A Book of Horrors - [Anthology] Read online

  Melissa had seen where the thing came from and even in her panic was wise enough to cover her own mouth with both hands. The thing skittered up her neck, over her cheek, and squatted on her left eye. The wind screamed and Melissa screamed with it. It was the cry of a woman drowning in the kind of pain the charts in the hospitals can never describe. The charts go from one to ten; Melissa’s agony was well over one hundred - that of someone being boiled alive. She staggered backwards, clawing at the thing on her eye. It was pulsing faster now, and Kat could hear a low, liquid sound as the thing resumed feeding. It was a slushy sound.

  It doesn’t care who it eats, she thought, just as if this made sense. Kat realised she was walking towards the screaming, flailing woman, and observed this phenomenon with interest.

  ‘Hold still! Melissa, HOLD STILL!’

  Melissa paid no attention. She continued to back up. She struck the thick branch now visiting the room and went sprawling. Kat went to one knee beside her and brought the broom handle smartly down on Melissa’s face. Down on the thing that was feeding on Melissa’s eye.

  There was a splatting sound, and suddenly the thing was sliding limply down the housekeeper’s cheek, leaving a wet trail of slime behind. It moved across the leaf-littered floor, intending to hide under the branch the way it had hidden under the bed. Kat sprang to her feet and stepped on it. She felt it splatter beneath her sturdy New Balance walking shoe. Green stuff shot out in both directions, as if she had stepped on a small balloon filled with snot.

  Kat went down again, this time on both knees, and took Melissa in her arms. At first Melissa struggled, and Kat felt a fist graze her ear. Then Melissa subsided, breathing harshly. ‘Is it gone? Kat, is it gone?’

  ‘I feel better,’ Newsome said wonderingly from behind them, in some other world.

  ‘Yes, it’s gone,’ Kat said. She peered into Melissa’s face. The eye the thing had landed on was bloodshot, but otherwise it looked all right. ‘Can you see?’

  ‘Yes. It’s blurry, but clearing. Kat … the pain … it was all through me. It was like the end of the world.’

  ‘Somebody needs to flush my eyes!’ Jensen yelled. He sounded indignant.

  ‘Flush your own eyes,’ Newsome said cheerily. ‘You’ve got two good legs, don’t you? I think I might, too, once Kat throws them back into gear. Somebody check on Rideout. I think the poor sonofabitch might be dead.’

  Melissa was staring up at Kat, one eye blue, the other red and leaking tears. ‘The pain…Kat, you have no idea of the pain.’

  ‘Yes,’ Kat said. ‘Actually, I do. Now.’ She left Melissa sitting by the branch and went to Rideout. She checked for a pulse and found nothing, not even the wild waver of a heart that is still trying its best. Rideout’s pain, it seemed, was over.

  The generator went out.

  ‘Fuck,’ Newsome said, still sounding cheery. ‘I paid seventy thousand dollars for that Jap piece of shit.’

  ‘I need someone to flush my eyes!’ Jensen bellowed. ‘Kat!’

  Kat opened her mouth to reply, then didn’t. In the new darkness, something had crawled onto the back of her hand.

  STEPHEN KING is the world’s most famous and successful horror writer. His first novel, Carrie, appeared in 1974, and since then he has published a phenomenal string of bestsellers, including Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Stand, Dead Zone, Firestarter, Cujo, Pet Sematary, Christine, It, Misery, The Dark Half, Needful Things, Rose Madder, The Green Mile, Bag of Bones, The Colorado Kid, Lisey’s Story, Duma Key and Under the Dome, to name only a few.

  The author’s short fiction and novellas have been collected in Night Shift, Different Seasons, Skeleton Crew, Four Past Midnight, Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Hearts in Atlantis, Everything’s Eventual, The Secretary of Dreams (two volumes), Just After Sunset: Stories and Stephen King Goes to the Movies. Full Dark, No Stars is a recent collection of four novellas, and his latest novel is 11/22/63, about a man who travels back in time to try to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

  The winner of numerous awards, including both the Horror Writers’ Association and World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Awards, and a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, King lives with his wife in Bangor, Maine.

