Vile Things: Extreme Deviations of Horror Page 3

  Ignore it. Move on.

  He walked up the driveway and stood in the middle of the street. All the houses were dark, the streetlamps shrouded in thick fog. It hit Frank hard that he was in the middle of an abandoned neighborhood at the edge of the world. He shivered, chilled to the bone by the profound aloneness he felt. He itched but refrained from scratching. He chose a direction and started walking.

  Down the middle of the deserted street.

  Closer to the rim of the world and whatever lay beyond.

  There.

  Down there on the right. A light in a window. Found the son of a bitch.

  Frank ran.

  Ran toward the light in the window of the two-story brick house with an old hearse parked in the drive. What the fuck, a hearse? Sure as hell. Seventies-vintage death wagon darkly shining in the streetlight.

  As he ran, Frank made disturbing connections. If the old man was a retired undertaker, he might actually know what he was talking about, might know about a flesh-infecting fungus and about disease-bearing fluids washed from the graveyard and into the pool where Frank had spent most of the day. But anybody could buy an old hearse, so the old guy might be nothing but a senile fart with a head full of fungoid delusions.

  Your funeral, said the dreamlike voice.

  “Fuck you,” said Frank, running past the hearse and up the steps to the front door. He banged his fist on it. He stabbed a finger at the doorbell button. “Hey! Old man! Open up!”

  The itch had him by the balls now. His groin prickled with fierce itching. He stuck his hands in his pockets to keep from scratching. He kicked the door. “C’mon, open up. I gotta talk to you.”

  He can’t help you.

  “Shut up,” Frank told the voice. And then he knew.

  Oh, Jesus …

  He knew. The fungus was talking to him.

  The old man answered the door in a shabby silk robe. He raised his cane as if to strike the crazed man on his doorstep.

  “Please,” said Frank, “you gotta help me. This shit’s eating me up.”

  “Toldja. But no, you wouldn’t hear it. Too late now.” The old man grinned. His toothless gums resembled a raw wound.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Frank slipped his right hand out of his pocket and balled his fist. The urge to hit the irascible bastard was almost as great as his desire to scratch his own rash-riddled skin.

  “I ain’t nobody. Go away.”

  Rather than hit the man, Frank gave his hands free rein to scratch at the spreading itch. He scratched his belly, his groin, his thighs, then went back to scratching his arms and the backs of his hands.

  “See there?” The old man pointed with the cane’s crooked handle at Frank’s right hand. The silver handle was an ornate ram’s head with jeweled eyes.

  The rash on the back of Frank’s hand had cracked open, and yellow liquid oozed out, followed by a greenish foul-smelling discharge. Followed by blood.

  Frank swayed on his feet. He grabbed the door’s edge to steady himself. “Oh God …”

  “Flesh-eating fungus,” said the old man. “Feasting on your ass already, ain’t it. Same kinda shit killed off half the frogs in Australia couple years back. Ain’t no cure neither.”

  “Please …” Frank’s vision dimmed, then blurred.

  You’re delicious, Frank.

  “It’s talking to me,” said Frank, desperately thinking this might convince the man to somehow help him.

  “That’s it eating your brain. Fungus don’t talk, you idjit. Now go away ‘fore I call the law. You’re dripping them contaminating fluids on my doorstep.”

  Frank saw red.

  Rash-red. His sudden impulse to do violence was like an itch that had to be scratched. He snatched the cane out of the gnarled hand and cracked the old coot’s skull with the silver ram’s head. The wizened scarecrow went down like a lumpy sack of rotting potatoes, knobby knees, elbows and head ka-thumping, deadweight on the door stoop.

  Frank whacked him again for good measure, cracked him dead-center on the back of his cranium.

  That’s it. Hit him again.

  Frank obeyed the talking fungus. He struck again and again. Until he’d crushed the old man’s head like a mush-melon and the cane’s silver handle was blood-plated. Then he grabbed the dead man by the ankles and dragged him inside and shut the door.

  Good job, said the fungus.

  “Fuck you,” said Frank. “You’re not real.”

  The fungus laughed. It was a wet laugh, a dirty basso profundo bubbling up from subterranean depths.

