Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 2 Read online

  Long pubic hair, thick and coarse, overflowed from beneath the pillow like worms to assault my face. My eyes rolled back, so that I could see a trembling sickle of light on the world as the black threads tried to force my mouth open. At the same time, I could hear my mother calling me to the table. I tried to get up, coughing and spitting hair, even after freeing myself from that living tangle. You bitch! I yelled at my mother, without knowing why. She seized me by the neck and pushed my face against the plate, forcing me to eat another handful of hair, that damn hair, my dark meal. I had nowhere to run. They hadn’t stayed in bed or on the floor where I had spat them. They piled up and chased me. Those obscene curls climbed back into my mouth, and from the dark heart of that bramble they found their way back to my nostrils, diffusing a scent of tanned leather, of a wet animal. I coughed, but in the end it was all pointless. Again they went inside my mouth, entangling my tongue, my teeth, attempting to flee down my throat, inhaled by my breathing. There wasn’t a filthier torture I could imagine. The cocoon slipped down my throat. That raven clump got stuck behind my palate, almost as if it wanted to climb back up my nose, and my stomach jumped in painful convulsion. Swallowing the clump was the only thing I could do to avoid choking. The effort to not vomit and hold that thing inside was so violent that it abruptly ended my dream.

  I opened my eyes, trying to catch my breath.

  In the darkness, slightly weakened by the dim light that filtered through the closed window, I saw the sooty shadow of my mother on the door. She looked at me, perfectly still.

  Without talking.

  Without breathing.

  I closed my eyes, expecting the worst.

  But nothing happened.

  The next morning while sitting at my desk, I still felt as if my throat was burning, after that horrible dream.

  A test. The essay topic said, “Describe your vision of world politics and then, in more detail, the national political scene here in Italy.” I wasn’t sure the teacher would have liked what I was going to write. With my mom, we had often discussed politics in a rather contemptuous way. I didn’t know how to proceed; I wanted to favorably impress the board. My pen slowed down, tangled by modesty and the fear of a bad grade. I knew that in order to get a good grade at that Catholic institute, I needed to align my views to those of my teachers. I had serious problems, and my thoughts would not pour freely onto the paper. I had to lie. In the end, it was just a bargain, really. I had to renounce a part of me, exchange a lie as if it were currency, in order to obtain the product I craved: promotion. Time went by quickly. The silence was so tense I could hear someone’s leather shoes creaking, pens dancing across sheets of paper, even the nervous sizzling of fingers passing through the hair of someone lost for words.

  “Excuse me, Miss Jones. Tomase smells bad.”

  “Tomase?”

  “Yes, he really stinks. Can I move my desk?”

  They were speaking in hushed tones, my friend and the teacher, but I could clearly hear them. They looked at me and then turned back around, possibly hoping that I had not heard them.

  Do I really smell? I asked myself, while looking at them as they moved the desk.

  The other pupils were immediately attracted by the movement. After having assessed the situation, the students sitting next to me quickly moved their desks, too.

  Then it’s true. I do smell.

  As soon as they resumed writing, I looked at the soles of my shoes: I had not stepped in shit. I sniffed my armpits, but they actually smelled nice. I stuck the pen down my pants and then smelled the tip: My ass was not dirty.

  Angered, I wrote without thinking. The cowardly behaviour of my classmates had humiliated me. I found myself in the middle of an empty circle, a sort of island of shame. The teacher and the external examiner kept staring at me: It seemed obvious that my smell annoyed them, too; they were patrolling between the rows of desks, walking slowly so as not to break the silence, but never approaching the empty atoll. They kept their distance, making my blood boil with contempt and rush to my head.

  I didn’t have the courage to open my bag and eat my snack during my ten-minute break; when the time to hand in the test struck, I left the classroom as quickly as I could, without even putting my things in order.

  I left with the dictionary under my arm, without looking back, chased by the looks and by that damn stench that I alone could not smell.

  That day, the sun blinded me.

