A Book of Horrors Read online

  Hugh frowned. ‘What—?’

  The Sheriff nodded at Hugh’s hands. ‘You’re trying to keep me occupied talking – because I surely do like to talk and that’s a fact – while you try to free yourself from my … my mind control.’ He said the last two words in a deep wavering voice.

  The Sheriff rested the bread-knife on Hugh’s knee, right next to his left hand. ‘I’m wondering, see … wondering if maybe we should’ – he tapped the finger with the knife – ‘if maybe we should just chop it right off so that it doesn’t distract us from our little conversation. What do you think about that, Hughie? Good idea?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What? I don’t seem to be able to hear you. Did you say, “Yes, sure, go right ahead, Sheriff, and chop off that naughty old finger!” Did you say that, Hugh?’

  Hugh shook his head.

  ‘Hugh, let’s pretend I can’t see you and can’t tell you’re shaking your head. Let’s pretend I can only hear your voice … and that if I don’t get a good answer, then I’ll just go right ahead and chop off that finger.’ He made a tutting sound with his mouth. ‘And what you need to worry about then is where do I stop. You understand that, Hugh?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I understand.’

  ‘Because I am one of the Pain People, Hugh. In fact, I am the Pain Man.’ Frank clapped his hands. ‘Koo koo ka-chew. Delivered to your very door, agonies beyond belief. Beyond even your most fevered imagination.’ He leaned in closer, his nose and beady pig-eyes right up against Hugh’s face, and said, ‘It’s what I do, Hugh. You understand that? It’s my job. What was it they said on the radio? Ghosts with teeth? I like that.’ He chuckled and shook his head. ‘I do like that.’

  ‘Causing pain is what you do,’ Hugh said.

  The Sheriff nodded. ‘Causing pain,’ he said, the edge now gone from the tone of his voice. ‘Let’s go downstairs,’ he said. ‘To the cellar.’

  ‘Downstairs?’

  Frank nodded again, but, for a second, it wasn’t Frank. It was Maudie Angstrom taking a hold of Hugh’s hand, lifting it up so that Hugh would follow after it and walk with her. ‘Hold on,’ she said as she scooped up all the knives. ‘Mustn’t forget my tools. Ain’t no way I’m gonna get any work done if’n I don’t take muh tools. Ayuh, and that is a fact.’

  ‘I don’t want to go downstairs,’ Hugh said.

  Maude was now Pop Maxell. ‘Hell, boy, I kin unnerstand that sho’nuff, yessiree. Trouble is, we cain’t allas do what we want now, kin we?’

  ‘I don’t want to go—’

  ‘Shh, hush now,’ Pop said soothingly. ‘You’re gonna get me all lathered up so’s I cain’t think straight. And when I cain’t think straight, why … I just has to do me some cutting, and some clipping. Maybe a little sawing and some prising. No need for that, I’m thinking. Is that what you’re thinking, too?’

  Pop had morphed into Angie’s sister, Nan, and was picking up one of cordless house-phones. ‘Gonna need this,’ Nan said.

  ‘Nan?’

  ‘Oh, dear … no, it’s not me, Hugh.’

  ‘Are you going … are you going to kill me?’

  ‘Here we go – mind that first step now.’ Nan hit the rocker switch at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Oh no,’ Hugh said.

  ‘Hold your nose,’ said the thing in front of him, now a curious amalgam of Maude Angstrom and Pop Maxell, skin rippling, hair frizzing in a series of small undulations.

  ‘Oh, Christ, no,’ Hugh said.

  ‘Oh, He has no jurisdiction here, young fella,’ Maude said in Pop’s baritone voice. ‘This here’s my domain.’

  Hugh covered his face with one hand and still held tightly onto Pop’s with the other. ‘What have you done?’

  ‘I bin bizzy, young fella,’ Pop announced proudly, just as they reached the final few steps and the full Technicolor majesty of the cellar lay before them.

  Each of the ‘guests’ had their own special position. Some of them were on chairs, some were hanging – both regular way and upside-down – and a few were lying down. Hugh saw two – he was almost certain one was Joe McHendricks – were thick piles of flesh from which all the bones appeared to have been removed. The smell was rank, a mixture of shit, vomit and old food left too long in the sun.

