D.O.A. Extreme Horror Anthology (7 page)

“I call that piece ‘Supplication’,” the man said from behind her.

From the sound of his voice, Cassie knew he was still on the far side of the room, yet his words swirled around her shoulders and into her ears like smoke.

“To me it conveys the relationship between mankind and a higher power.” The man continued, “Or, you may find it symbolic of a victim and their oppressor.”

His voice had taken on a rather egotistic tone that Cassie didn’t much care for. She was mesmerized by the piece however.

“So you take plaster casts?” Cassie heard herself asking. “Or do you do all the sculpting by hand?”

She felt another wave of dizziness wash over her. The hands blurred, as if waving goodbye. Despite drinking the better part of a glass of ice water, all the saliva had dried up in her mouth.

When the man didn’t answer Cassie turned around to look at him. He stood at his front door. Both her host and the living room appeared fuzzy and drifted in and out of focus.

“My dear, though I am an artist, I am not a sculptor at all,” the artist replied as he padlocked the door leading back the the safety of the outside world. “I am a taxidermist.”

***

Cassie could smell a pungent chemical odor. She felt like a cork bobbing in water, but realized that though her body seemed to be in motion she could not move her arms or legs. Cassie heard soft footfalls, a rhythmic squeaking and someone’s rapid shallow breathing. She realized the breathing was her own. Her mouth felt stuffed with cotton balls. Cassie tried to open her eyes but they seemed glued shut.

Her forward momentum suddenly ceased and Cassie’s head drooped forward so that she could feel her chin on her chest.

“We shall begin our tour here,” a male voice quietly announced. Cassie’s brain reeled in confusion for several moments then the events of the afternoon snapped into focus.

Get up and run from him
! Cassie mentally commanded. She might have told herself to burst into flames or sprout wings and fly with more success. Surrounded by darkness and unable to move her limbs, Cassie could only wait. The hands of her captor caressed her shoulders and she shuddered.

“Allow me to show you what no other living person has ever seen,” the little man invited. Cassie felt his fingers slide up her cheeks and she cringed.

Light flooded in, drowning all other sensory information as she squinted at the sudden change. The self-proclaimed artist had removed her blindfold. He had apparently brought her to the end of a long hallway. To Cassie’s left a beige wall retreated away from them. To her right she saw what looked like a series of holding cells as in a prison, but without bars. She glanced down and saw that her captor had removed all of her clothing and had used leather straps to tie her arms, legs and torso to a chrome wheelchair.

The initial shock from the brightness began to wear off and the man’s carefully enunciated words gradually rose back to the surface of her consciousness. “As you will soon see, my museum is a work in progress.”

Cassie looked again at the ‘holding cells’ and realized they were actually a series of small shallow rooms designed to house her captor’s artistic creations.

What did he say he was
? Cassie thought.
A taxidermist
! She remembered. Cassie considered him to be a kidnapper, murderer and madman. But her captor obviously thought of himself as an artist above all else. And now Cassie shuddered again as she realized that he was about to force her on a guided tour of his ‘artistic’ creations.

“I adore literature,” the man was saying. “And I try to convey my appreciation with my art. Each tableau is a representation of a key moment from one of my favorite novels. This first one for instance—,” her captor abruptly wheeled her chair forward and two figures seemed to lurch into view. Cassie gasped. The artist beamed.

“Your reaction is exactly how I felt when I read the passage where Lennie kills Curley’s lovely wife by trying to stroke her hair yet accidentally breaks her neck instead!” Cassie gaped at the green glassy eyes of the slumping woman. Her gaze traveled up to the face of the hulking behemoth that held the dead woman. His bright blue glass eyes were set imperfectly in their sockets.

“That’s by design,” the artist quickly announced after following her gaze. “The man I used as my subject was the right size physically but had no mental defects. I had to compensate by adjusting the eyes to convey Lennie’s shortcomings.”

