Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories (16 page)

There is a vibration in the room, as our various mantras are uttered from behind clenched lips and bared teeth, my eyes closed as I repeat the same phrase over and over again: come to me, spare the boy; come to me, spare the boy; come to me, spare the boy; come to me, spare the boy.

A bell rings again in the distance, and three robed men move toward the center of the ring, pulling back their hoods, as they look around the room—bald heads and black eyes, nubs pushing out of their foreheads. When they settle on me, I nod, and they walk toward me, leading me to the altar. I lie down as the room hums, the names of various demons filling the air, and I am reminded of gunshots, the screams of the fallen filling abandoned houses, back alleys, metal wrenching against metal as a car careens off the street into a wall, the sound of feet slapping the pavement, my breath increasing, until it fills my ears, the men with their hands on me, oil coating my flesh, as my skin numbs, coins placed on my eyes as I close them, the tip of a blade placed at my sternum and run down to my navel, my flesh parting, blood seeping over my ribcage, and onto the table. I moan, and they are at my ears, whispering, asking, other hands pulling back my flesh, pushing something inside me, and I pass out.

***

When I wake, I’m sitting behind the wheel of an unmarked sedan, the heater running full blast, the engine rumbling as my partner nudges my shoulder, handing me a cup of coffee.. I blink and take it from him, sitting up, as we stare at a set of concrete buildings, Section-8 housing, three men standing out front huffing breath into their hands—a skinny white kid with dreads, a fat black man in sweats, and a skinny Hispanic girl with a skirt so short her ass is hanging out. My partner says we’re waiting for somebody to show up, and he goes on about what we’ll do later once we bust these punks, some dive bar over in Wicker Park he knows about, cans of Schlitz and a decent pool table, offering me a bump of cocaine on a tiny spoon, which I take, my eyes going wide, a rush over my skin, him mumbling, thank God neither of us is married. A car pulls up, radio blasting, fat tires on a little car, the bass bumping, and he says it’s time to go, so we pull out our pistols, clicking off the safeties, and open the doors, the light inside turned off, slinking in the darkness toward the housing, a whistle and a shout, the skinny kid off like lightning, the girl tripping and falling off to the side of the house, the fat man not moving, just grinning as we rush him, the car speeding off, shots into the wheels, it skidding to the side, stopping, two kids popping out, one taking a shot to the back, the other lost in the night, the big guy raising his hands and whispering don’t shoot, but I do anyway.

Somewhere far north of me a boy coughs and spits and then sits up, able to breathe. His mother sits next to him, patting him on the back, and his color comes back, his eyes bright white, a smile slipping over his face, asking for a glass of water. She sees in him something different, and she relaxes for the first time in weeks, months, running her hand over his bald head, holding him to her, the chemo, she says, maybe it’s working, a gnawing at the base of her skull, something she forgot to do, somebody she meant to call back, but she can’t quite place it, so she lets it go, a phantom of a shape drifting down the hallway, gone forever, a hollow pang in her chest quickly replaced by her boy hugging her, asking about a sandwich now, as the wind and cold whips around the house, a candle downstairs snuffing out, a wisp of smoke curling into the air.

***

I stand at the end of the alley, and warm my hands. I’m sick. The heat from the trashcan barely warms my flesh, the rats running up and down behind the garbage cans, nipping at my skin, and they’ll never stop, they’ll never go away now, I’m too far gone, a rotten apple bruised and dented, a cockroach at my neck, and I slap it away, eyes forever glued to the end of the brick walls, down toward the light where I can no longer go, no longer any good to anyone, including myself; especially myself. My eyes have become pools of black liquid, running down my sallow cheeks, and I shake my head, trying to focus, but it’s no good, I’m blurring now, ready to let go. It will be over soon.

I forgot their names, all of the people, all of the friends, the world around me but especially the boy, his hair was brown, I know that much, his eyes the same, and she was, she was . . . no, I can’t remember, she was there, she used to kiss me when I came home, she would hold my face in her hands and try to take my pain. And there were times I let her.