  Maude/Pop was now Sheriff Frank and he gave Hugh a big smile. ‘Welcome, my friend, to the show that never ends,’ he said, adding, ‘I seen this in a movie one time,’ as he reached up and set the hanging light-shades to swinging, bathing the whole vista in a swirling miasma of light and shadow and making it look like the poor unfortunates were still alive and moving. But they weren’t. Not for a long time. ‘Just needed some screeching violins.’

  ‘Angie—’ Hugh said.

  Angela Ritter, her eyelids clipped away so that her eyes remained fiercely open, was tied to a chain hanging from one of the cellar beams. Her arms and legs had been broken in several places and strapped to her sides, so that thick brown tape wrapped around her head at mouth level secured her feet to her ears. She was naked.

  Sheriff Frank – the real one – lay on the floor in a thick stain. His feet had been removed and his eyes gouged out.

  Hugh glanced at the others – even recognised a couple of them – and then looked away.

  He felt a strange calm come over him, like a wave over his feet while paddling on the beach at Oguncuit or Wells. He lifted his hands and looked at them. Every fibre of his being, every cell in his brain, was crying out for him to avenge the deaths of these people … but he couldn’t move – at least not aggressively. It was as though he had been paralysed.

  The Frank-thing reached down and took hold of the real Sheriff’s collar, pulled him across the floor. ‘You have civic duties to perform, Sheriff,’ he said. ‘A telephone call and some fingerprinting, for example. But first, you have to administer a near miss.’ He pulled out his revolver.

  ‘Turn around,’ he said to Hugh.

  ‘You sick bas—’

  ‘Just turn around.’

  Hugh did as he was told.

  The Frank-thing rested the barrel of the revolver against Hugh’s forehead and fired.

  Blammmmm!

  XI

  Hugh woke up to the sound of sirens and a pain between his temples that was to headaches what Hiroshima’s ‘Little Boy’ was to Fourth of July firecrackers. The first thing he discovered was it was a good idea not to move anything – his head, his arms, his legs, his ass, his finger—

  now why did just the thought of that, of moving a finger … why did it cause a sudden rush of anxiety?

  —nothing. Even breathing was troublesome so he did it as slowly as he was able. He closed his eyes. That hurt, too.

  The sirens stopped right outside – in fact, it sounded like they pulled up next to him … so maybe he was in the street. He opened his eyes again and slowly turned his head. Nope. He was in a room. The lights were on. He was lying on a carpet. It was his room, a room in his house.

  His house?

  His and Angie’s house.

  So he was face down on the living room floor of his own house. He shifted his head to an angle and saw that the sofa and a chair were tipped on their sides … and there was blood on the floor. His blood, he reckoned. There was no way on God’s earth that you could feel this much pain without there being blood. He moaned his wife’s name. There was no answer. God, what was happening?

  Someone thumped on his door.

  ‘I can’t move,’ Hugh said, his voice croaky and soft.

  ‘Police,’ a stern voice proclaimed. ‘Open up.’

  He needed a drink. Something—

  put on the pan said greedy nan, we’ll sup before we go

  —to take away the dryness in his mouth and throat.

  ‘We’re coming in,’ the voice outside said.

  ‘Angie,’ Hugh whimpered.

  The door bounced open, splinters of wood raining onto the tiled hallway floor. Barked orders flooded Hugh’s head—

  oh, Christ, no, he r
ecalled saying

  —in a bizarre jumble of meaningless words and phrases, melding into the loud clatter of feet working their way to him, moving from the tiled floor into the carpeted living room where he lay.

  Hugh pulled his arms back so that he might rest on them in order to lift his head and torso but a loud voice—

  welcome my friend to the show that never ends

  —screeched at him to lay still. ‘Sir, do not move. Place your hands out in front of you.’ As Hugh did as he was told, and stretched out his hands, he discovered a bread-knife under the palm of his right hand, with the end of it snapped clean off. He wondered what on earth it was doing there.

  Feet ran past him heading for—

  angie …

  —the cellar. ‘No,’ he barely managed to say, a single faint word lost in the chaos and confusion.

  Footsteps clattered up the carpeted stairs, going from the hallway and down the wooden steps leading to—

  i bin bizzy, young fella

  —leading to … leading to …

  Somewhere a phone rang.