  Frank looked at his oozing hands. “Okay, maybe you’re real. But you’re not … not natural. You’re …”

  Supernatural? Again with the dirty laugh.

  “What the fuck are you? Who ever heard of a talking fungus?”

  Once upon a time you believed in a talking burning bush.

  “God,” said Frank, the stench of the fluids erupting from his fungus-infected flesh making him sick to his stomach.

  The fungus began to whisper conspiratorially. It told Frank exactly what to do.

  Frank obeyed. He found the keys to the hearse hanging on a hook by the front door. He dragged the old man out to the hearse, opened the rear door and dumped the body in the back. Only thing missing was a casket, but what the hell? They weren’t going to a funeral. The fungus had whispered: Feed him to me. Frank obeyed because he knew something bad would happen if he tried to disobey the Fungus God. Something worse than bad. Bad was already happening.

  He climbed behind the steering wheel, cranked up and drove back to the jobsite. He backed up to the swimming pool, dragged the old man out of the death wagon and dropped the corpse into the deep-end sludge. It hit with a sickening splat.

  “There ya go,” he said. “Bon appétit!”

  He couldn’t see what was happening in the dark pool but he heard a god-awful slurping-sucking sound that made him turn away and stumble toward the house.

  The fungus spoke in a language Frank had never heard before, though it sounded vaguely French, with a smattering of silky Japanese. The voice was inside his head but it was also resounding from the pool.

  He pressed his palms to his ears to shut out the nerve-racking voice and immediately realized his mistake when the gooey stuff leaking from his ulcerated hands seeped into his ear canals. “Gah!”

  The Voice of Failure slipped a few words in edgewise: Gonna let that fungus get the best of you, you miserable fuck? Be a man. If you still can.

  “I am a man, goddammit,” he said, stumble-bumming through the back door.

  All at once his groin was on fire with needling pain. A deep slicing ache brought him to his knees. He whimpered. This was worse than the time he’d passed a kidney stone. Way worse. “Ah God, it’s inside me.” So much for being a man. How could you be a man when a flesh-eating fungus was devouring your waterworks from the inside-out?

  Snake your drain, said a voice. Frank didn’t know whose voice it was, nor did he much care. He took the command as the way to his salvation. The only way.

  He shed his sweatpants and crawled over to the sewer snake he’d left by his gym bag. He uncoiled the metal auger, dragged it to the corner and sat with his legs spread wide. He held the pointed end of the metal snake in one hand and his flaccid penis in the other. Green liquid oozed out of the tip of his cock. Good. He figured the goop was plenty thick to provide lubrication for plumbing his prick.

  Snake your drain.

  “Shut up, I am.” With his thumb and forefinger he spread his prick’s slit as wide as it would go, then he slowly brought the sharp point of the snake to the opening and inserted it with trembling, pus-dripping hands. Then he shoved it up his burning chute.

  He screamed as the snake punched through his urethra and ripped a ragged path all the way to the bladder. With a delirious heave, he yanked the snake out. Blood and slime-streaked urine poured out of him, and he passed out screaming.

  A kick in the face woke him. Frank looked up at the old geezer with the rotten mush-melon head looking down at him with one dangling eyeball. The dead guy’s flesh was furred with greenish-brown fungus, shot-through with black. Parts of his brain showed through the jagged chinks in his skull. Swatches of his blood-spiked white hair were hung with strings of slimy brown sludge like dark tinsel on a dead tree. His toothless mouth, slack jaw, and sagging posture added to the illusion of a melon-headed scarecrow that had slipped down from its makeshift wooden cross and shambled out of a cornfield and into Frank’s fevered nightmare.

  The scarecrow kicked him again, but Frank hardly felt it. The incandescent pain in his groin blocked out all lesser sensations.

  Get up.

  “Fuck you,” Frank roared, hands clasped over his ruined plumbing. “I’m dying.”

  The dead geezer worked crooked fingers into a crevice in his broken head, seized a handful of fungal muck and slapped it on Frank’s groin. Its narcotic effect immediately took away the pain. And stopped the bleeding. Miraculous shit!

  You’re not dying. Get up. It’s time to go.

