The Spectral Book of Horror Stories Read online

He picked up the guitar with some amount of dread but after checking the strings—no blood, only the normal gunk of dead skin, sweat and oils—he switched on the amp and worked through his new routine. He was a few minutes from the end, unpicking the secrets of the introduction to My Iron Lung, when the phone rang. It was the office. It was Alice.

  “You’re working late,” said Fleckney.

  “Sorry to call you now,” she said, and her voice was all wrong. “I’ve got some bad news.”

  Panic flooded him. I’m sacked? What did I do? The argument with Jackson? But we cleared the—

  “Bob Jackson was found dead this evening at his flat.”

  His first insane impulse was to yell: “It wasn’t me.” But he pressed his lips tight against it. He didn’t say anything.

  “Trevor?”

  “I’m here.”

  “He was murdered, Trevor. He was found on the floor of his bathroom. Someone broke down his door and… well they’re not saying exactly what happened, but I heard he was stabbed. Repeatedly. Slashed apart. Can you believe it?”

  “No I can’t,” Trevor said.

  “So Chris said we should come in tomorrow afternoon. Take the morning off. He said the police will be here and we’ll need to make statements.”

  “Okay.”

  “I just thought I should give you the heads-up, you know… given what happened earlier.”

  “It was just a stupid row, Alice,” Fleckney said. “He rowed with everyone, not just me.”

  “Well, yes,” she said, “but today he only rowed with you.”

  Suddenly he wanted to get off the line. Nausea was filling him up. He gazed down at his left hand. It had remained on the neck of his guitar. His fingers had somehow accomplished a stretch between the first and the sixth frets. He’d never managed a reach anywhere near that before. Alice was saying something else now but he could no longer hear her. He concentrated on his little finger. He tried shifting it one more fret to the right. And then another. And another. When his little finger had stretched to the tenth fret—the distance between his fingers was now something like ten inches… impossible… impossible—he dropped the telephone and placed the guitar back in its stand. He put his plectrum in the drawer and closed his music book. He switched off the amp.

  #

  In the bedroom, in the dark, he watched until he saw Eddie’s front door open, and the boy moved into the street. He was carrying his guitar case. He walked past the gang of older kids, trying to keep his gaze fixed on the floor in front of him. One of the boys tripped him over. He landed heavily, and—Fleckney could hear it—either he or his guitar made a long, lonely groan of pain. He got to his feet and stared back at the gang. He rubbed his raw palms. Then he picked up his guitar and walked away. His jaw was set: the same determined refusal to cry. Fleckney watched the boy who had stuck out a leg. From his den he could hear his Strat begin to rumble and wail, as if in response to the other instrument. The first. The diminished fifth. He didn’t dare look down at his hands.

  He waited. The doorbell rang. Fleckney sighed and went downstairs. He opened it and Eddie was there, staring up at him with his black, glossy eyes. He had unsheathed his guitar; now he held it out, like an offering.

  “Teach me,” he said.

  STOLEN KISSES

  Michael Marshall Smith

  Well, yes, okay, if you want to call it “stealing” then I guess I did steal him from her. But I didn’t hear him complaining, okay? The man did not fight. At any point. And stealing’s a strange word anyhow when it comes to emotions and relationships, don’t you think? Stealing says you took something that belonged to someone else—but a person is not a thing and so I don’t see how he or she can “belong” to anyone. A person is not property. Okay, they were in fact married, yes, I know that—God, don’t I know it! I was one of the first she showed the big-ass ring to, duh. I was at the fucking wedding, ringside seat. I bought the bitch a huge set of premium bakeware to show just how fucking cool I was with the whole thing, because if your best friend gets married that’s what you do even though you know she doesn’t deserve the guy and she’s got him under some kind of frikkin’ spell.

  Okay, not an actual spell.