  ‘The Little Green God of Agony’ is a tribute to the classic monster and old dark house stories. This is its first publication anywhere.

  ‘Monsters are real,’ says King, ‘and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.’

  <>

  *

  Charcloth, Firesteel and Flint

  -CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN-

  S

  HE DOESN’T KNOW HOW or where or why it began. She cannot even say when. These memories are as lost to her as is her own name. Sometimes, in the empty hours between burning, she has concocted scenarios, both elaborate and unadorned, mildly implausible and entirely outlandish, to explain how a woman might become the midwife of infernos. These fictitious consolations have numbered in the many tens of thousands, and most are soon forgotten. They rise from her like blackened bits of paper, glowing brightly about the edges and buoyed higher and higher by the updrafts of her singular desires. They are wafted away, to settle on unsuspecting rooftops and in patches of dry brittle grass, to lie smouldering in mountainous chaparral scrublands. In this way, they bear a great resemblance to the longings of all lonely persons.

  ‘I am the daughter of Hephaestus and a mortal woman,’ she whispers to the darkness. Or, ‘I was born in the Valley of Hinnom, and am a child of Gehenna. The corpse of my pregnant mother was left there amid the rubbish and the dead, but I survived, however scarred.’ Or she assures herself that she was only raped by a Catalan dragon, or that she is a salamander who was freed by a careless Arabian alchemist and thereafter assumed human form, so that she would not ever be found out.

  ‘In the bright crucible of Earth’s molten birth,’ she says. ‘I was conceived, a stray and conscious spark thrown from that accreting, protoplanetary disc. I swam seas of magma, and sank, and later slept long aeons beneath the cooling lithosphere, waiting to be born from some stratovolcanic convulsion.’

  Of course, she believes none of her tales, not even for an instant. They are fancies, and nothing more. But without them, she would be lost. And were she lost, who would bear witness to the fires?

  On a deserted stretch of Midwestern highway, half-an-hour past midnight on a hot summer night, a young man sees her in the glare of his headlights. She is not hitchhiking. She’s not even walking, but merely standing alone in the breakdown lane, gazing up at the broad, star-freckled sky. When he pulls over, she lowers her gaze, meeting his through the windshield, and she smiles. It’s a friendly, disarming smile, and he asks if she needs a ride, and tells her that he’s going as far up I-29 as Sioux City, if she’s headed that way.

  ‘You’re very kind,’ she says, the words delivered in an accent he has never heard before and thinks might be from someplace in Europe. She opens the passenger-side door and slides in next to him. He thinks that he’s never seen hair even half so black, though her skin is as pale as milk. She laughs and shakes his hand and, by the dashboard’s glare, her eyes seem golden-brown, shot through with amber threads. Later, in a motel room on the outskirts of Onawa, he will see that her eyes are only hazel green.

  When he asks her name, she decides on Aiden, as it’s a name she hasn’t used in a while (though Mackenzie, Tandy and Blaise also came immediately to mind). She doesn’t volunteer a patronymic and the young man, whose name is only Billy, doesn’t ask her for one. He notices that her unpolished nails are chewed down almost to the quick, and as she shuts the door and he shifts the car out of neutral, he catches the faintest whiff of woodsmoke. He doesn’t ask where she’s come from, or where she’s bound, as it’s no business of his; he keeps his eyes on the road, the broken white line rushing past on his left, while she talks.

  ‘My father is a fireman,’ she lies, though it�
�s an old lie, worn smooth about its periphery. ‘Well, not exactly a fireman, no. He’s a certified fire investigator. He’s the guy who decides whether or not it was arson, the fires, and if so, how the arsonists started them.’

  She talks and Billy listens, and the indistinct smoky smell that seems to have entered the car with her comes and goes. Sometimes it’s woodsmoke and sometimes the odour is almost sulphurous, as if someone has just struck a match. Sometimes it makes him think of the rusted-out old barrel his own father used for burning trash, the way the barrel smelled after a hard rain. He keeps waiting for her to light a cigarette, but she never does.