  The bus that was supposed to take me home missed the stop, even though I had called for it, and sped away, leaving me stranded. I walked all the way home under the one o’clock sun. It was the best choice: I avoided the risk of infecting passengers with my mysterious stench.

  I was crying, and my tears reflected the light. The road ahead was long. At one point I had to drag my school bag like a dead weight; the burden seemed to grow with each step. I kept drying the snot coming down my nose and wiping the sweat off my forehead. Mostly, I thought about my stench. I must have smelled terrible, but why?

  A scooter with two guys raced alongside, raising a great cloud of dust. The one sitting behind turned. They were laughing at me. I could not understand.

  No, I really could not understand.

  I entered the garden of the house, closed the gate behind me, and ran to my mother who was waiting for me at the door.

  “Mom.”

  “Come, my love.”

  I hugged her tight. I had missed her a lot.

  “You’re late.”

  “Sorry, Mom, I missed the bus.”

  “You should have waited for the next one.”

  “I was alone there at the stop.”

  “Come on, let’s go inside. Your lunch is ready. You must tell me how the test went,” she said, leaving me there with a kiss.

  I heard a voice calling me from the garden, but I remained on the threshold. Oh, no.

  “Tomase, I’m here.”

  I did not want to, but was forced to turn.

  Luckily, my mom had already gone inside when I saw the fairy standing on the lawn; she looked at me with a finger in her mouth.

  She was back. Damn it.

  “Tomase,” she repeated, sucking her finger. “Hello.”

  That small blonde creature, who every now and then visited our garden, was back. I did not know where she came from. She spied on us and did strange things when I was alone. She hid in the midst of the dwarf pines; she had hidden there so as not to be seen by my mother. “Come, come see what’s under my dress, come and play,” she said.

  “No, I must go, I’m late for lunch.”

  “Come on.”

  “I can’t, really.”

  My mother called again, but I wanted to find out what the fairy meant to do.

  She giggled, and then made up her mind. Looking at me with her pure smile, she slowly lifted her dress, revealing her knees, legs, and belly. Her skin showed bruises, burns, and long surgical scars that looked like horrible red caterpillars.

  “Oh, sure you can,” she insisted.

  I just stood there paralyzed. She wanted me to look at all costs, and I couldn’t help but obey.

  She bit the trim of her dress, lifting it up to her pubis, and then she touched her pussy with her fingers. She opened her legs, blushing for the effort, and sprayed on the grass a river of pee and a brown rope. I couldn’t swallow or move. I felt as if the hair spider I had swallowed in my dream was climbing up my throat.

  The fairy opened her mouth and the dress fell off her dirty, naked body. “Here,” she said. “Wait.” She bent over and picked up the feces, holding them between her fingers. She ate entire mouthfuls of the stuff, and what was left she spread on her body, on her neck, until she finally licked the palms of her hands and her filthy fingers. As she showed me that disgusting stuff she laughed. Then she walked toward me. “You have some, too.”

  I backed away, leaving my bag at the base of the stairs. The fairy quickly walked through the grass to give me that warm gift. I walked into the hous
e and closed the door just in time. She stopped outside the door; I could hear her panting. I stood there listening, waiting for her to go, until my mother called me for the last time.

  Mom was cooking. She chopped and threw the ingredients in the pot. “Tell me, honey, how did the exam go?”

  “It went well, Mom.”

  “Was it the essay today?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what was it about?”

  “Politics, Mom.”

  “And what did you write, honey?”

  “In the end, I wrote what we always say, Mom.”

  “And what is that, honey?”

  “That politics is the intestine of evil, which only serves to digest the spirit of the people.”

  “Well done, honey. And do you actually believe it?”

  “Yes, Mom. Politics is a bloodsucker.”

  “Exactly. Did you really write that in your essay?”

  “Yes. I had started by writing something different, but then I had to put down what I actually thought. I’m afraid I’m going to fail the year, Mom.”

  “Don’t you worry. Do you like the lasagna?”

  “Yes, Mom. It’s really good.”

  “Thanks. Eat it all. I made it just for you.”

