A Book of Horrors Read online

‘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.

  When Billy returns, he has a small paper envelope with the motel’s logo printed on it containing a plastic card, the sort with a magnetic strip on one side.

  ‘I miss real keys,’ she says, ‘the old brass-coloured keys, attached to big diamond-shaped chunks of plastic with the room numbers stamped on them. You could steal them, those keys, and have a souvenir. But that,’ and she pauses to point at the envelope, ‘that doesn’t make for a very interesting souvenir.’

  ‘Where are you from?’ he asks, squeezing the car into an empty space nearer their room. ‘I don’t recognise your accent.’

  ‘Would it really matter?’ she asks.

  All he has for an answer is a shrug, and neither of them says much of anything after that. It may be they’ve passed the point where talk is necessary. That’s what she would say, if the question were put to her. The night has gathered sufficient momentum it no longer needs to be propelled by small talk.

  Inside, she goes to the sink and splashes her face and the back of her neck with icy-cold water. Billy switches on the television, to some channel that shows old movies 24/7, and he turns the volume down low. She doesn’t recognise the film that’s playing, but it’s in black and white, which suits her fine. It helps to counter the garish, mismatched wallpaper and comforter, the ugly carpet and the uglier painting hung above the queen-sized bed.

  ‘I was only fourteen, my first time—’ he begins, but she places a wet finger to his lips, shushing him.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says. ‘Not to me, not to anyone.’ And then he sits down at the end of the bed and watches her undress. She’s thin, but not as thin as he’d expected. Her breasts are small, her belly flat. Her pubic hair is as black as the hair on her head, a sable ‘V’ there between her pale thighs. She folds her dingy, road-weary clothes neatly and sets them aside, which surprises him more than the crimson triangle tattooed between her shoulder blades. He asks her what it means, and she tells him that it’s the alchemical symbol for fire, though it may mean many other things as well. He asks where she got it, and when, and she tells him, truthfully, that she doesn’t remember.

  ‘But it was a very long time ago,’ she says, and then begins undressing him. She pulls the T-shirt off over his head, undoes his belt buckle, and then Billy takes it from there. The bed is soft and cool, and the white sheets are heavily perfumed with a floral-scented fabric softener. When he kisses her, she tastes like cinders, but he doesn’t say anything. She climbs on top, and he enters her effortlessly. He comes almost immediately, but she doesn’t seem to mind, and whispers soothing words in his left ear while she grinds her hips roughly against his. The thought occurs to him, then, that he might only be dreaming, because it all seems somehow so unlikely. He hasn’t got off with anything but his own hands and tubes of KY in years. And because the words she’s whispering are coalescing into such vivid pictures in his mind, images so clear he can’t be entirely sure that he’s not seeing them through his eyelids. She fucks him, and her teeth and tongue and spittle and palate taste of cinders, and the visions spill freely from her lips – dazzling, exquisite apparitions of holocaust – and he comes again. He opens his eyes and gasps loudly, and she smiles and kisses him again.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ she says, and there’s a tone in her voice that’s almost enmity. ‘Keep them closed. Close them as tightly as you can.’

  Billy does as he’s told, and he understands now that the bright visions are not so much what she wants him to see, but what he needs to see.

  ‘That’s a good boy,’ she whispers and places a hand on either side of his head. The rhythm of their lovemaking has assumed a cadence, a force, that he will later describe, in the spiral-bound notebook he uses for a diary, as violent. I almost thought that she was raping me, he will write. But it wasn’t rape. It wasn’t rape at all. He will also write about how quiet she was, the unnerving, heavy silence of her orgasms. But mostly, he’ll write about the fires.

  He will write, I think maybe she was Hawaiian. She was a Hawaiian woman, and her great, great grandmother made love to the goddess Pele.

  She fucks him, and the fire licks at his mind, at the inside of his eyelids and the chintzy wallpaper of the motel room.

  ‘This is my gift,’ she whispers. ‘This is the only gift I have to offer.’

