Possessed: Spine Tingling Tales From Ten Masters of Horror Read online

  POSSESSED

  An Anthology

  Edited by Nate Kenyon

  LFP

  Lower Falls Press

  A Lower Falls Press Book

  Copyright 2011

  All Rights Reserved

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  McKinney: Coyote Season

  Maberry: Doctor Nine

  Burke: The Room Beneath the Stairs

  Morton: Ego-Alien

  Shipp: Just Another Vampire Story

  Wood: The Shower Curtain

  Nicholson: The Devil’s Doormen

  Alexander: The Last Word

  Nassise: Becoming Michael

  Kenyon: The Buzz of a Thousand Wings

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  We are not who we think we are.

  The thought occurred to me the other day—not the first time, and certainly not the last—that our sense of “self” isn’t often in doubt. Most of us go about our daily lives comfortably familiar with who we are, without really considering what that means. I’m a writer, father of three, a family man. I’m smart enough, people seem to like me (keep your mouth shut over there, smart ass), and I’m a generally nice guy.

  Except when I’m not. Sometimes I fly off the handle about one thing or another that on most days wouldn’t bother me. Sometimes I snap at my bickering kids. Sometimes I want to scream at the woman in front of me in Starbucks who can’t seem to figure out what kind of coffee she wants. And sometimes I get pissed off at a guy who cuts me off in traffic, and swear out loud while fantasizing about running him off the road and into a ditch. I can blame all that on being exhausted, or feeling sick, or whatever is bothering me at the time. But to those people who actually see my irritated face, or catch a glimpse of my violent swearing through my car window? I ain’t no nice guy, after all.

  What if our self-image doesn’t mesh with how others see us? What if, more often than not, we’re regarded as someone (or something) utterly different? Does it matter?

  I say it does. In fact, this sort of dissonance certainly can contribute to the mass shootings and other violent acts that seem to be happening with more regularity these days. A particular individual sees him-or-herself as a particular kind of person (smart, successful, driven, important), while the rest of the world treats them quite differently. How does that person reconcile who they think they are, with how they’re being treated by others? Decide to better themselves by working harder, joining a gym, going back to school?

  Or do they pick up a gun and teach those bastards a lesson?

  Of course those particular individuals are disturbed. Normal people don’t do that sort of thing, right? In fact, you might say those folks are possessed in some way—by mental illness, by some sort of alter ego, the proverbial “id” that must establish some kind of authority; damn the torpedoes and to hell with the consequences. They can’t help themselves. Something is wrong with them.

  Now, this is where my own (admittedly) sick imagination starts to kick in. What if, in some of these cases, these people are possessed by something else entirely? Whatever that might be—demons, or ghosts, or whatever else—it takes over their sense of self, and makes them act in a way that they would otherwise abhor. The outside world sees them as killers, while in reality they’re just like you and me, except they caught a nasty case of possession. Now that’s some good stuff, for a horror guy.

  When I started putting this anthology together, I went looking for stories of people who are possessed by either internal or external forces. Maybe they’ve simply lost their minds. Maybe they have a very active—and angry—alter ego. Or perhaps they are a witness to some other kind of dark force that permeates our world when the lights go down, and things begin to look murky and strange and surreal.

  I wanted to explore, as I often do in my own novels, the very odd, complicated and often terrifying world of the human mind. What I found frightened even me: Sweet little girls who kill. A diary that suggests murder to whoever writes in it. Hands that remain alive, long after their master is dead. The human race, like too many rats stuffed in a cage, deciding to end itself, one person at a time. And more.

  So give these fabulous stories, written by some of horror’s brightest lights, a read—and when you’re done, go take a good, long look in the mirror. Think about all the encounters you had that day—the guy at the dry cleaners, your co-worker who snickered and muttered something to someone else as you walked by, the gas station attendant who looked you up and down and gave you an odd little smile. Think about what they saw. And think about how you saw them.

  What are you capable of, when the dark comes on and something gets its nasty little fingers into you?

  Who do you think you are?

  --Nate Kenyon

  May, 2011

  Coyote Season

  Joe McKinney

  For Bob Rawlings, it started on a cool, breezy night in early May. He was driving home on Texas Farm Route 181 when he saw the first one, moving across the road from left to right with a slow, loping gait.

  At first he didn’t recognize it as a coyote. It didn’t look right. It didn’t move right.

  Coyotes were supposed to move like dogs, but there was something different about this one. It almost seemed to hop, more like a rat than a dog. Rawlings watched it move across the road and thought it was odd, but not alarming.

  Two more went by, disappearing into the cedar thicket off to his right.

  A forth went by a moment later.

  He waited to see if there were any more, but none came. The night was perfectly still and quiet, save for the burbling exhaust of his idling truck.

  He shook his head and chuckled, dismissing the encounter as just another strange thing you sometimes see on empty country roads in the middle of the night, and drove on.

  He had no idea, then, that something had begun.

