodden gorilla pummeled its scaly body. A swirl of white splotchy rain pattered from the clear sky, the droppings of frenzied owls befouling one and all. Something dragged the bellowing ape out of sight under the mud.

  These were the last things Lowell saw with any certainty. As the marsh banks began to quiver and undulate into wakefulness, he took the binoculars off and threw them. When the contours of the landscape lost definition, buckling toward the center where the alligators were still sorting limbs from bodies, he turned his back. When the marsh or what lay under the marsh flexed its gullet to swallow, Lowell never knew what became of the creatures that had come to play and offer praise. He did not watch as the swirling maelstrom drew down every ounce of what had been spurted, voided, ejaculated and torn free in the confused ecstasy. He did not glimpse what gathered at the banks in slouching legions to worship what followed. He retreated, observed by owls that called down the line to one another like sentries. They had known him for an interloper straight off. In its renewal, nature cared nothing for witnesses. It wanted only votaries, participants, fuel. By taking flight before the end of the beginning, even as an unwelcome voyeur, Lowell missed learning that all things natural and unnatural demanded their nourishment properly spiced.

  He had to beat some greenery in search of the spot where he had left his truck, out of sight even from the park service road. The general area was right, but in his panic it seemed that natural landmarks had shifted on him. He paid as little mind as possible to the bushes and thorny vines bowing forward to trip him up. Pain stung him in bleeding furrows along his ribcage, a farewell bite from scrambling over the barbed wire he had crossed, hours ago, with the utmost care. He would take the tetanus shot with a glad heart. He meant to request whatever they had for rabies too, in case an airborne strain had caused his delusions.

  He discovered the front bumper of the truck, enlaced in clinging vegetation, at the same moment that a lone owl perched on a high branch above. It was all crapped out, evidently, having come only to chuckle at him once more. Lowell would have thrown his truck keys at it, had they been handy. He realized he did not have them. They were lost along the way somewhere, or else he had locked them inside the cab. Either way he meant to break the driver’s window and roll those wheels any way he could. The first heavy rock he found would get him started.

  So things might have ended, with a perfectly good vehicle damaged for nothing, a cowardly morsel of flesh escaped and wasted. Instead, at the word of a watchful owl the thing crouched beside Lowell’s truck, the thing that was not a tree, stood up to make itself known.

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  Author’s Story Note

  This is not my first story, but it is the first I've had published, and it's less fictional than I'd like to admit. I modeled the setting from memory on specific places I haven't seen for many years but enjoyed very much as a youngster. I am not Lowell Paxton, though he and his life's regrets resemble a youthful version of myself as people tended to perceive me. I hope he resembles some of you, not because we need more people like him, but because the alternative could always be worse. I feel it's important for everyone, even those of us wavering between healthy self-reliance and outright misanthropy, to get some fresh air when we can.

  -Lyman Graves, 2019

  BLOODLETTNG AND INTRIGUE ON ALL HALLOWS’ EVE

  Jeremy Thompson

  From Sweet Chuckling Morbidity

  Sad Mannequin Press

  Unto a two-story residence whose meticulous cultivation made October stretch unending—whose horror-themed confines had hosted countless baroque deaths, for the pleasure of a madman and the astral pumpkin he called deity—the day most revered had arrived. The thirty-first of October! Halloween, sure and truly!

  Let the costume parades commence! thought the Hallowfiend, supine in a brown recliner that he’d built to moan and shift, as if victims were trapped therein. Let candy gluttons eat their fills, thinking upset tummies empty threats! Let werewolves howl and vampire bats fly!

  Ah, but it remained early in the day. Outside, a blazing bulb owned the horizon, an unwanted, yet lingering sun. Best to pace myself on excitement, thought the Hallowfiend. True euphoria awaits me, come nightfall.

  Carefully had the killer made his preparations.

  * * *

  Though, over the course of each year, the Hallowfiend would often see orange in prelude to masked abductions and slash-and-sprints, in comparison to the mayhem that he perpetrated every thirty-first of October, those efforts seemed rote, blasé, hollow urge fulfillments, sugar rush slices in the shadow of a feast.

