Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 2 Read online

  Patty was a schoolteacher by profession; she tried coaxing Marilyn back to the house as if calling in one of her students from recess. Stopping, Marilyn turned and gazed up into the buoyant entrails of Spanish moss that hung from the cracked limbs overhead. Her scars scissored open, wide. “Baby,” she cooed. “Baaaaby.”

  When Patty saw the thing in the tree, she screamed.

  Dan raced outside, but by the time he stumbled to the back of the yard Patty had fainted and Marilyn was gone, a single scarlet handprint left on the fence in her wake. He quickly determined the source of his wife’s terror and ran back into the house.

  When the police arrived ten minutes later, they cut through the jump rope cord and brought the girl’s body down from the tree.

  The Editor remembers a time when he was a boy watching the Friday Nite Movie while his mother was busy washing sheets at the hospital. It was the first time that he saw Boris Karloff, his favorite actor, here gazing longingly at the polished skull he held aloft in the moldering crypt of the crackling television set. “I love dead,” the Creature intoned. “Hate living.”

  It was the first philosophical thought the Editor had ever heard and felt that he understood, and he, in turn, felt that he was understood. There was a strange beauty to the death depicted in those hoary old films, in the stillness, in the enshrining. The monsters would become his nightly companions from then on—Dracula holding slaves under his lustrous stare, the Wolf Man trawling misty seas for fresh throats—and he would revel in the exploits of these brilliant machines of destruction.

  He was fourteen when he found the books in his mother’s closet. They lay akimbo on the top shelf, tucked away like familial skeletons. The musty cream pages between the black hardbound covers were transcribed with a new unholy lexicon, names full of mystery and dread import: the Zodiac, the Angels of Death, the Candy Man, the Night Stalker. These were new monsters, ghouls and vampires in Halloween costumes of hardbitten flesh stalking the bustling veins and lonely arteries of America’s urban and country heartland alike. If Karloff had given the Editor his first taste of philosophy, the books were to become his religious texts, their passages inspiring equal parts awe and horror. He would pore over them at his altar of mothball-incense, learning of the men and women who lived as the bestial gods of old, gruesome to behold, free to take life as they saw fit.

  Though the pictures of their grinning masks terrified him, the Editor found that he could never look away, not even from behind the drawn blinds of his fingers. He’d toss the books back onto the shelf before his mother came home, disgusted by what he’d read, disgusted by himself, but every night he would bring them down again and read the same passages till his eyes grew heavy with experience. They were brilliant machines of destruction, these new gods, and they were everywhere.

  One time his mother came home early from a night out she’d insisted she deserved. A giantess in crimson, funk of nickel beer hot on her breath, she’d dragged him out of the closet, her knee a stone in his gut as she bent him over and rocked him with wild, flailing slaps on his ass. He was blind to the pain, too overwhelmed with surprise and shame to fight back. Afterward he’d just lain on the cold floor and wept, a flagellated priest spilled across the church steps, the glowering mask of the Sex Beast singing him to his rest.

  The girl had been killed like her father: axe cleave to the skull, mouth torn open with the razor. She’d been strung up to a branch at the top of the tree. Neither of the Kesslers had seen her at first due to the mass of Spanish moss covering the body. When Patty had looked up, all she saw was the whites of the girl’s eyes and her new red grin. In later interviews she confessed that face would come to her every night before she went to sleep.

  Marilyn couldn’t be found. Considering the faint traces that were left of her former life, it seemed plausible to think that she had never existed in the first place. She had merely been a whispered rumor, a fantasy. A ghost.

  The Osceola County Police felt differently about the matter. The sheriff was convinced that Marilyn was in hiding—with whom he couldn’t say, as she had no immediate family or close friends—and suggested that she would be seeking out cosmetic surgery to mend her telltale scars. A statewide search was instigated. News anchors grimly intoned the crimes to stunned households. Curfews were rigidly observed. Bloodhounds bayed fear-wild in the night and parents sat up late in the smoky stillness of their dens, wondering aloud to each other where God ran off to during that little girl’s last moments.

