Masters of Horror (22 page)

Leo was already in the car waiting for them. “What the fuck, guys?” Jason started as they let go of him.

Mark opened the back door and pushed him into the car. “Shut up, Bro…Leo, get us the hell outta here!” Leo hit the accelerator and peeled out of the dirt lot leaving a cloud of dust with Phil and his friends behind them. Jason didn’t know they had been out to catch him.

“
Is anyone gonna tell me what the fuck is going on?” Jason blurted.

Mark started to tell him the evening’s events. “I saw that guy Phil in the bathroom and heard him and a bunch of guys talking about taking some punk out back for a boot party and then curb-jawing him. The first thing I thought of was
your
drunk ass. Anyway, when I get upstairs there you are swapping spit with some lil’ girl and fingerin’ her right at the bar. I grabbed Nate and we got you out of there just as these guys were walking up to kick your ass.”

“
It was like the Marines doing a rescue on a downed pilot, man!” Nate couldn’t hide his excitement about the whole scene. Jason started laughing. They slowly joined him and in a few seconds, the whole car was laughing and celebrating Jason’s adventure.

Through the laughter and congratulations, something caught Jason’s attention out of the corner of an eye.

What he saw wasn’t possible.

Someone he
could not have seen
was walking along the street. He must’ve been feeling the effects of the Percocet cocktail he had been drinking all night.

He could
not
have seen that long red hair or that confident strut.

He lost himself in the song that his friends were all singing badly at the top of their lungs. Atreyu’s “The Curse” was the soundtrack of their drunk nights and not one could end without the album being played—and sung full blast—until whoever was driving was about to pass out. Tonight would be an extra long night. Mark brought along some amphetamines.

They turned onto Route 21. The light drizzle, which threatened hours ago, finally came through on its promise of rain. The skies broke open on them as they took their first turn on the squiggle that was a ten mile stretch of highway. It didn’t matter; pretty girls were bleeding mascara…and song and laughter filled the car.

Leo took the turns like a pro. They knew this road so well they could drive it home under the influence of any substance known to man, and probably had done so. They roared towards the last set of S curves that would bring them past the cemetery and into the streets of Newark.

The cemetery bordered Route 21, Jason stared absently as the trees, and grave markers zipped past him. He jumped as the face pressed itself against his window. The green eyes and red hair he knew, but that mouth was not as he remembered. The mouth he had seen was gaping, twisted, as if someone had forced their fist down her throat and ripped her soul out from inside with a violent hand. He looked at his friends, still lost in song, and shook off the vision.

They hit the city and made the turn down to the river that would take them home. As Leo swerved around the corner onto the bridge, Jason saw the girl in the middle of the street. She stood frozen in their drunken path. Leo did not see her. He was lost in the song on his lips or the drugs in his mind. Jason reacted instinctively; he jumped forward from the back seat, grabbed the wheel from Leo and jerked it to the left, away from the poor deer in headlights that stood in their way. “Jesus, Leo,
LOOK OUT!”

“
JASON! What the fuck are you do—” Leo’s final words never got finished.

The scream of metal meeting metal drowned out Nate’s cry as his door met the rails of the bridge and crumpled crushing him. Bits of glass twinkled in Mark’s empty eyes as the car made its first flip onto the bridge’s narrow walkway. Leo’s head struck the ceiling with a sickening crack.

Jason was flung back into his seat by the initial impact and now just sat and watched his friends die, as he was sure he himself would when their car hit the water. But the feeling in his lungs lasted much longer than he thought possible. As the icy water flooded the car in torrents—and turned even darker as his friends’ blood seeped into it—his brain desperately chanted
Hold your breath, don’t inhale, hold your breath, don’t inhale…
It took three minutes and thirty-six seconds until the air in his lungs burned away, and he finally inhaled the blood-water. It felt like acid was filling his body as everything went black.

Jason felt as if the world had flushed him like so much shit. Water dripped from him, and stank of death. He looked around trying to clear his eyes of the muck that ran down his cheeks. He didn't recognize the road he was on, it looked like something out of an 18th Century painting of hell. He suddenly felt someone in the dimness around him.

The tall, black figure that loomed in the darkness before him stepped into sight. He was beautiful—not frightening, as Jason had imagined all his life. His smooth, light features were almost androgynous. As the pale blue eyes looked him over, he could feel himself becoming aroused…but aroused by a
man
? Jason’s desire shrank in disgust.

His eyes met Jason’s and he felt all the awesome power hidden beneath them. He could feel his soul being touched, molested…raped. Jason saw and felt every deed he had ever committed to bring him here, but not as he saw it in life. He saw all his actions through the pain and tears of those that he had hurt.

“
You have done a fine job, my dear Jason, a fine job. I could not have asked you to be a better servant. Even if I had struck a bargain with you that night and told you what you would be doing for me, I do not think that you would have served me better than you have.”

Jason couldn’t speak—but he didn’t have to. The entity in front of him had no use for his words.

The tall man caressed Jason’s cheek with one strong, velvety soft hand, drawing blood with the long fingernails that tipped each of his digits. He brought them to his mouth and obscenely licked away the blood. He gently took Jason’s face in one powerful hand, removed the fingers from his mouth and slipped them inside Jason’s own to feel the rough, wet texture of his tongue. The taste of herbs, smoke, and altar wine filled his mouth. His soul pleaded for this to stop, but his body gave into the beauty before him, as disgusted as his mind was by this action.