  “Go? Where?” The absence of pain was blissful. Frank leaned into the corner, breathing easier now and savoring the relief that washed over him.

  South. Away from the coming cold.

  Frank tumbled to the scheme. The old man’s walking corpse was the temporary vessel for the Fungus God’s essence, and Frank was the designated driver, wheelman of the hearse that would take the foul entity to warmer climes, where it could flourish in fungal delight. It needed Frank severely injured and dependent on its pain-relieving narcotic. That was how it intended to control Frank, the predictable addict.

  Don’t do it, dumb-ass, said the nagging voice of his disgruntled ex-wife. Be a man for once. Stand up to this disgusting shit. Stop it!
>
  “Janet? What the hell are you …?” But then he knew what she was doing in his head. The particular part of his out-of-whack off-the-tracks mind that was still his own was using Janet’s intractable voice to get through to him. To warn him: Stop it.

  “Fuck you, fungus,” he said. “My mind is mine.”

  The scarecrow kicked him again, smashing Frank’s nose. Then once more, pulping his lower lip.

  “All right! All right, I’ll do it, goddammit,” Frank shouted with a fat-lipped lisp. “You win.”

  That’s it, whispered Janet, play along and then cream the sonofabitch when he ain’t looking. Just the way I taught you. You still got a little juice left in you, Franklin. Just enough to do something right for once in your miserable goddamn life.

  “Shut up, bitch,” Frank muttered. “I got this.” He slipped carefully into his sweatpants. He didn’t want to do anything to undercut the blessed numbness in his urinary tract. His rash no longer oozed and the itching had abated, thanks to the healing properties of the slimy balm the Fungus God had slapped onto his crotch and belly.

  He wished he could have one last double-shot of vodka with a beer chaser. See the sunrise one last time. But … fuck it. Janet was right. He had one last chance to do something right. Fucked if he was going to blow it. And anyway, there was no point in living when your dick was split open from the inside. He put his crushed pack of smokes and Zippo in his pocket.

  He followed the limping dead scarecrow out to the hearse. “Need gas,” Frank said as he grabbed the plastic gas can with a faded red rag tied to its handle from the bed of his truck. He uncapped the hearse’s tank and fed it half the can’s contents, then he soaked the rag in gasoline and stuck it into the mouth of the tank, turning the death wagon into a giant Molotov cocktail.

  “Get in the back,” he told the dead geezer/Fungus God, “so nobody can see your ugly fucking head.”

  That filthy fungal voice hissed angrily in Frank’s head, warning him to show proper reverence and awe.

  “Yeah, yeah, I hear ya. Not to worry. We’re going south right now.” Frank flicked his Zippo open, lit his last cigarette and then held the flame to the gas-soaked rag hanging like a red tongue out of the vehicle’s tank. He slid behind the wheel and keyed the ignition. The hearse’s motor sputtered, coughed, and then rumbled to life. He slapped it into reverse and gunned the engine.

  The death wagon lurched backward, rolled over the edge, undercarriage shrieking, and bumped and bounced down the steps and banged into the shallow end of the pool. Something snapped in Frank’s back. He gritted his teeth and waited for the explosion.

  The voice of the fungus screamed incoherent curses inside Frank’s head.

  The hearse rolled in reverse until the mound of sludge in the deep end stopped it.

  “C’mon,” Frank said around the Spirit clamped in his teeth, “blow!”

  Then he saw the burning rag flame out on the shallow-end steps.

  “Sonofabitch,” he said, realizing his Molotov hearse was a dud.

  What a fuck-up, said Janet.

  When he heard the geezer bumping around in the back of the vehicle and then the creak of the rear door swinging open, Frank figured it was time to get the hell out of there.

  But he couldn’t move his legs. Couldn’t move anything below the waist. The loud snap when the hearse bounced down the steps had been the sound of his lower spine cracking.

  He would have to crawl out on his forearms. Shit!

  He threw open the door, leaned left and fell out onto the sludgy floor of the pool. He heard the shuffle of the dead guy’s bare feet behind him. Pain flared in his groin, renewing the hot-poker sensation in his devastated urinary tract.