  Indeed, when the holiday overwhelmed him, when the jack-o'-lantern shone through him, time acquired new textures and each and every blood-regurgitating gore shriek echoed itself into immortality. The Hallowfiend would don his favorite costume, fondle past years’ trophies, stab sticks through tongues that he then dipped in caramel, and go out and away—into the foggy, smoggy, ghoul parade night—to seek artistry in the pleading, howling, disembowelment mush depths of sustained torment.

  With a well-sharpened knife, with pliers and a hacksaw, with a scythe and a bear trap and drug-laced death dreams bound in tasty treats he’d rewrapped carefully, the Hallowfiend sought to spiritually-topple those who’d attracted his hollow-eyed stare.

  Only then would he kill each sufferer. Pain-pliancy made eternities of weeping instances, as ingenuity rippled through his fingertips, through his bony knees and elbows, through the Hallowfiend’s very teeth. His inner adolescent—that undead, perpetual adoptee he’d permitted to fester for decades, shrouded in hope and resentment—danced to slaughterous rhythms, and fed, fed, fed.

  Already, his muscles ached with the accumulations of preparations accomplished. In those efforts—due to time constraints, mind you—of course, he’d been aided. From midnight to morn’s dawning, his six helpers and he, all dressed identically, had paid visits to the owners of the names on the Hallowfiend’s list. Acquaintances of his intended, gifts for her to unwrap later, those unfortunate ones had struggled, writhing in comfy beds, chloroform rags on their faces. Finding no pity in orange skull countenances, they’d gone nighty night.

  Wrapped in blood-streaked carpets, the abductees had endured transport, spiraling, crumbling, bumpily bumbling routes of unconsciousness. When next they came to, diminished capacities had claimed them, with crude lobotomies having sliced away segments of their brains. Chained to metal crosses in the Hallowfiend’s cornfield, they found themselves dressed in scarecrow costumery, to give his special lady a fright come nightfall.

  And when the night blossomed, unfurling its chilled tendrils to a soundtrack of snarling incubi and wailing specters, the madman would head out, into the shifting shadowscape, to claim her. Parking a couple of suburban streets distant from his special lady’s cozy bungalow, he would hop fence after fence to reach her back entrance, to invite her to his abode, the House of Eternal October—with a rag on her face, no refusals accepted. And oh, how’d they play, until the coming of All Saints’ Day. His special helpers, not invited, would have to find their own fun.

  Already, scant minu
tes before sunrise, as a token of his infatuation, the Hallowfiend had left a present on the woman’s porch: the corpse of her friendly, corpulent mailman, decapitated and exsanguinated, wearing a jack-o’-lantern atop his neck stump. Lolling in a wicker rocking chair, the corpse had seemed a holiday decoration, until closer scrutiny.

  The very moment that the woman fled inside to call the cops, to make her doubt her own senses, the Hallowfiend had removed that body. Later, if everything went as planned, post-abduction, the fabulous femme would awaken pressed against it, in the claustrophobic confines of an ebon coffin, in the House of Eternal October.

  * * *

  With hours of interim time stretching afore him, the Hallowfiend desired an activity, nonstrenuous, to occupy his attention. Too keyed up to read, too twitchy to knit, he turned his focus wallward, seeking answers in the empty eye sockets of the myriad latex masks he’d arrayed there as decoration. The lagoon beast, the cartoonish dream babe, and the ventriloquist’s dummy offered no inspiration. Neither did the begrimed mummy, the anthropomorphized canine, or the square-jawed superhero.

  Only when the Hallowfiend’s gaze reached the goofily grinning visage of a sugary cereal’s monster mascot did he arrive at the obvious solution: The television, of course! Surely one channel or another will be airing something seasonally appropriate.

  Seizing a remote control from underneath his seat, the Hallowfiend brought his television sliding down from a hidden ceiling alcove, no less than sixty inches of ultra-high-definition materializing like magic.

  When victims were present, the killer, of course, kept the set out of sight, so as not to contaminate the spooky-bleak atmosphere he’d so carefully cultivated with unfiltered pop culture. When alone, however, he was only human.