  #####

  Rawlings’ best friend was a man named George DeSpere. They’d known each other for almost ten years, going back to when Rawlings was a rookie detective assigned to the San Antonio Police Department’s Homicide Unit and DeSpere his sergeant. It was DeSpere, in fact, who’d talked Rawlings into moving his family out to the country, out to Espada Ridge.

  Rawlings would be the first to admit it that DeSpere was a genius. And he wasn’t alone in that belief, either. He’d watched, like the kid brother of somebody famous, as DeSpere’s skill as an investigator and police administrator made him into a law enforcement legend all across South Texas. Those same skills also earned DeSpere the coveted lieutenant’s position overseeing the SAPD’s Homicide Unit, a job he still held, and did exceedingly well, despite everything else he had on his plate. For as successful as he was in doing police work, he was even more successful writing about it. His textbook Criminal Investigations for the Texas Peace Officer was now in its fourth edition, and the money he made from that allowed him to reinvent himself yet again - this time as a major player in South Texas real estate.

  Now, looking out over the fourteen hundred acres that DeSpere planned to turn into the Espada Ridge Estates, Rawlings felt a renewed awe for the scope of the man’s vision.

  It was beautiful country. Espada Ridge formed a fat crescent around the northwest corner of Worther Lake. Its gently rolling hills were densely covered with cedar and hardy Spanish oaks. There were occasional meadows carpeted with wildflowers, and in a few places, DeSpere had added old-fashioned split rail fences to demarcate available lots.
And of course there was the lake itself. Right now it was dappled with late afternoon sunshine, a rich tapestry of yellows and reds, a pool of molten bronze.

  DeSpere was showing him an old country church and the ruins of six small cottages he’d found while clearing the bottom ten acres of his land.

  “Impossible to say how old they are,” DeSpere said. “Too overgrown. I bet the place is probably crawling with rattlesnakes.”

  Rawlings nodded, suddenly mindful of where he stepped. The cottages themselves were nothing special, just small moldering derelicts waist deep in yellow alkali grass. None of them had roofs, and only one still had all four walls. The weather and the years had not been kind to them.

  But the church was in better shape. It no longer had a front door, and few of the grave stones on its north lawn were still standing, but it had retained enough of its former self that you could tell at a glance that it was a church.

  “This is what I wanted to show you,” DeSpere said, watching with pleasure at the fascination on Rawlings’ face. “Go on, look inside.”

  Rawlings got as far as the front steps and stopped. “Oh Jesus,” he said. He put a hand over his mouth and gagged. “Something’s dead in there.”

  “It’s a deer,” DeSpere said.

  Rawlings glanced at DeSpere, his face wrinkled in disgust. Even after twenty years of handling homicides, the smell of rotting flesh still rattled him.

  The church was as simple on the inside as it was on the outside, no frills, no ornamentation. It was just a large, high-ceilinged, rectangular room with a couple pews. The dead deer lay across what had once been the altar, and swarming around its carcass was a vast gathering of flies. Their murmuring buzz filled up the deepening shadows.

  DeSpere led him around the carcass to a small wooden box tucked back into a corner. The ancient black iron lock had been forced open.

  “One of my workers found this yesterday while he was clearing brush for me,” DeSpere explained. “Go ahead. Open it.”

  Inside was a small brown leather book. The back flap was water damaged, but the spine was still somewhat supple, and the pages felt stiff as he thumbed through them.

  The handwriting was a thin, scrunched-together scrawl that didn’t yield to easy translation. It looked like a series of journal entries, with an occasional list of names and dates. Some of the earliest were from the 1720s.

  “It’s in German,” Rawlings said.

  “Yeah, I was hoping you could translate it.”

  Flies buzzed around them. Rawlings waved a hand to shoo them away. “I can try,” he said.

  DeSpere nodded and together they walked outside. The trees were wrapped in the dusty haze of late afternoon, and DeSpere was saying something about wanting to know the history of the place.

  But Rawlings was only half listening. He was watching a coyote about forty yards off, and it was watching him. Rawlings opened his mouth to say something about it, but the animal melted back into the cedar before he could get the words out.

  He turned to DeSpere. “Did you see that?”

  #####

  Neither of them was getting any sleep. Rawlings and his wife Maxine both lay awake in bed, their eyes open in the dark, listening to their dog howling in their kitchen downstairs.

  “Will you please go check on him?” Maxine asked.

  Rawlings grumbled something about strangling the dog with his bare hands and got dressed. On his way downstairs he passed his daughter Sam’s room and for a moment he thought of getting her to do it. Bobo was her dog, after all, and she was probably in there with her iPod cranked up way too loud, killing her eardrums.

  “Screw it,” he mumbled, and went down to shut the dog up.

  Bobo, a full-grown chocolate lab who ordinarily was gentle as a kitten, was standing in the kitchen by the back door, barking himself hoarse. His coat was bristling down his spine and his lips were pulled back over his teeth in a fairly convincing imitation of a tough-as-nails junkyard dog.