  ‘Did you know,’ she asks, ‘that before gasoline was ever used to fuel internal combustion engines, it was sold in pretty little bottles to kill head lice? People sprayed it on their hair.’ And no, he says, I didn’t know that, and she smiles again and stares up at the stars, the wind through the open window whipping at her ebony hair. ‘It wasn’t called gasoline back then,’ she says, ‘Just petrol.’

  ‘Wasn’t that dangerous?’ he asks her.

  ‘Calling it petrol, instead of gasoline?’

  ‘No,’ he replies, only pretending to sound exasperated, ‘folks putting gasoline in their hair.’

  She laughs, and when she laughs, he thinks that the burnt smell grows slightly more pungent. ‘Why do you think no one does it anymore?’ she asks, but Billy doesn’t answer. He drives on, shrouded by the west Iowa night, and she lets the wind blow through her hair and talks to keep him awake. He never mentions that he’s sleepy, or that he’s been on the road since just after dawn, but she sees it plainly enough on his face and hears it in his voice. He offers to turn on the radio, but says there’s nothing out here except preaching and a few honky-tonk stations, and she tells him no, the night is fine without the radio, without music or disembodied voices threatening brimstone and damnation. It never once occurs to her that he might find it odd, how the topic of her conversation (which is really more a monologue, as he says very little) never strays far from matters of conflagration. She has too little understanding of thoughts other than her own to suspect, or even care, what anyone else might find peculiar. And in truth, he’s so grateful for the company of this strange girl that her single-mindedness is an easy enough thing to overlook.

  She recounts Algonquin, Creek and Ojibwa myths, and in all three, a rabbit or hare steals fire and gives it to humanity. She talks about Prometheus and the Book of Enoch and the relative temperatures of different regions and layers of the Sun. He has to interrupt and ask her to explain Kelvins, and when she converts the numbers to Celsius, he has to ask what that means in Fahrenheit.

  ‘5,800 Kelvins,’ she says, referring to the surface of the sun, and speaking without a hint of condescension or impatience in her voice, ‘is roughly equal to 5,526 degrees Celsius, which comes to a little more than 9,980 degrees Fahrenheit. But you go deeper in, all the way down to the core of the sun, and it’s very close to 13,600,000 degrees Kelvin, or almost 25,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit.’ And then she informs him that, by comparison, the highest temperature ever recorded on the surface of the Earth was a mere 136 degrees Fahrenheit, in the deserts of El Azizia, Libya, on September 13th, 1922.

  ‘That was sixty years before I was born,’ he says, and tacks on, ‘Libya. Now, that’s in Africa, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replies, ‘now, and in 1922, as well.’

  He laughs, even though she’d not meant it as a joke. ‘So, what’s the hottest place in America?’

  ‘North America?’ she asks. ‘Or do you mean the United States?’

  ‘I mean the United States.’

  She considers the question for only a few seconds, then tells him that sixty-nine years before he was born, a temperature of 134 degrees Fahrenheit was recorded in Death Valley, California, on July 10th, 1913. ‘In fact, the hottest place in the US, or anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere, is Death Valley, which averages ninety-eight degrees in the summer.’

  ‘Ninety-eight,’ he says. ‘That’s not so hot.’

  ‘No,’ she agrees. ‘It really isn’t.’

  ‘You learn all this stuff from your dad?’ Billy asks her. ‘A certified fire investigator, does he need to know all about Indian legends and how hot it gets on the sun?’

  ‘My father is a fireworks manufacturer,’ she says, as though unaware, or merely indifferent, that this lie contradicts the earlier one. ‘He specialises in multi-break shells and time rain. He has factories in Taiwan and China.’ And then, before Billy can object, she’s already explaining how different chemical compounds produce different-coloured flames. ‘Copper halides give you blue,’ she says. ‘Sodium nitrate, that makes a nice yellow. Cesium burns indigo.’

  Billy flunked eleventh-grade chemistry, and none of this means much of anything to him. But he asks her how they get red anyway.

  ‘Depends,’ she sighs and leans back in her seat, pushing windblown strands of black hair from her face.

  ‘On what?’

  ‘What sort of red you’re after. Lithium carbonate gives off a very nice moderate shade of red. But if you want something more intense, strontium carbonate’s always your best bet.’

  ‘And green?’

  ‘Copper compounds, barium chloride.’