  For half an instant, it is another summer night, July 18th, one thousand and forty-five years before the night he finds her standing at the side of an Iowa Interstate highway. And he stands on a Roman street, outside a cluster of shops near the Circus Maximus. It’s two nights past the full moon, and the fire has already begun. It will burn for six days and seven nights, and Nero will accuse Christian arsonists of starting the blaze.

  Billy can feel her hands on him, those short nails digging into his scalp and maybe even drawing blood. But he doesn’t open his eyes, and he doesn’t tell her to stop.

  That half-instant passes, taking Rome away, taking century after century, until he finds himself on the banks of the Sumida River, looking out across the Japanese caste town of Edo. It is the second day of March 1657, and hurricane-force winds are sweeping down from the northeast, fanning the flames devouring the city of wood and paper houses, bamboo still tinder-dry from a drought the year before. But Billy hardly even feels the win
d. It barely touches him. The sky overhead has been blotted out by smoke, underlit by the fire so that the grey-black billows glow as hellishly as anything Dante or Milton will ever imagine. Over the next three days, more than a hundred thousand people will die.

  And then he’s sitting on a crowded wooden bleacher, beneath the big top of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. It’s a humid summer day in July of 1944, and far overhead, the Flying Wallendas have just begun their trapeze act. In only a few seconds, the tent will begin to burn. The canvas has been waterproofed with a mixture of paraffin and white gasoline. In less than eight minutes, the tent will be consumed, and the melting paraffin wax will drip down like a rain of napalm upon the heads of the 6,800 people trying to escape the fire. Near the end, Billy thinks he’s hearing wild animals screaming, but no, she says, no, those are human voices. Not a single one of the cats or elephants or camels was killed that day.

  ‘Enough,’ he whispers, and tumbles from that day to another. But he doesn’t tumble very far this time. Not so very far at all. Hardly more than a year, and it’s August 6th, 1945, Hiroshima, and somehow Billy is not vaporised when the atomic bomb code-named ‘Little Boy’ detonates 1,900 feet overhead. The subsequent fireball reduces sand and glass to bubbling, viscous pools, and everything burns. Some of the 140,000 who die are so completely obliterated that they leave behind only shadows on bridges and the sides of buildings. Some leave even less than that.

  And it does not matter how many times or how desperately he asks that she make it stop. He cries out and he screams and he sobs, and the immolations unfolding behind his eyelids, inside his skull, continue unabated.

  ‘I was there,’ she says. ‘For every one, I was there. I carry the memories, and this is my gift to you.’

  April 18th, 1906, and, in San Francisco, more than 3,000 perish in the earthquake and firestorm that proceeds it.

  Dresden, Germany, a few minutes past midnight on the morning of February 14th, 1945, the holy day of Ash Wednesday, and hundreds of British bombers drop hundreds of tons of high explosives and incendiary devices on the seventh largest city of the Fatherland. Billy huddles in the largest of the public air-raid shelters, below the central train station, him and 60,000 others. Almost all of them will be dead soon. By sunrise, much of the city will be at the mercy of a fire whose temperatures will peak at more than 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit. He watches, unable to turn away, and is aware that the woman who calls herself Aiden is somewhere nearby. Near enough that he can hear her as she reads words a survivor will someday put to paper.

  ‘We saw terrible things,’ she reads, ‘cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from.’

  ‘I do not know why you are showing me this,’ he says, shouting to be heard above the cacophony of explosions and screams.

  ‘Yes,’ she whispers, and he hears her perfectly well. ‘You know precisely why.’

  And there is more, conflagrations beyond reckoning, though, later, he will try to write them all down: the burning of Atlanta, as ordered by Union General William Tecumseh Sherman. October 8th, 1871, and on the same day as the Great Chicago Fire, the town of Peshtigo Wisconsin, burns, along with the Michigan towns of Holland, Manistee and Port Huron. Hundreds die in Chicago, and in Peshtigo, men and women who try to seek refuge from the heat in the river that divides the town in two are boiled alive. The firestorm generates a tornado, flinging houses and boxcars into the air like incandescent toys …

  ‘Open your eyes,’ she says, and he does. And there’s only the dingy motel room now, the murmur of the television and the naked girl straddling him. He’s sobbing, and she watches him as one might watch some outlandish phenomenon that can never truly be understood. She climbs off him, and Billy sits weeping on the edge of the bed. Almost fifteen minutes pass before he says anything.

