Masters of Horror (34 page)

“
That’s the first ordinary thing you’ve said,” the doctor cracked. “What do you do for a living, Arthur? Do you have a job?”

“
No.”

“
Does anyone support you?”

He vehemently denied this.

“
How do you survive?”

“
I’m a klepto.”

“
You shoplift?”

“
I snatch purses from old ladies.”

“
You have a purse fetish?”

“
It isn’t a fetish. Don’t make it sordid. I collect them,” he pouted.

“
As a hobby?”

Arthur bobbed affirmation. “Pebbles,” he bluntly asserted.

“
Collecting stones isn’t unusual. Hobbies can be rewarding.”

“
Not nice stones. Plain ugly gravel,” he insisted. “And pencil shavings. I grind them myself. I don’t even use the pencils. It’s wasteful. I’m single-handedly destroying the forests!” he complained.

“
That is a problem,” she agreed.

“
Are you humoring me?”

“
No. But these things aren’t
terrible
, Arthur.”

“
I eat too many marshmallows! It’s all I eat.”

She smirked. “That is bad. For your health. But it isn’t terrible.”

Arthur’s mood plunged. “I won’t be patronized!!!” he yelped. Fists clenched in fury, marching frantically, the man glanced at the head on the desk. Its eyes seemed to be watching him. Accusing.

“
I’m afraid, Mister Chiaroscuro, your time is up.” The psychiatrist adopted a formal tone.

“
It’s
Chiaroscoro
!” he railed.

“
I distinctly heard Chiaroscuro on the phone,” Doctor Winnow refuted.

“
I think I know my own name!” Arthur heatedly contended.

“
Well, do you or don’t you?” Mildred scorned.

Arthur halted, shifting to a baffled disposition. “I haven’t told you why I’m here yet,” he said with a peevish flare of indignation.

“
It doesn’t matter. You’re clearly beyond help,” the doctor dismissed.

Arthur gawped at her forlornly.

“
I’m going to share a secret.” Mildred walked to the mystery door and grasped the knob. “I have a collection too.” She wrenched the door wide.

Human heads
tumbled forth, preserved with lacquer, rolling in every direction. Various faces wore masks of pain. A number were frozen in terror.

Jaw flapping, Arthur uttered an astonished “No!”

“
It’s actually a compulsion,” Doctor Winnow chortled.

Bleating, a palm clamping his mouth, Arthur pointed to the head mounted on the desk.
It wasn’t a statue!

The psychiatrist savored his epiphany . . . then grew impatient. He should have fainted, or been reduced to a shuddering wreck if she had gauged him correctly. Sometimes she commanded a victim to swallow sedatives and call her in the morning. They succumbed to a drugged stupor and were easily overpowered. This one, she estimated, could be subdued by shocking him. But he wasn’t cooperating.

She had a similar case last week. A green-clad woman who thought she was turning into a frog. She wouldn’t take the pills. She didn’t have the brains to be alarmed. She kept hopping around. Mildred had to pursue her until they were exhausted. She then tried to strangle the woman into submission. The loon thrashed so violently, she knocked Mildred against her desk. The doctor hit her head. Briefly unconscious, she woke to behold that her prey had departed. Mildred unsteadily tracked the nut to a park. The silly nitwit was half-jumping, half-loping through the grass. They wrestled and clawed, grappling for dominance. Bums spectated, whistling and wagering. Mildred finally tugged off a shoe and was about to hammer the woman’s cranium but hesitated, reluctant to damage the specimen. It was a sensible shoe, she decided. And clobbered the frog-lady till her hair was black and blue.

She’d better not have any grief tonight! She was getting a migraine.

“
There were ancient cultures that displayed the heads of their bravest and strongest enemies as trophies,” she expounded, sidling to her desk where a knife was stashed as a precaution. “I prize the warped minds of my most disturbed patients. It’s the supreme conquest. The ultimate addiction! We all have our needs, Mister Chiaroscuro, and I need your beautiful addled head. It isn’t doing
you
much good.” She scraped out a drawer to wield a brass letter opener.

“
You’ll be interested to note I’m a Cat Lady also,” she preened. “My home is filled with felines. Except for the aviary. I’m a bird-lover as well. Raptors and owls. If I’m not careful my house could become a war zone. Fur and feathers flying.”

Composure regained, Arthur reached beneath his overcoat and withdrew a sword.

Mildred released her meager blade. It landed on the floor.

A grin split the patient’s narrow countenance. “What do you do with the rest of them?” he avidly inquired. “The bodies? I collect those. From the neck down. It began with mannequins. I would smuggle them from stores. They were my friends. My peers. But I couldn’t tolerate their eyes, unblinking, always looking at me day and night. So I disposed of the upper portions. Eventually I graduated to cadavers, looting them from cemeteries, digging up graves, leaving the heads in the coffins. Their bodies smelled awful. I had to switch to homicide and stow my companions in a freezer at night. They stay fresh longer. There’s just the thorny predicament of what to do with the heads!”