  The fairy was standing outside the window, watching us, listening to us with her smeared face. I did not want to look at her, I wanted to eat but in that condition I could only chew a few forkfuls. I watched her no matter what, even though I was trying to look at my mother, who was bent over the stove. The fairy stood there staring at me, licking her lips. I just couldn’t swallow; knowing she was out there with her face covered in shit filled me with a sense of disgust. I made an incredible effort to finish my plate, but every time I put the pasta in my mouth, my gaze fell on that brown face. I spat out the food twice. I had the urge to vomit but I forced myself to eat: I did not want my mother to scold me. In the meantime, the fairy was signing letters of the alphabet: y o u a r e a n a s s h o l e. She was harassing me, and I did not know why. I threw the fork at her and she disappeared.

  “I’m full, Mom,” I muttered.

  “That’s all right.”

  “Can I go out to the garden?”

  “Sure, honey, go ahead. I’ll join you in a few minutes. Are you up to eating some fruit together in the sun?”

  “Great idea, I love fruit.”

  I opened the door and looked out.

  The fairy was gone, finally.

  My schoolbag sat at the bottom of the steps. I tried to lift it up to put away the books, but it weighed a ton. In the effort, I tore the seams of the strap.

  I opened the bag and found it full of shit.

  I was afraid to talk to my mother; I knew she would never believe the story of the fairy. School was over; I could throw the smelly stuff in the dumpster. The sun was burning. Green and blue flies were beginning to cloud the patio while Mom was in the kitchen washing the dishes.

  I dragged the school bag full of excrement outside the gate. I walked toward the bins without ever looking back at her. While dragging the bag, in my head I imagined it shape-shifting. Another nightmare similar to that of the hair, the difference this time was that I was awake. I had the strange idea that the bag, in friction with the ground, had turned into a severed head. It felt like I was carrying a head that rolled and bounced, following the rhythm of my footsteps. It couldn’t be a new trick of the fairy, but even the strap with which I pulled the head gave off the stench of dried meat. That day, everything had a bad smell. I thought that this was a descending wind of death, overheated by the angry womb of summer.

  I dragged that dead thing, my bag, along the dirt pathway that ran around my house, almost all the way to the paved road that then led onto Appian Road. I finally saw the garbage cans at the crossroads. I threw open the metal mouth of the box and handed the load to that oven of flies. Then I ran toward the gate of the house and stopped to catch my breath as soon as I was far enough from the dumpster. I turned to make sure that the bag was not trying to escape. Carrying that weight and running to safety had put heaviness in my chest. The chirping of the cicadas and the smell of pine resin and fir trees around the Circeo comforted me, soothing my heart.

  I crouched down to rest, and some drops of sweat fell to the ground between my feet. I was alone. The area where I lived with Mother was still dotted with construction sites; our house was the only inhabited island in the middle of a village of incomplete structures that died before being built. In the eerie silence of still cranes, bulldozers, concrete mixers, and concrete skeletons, inside the dumpster where I had thrown that absurd load, something began to crawl amid the trash, rubbing against the plastic. The buzzing of flies went up and down in intensity like a gasp, until I began to feel observed by the blind windows of the buildings under construction. In the toothless, eyeless heads made of brick, I had already heard the howling night wind, imagining that its cold voice was coming from the throat of a hidden spirit among the dark foundations.

  Now that voice was absent. But the fairy was standing at the end of the street, looking at me from a distance. Although I could not see her eyes distinctly, I knew she was staring at me. That was her place: the clutter, unfinished and abandoned. The girl just stood there, planning a new attack, for sure.

  A noise came from the dumpster, something hard being crushed and chewed by a powerful jaw. I pushed open the gate and rushed to fasten it carefully, before taking refuge in the house, with my heart in my throat, sweaty hands, and a deadly need to pee.

  The following day we went to Terracina to do some shopping, following another dream of hair and choking; a feeling that stuck in my throat the entire day. Before going out shopping, my mom always asked me what I wanted, to try and make all my wishes come true. So she did this time also, but the memory of that dream lingered on, scratching my throat.