  She was very pretty. Still is. I get that. And she was all “Let’s have a family, right now”, and he was totally into that. But so was I, or I was going to be, when the time came. We were only twenty years old, for God’s sake—it was way too early. Like, insane, right? Who gets married at twenty these days? This is not the Middle fucking Ages. I’d figured we’d all hang out together a few more years and he’d get around to asking me out on a date when everyone’s oats had been duly sown and it was time to pick a lane and start cooking up the next generation, so they could go out and make the mistakes we hadn’t even finished making yet ourselves.

  I figured wrong.

  And I figured wrong, I finally realised—drunk as a skunk at that fucking wedding, watching their first dance and grinning and clapping along like everyone else—because in fact, he hadn’t been thinking of me at all.

  #

  I’d assumed too much. I’d read between lines it turned out had not even been there. But we’d hung out a lot. We talked all the time, we laughed, we really got each other. How could I not think that he’d realised I was more fun and a lot smarter than Lisa could ever be? I assumed he’d understood that there was a pure connection between him and me, something real and deep and strong, and it was only a matter of letting it mature.

  In the meantime I’d played the field, sure. I had my times and some of them were good. But then boom—suddenly they’re married, and it dawned on me, way too late, that all my good times had just been about marking time. It had always really been about him.

  I know most women might think “Huh, well that’s the end of that” at this point—but I am not most women. For a while I let it be, of course, and you know what? That was me being nice. I figured that if they’d done the thing, if he’d gone down on one knee and she’d said yes and they’d strutted down the aisle and declared “I do” in front of pretty much everyone in town, I had to let it ride. I owed it to him, my love. If it turned out he was blissfully happy… then I’d let it be. I am not someone who wants to bring sadness into the world unnecessarily.

  Sure, I was pissed. I was miserable—I’d been in love with the guy since the eighth grade. I’d had him in mind all along, and I’d assumed, hoped, whatever—taken for granted, I guess—we’d been following signs leading us up the same road. I was bitterly fucking sad to find myself now walking that path by myself. I was not heartbroken, though, because I knew nothing’s over until the fat lady sings.

  And no overweight woman had yet sung.

  #

  So we all stayed friends. Why wouldn’t we? She’d been my BFF since forever, and had no idea I wanted her man. He didn’t either, evidently. So we rubbed along. We hung out. For years I watched the two of them building a life together, step by step. They rented an apartment. Then they bought a house and furniture. The cars they drove got bigger and bigger. They graduated from thrift store and Ikea to Crate & Barrel and Restoration Hardware. Her clothes got fancier and upper arms heavier, unlike mine. They stopped having keg parties and started throwing dinner parties instead. They kept ticking boxes.

  But there were no kids.

  Lisa talked to me about it, a lot, the troubles they were having. The doctors said it was likely her fault, though they couldn’t be sure. I thought the doctors were most likely right, though I kept the opinion to myself.

  In the meantime I watched them get older, saw the lines that started to appear around his eyes. I thought about telling him that I could kiss them away, if he’d let me, with a hundred stolen kisses. But I did not.

  I waited.

  For the time being she still had a lock on his love, but I knew my time would come and that I would not hesitate when the moment arrived. And I did not.

  #

  So I stole my best friend’s husband, yes.<
br />
  I do not feel bad about it and I never will. I know she’s hurting now but that’s an unfortunate side effect of the situation, collateral damage—and I stand by saying there’s no such thing as stealing when it comes to the heart. There is no God looking down on us like some bearded super-cop, watching to see if we break his laws. Those laws are not even real. They’re only there in our heads, and even if there is a God then I truly believe that he wishes us to be happy above all else. If two people are going out or living together or whatever and one decides to be with someone else, that’s not stealing, is it? So why should it be stealing just because they were married? ‘Stolen’ is nothing but a word, and if a man’s happier being held by you than he ever was in her arms, then it’s not the right word to use.

  I look at him now and I know that’s how it is. He tells me he loves me every day and every night. There is joy on his lips when we kiss. I know he’s better with me, in every way, so much happier with me, that the years we lost were a mistake, and it was her fault for being too fast, and mine for being too slow.