  ‘Oh my fucking hell!’ a voice exclaimed.

  Someone else said, ‘Jesus H. Christ!’

  Footsteps slowed, didn’t stop … just wound down.

  ‘Angie,’ Hugh Ritter whimpered.

  He heard muttering from the top of the cellar stairs.

  ‘How many?’ someone asked.

  ‘Motherfucker,’ a voice said.

  Someone threw up noisily.

  Rough hands pulled his arms behind his back and clamped cuffs on his wrists. Then the same hands lifted him to his feet. His head felt like it had been hit with a baseball bat. He caught sight of himself in the mirror – his forehead was a red gash with black edges, a flap of skin hung down from his hairline almost to his left eye.

  ‘I want … I want to see her,’ Hugh croaked.

  ‘Who? Who do you want to see, you sick fuck?’ a voice said.

  ‘Easy, Mike,’ someone said to Hugh’s right.

  ‘My wife. I want to see my wife.’

  A phone rang and was quickly answered.

  ‘Ten, fifteen … no way of knowing,’ someone else said, his voice hushed.

  ‘Removed their bones,’ another voice said, the words oozing incredulity.

  ‘Clipped her eyelids.’ Another.

  ‘Every single tooth—’ One more.

  ‘Fingernails. Toenails …’

  Hugh’s vision was swimming, but very slowly, shapes were becoming clearer. A policeman had hold of his right arm, pulling it upwards all the time so that Hugh had to lean to his left. This must be Mike.

  ‘Take him up,’ the other voice said. ‘Read him his rights.’

  Mike turned and pulled him towards the cellar steps.

  The policeman hoisted him higher and forced him further forward as they stumbled down the stairs, narrowly avoiding a pile of vomit splashed over two steps.

  Upstairs, the doorbell rang.

  ‘I didn’t do this,’ Hugh said as the full impact of the cellar pulled into view. He remembered it now, remembered seeing it before. ‘I didn’t do any of this.’

  ‘Sure you didn’t,’ Mike said and, just for a moment, Hugh was taken in by what sounded like it just might be compassion in the voice … until he turned and saw the hatred and disgust in the policeman’s face.

  A man in a white coverall clapped his hands and spoke loudly. ‘I want everyone back upstairs please. Nobody down here at all unless you’re wearing a white overall.’

  Mike started to turn Hugh around, but Hugh faltered and wrenched his arm free. He had seen Angie. The sound from his throat stopped everything and Hugh could barely believe that he was making it. He couldn’t form any actual words, could only howl in pain.

  ‘He’s fucking good,’ someone said, edging past Hugh and Mike to get to the stairs.

  ‘Come on,’ Mike said.

  Hugh turned around, his mouth wide open in a soundless scream.

  On the floor at the bottom of the stairs lay Sheriff Frank Gozinsky. His feet had been sawn off. In his right hand he still clasped a revolver. In his left, a telephone handset. A snapped-off serrated blade protruded from his right eye-socket.

  ‘I don’t know how he did that,’ a young man with a heavy Massachusetts accent was saying. ‘Must have had balls of steel. Just think … making a phone-call with a knife in your eye.’

  Hugh snapped his head around and pushed forward towards the young man, who visibly flinched backwards. ‘He didn’t do that,’ Hugh said. ‘He was dead before that. It was … it was—’

  Who was it? Hugh thought. Or more to the point, what was it that did this deed?

  It was a shape-shifter whut done it, Muskie, a Deputy Dawg voice whispered in the back of Hugh’s head. It wuz some kinda Hellspawn demon with a penchant for torture whut killed these folks.

  But would they believe him?

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ Hugh said, fighting to keep his voice quiet and emotion-free. ‘I didn’t do any of it. Hey, hey … hear me out,’ he whined as the policeman started tugging him up the steps. ‘Look … just look at it, for Christ’s sake.’

  The cop stopped and looked down, then back at Hugh. ‘He’s got a gun in the one hand – that he shot at me with, right?’ Hugh wiggled his face and particularly his forehead in front of Mike the policeman. ‘Around that same time – either just before or just after – I stabbed him in the eye-socket with a bread-knife and then snapped the blade, leaving part of it sticking out of his head.