The end of the alleyway fills with bright light, a car passing by, the snow swirling around, and when the shadows drift over the opening, it finally steps into the space I’ve been watching for weeks, waiting my whole life for, elongated skull and a crown of horns, antlers above its head, lumbering toward me, sinew and muscle, hooved feet clacking on the concrete, great gusts of exhale out of its snout, a flicker of flame, eyes glowing red and there is no pleading now, nothing left to ask for, nothing to forgive.

It shifts its shape as it walks, goat head one moment, minotaur the next, a deep vibration rumbling the walls, the earth, as it laughs a guttural moaning, and before I can say anything, ask anything, it is there, my neck in its hands, as a great wingspan unfolds behind it, black as oil, a fluttering as other creatures emerge from under its leathery feathers, a pain in my chest as the cancer spreads, filling my chest with a scurry of beetles, my fingernails turning black, my mouth opening as maggots and worms spill out of my gaping last gasp and I embrace what I have been—the clanking of iron chains, gates slamming shut with a rush of foul wind and a blast of heat. As my eyes close, I see the sculptures, the piles of sticks, the pyramids, the twine and rope, the vines and metal, running up and down the alleyway, these structures I’d been making my whole life, these quiet moments of meditation, sending out into the world a stream of evil that finally added up to something. My pain and pleasure, my suffering and vengeance, a rippling in a dark pond that would infect so many for so long, the waters settling, calming down to a sheet of black ice, the last moments of my rotten life filled with the sound of my son coughing, sitting up, my wife holding him, crying, my name never to be uttered aloud again, by them, or anyone else.

COMING TO GRIEF

Clive Barker

Miriam had not taken the shortcut along the rim of the quarry for almost eighteen years. Eighteen years of another life, quite unlike the life she’d lived in this all-but-forgotten city. She’d left Liverpool to taste the world: to grow; to prosper; to learn to live; and, by God, hadn’t she done just that? From the naive and frightened nineteen-year-old she had been when she had last set foot on the quarry path, she had blossomed into a wholly sophisticated woman of the world. Her husband idolized her; her daughter grew more like her with every year; she was universally adored.

Yet now, as she stepped onto the ill-bred gravel path that skirted the chasm of the quarry, she felt as though a wound had opened in her heel and that hard-won poise and self-reliance were draining out of her and running away into the dark; as though she’d never left her native city, never grown wiser with experience. She felt no more prepared to face this hundred-yard stretch of walled walkway than she had been at nineteen. The same doubts, the same imagined horrors that had always haunted her on this spot, clung now to the inside of her brainpan and whispered about the certainty of secrets. They still lay in wait here, idiot fears concocted of street-corner gossip and childish superstition. Even now the old myths came running back to embrace her. Tales of hook-handed men, and secret lovers slaughtered in the act of love; a dozen rumored atrocities that, to her burgeoning and overheated imagination, had always had their source, their epicenter, here: on the Bogey-Walk.

That’s what they’d called it; and that was what it would always be to her: the Bogey-Walk. Instead of losing its potency with the passage of the years, it had grown gross. It had prospered as she had prospered; it had found its vocation as she had done. Of course, she had grown into contentment, and perhaps that weakened her. But it, oh,
it
had merely fed on its own frustration and become encrusted with desire to take her for itself. Maybe, as time had passed, it had fed a little to keep its strength up: but it needed, in its immutable heart, only the certainty of its final victory to stay alive. Of this she was suddenly and incontestably certain: that the battles she had fought with her own weakness were not over. They had scarcely begun.

She attempted to advance a few yards along the Walk but faltered and stopped, the so-familiar panic turning her feet to lead weights. The night was not soundless. A jet droned over, a longing roar in the darkness; a mother called her child in from the street. But here, on the Walk itself, signs of life were a world away and could not comfort her. Cursing her own vulnerability, she turned back the way she’d come and traipsed home through the warm drizzle by a more roundabout route.