  I loved him first, after all. In fact, if you look at it one way, it was actually her who stole him from me. All I did was put it right. Maybe you disagree, but what’s done is done. Yes, I took a man from another woman, and if you want to call that stealing, then okay—I stole. Fuck you. My bet is that she’ll get over it in a year, but I don’t really care.

  The bottom line is she never deserved him, and the evidence was plain to see. He’d been in the ground three months before I brought him home, and the lazy bitch hadn’t even gotten round to putting up a stone.

  CURES FOR A SICKENED WORLD

  Brian Hodge

  Mr Sunshine woke up with a hangover as hard-earned as I’d ever seen. When you’re a road manager for touring bands, hangovers are as much a part of the routine as sound checks and the bleary-eyed boredom of all-night drives. After twenty-three years of this, I’d witnessed people coming to and sweating out the effects of everything that could possibly come in a bottle or a small, unmarked packet. But someone who’d been out for the last thirty-plus hours and two thousand miles… this was new.

  A scheduled cocktail of injectable benzodiazepines will do that, keep you asleep or in a stupor for the duration.

  Mr Sunshine spent a few groggy minutes rubbing his head and blinking at the sky and the trees and the nearby slopes and snow-spattered peaks in the distance. He could see the barn from here, and maybe the cottage through the trees. He was getting the idea: he was rousing in the ass-end of nowhere.

  He groped one hand across the ground for purchase, then tried to push himself upright, toppling back to the spring-lush meadow three times before he figured out the reason he couldn’t stand was because his ankles were laced together with zip-tie cuffs.

  Tomas tossed him a bottle of water. He had to be thirsty down there. Every pull at the bottle let him speak a little more clearly—though that didn’t necessarily mean he had anything worth saying.

  His given name was Derrick. Derrick Yardley. Mr Sunshine was the byline he wrote under, obviously meant to be ironic. Guys like him are all about the irony. All about the smirk.

  “First off, nobody’s going to believe you,” Tomas told him. “Nobody. Second, that’s enough out of you for now. There’s only so many times you can say ‘what the fuck’ before it gets old.”

  He was focusing, finally, but it was obvious that he still had no idea who was talking to him, much less who I was. Apparently he only knew what Tomas looked like onstage, or in promo photos, the persona that Tomas Lundvall called Ghast. At the moment, in camo pants and a black sweatshirt, he looked like a particularly intense hunter. He was clean-shaven again, too, ridding himself of his beard because it was starting to grey early, and he no longer wanted to waste the time or mental energy dyeing it.

  “Third,” Tomas said. “Normally I have no use for stupid dichotomies about how there are two kinds of people in the world. But just this once I’m going to make an exception. There are two kinds. There are those who’ll be missed. And there’s you.”

  “Where am I?” Derrick Yardley croaked.

  When you don’t know, one range of mountains looks about the same as another. All he would know was that the Cascades of Oregon looked nothing like downtown Chicago. There was a lot of distance between him and the roofie that first put him under; the sycophant at the club who wasn’t what he thought she was.

  “Let’s call it a hell of your own making,” Tomas said.

  And I didn’t know what I was thinking, signing off on this. That’s the thing with bands like Balrog, guys like Tomas. You spend enough time on the road with them, and the craziness starts to seem reasonable. My whole thing was organisation and logistics, making sure that people and gear got from Point A to Points B through Z on time and intact. By the end of a fifty-four-date North American tour, even a kidnapping victim stops seeming out of the ordinary. It’s just a prank. He’s just one more piece of cargo, who needs the right kind of van.

  “Sorry about the bad review,” Derrick tried, but even he looked aware of how empty that was.

  “I’ve had bad reviews before,” Tomas said. “Do I look like someone who’s going to let a bad review leave a mark on my day?”

  Onstage he looked like a charred nightmare. But even without his stage wear on—without the crusted old leather, without the war paint, or more accurately, corpse paint, without the blood—he was still an imposing figure. He stood tall and lanky, ropy muscle knotted over a towering framework of bone. His eyes and demeanour could project warmth when he was feeling it. He didn’t appear to be feeling it now.