Cassie remained silent. These
were
human beings. A man and a woman who had been lured here, murdered and then stuffed to recreate something this madman had once read in a book. Their unnatural poses and contorted faces were a mockery of humanity.

“Haven’t you read Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men
?” her captor asked. Cassie shook her head. His lips pressed into a thin white line and he stepped back behind her chair. “This next display was actually my first creation.”

Cassie’s eyes swam with tears. A little boy of perhaps ten reached out with one arm into the pocket of the other figure, a man in a black cloak and top hat. The boy’s face and hands were dirty and his clothes were shabby and threadbare.

“The irony here is rather humorous and worth mentioning,” the artist prattled. “The wealthy ‘mark’ was actually a homeless transient, while my street urchin was obtained on his way home from a prestigious private school.” He grinned at Cassie as if waiting for her to share his enthusiasm. Instead she felt nausea threaten to overwhelm her. Obtained on his way home from school? Cassie didn’t want to look at the abomination on display so she gazed at her captor instead.

“Surely you must recognize this one,” he said and raised his eyebrows. “The boy is the Artful Dodger! Dicken’s
Oliver Twist
! Ring any bells?”

Cassie shook her head and the little man made a show of groaning aloud. Then he sighed and pushed her forward to the next exhibit. Cassie wrinkled her nose in surprised disgust. Two large hogs stood on hind legs on either side of a small table covered with playing cards and shot glasses. The swine’s lips were curled into malicious smirks that made them look surprisingly human. “And here are Karl and Dick,” the artist announced.

“At least they’re not humans,” Cassie whispered. It was the first time she had spoken since regaining consciousness.

The little man only scowled. “That was a joke. They’re obviously Napoleon and Snowball from George Orwell’s classic novel
Animal Farm
.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about and I want to go home now,” Cassie told him.

He gaped at her, mouth hanging open. Finally he shrilled, “For God’s sake! It’s an easy read!” Spittle flew from his mouth and Cassie felt convinced that he would lash out and strike her. Instead he angrily shoved her wheelchair forward.

Cassie saw that a wall of stone and mortar hid the next exhibit from view. “I hand-sewed the jester costume for this artistic subject myself, then hid my handiwork behind this wall that I built stone by stone,” the artist complained, “But I suppose the ingenuity of my homage to Poe’s
The Cask of Amontillado
is lost on a blond zero like yourself.”

They moved forward again and Cassie cried out, clenching her hands into helpless fists of impotent fury. A hairy, naked man sneered in glassy-eyed lust from his position on top of a grimacing teenage girl. The bed sheets lay crumpled at the foot of the bed. “I needed help getting this one just right,” the madman admitted. “So I let my ‘Humbert’ get into character first before I took his life—”

“You’re fucking insane!” Cassie shrieked. Hot tears scalded her cheeks. Fueled by vindictive rage she struggled against the straps that held her down. “This is not art! This is garbage excreted by a diseased and depraved mind!”

The little man staggered back as if she’d struck him. All the color drained from his face. For a moment it looked like his knees might buckle and her captor would sprawl onto the concrete in a dead faint. Any glimmer of hope Cassie had was immediately snuffed out as the little man instead leaned forward until their noses were almost touching. His skin was ashen but his eyes glittered with the juices of insanity and cold fury.

“You ignorant little pinhead; how DARE you criticize my art!” He straightened abruptly, chin up and chest out. “I thought you might appreciate what I have created, but I see now that I was gravely mistaken.”

He moved her chair forward for the last time. The next display was incomplete. A thirty-something man in a business suit posed awkwardly in one corner.

Her eyes skimmed over an array of liquid-filled jugs, scalpel blades, heavy duty scissors, knives, fleshing tools, and tumblers neatly arranged on a large rolling tray table without really knowing what they were. She guessed their purpose however.