  Nothing came from any of it.

  After three weeks, no trace of Ford could be found anywhere in the miles of swamp and scrubland that lay on either side of her home. The sheriff grunted a few vague oaths at the press meetings, and the public gradually turned their attention to crashing planes and immolated demonstrators for their reminders of mortality. Just as she had been for her entire life outside of one unsullied moment upon a stage in St. Cloud, Marilyn Ford was cast aside and promptly forgotten.

  Six years later, the murders began.

  The Editor passes a bizarre sign as he takes the exit from the highway: a giant, gaily-colored clown holding a little suited man in its lap. The circle of inverted 9s carved into the clown’s extended hand can’t be the mile marker, but there’s no other indication on the road that he can see.

  He pulls into a dilapidated service station. An insidious droning of flies issues from the open cavern of the faded barn that squats behind the station. He heads towards the service building, eager to relieve himself. A low voice scrapes the air.

  “You have to use ever’ part a the animal. Can’t waste nothin’. Injuns knew that. Used it all. House, food, tools, everythin’. They were smart, them Injuns.” The man on the porch seems to have materialized from thin air. A rocking chair cradles him as he contemplates his mud-splattered boots.

  “Nothin’ to be done ‘bout that smell though. That smell … that’s just part a the job.” The man peers up at the Editor from under the brim of a hunting cap and smiles, flashing crooked teeth. A faint breeze stirs the wind chimes hanging over the man’s head and the Editor sees that they’re too white, their music too dull, to be only metal.

  The Impala’s wheels are spinning through dust and pulling the Editor away from the station in the next second. His pants are stale with urine. He pays no mind to it, only drives, glancing in the rearview just long enough to see the split alabaster statue swinging from its ankles inside the mouth of the barn. A peal of distant thunder cracks open a metal cask in the air, blue ozone surging with rusting blood.

  The Editor knows he is close.

  The first one was found in his car. An officer passing a lover’s lane at Lake Alfred on a muggy night in ’72 noticed that one vehicle didn’t speed off at the sight of his cruiser’s lights. The officer knocked on the driver’s side door expecting to catch a pair of fumbling high school lovers in flagrante. He shone his flashlight in the window and instead saw the jack o’ lantern face of a corpse staring out at him. Backup was promptly called.

  The victim was lashed by his wrists to the steering wheel with his own unknotted tie. All other articles of clothing had been taken. His abdomen had suffered incisions of varying depth, his mouth carved open. The car was redolent with the damp smells of fear and sex. There was only one indication of the killer’s presence: a single bloody handprint left on the passenger seat. When tested, the fingerprints were discovered to be those of one Marilyn Prescott Ford.

  The ghost of St. Cloud had returned.

  Three more bodies were discovered in as many counties within the week. A homeless woman stuffed into a storm drain, a security guard caught in a department store’s revolving doors, a shoeless teenager propped against a McDonald’s dumpster. All of them kissed by razors, all of them smiling their benedictions.

  The sheriff, noticeably aged, proved less vociferous at the next press conference and shortly afterward took an early retirement. It was rumored he moved to Arizona to become a reptile handler and then emptied his s
kull out with a snub-nosed pistol on the night of his 61st birthday. Neither story was ever confirmed.

  And then the murders stopped. For one week, residents of central Florida kept to their houses, leaving only for emergencies, before the pendulous cloud of terror evaporated as quickly as one of the region’s erratic thunderstorms. The swiftness of the crimes provoked questions as to their legitimacy. There was talk that they’d been politically motivated, a means of booting out the sheriff by resurrecting the coldest case from his checkered career. Marilyn’s modus operandi was a matter of public record and local legend, easily duplicated by any enterprising saboteur. And the fingerprints? Surely those could be copied.

  Improbable, but it was all easier to believe than the notion that a missing, insane pageant queen resurfaced half a decade later in the next county over to strike out at random strangers. No, better to swallow the other theory, or the truth, as it came to be accepted by all concerned. Better to let the matter rest, and pray that this would be the end of it.