The serial slashers locked gazes. They were the perfect couple! If only they weren’t driven to kill.

The rapture of discovery and connection faded.

Defenseless, the doctor wisely fled. She pulled the bookcase ajar and escaped the office. Arthur chased her, roaring, his lengthy saber brandished aloft.

His initial victim had been the deaf man who never smiled. Who spoke with his fingers, coiled into rocks, and vented his frustrations on an innocent son—a child unfairly blamed for his own mother’s death.

Although she had been killed in a cyclone! Struck by a refrigerator with wings.

The son had pleaded for years to be loved, respected, forgiven for an accident that wasn’t his fault. The tyrant never listened to reason. Of course, the old man
was
deaf . . .

He teased the boy, told him he would love him if he stole a purse. Only to torment him the next day with the same bribe, the same promise. Or another. Bring him cigarettes. A pair of shoes. It was always something. Another condition. Another shattered vow!

Arthur skidded at the center of a clandestine chamber lined in sheets of plastic, like painter’s drop cloths, and drums of a foul-smelling liquid, ostensibly her head glaze . . . then whirled to confront the woman.

“
This is my murder vault.” Beaming madly, Mildred clutched an axe that had been leaning near the threshold. “I’ve dubbed it my Red Room. You’ll see why in a jiffy.”

The pair of slayers swung their weapons in unison, harmoniously aiming for each other’s necks from contrasting angles. Both neglected to duck, so obsessed were they with the hoarding of people parts.

Sadly, the only cure for their addiction was to meet their match.

And their maker.

Liked Lori’s story? Check out her story collection:

OUT-OF-MIND EXPERIENCES

By Lori R. Lopez

Thirteen quirky, often humorous, sometimes twisted tales ranging from Horror to Fantasy to Science Fiction!

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Back to TOC

It’s interesting to note how many addictions start by noticing someone else’s ritual…something that’s clearly toxic and wasteful (smoking cigarettes, or freebasing comes to mind)…and then you end up doing it anyway. It’s rumored that Rick James saw another musician freebasing, and afterwards he held a band meeting and told everyone “None of us will EVER do that!”

A few days later, they were all doing it.

If you were just to simply find some angel dust, would you even know what it was? Would you be tempted to try it, having heard of the hideous strength it imposes? What if you tried it and discovered it was really…

Devil Dust

By C.D. Bennett

The night is a cruel mistress. For every secret desire granted under her dark countenance, another soul lay broken by her graces. How far must we fall before we succumb to the dark inside ourselves? Can we indeed hold on to our humanity in a world that has forgotten the very meaning of the word? Lies have become our tenets, and our currency, blood.

In the bowels of the city, in that damnable pit of squalor, where dreams suffocate under a mask of grime, where the dead pass unnoticed and unheeded, Tomas wept. Another faceless soul swallowed by destitution, another forgotten denizen of a city that tossed away its less fortunate citizens like the trash that littered its ghettos. He wept, for all he had to offer the city that deserted him were but his tears and his soul. He had a life once, a loving wife and a young son that was his greatest gift to the world. He had everything a man in this modern world could want, but like so many of us, Tomas had dreams, secret desires that the antiseptic American Dream could not fulfill. Alone there in the filth and the dark, Tomas reflected on those days lost so many months ago, his mind awash in torment.

She came into his life like a goddess draped in the passions of a thousand lifetimes. He never meant to be unfaithful to his wife, but there was something in her eyes he couldn't resist, and somewhere within her dark, longing gaze he was lost to her charms. Innocent flirtation soon gave way to a burning in his soul he had never before known, and he surrendered completely. In the months that followed, it was a secret he could no longer bear, and he came to his wife in hope of forgiveness. He would find none. She cursed his name, damned the very day they met. Her cries of anger filled the house, and from his room upstairs, Tomas' young son Jacob shut his ears to their shouting.

In the alley, Tomas clenched his fist at the memory, pounding the wet ground in anger. He smashed his fist again and again, his knuckles bleeding with each strike. In his mind, he could still see his son standing at the top of the stairs, Tomas' own gun in tow. His wife had always begged him to get that damn gun out of their house, but there it was, trembling in their ten-year-old's tiny little hands. They barely had time to scream before they heard the shot.

The memories haunted him every day, drowning him deeper into his own private hell. He lost his family, his job, his every reason to live. Tomas knelt in the filth of the alley he called home, resigning himself to watch his tears drip into a shallow pool on the ground between his legs. Let the city take his soul, he pleaded, he had nothing left.

Gunshots. They were close. Tomas snapped out of his misery. Though he had lived in the streets less than a year, he had heard this particular chorus a dozen times over. Someone was running through the abandoned warehouse just beyond Tomas’ trash-strewn hovel. He could hear the fevered clacking of shoes against wet concrete and the incoherent squelch of a police radio. Tomas backed into a corner next to a large green dumpster and tried to conceal himself in the shadows. It wouldn’t have been the first time that the police had come down to the ghetto to drive out the vagrants.