  “Honey, what should we bring back home?” she asked, holding the steering wheel with her stretched arms. Our orange Fiat 127 darted about on the scorching asphalt under the sun.

  “A lot of fruit, Mom.”

  “Sure. I also want to buy you something to read, a new swimming suit, a small rubber boat to play with in the water, some new CDs, maybe some colors and paper to draw on, some films to watch together, and a new TV, too. What do you think?”

  “Oh, Mom. I think that would be great.”

  “OK, honey. I’d like to eat out and go for a walk, pizza and then ice cream. Up to it?”

  “Sure, Mom. But it’s not my birthday.”

  “I know,” she replied. She changed gear, making the engine roar. “And some clothes, too? We could buy some new clothes, perhaps two or three pairs of Adidas. We could go to the mall and then to the supermarket.”

  “Mom, I’m super happy!”

  “That’s what I’m here for. Your wishes are mine, Tomase.”

  She changed gear again and the car gained speed. We passed a tractor trailer full of dirt at one hundred and forty kilometers an hour. We were driving the wrong way. “Don’t worry,” my mom said.

  The truck honked its horn in a sign of protest. But we were already ahead by several meters.

  The truck abruptly steered to the left, leaning to the side: The cars that were passing at that moment were forced into the opposite lane, the ones behind crashed into them. It was a disaster.

  “Mom,” I shouted. “Had we not …”

  “I know,” she interrupted me.

  All the things my mom had promised to buy were loaded into our 127: toys, clothes, a big TV. That day she was tireless. She never took off her sunglasses. She didn’t say much, but she always smiled.

  “Here you go, ma’am,” the newsagent outside the mall said.

  “Here, Tomase,” Mom said, handing me a pile of comic books.

  “Ma’am, don’t forget these,” the man behind the counter said as he picked more comics from the shelves, handing them over to my mom. She kept giving me comics. By now, I literally had kilos of them.

  “Than
ks, Mom.”

  “Goodbye,” she said to the newsagent.

  He looked at her, after a puff on his cigar, and said, “Goodbye.”

  At the supermarket, pretty much the same thing happened.

  The cart filled up in just a few minutes. The day seemed endless. The sounds seemed muffled, part of another dimension. I was living through that morning with the carelessness of an afternoon doze. Less than an hour after the road accident that we had miraculously avoided, I had the distinct impression that life was floating around me in the albumen of a transparent egg. I found myself on the point of asking my mother if I was breathing. The feeling of not being me, really began to take shape. The nightmares, the strange events and meetings with the fairy did not seem like nonsensical, unrelated episodes. Suddenly, following my mother, among the shelves full of food and other products, I began to think of something that was condensing and consolidating into a strange disease.

  We were not alone at Terracina’s supermarket.

  Whenever my mother filled the cart with fruit, canned goods, jams, cheeses, butter, bread, and packaged meat, enough to feed an army, the fairy returned to make an appearance. I was sure I saw her standing in the refrigerator, making fun of me from behind the door, under the white and blue light; she was crying, desperate, lying in the ice cream fridge; she put her fingers in her nose and then stuck green stuff on baskets of bread; she spat into the bottles of milk. She was everywhere, spreading her tiny crap in every department. I followed her in spite of myself, horrified, unable to tell my mom.

  Finally we finished the tour. The cashier scanned all our items, took out her own wallet, and placed the amount my mother should have paid in the cash register. Then she handed us the receipt, put everything into four plastic bags, and said, “Come back whenever you want, ma’am, for more great offers.”

  On the beach, the sun hurt my eyes. I stayed under the beach umbrella so as not to get sunburned, while my mother lay on the sand without shedding a drop of sweat. She approached a stranger and started talking to him. He wore sneakers, sunglasses, and a bathing suit. His body showed strong muscles under smooth skin. As I looked, it occurred to me that from the newsstand to the supermarket, and then at the pizzeria and ice cream place, my mother had never pulled out one euro to pay. I tried to remember, but I could not recall if it had happened in the past. Suddenly, I realized that I had never seen her handle money, either in the house or outside.