  The Editor began Carnage Nation during college, covertly making copies of the B&W zine on the library’s Xerox, tucking them under dormitory doors and windshield wipers by cover of dark. Issues frequently made their way into campus wastebins, but occasionally he would glimpse a burnout or a meatheaded jock hovering over his carefully reproduced portraits of the Manson family at play and the child-killers of the Weimar Republic. Word of mouth seeped into the cultural bedrock, and after two years the Editor began receiving mailed requests for subscriptions, all of them with return addresses to anonymous PO boxes. That was all right. He could understand his readers’ desire for secrecy; the zine’s masthead identified him simply as “Editor.” He wouldn’t feel the sense of distant camaraderie he’d gotten from those letters again until he joined the Forum.

  The Forum was an online community dedicated to highlighting what their manifesto called “public works of the esoteric.” The sub-group that the Editor participated in was named “De Mortuis.” It consisted of roughly a dozen steady members who commented on the pieces published by the group’s lead moderator, the RiverMan. There were galleries dedicated to Hollywood autopsies, fatal highway collisions, and animal maulings, among others, with one folder specifically devoted to the mugshots that haunted the Editor’s adolescence and pictures of all the grimy leavings from their crime scenes. Carnage Nation was a pamphlet of doodles compared to the splendor of those morbid collages.

  The Editor felt a special kinship with the Forum members that couldn’t be shared with anyone else. His dirty secret was everyone’s dirty secret. They were all identified only by usernames: TripleH83, Giggling_Granny, Heckler Skelter. But even under the auspices of a pseudonym, the Forum allowed the Editor to be himself, to drop all pretense and give sway to his charnel fascinations. There was a shared knowledge among them all that they were society’s misfits, the select few who dared to look death in the face and find something worth loving.

  He suddenly remembers the woman from Glenn’s Tavern, the only real connection he’d made outside of the Forum in that time. She’d been sweet, and drunk, a little heavy, but he was no looker, and she didn’t mind it when he came too quickly, so they tried again, and it was good, but then the next morning she left with boozy apologies, breath just like his mother’s, knocked over the folder of glossies for the next issue, saw them pour across the floor, and screamed, not looking at him, just running out the front door half-naked and screaming, the brown ruptured skulls on the floor screaming with her—no—he wouldn’t think of it, not again, just pack it away, swallow it down—

  Forget it.

  That’s when he’d heard of Marilyn again. The RiverMan packed the message board with personal theories supported by evidence that the Editor thought only a law enforcement officer or experienced hacker could obtain. The RiverMan claimed that Marilyn was responsible not only for the killings in ’72, but also a host of others scattered throughout the state. The Editor found the very concept preposterous, fuel added to the campfire balladry that Ford’s life had become.

  That was before he saw the pictures. Murky, unprofessional shots of bodies black with rot tied to trees, laid across flaking railroad tracks, tucked in their own beds. 1981, 1988, 1995, 2002. Every one of them smiling.

  Scans of crime scene and autopsy reports were laid out in the RiverMan’s dissertations. Included in them was one note that had made the Editor feel the weight of his mother’s stony knee again. “Handprint in victim’s blood noted on windowsill of bedroom,” it read. “Submitted to lab for testing. Pathology found that prints—”

  Here it appeared as if a section of the report had been whited out. The following line of text read: “Results inconclusive.”

  “Ever wanted to know how to get rid of a ghost?” the RiverMan asked. “Just deny that it exists.”

  A squat figure stands on the road’s shoulder, thumb hitched. The sun that frames him is liquid flame, a final protest against the coming night. The Editor sees the man’s face for a split second—arched eyebrows, pursed lips—and as the car zooms past he hears the barking of many dogs, though there are none to be seen.

  It will be dark soon. The Editor knows he will have to find lodging for the night. He can’t risk being awoken by another state trooper. Too many questions. Just looking at the inside of the car they’d know he was up to no good, though not for any of the reasons they’d suspect.

  Appearing as if a heavenly beacon, a blue-lit sign on the horizon: LAST RESORT. VACANCIES.