Grief, she half reasoned, had battened upon her and sapped her will to fight. In two days’ time perhaps, when her mother’s funeral was over and the sudden loss was more manageable, then she would see the future plainly and that pathway would fall into its proper perspective. She’d recognize the Bogey-Walk as the excrement-ridden, weed-lined gravel path that it was. Meanwhile she’d get wetter than she needed taking the safe road home.

The quarry was not in itself such a terrifying spot; nor, to any but there was the path along its rim. There’d been no murders there that she knew of, no rapes or muggings committed along that sordid little track. It was a public footpath, no less and no more: a poorly kept, poorly illuminated walkway around the edge of what had once been a productive quarry and was now the communal rubbish-tip. The wall that kept the walkers from falling a hundred feet to their deaths below was built of plain red brick. It was eight feet high, so that nobody could even see the depth on the other side, and was lined with pieces of broken milk bottles set in concrete, to dissuade anyone from scrambling up onto it. The path itself had once been tarmac, but subsidence had opened cracks in it, and the Council, instead of resurfacing, had seen fit simply to dust it with loose gravel. It was seldom, if ever, weeded. Stinging nettles grew to child-height in the meager dirt at the bottom of the wall, as did a sickly scented flower whose name she did not know but which, at the height of summer, was a Mecca to wasps. And that—wall, gravel, and weeds—was the sum of the place.

In dreams, however, she’d scaled that wall—her palms magically immune to the pricking glass—and in those vertiginous adventures she’d peer down and down the black, sheer cliff of the quarry into its dark heart. It was impenetrable, the gloom at the bottom, but she knew that there was a lake of green and brackish water somewhere below. It could be seen, that choked pool of filth, from the other side of the quarry; from the safe side. That’s how she knew it was there, in her dreams. And she knew, too, walking on the unpiercing glass, tempting gravity and providence alike, that the prodigy of malice that lived on the cliff face would have seen her and would be climbing, even now, hand over clawed hand, up the steep side toward her. But in those dreams she always woke up before the nameless beast caught hold of her dancing feet, and the exhilaration of her escape would heal the fear, at least until the next time she dreamed.

The opposite end of the quarry, far from the sheer wall and the pool, had always been safe. Abandoned diggings and blastings had left a litter of boulders of Piranesian magnitude, in whose crevices she had often played as a child. There was no danger here: just a playground of tunnels. It seemed miles and miles (at least to her child’s eye) across the wasteland to the rainwater lake and the tiny line of red brick wall that beetled along the top of the cliff. Though there had been days, she remembered, even in the safety of the sun, when she would catch sight of something the color of the rock itself stretching its back on the warm face of the quarry, clinging to the cliff in a tireless and predatory pose not a dozen yards beneath the wall. Then, as her child’s eyes narrowed to try to make sense of its anatomy, it would sense her gaze and freeze itself into a perfect copy of the stone.

Stone. Cold stone. Thinking about absence, about the disguise required by a thing that wished not to be seen, she turned into her mother’s road. As she selected the house key, it occurred to her, absurdly, that perhaps Veronica was not dead: simply perfectly camouflaged in the house somewhere, pressed against the wall or at the mantelpiece; unseen but seeing. Perhaps then visible ghosts were simply inept chameleons: the rest had the trick of concealment down pat. It was a foolish, fruitless train of thought, and she chided herself for entertaining it. Tomorrow, or the day after, such thoughts would again seem as alien as the lost world in which she was presently stranded. So thinking, she stepped indoors.

The house did not distress her; it simply reawakened a sense of tedium her busy, clever life had put aside. The task of dividing, discarding, and packing the remnants of her mother’s life was slow and repetitive. The rest—the loss, the remorse, the bitterness—were so many thoughts for another day. There was sufficient to do as it was, without mourning. Certainly the empty rooms held memories; but they were all pleasant enough to be happily recalled, yet not so exquisite as to be wished into being again. Her feelings, moving around the deserted house, could only be defined by what she no longer saw or felt: not her mother’s face; not the chiding voice, the preventing hand; just an unknowable nothing that was the space where life used to be.