  ‘And gold? What do you have to burn to get golden fireworks? The gold ones have always been my favourite. Especially the big starburst ones.’ And he takes a hand off the wheel long enough to pantomime an exploding mortar and the gilded stream of sparks which follows.

  She turns her head and watches him a moment, then says, ‘Daddy uses lampblack for gold, usually.’

  On his right, a reflective sign promises an exit, with motels, restaurants and a truck stop, only five miles farther along. He checks the gas gauge and sees that the red needle is hovering just above empty. ‘I don’t want to seem ignorant, but I have no idea what lampblack is,’ he says to the woman calling herself Aiden.

  ‘Lots of people don’t,’ she replies, and shuts her eyes. ‘It’s just an old word for soot, really. You know what soot is?’

  ‘Yes,’ Billy says. ‘I know what soot is.’

  ‘Well, lampblack is a very fine sort of soot, sometimes just called blacking, gathered from partially burned carbonaceous materials. It’s been used as a pigment since prehistoric times, and is considered one of the least-reflective substances known to man.’

  ‘I’m just gonna have to take your word for that,’ he says, and she smiles her easy, disarming smile again and opens her eyes that only seem to be golden brown with glittering amber streaks. ‘I’m also going to take the next exit, ‘cause we need gas and I could use some coffee.’

  ‘I have to pee,’ she says, and briefly wishes she had a road map, because the positions of the stars and planets above the plains and cornfields can only tell her so much.

  ‘You drink coffee?’ Billy asks, and she nods her head.

  ‘I drink coffee.’

  ‘I’m guessing you drink it with milk, but no sugar.’

  ‘I drink coffee,’ she says again, as if perhaps she failed to make herself understood the first time. ‘I drink it, though I’ve never much cared for the taste. It’s bitter. I don’t like bitter things.’

  Billy only nods, because he doesn’t much like the taste of coffee, either. And then they’ve reached the off-ramp and he cuts the wheel right, exiting the Interstate into the gaudy glimmer of convenience stores and gas stations. The exit for Onawa distinguishes itself in no way from most remote highway exits, just another oasis of electric light, parked automobiles and towering billboards touting everything from beer to a local strip club. The woman whose name is no more Aiden than it is McKenzie spots a McDonald’s, a Dairy Queen and a Subway, and here and there, a few stunted, unexpected trees. Mostly this is farmland, and she suspects the fast-food places are more welcome than are the trees. Billy steers into the parking lot of a BP, not far from a motel; both lots are crowded with semis and pickup trucks.

  ‘We could maybe
get a room,’ he says, as matter-of-factly as it’s possible, considering he only met her a few hours before. ‘We could get a room, grab a little sleep before driving into Sioux City.’

  ‘We could get a room,’ she replies, the words passing indifferently across her lips, hardly more than an echo. ‘I need to pee,’ she tells him again, changing the subject as though it’s settled, and he stops the car beside the pumps, beneath the halogen shine of the station’s aluminium canopy. When he’s cut the ignition, she gets out and goes inside. The restrooms are in one corner, near an upright cooler filled with sodas and energy drinks. The women’s room reeks of urine and cleaning products and sickly-sweet cakes of toilet deodoriser. But she’s smelled much, much worse, times beyond counting.

  When she’s done, she goes back out to find him shutting the trunk. Though she doesn’t ask, Billy hurriedly explains, ‘Something was shifting around back there. Making a racket. Turns out, the lug wrench had come loose.’ It’s as good a story as any, and she doesn’t dispute it.

  ‘You heard it, yeah?’ he asks.

  ‘No,’ she answers, and then gets back into the car.

  He pulls his car from the BP’s lot into the parking lot of a neighbouring Motel 6, and she waits alone while he goes into the lobby to register. Billy offers to pay for the room, since, after all, it was his idea, and she doesn’t object. While she waits, she stares up at the night sky past the windshield, trying to pick out the stars through the orange-white haze of light pollution. But they’ve been blotted out, almost every one of them. Only the brightest and most determined are visible, even to her, and she knows the night sky better (as they say) than the back of her own hand. It occurs to her, in passing, that neither of them got coffee at the BP station.