  A little rest for the night, then the mission could resume. He would be out before dawn’s first light and arrive at his destination by early evening. After that …

  After that, who could say?

  The Editor turns into the parking lot, and the invisible hounds resume their chorus.

  His madness insinuated itself slowly.

  It started just as a trickling of thoughts and incidents permeating his daily routine—a clothing catalog featuring a red dress, a serpent of Spanish moss lying across the sidewalk—but after a month of visiting the Forum, the Editor began actively seeking more information, trolling newspaper archives at the library, printing message board posts, contacting anyone still alive who might have ever spoken to Marilyn Ford. He felt as if he’d been told that something was missing from his life and, now aware, was driven by the need to find it again.

  An old photo album he’d taken from the hospice room where his mother finally died of cancer was emptied of family members he never met or knew and replaced with the growing pile of material that he was accumulating based on Ford’s life. He sent a private message to the RiverMan, asking him if he had anything else that could help him in his search.

  He received no reply, but two weeks later a package arrived at his door marked “ATTN: EDITOR.” Inside was a cache of photos taken of each of the known crime scenes and several other locations: iridescent seaside piers, bus stops, little league fields. The Editor remembered them as the sites of Ford’s other alleged killings from the RiverMan’s threads. They were stabbed through with a pinned message: “Look them up.”

  Following the penciled dates and names written on the back of the photos, the Editor discovered that these were in fact the locations of several homicides. The newspaper write-ups he found online were all decidedly terse, referring to the victims simply as having been in “stabbing incidents,” the police commenting that they were probably “a drug deal gone wrong” or “attempted robbery.” There was something elusive about it all, a quiet insistence that everything was as it appeared on the surface.

  The Editor knew subconsciously that the thoughts he was beginning to have were intrinsically paranoid. But how could he possibly avoid the conspiracy when it was all laid out so plainly before him?

  Wrinkled, road-sore, the Editor slumps down the concrete walk towards the ice machine. The keeper of the Last Resort didn’t ask any questions when he rang for a room, hardly glanced up from her cooling coffee as he wrote his name in the registry.

&
nbsp; A door creaks open to his left and slams shut just as he glances over, severing the hoarse laughter coming from within. He looks towards the parking lot and confirms his suspicion. His is the only car there.

  He heaves back the lid on the ice machine and stares into its roasted depths. A few inches of water sit at the bottom, the dark corpses of spiders gliding across its scummy surface in slow pirouettes. He watches them dance for a few seconds more before heading back to the room.

  The place is serviceable for the night. He’d only noticed one cockroach upon entering earlier, and the scrim of dust coating the oak-paneled walls wasn’t too thick. But as he opens the door and turns the switch on to the room’s twin lamps, their yellow light gleams off the surface of a stark mural on the ceiling that wasn’t there before.

  The Editor recognizes the image by the colors before he processes its full scope: the sensuous hair, the white devouring smile. It is the color photo of Marilyn from the Miss Citrus pageant blown to fit the expanse of the ceiling. On impulse, he rushes to the bed and pulls the scrapbook out from under the mattress to make sure that his copy is still there.

  It is.

  The two shots are identical save for the black inverted crosses that have been spray-painted over the eyes of the mural. He notices a line of text scrawled across the bottom. He lies across the bed to make out the message. A single question blazes down at him in burning fuchsia: WHO ARE YOU?

  The Editor reads it aloud, lets the question hang suspended in the air. If one were to hear it, they couldn’t be sure who it was that was really asking.

  The scrapbook began to fill up and take weight, its pages adorned with a clumsy assemblage of highlighted articles, magnified photos, hastily-scribbled notes from twilit interviews conducted in whispers over the phone. Packages from the RiverMan arrived with regularity. One envelope contained shots of slabbed cadavers from various morgues, their rushed quality indicative of secret photography. Toe tags showed they were the victims from the sites in the RiverMan’s earlier photos. All the corpses were flayed with razor scars, some even eyeless, but all of them bore the gruesomely beatific Glasgow smile like a dark wax seal. There could be no doubt about any of it now. Marilyn Ford lived.