  “But what you do, you can’t call them reviews, can you? You don’t seem to ever talk about what’s there. You just react to the idea of its existence.”

  From one pocket, Tomas pulled out a couple of quartered pages, a printout from the online magazine that Derrick Yardley wrote for, a pop culture site called The Pipeline. Tomas dropped them into Derrick’s lap.

  “Go on,” he said. “Read it. Out loud.”

  We waited for him to unfold the pages, and Derrick’s face went the colour of cream cheese. Now, finally, he knew.

  “Hey. It’s just… it’s not…”

  “Go on.” This time, Tomas punted a boot tip into Derrick’s ribs for emphasis. “Read it like you mean it.”

  “Come on, it was supposed to be funny.”

  “Then make me laugh.”

  He was squirming now, getting a full sense of how isolated we were. “I’m not really a performer.”

  “Apparently I’m not much of one either, but that’s never stopped me.” Tomas gave him a harder kick that sent him scuttling back with a yelp.

  Go on, just read the stupid thing, I willed him, and after a couple of shaky breaths, he smoothed the pages and got started:

  Well, fuck me with a pentagram, points and all, but that’s rich. If you’re going to call your new album Cures For A Sickened World, maybe you might first want to make sure you haven’t spent your previous nine albums establishing yourself as part of the disease.

  Derrick peeked over the top of the pages to see if any more pain was coming but Tomas only stood there as impassive as a granite carving, so he continued.

  Listen, dipshits, I’ve got your cure right here. Kill yourselves! Do it onstage, film it as a how-to video for every other lame-ass band that would stoop to follow in your wake, and take as much of your poxy audience with you as you can, because if they’re supporting you, then they’re part of the disease too. Do that much, and the rest of us will all feel so much better in the morning. Because, if I haven’t made myself clear enough, the prospect of performing acupuncture on my testicles with rusty needles is preferable to the idea of waking up tomorrow suffering the knowledge that this is still a world afflicted with a Balrog infestation.

  The entire band had taken exception to this broadside, but none more so than Tomas. Co-founder. Rhythm guitar. Lead vocals. Main songwriter. He wasn’t a solo artist, bu
t it was very much his band.

  Balrog. See how their name has R—O—G in it? They’re missing a huge opportunity here, but I’ll get back to that. For now, just look at these asshats. I know it hurts, but look at them. Take a good, hard look and keep trying to remember these are grown men. Allegedly. Grown men painted up like fucking rodeo clowns that the ancient Greeks might’ve sent into the fucking Labyrinth to distract the fucking Minotaur, because even the Minotaur would have to possess enough of a sense of humor to fall down fucking laughing. We get it, you twats! You’re evil! With a capital Eve! Or something.

  Interesting that he chose to deride them for being grown men. Because, just based on his approach to so-called journalism, I would’ve thought it was coming from some smarmy douchebag still in college, or not long out. But he’d obviously seen his thirtieth birthday, maybe even his thirty-fifth.

  I don’t even know where to begin. So why bother. Just this: if this pack of sheep in wolves’ clothing proves anything, it’s that pretend-evil can still be a lucrative career path as long as your amp knobs go to eleven and you’re lucky enough to find four other hairy dudes with the same birth defect that gives them a super scary scowl. Didn’t these short-bus regulars have mothers around to warn them that their faces were going to freeze like that? Sorry, my bad. They didn’t have mothers! They were born of goats!

  Okay, so the guys had gotten a laugh out of that part.

  Speaking of goats, that’s how much I don’t want to hear any more from these shit-mongers. I’d rather be staked out spread-eagle while Satan’s most incontinent he-goat takes a steaming infernal dump on my face than listen to another minute of this. I can almost guarantee that the sound of it would be more musical. I would rather scarf up a rotting platter of serpent roadkill scraped off the Highway To Hell, tail-to-head, washed down with a bucket of demon jizz.