  Smoke from the bent cigarette still clenched in his teeth burned his eyes. He looked back at the open mouth of the gas tank on his left, and crawled toward it. One shot, he told himself. Make it good.

  He sucked on the butt until its ember glowed bright red, then rolled onto his back, took aim and tossed it at the target. The remains of his last American Spirit struck just below the tank’s mouth and fell harmlessly in a shower of tiny sparks.

  “Fuck!”

  He saw the walking dead man coming at him with arms outstretched, zombie-style. The voice of the Fungus God gibbered madly, but there was no mistaking its rage.

  Give it up, Frank, said his ex. You’re fucked. And I’m outta here. See ya. Wouldn’t wanna be ya.

  Since when did Janet speak in sports clichés? he wondered.

  Easy answer: Since your maximum fuck-up landed you in this giant toilet bowl in the middle of a deserted suburb, trapped with a pissed-off talking fungus that fancies itself a god. Capische?

  Frank screamed in frustration. Old Melon Head reached down for him. Frank grabbed both of the fungus-furred wrists and fended the monster off as best he could. But the geezer fell upon him and gave Frank a big, slimy kiss on the lips.

  When he opened his mouth to spit and bellow his disgust, the thing vomited a gushing torrent of stinking slime into Frank’s nose and mouth and down his throat.

  Gagging, Frank flung the geezer aside and tried to catch his breath through the foul, viscous fluid blocking his airway. The putrid stuff wheezed obscenely in his throat.

  That was when Frank knew he really was going to die here in this giant toilet. His remains might go on as something else, but Frank would be no more.

  Defeated by fungus.

  Then he remembered the Zippo in his sweats’ pocket.

  He dug it out as Melon Head was getting up to come at him again, no doubt to heave another barrage of fungoid stew at him. He flicked open the Zippo’s metal lid, thumbed the roller and struck the flint. A slender flame danced in Frank’s fist.

  He rose up off his belly with a snake-like motion and lobbed the lighter at the mouth of the old gas tank. The flaming Zippo disappeared through the opening.

  From the belly of the tank came a whooshing sound and then a blinding light—

  Frank was grinning when the explosion flushed him out of the world.

  Riding updrafts and thermals on dihedral-angled wings, the turkey vulture soars, then glides closer to the earth and begins to circle the manmade pool below. With its acute sense of smell it scents food, descends gracelessly and alights beside the dead thing in the bottom of the waterless pool.

  Designated “peace eagle” by the Cherokee Nation because it does not kill, the turkey buzzard dips its bald red head into the broken skull of the dead thing that isn’t as badly charred as its carrion companion. The vulture pecks brain tissue from the fuzzy fungus growing inside the shattered skull and eats with great appetite.

  Two cold hands suddenly seize the bird’s stubby neck. The buzzard flutters its wings and dances on air but cannot escape its captor’s grasp. The dead thing vomits a thin stream of gummy liquid into the bird’s mouth and eyes, then it releases its hold and the buzzard takes to the air.

  Ruffled by the unexpected encounter, the buzzard nevertheless rises into the autumn air and catches a southwesterly current.

  Tenant’s Rights

  Sean Logan

  * * *

  NOTHING MADE ALBERT MORE ANGRY than Lance’s hair. It was messy, but that wasn’t the bad part. The bad part was that it was messy on purpose! The guy spent an hour in the mirror every day to get his hair that messy. When he woke up in the morning, that hair just wasn’t messy enough. It took a strained and concentrated effort to make every odd clump stick out in a different direction, poking up from his scalp like it was trying to get the hell out of there.

  That was the bad part, but that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that all the girls liked him. They didn’t even seem to care that his hair was a disorganized disaster. Once, when Albert was on surveillance—looking through Observation Hole Excelsior on the south end of the attic, which spied down on Lance’s bed—he actually heard Sally-Ann, Lance’s most recent conquest, say she “loved” his hair and asked who “styled” it.

  It didn’t make any sense. Why did Lance get all the girls when Albert was the one with perfect hair? It was thick and dark, neatly trimmed, and he had a flawless part. He took great pride in that part. It took years to cultivate. And now it was as straight as the barrel of a Remington 12-gauge, a sharp white line cutting precisely through the dark forest on his head.