  ‘I won’t do it again,’ he says. ‘I promise. I won’t ever fucking do it, not ever again.’

  And she laughs, and it sounds like steam escaping a punctured pipe. A laugh like a thunder crack, that laugh, like lightning finding its mark.

  ‘I didn’t come to stop you, Billy. I came to be sure you’d never stop.’

  His mouth tastes like cinders, and when he blinks and wipes his eyes, the air dances with the afterimages of a trillion embers sparkling against the backdrop of innumerable smoky skies.

  ‘I didn’t think I’d have to explain that part,’ she says, remembering all the ones who have knelt at her feet and grovelled and, after she was done with them, begged for still more revelations.

  ‘I was only fourteen the first time,’ he says again.

  ‘I know. You’ve done well, I think. You’ll do great deeds before you’re finished.’

  And then she dresses, except for her shoes, which she carries, and leaves him alone in the room. No longer calling herself Aiden, the woman who doesn’t know how or where or why it began, or even when, walks across the parking lot. She passes his car, and the homemade pipe bomb hidden in the trunk, packed snugly beneath the spare tyre, in its locked aluminium carrying case. She’ll be in Sioux City when it goes off, of course. But right now, she needs to walk. The eastern horizon is going shades of pink and violet as the world rolls towards a new day, and by the time she reaches the northbound lane of the Interstate, she’s begun telling herself a new story, about the phoenix that might have been her mother, and how she helped the great bird build a nest of frankincense and myrrh twigs. How she set the nest ablaze …

  CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN is the author of several novels, including Low Red Moon, Daughter of Hounds and The Red Tree, which was nominated for both the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy Awards. Her latest novel, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, is published by Penguin.

  Since 2000, her shorter tales of the weird, fantastic and macabre have been collected in several volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder, From Weird and Distant Shores, To Charles Fort with Love, Alabaster, A is for Alien and The Ammonite Violin & Others. Subterranean Press has recently released a retrospective of her early writing, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One).

  Kiernan lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her partner Kathryn. She is currently working on her next two novels, Blood Oranges and Blue Canary.

  ‘Almost always, it’s hard for me to point to any single source of inspiration for any given story,’ she reveals. ‘I need to write a story. I sit down and write a story. I stare at the page, and something comes to me. Or, the vaguest germ of something occurs to me, and I sit down and make a story out of it. I find the story I need to write.

  ‘In the case of “Charcloth, Firesteel and Flint” – which would make a fine name for a demonic law firm – I have nothing but a few faint inklings as to why I wrote this story when I wrote this story.

  ‘I do know that, for many years, I’ve wanted to write a story about the 1871 Peshtigo Fire, which was really a very odd and terrible event, occurring at precisely the same time as the Great Chicago Fire and the Point Huron Fire, but so many miles apart. And this found its way into the story.

  ‘How can we not be fascinated with fire, with its destructive capability when it’s no longer under our control, or when it’s used as a weapon? Many, many things in my head, writing this, all coalescing into the character of a woman who’s drawn to fires before they occur.’

  Ghosts with Teeth

  —PETER CROWTHER—

  Horror of horrors! To remove the bones

  and let the girls still live!

  —‘The House of Horror’

  by Seabury Quinn

  ‘Boo!’

  —Spooky, the Tuff Little Ghost

  Prolo
gue

  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.

  And then it all started to come back.

  I

  The Previous Day.

  Tuboise, ME – and that’s Tuh-bwah and not Two boys – isn’t a town, not as such. It’s a bend in the road: a comma between words, a fart between stools … the middle film in a trilogy. A bona fide dalliance between pieces of real business, like Portland and Bangor, both a half-hour’s drive away.