  ‘I then staggered upstairs – without finishing the job, incidentally and still holding the handle-end of the bread-knife – only to collapse in the sitting room, still holding the fucking bread-knife yet. Meanwhile, the Sheriff keeps a hold of the gun, valiantly ignores the knife in his eye and the fact that I have sawn off his feet and calmly dials you folks in … in where?’

  ‘Portland,’ Mike said.

  ‘Calls you in Portland and then dies before you get here. That about it?’

  Mike nodded. ‘I guess that’s about it, yeah.’

  Hugh joined in on the nodding.

  Two of the guys in white coveralls started lifting bodies away from the steps and placing them side by side against the far wall. A third was talking into a hand-held recorder.

  Hugh pointed down at the Sheriff with his elbow. ‘Okay, fuckwit, how did he dial? Answer me that. There he is, a knife in his eye, his feet sawn off, and his corpse has a gun clamped in one hand and a phone clamped in the other. So he dialled, how?’

  Mike looked puzzled. Then he said, ‘So if it didn’t happen that way – and you didn’t do it – who did?’

  ‘I told you. It was hard enough to tell you the first time, but it’s harder to repeat it. It was some kind of … some kind of entity that has the ability to—’

  The cop dropped his pen.

  Hugh watched it fall.

  Then he watched Mike smile at him, turn around to check on the forensics cops, then bend down to retrieve the pen. Just before he picked it up, the cop took hold of the gun and pulled it. It was difficult at first – the Sheriff must have really had it clamped – but at last it came well free of his hand. The cop retrieved the pen and stood up straight again.

  Hugh stared at him.

  The cop smiled and slipped the pen into his tunic pocket. ‘Good spot,’ he said, his face momentarily shifting into the familiar lines of Angela Ritter, ‘sweetie.’

  Hugh staggered back and fell against the steps.

  The policeman’s features returned and Angie disappeared again.

  ‘I think this one is one of my favourites,’ he said softly, yanking on the cuffs behind Hugh’s back and turning him to start back up the stairs. ‘All the rest – the breakings, the eyelids, the removal of internal organs and hands and feet and stuff – all that is routine. I’m talking in torture terms here, right?’

  Hugh did not respond. Instead, he looked around for some way to escape – some means of getting out, someone to talk
to, to explain himself … maybe to reason with. Perhaps there would be a way to measure times of death on the bodies? That way, they could show that the Sheriff couldn’t have called them.

  The cop-thing was still talking as they reached the kitchen.

  ‘But this is … how shall we say – psychological. We all know about making bars of soap and lampshades out of the flesh of young children – it’s gross, sure. But the kind of mental cruelty – mental torture – that asks the victim to choose between which of their kids gets it, well … that’s special, isn’t it? It’s a change from the basic stuff … more cerebral.’

  A senior policeman was walking over to them as Mike-the-cop-who-wasn’t-a-cop stopped, still holding onto Hugh’s cuffs.

  Suddenly Hugh lurched to one side and knocked Mike sprawling. The senior policeman pulled his nightstick free and lifted his arm back.

  ‘Nononononono,’ Hugh cried, ‘before you do that, hear me out.’ The room was already full of cops, and the three forensics guys appeared at top of the cellar stairs.

  Then Hugh told them about the Sheriff.

  And the phone.

  And the gun.

  And the bread-knife.

  The whole nine yards.

  And then he told them all about Mike, the cop-who-was-not-a-cop – about him pulling free the Sheriff’s gun, and leaving his fingerprints on it.

  ‘Check it out,’ Hugh pleaded, his voice almost hoarse. ‘Take his prints and check the gun. That’ll prove it.’

  ‘Mike?’ the senior policeman said. ‘Did you do what he says? Did you pull the gun free?’

  Mike nodded. His face serious.

  ‘So the fingerprints would bear out what he says?’

  Another nod.

  The senior policeman took a deep sigh. ‘Fuck,’ he said.

  He turned and smiled at the others.

  The other uniformed cops pulled out their nightsticks.

  Mike pushed Hugh onto the floor and lifted free his own baton.

  ‘To bed, to bed,’ Mike began.

  ‘Said Sleepyhead,’ said the senior officer.

  ‘Tarry a while,’ continued another.

  ‘Said Slow,’ said a fourth.

  ‘Put on the pan,’ said the young rookie from Massachusetts.