  “Bobo, shut up!”

  Bobo turned and looked at him, whined once, then started barking even louder at the door. Rawlings watched him for a second, morbidly fascinated. He’d never barked like this. Not when they lived in the city.

  Of course there he hadn’t had ten acres of country land to lord over.

  Still, there was something hideous in his bark. At times it became a keening wail, almost feral.

  Rawlings flipped on the kitchen light and Bobo backed away from the door, his barks trailing off to a low, stuttering growl.

  He turned on the floodlights for the backyard and looked through the window.

  There was nothing there.

  “Stupid dog,” Rawlings said, and patted him on the head.

  He looked outside again, his hand poised over the switch to turn out the backyard lights, when he heard a low murmuring hum. He glanced back at Bobo, who was still growling, and then back at the yard.

  There was nothing but green grass and darkness out beyond the trees. He hesitated for a moment, then opened the door and stepped outside - only to jump right back in and slam the door behind him.

  A huge swarm of flies covered the outside of the door. They were thick as moss, big and fat and black against the freshly painted white surface. He put his knuckles in his mouth to stifle the nausea threatening to overtake him.

  “Jesus,” he said. “Oh Jesus.”

  #####

  Though he was unbelievably tired, Rawlings stayed awake most of that night thinking about the church on DeSpere’s land, and the book he’d been given to translate.

  It was curious how a building like that could have been spared the ravages of South Texas weather for as long as it had. According to the book, the church had been there since at least 1728, for there had been a baptism there in March of that year. Later entries showed the church had been in constant use until at least 1848, when the last entry was made.

  But the most curious thing about the book was that it only mentioned one name - Kretschmer. Rawlings guessed that it was a family prayer book, which might explain why only that name was written there. The other alternative, that the little community had been so isolated that they only married each other, was too repugnant for him to dwell on.

  He assumed it was a prayer book because the various authors whose handwriting he could decipher all made mention of religious rites and ceremonies. He’d skimmed over them at first, only because he’d been naïve enough to assume they described the conventional practices he’d been raised with in the Protestant faith. But when he began to read them in more detail, he realized they described rites so hideously strange that they could only be satanic in design. There were so many references to demons that Rawlings began to wonder if the community’s isolation was voluntary, or perhaps imposed upon them by horrified neighbors.

  He was enough of a modern man to dismiss most of what he read as hogwash. But there were constant references to flies that stirred something superstitious inside him. He was almost surprised to learn that that side of his personality was there, but there it was. He read the numerous entries about those flies, how they were, according to the book, the eyes and ears of a demon called De Vermis, which Rawlings guessed meant “the worm,” and he found himself thoroughly creeped out. It wasn’t a feeling he enjoyed.

  But he hadn’t know any of that when he went to DeSpere’s house earlier that evening. At that time, shortly after touring the church and cottages on DeSpere’s land and before making it back to his place for dinner, he hadn’t even opened the book yet. It wouldn’t be until he was alone in his own study, while Sam was upstairs doing her homework and Maxine was in the kitchen doing the dishes, that he learned about the demon the Kretschmers called De Vermis.

  “I suppose the first thing we ought to do is to figure out how old those structures are,” DeSpere had said. “Once we know that, we can make more informed decisions.”

  They were sitting in DeSpere’s study, looking over some old maps of the land around the lake.

/>   “Decisions about what, exactly?”

  “Well, think about it, Bob. If it’s just some cowboy church, we might as well bulldoze it and move on. But if it’s something else, something older - maybe Spanish or something - we could use that.”

  “Why would it be something Spanish? That book was in German.”

  “You know what I mean. I just want to know if it’s something we could use.”

  “Use how?”

  DeSpere smiled at him patiently. “We could market it. Maybe change the name of the development from Espada Ridge to something having to do with the church.”

  Rawlings started to speak, but suddenly stopped himself. It was dawning on him that he and DeSpere had very different ideas about their obligations.

  “Do you think we have the right to do that?” Rawlings asked.

  “What do you mean? Why wouldn’t we?”

  “Well, if it is a church, Spanish or otherwise, wouldn’t it fall under some kind of historical preservation act? The federal government’s got that law protecting archeological artifacts.”

  DeSpere waved the idea away with a dismissive flick of his hand. “This isn’t like finding the Dead Sea Scrolls, Bob. It’s just a little out of the way church that the world forgot about. My point is we could use it to really give the development an identity. Make it something unique, you know?”

  “George, I really think - ”

  DeSpere held up his hand. “I’m not going to turn this thing over to a bunch of academics and let them put the development on hold indefinitely, Bob. You know that’s what they’d do. Remember when they were building the Alamdome downtown and they found that old Indian village? Remember what they did? The academics got a court order to put a one hundred million dollar building project on hold so they could dig around for a bunch of fucking arrowheads and cornhusk dolls. You think I want that?”