“
Did you not
feel
it, all this time?” The figure asked. “You took your life that night you said you would not wait forever. That is what you said, and you did not. You simply swallowed all of your favorite pills and you stopped waiting.”

Jason saw events replay in his mind…differently, now. He saw himself standing in front of the mirror again, his face covered in tears, but this time he smiled at himself as the pills spilled into his hands and gulped lethal mouthfuls of them as he washed the snot from his face. He saw shadows closing in over his limp body on the bathroom floor. They played their hands across his body as he lay there. Suddenly they dispersed. He could hear laughter—deep, seductive laughter. Then he woke up from the floor.

“
You just could not
remember
to lie down and
die
, as you cannot remember some of the nights that you’ve lived since then. Typical; so euphoric that you did not even know you were dead. You were the perfect agent for me. You wanted to be a villain and in your drunken death, I made you to be just that. You corrupted the innocent, you helped others on their way to sin and the tastiest moment of all, you led your best friends to their deaths. You were a better collector than even
Jessica
.” He laughed a cold laugh and the gleam in his eye brightened.

“
Jessica?” Jason could not believe what he was hearing or seeing.
This is not happening. It CAN’T be happening.

The tall man laughed. “Now, now, do not pretend that you never wondered how someone could make you commit what to you was the ultimate sin, and still make you feel so good, so right about it?”

“
No!” Jason was finally able to speak; the accusation of having caused his friends’ deaths stirred something in him. “
YOU
killed us, not me; you put that girl in front of the car…”

“
What
girl, Jason? There
was
no girl. I do not believe in ghosts…and the souls that come here do not get to seek vengeance. That is part of their torment. There was nothing there but your chemically fueled imagination, Jason.” That deep laughter filled the chamber again and seemed to come not from the man but from the air itself. “Ghosts!
HAHAHAhahahaha…
”

Jason’s frail grip on his composure broke. “NO!” he clawed at his tears; fell to the ground and punched slabs of rock. “God! 
Why,
God?” he screamed as his knuckles broke. Blood and tears flew from him like sweat as he clawed at his own wet cheeks.

“
God isn’t here
. He stopped looking after you a long time ago. He gave you to ME! And now, I’m giving you to
her…
”

Jason felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked up into blue eyes—eyes he had seen love him so many times before. Jessica wiped his face as she stood him up.

She was as lovely as he’d remembered, for the most part…her flesh was noticeably paler, though, and her perfect breasts lactated blood in dark streams down her naked body. She was more muscular now, her thighs and calves bulging as they tapered down to
cloven hooves
. Huge, membranous wings grew from her shoulders and wrapped around him as she lifted his face to hers. “I’m sorry, we have to go now.” She led him down into the darkness and heat. The screams of torment filled his ears and shook his soul with dread.

Below him, up to their throats in a sea of boiling, flaming blood…or perhaps magma…was a legion of scorching, screaming sinners, stretching to Hell’s smoking horizons.

Directly
below him, he saw Leo, looking up at him in confusion, then realization, then with the raw hatred of betrayal. Brain tissue trickled out from the crack in his skull. His roar of
YOU MOTHERFUCKER, YOU PUT US HERE, GET DOWN IN HERE WITH US…
was understandably lost in the ‘roar of the crowd’, but Jason could still hear it clearly in his mind…

Mark, glaring up with empty eye sockets filled with broken glass, weeping dark tears of blood, as he would forever…but Jason still knew he could
see
him, blame him,
damn
him…

Nate, reaching up out of the magma with both arms—giving Jason the finger with his whole arm, and ostensibly trying to do the same thing with the other, that had been smashed into a pulped, flopping tentacle from the accident…

Psychic agony tore through the remnants of Jason’s mind. He
had
put them here, he’d
grabbed the goddamned wheel
and spun his best friends right into the lake of fire…and none of them deserved
Hell,
they drank and fucked and cursed like everyone else he’d ever known; they weren’t evil, but here they were. He wanted to say
I’m sorry, guys, I fucked up, I know…
but nothing came out of his throat. Then he remembered saying
Real villains don’t feel they’ve done anything wrong…

Jessica smiled at the sight of his fear. “Don’t worry about them, Jason, you’re one of
us
now. You’ve turned. You’ll be
bringing them here
. Get used to the screaming.”  She then led him through a dark passage and returned him to his life. “Remember when you said you wouldn’t wait forever? Well…this
is
forever.”

He glanced over his shoulder at the misery he’d barely escaped; the misery he would spend eternity bringing upon others…

…
And in the shadows of the tunnel, he caught a glimpse of red hair.

Back to TOC

Sex, as we all know, is the mechanism that puts us all on the planet, it’s proof positive that God wants us to feel something pleasant while we’re here. Having said that…it CAN be a ‘slippery slope’ leading some individuals to a Pandora’s Box of perversions that can destroy any hope for a healthy relationship.

There were two shocking, cult-classic horror tales in a genre all their own: one is “Love Doll” by Joe R. Lansdale, another is “Somebody to Love” by Robert Bloch.

And now, courtesy of Mr. Joseph Pinto, there are three…

Plastic

By Joseph Pinto