The artist lifted the footrests of the wheel chair into the air and locked them into place. Did he intend to break her legs? Cassie struggled vainly and watched as he strode across the tiny room. He retrieved a large metal tube from the table. The man shook the tube, held it up to his ear and listened. Cassie heard a faint sound that reminded her of nails on a chalkboard and a squeaking that wasn’t coming from the wheelchair.

“Here’s another instance where I want to make this display as authentic as possible. I will recreate the most shocking scene in the novel. I’ll film the process for reference and that way I’ll be able to preserve you and your attacker in the most realistic pose possible.”

A sheen of sweat glistened on the artist’s forehead. He grinned like a hyena.

“Your facial expression, how much exposed organ tissue is created as a result, how your body will contort; I won’t have anything less than perfection in my final creation.”

The artist stepped forward and stood between Cassie’s outstretched naked legs. His sweaty hands struggled to twist the lid from the shaking metal tube.

If Cassie had realized what waited inside the tube and where the starving creature was headed next, she might have started screaming immediately. But Cassie disappointed the artist one final time.

She hadn’t read Bret Easton Ellis’
American Psycho
either.

Plague Hulk

Glynn Barrass

When the ship was first sighted drifting into port, the small harbor town fell into an uproar. But talk of calling in the Army or the Navy became nothing but that... talk. Town officials finally decided to alert the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, but, until such representatives arrived, the town’s general consensus was to stay away from the port.

Ash and his gang, however, formulated a different way to deal with the problem.

Using a stolen boat and dressed from head to toe in oiled leather boiler suits, their intention was to board the ship and liberate its passengers of their valuables.

Not necessarily a solution to the town’s terrible problem, but it provided a means to address the gang’s cash shortage issues.

They’d brought no weapons with them. None were needed. The ship’s occupants had been dead some twenty years. Bundled off to die in shame, their carcasses haunted the ship, one of hundreds sent adrift on the Atlantic after the plague had decimated the majority of the South East of England.

The three thieves: Ash, Terry and Will, proceeded with their mission unperturbed by anything as mundane as moral decency. Leaving the harbor’s breakwater behind, the boat was hit by one swell after another as the sea revealed
its
distaste for their mission.

“Keep it steady,” Will said, seated at the bow. In answer, the swell tossed the boat angrily in its wrath. At one particularly high leap, Terry emitted a strangled gurgle from behind his divers mask. He barely succeeded in removing it before he began to divulge slick gobs of vomit down onto the deck.

Ash, looking down at his friend’s steaming deposits, had to hold back his own rancid expulsion.

The swell continued, bumping them about wildly as they left the breakwater far behind. From his spot at the stern, Ash suffered the least from the tumult. But despite his position, Ash took his mask off in order to laugh as he witnessed Terry slip and fall over in his own vomit. His giggling fit mingled with Terry’s exclamations of disgust.

Ash’s mask fell to the floor. The respirator crackled, making the earpiece in Will’s hood shriek loudly. Will screamed.

Ash continued to laugh.

Will added his mask to those already discarded, his expression filled with dark-eyed hatred. His hair protruded comically after being restrained beneath his hood. Ash turned his appearance into another reason to laugh. Will and Terry glared; Ash hid his tear-stained face in his hands.

Will spat and swore.

Ash’s problem was that everything around him appeared far more entertaining than it actually was. Earlier he’d downed LSD and vodka with the goal of gaining the euphoria he thought he’d need to board a ship brimming with the dead.

Unfortunately, his actions also had the effect of infuriating his already nervous companions.

“How many pills did you take, dipshit?” Will said, scowling.

“Yeah, you silly, fat fuck,” Terry added, scrubbing the vomit from his leg.

Choking away his laughter, Ash wiped his face before grinning at the two. “Chill out guys, I got us here, didn’t I?”

While the three were heckling, the plague hulk had sneaked closer. It floated thirty feet away from the bow.

“Now that’s what I’m talking about,” Ash added with enthusiasm.

All heads turned to the hulk. The huge, rusted freighter, floated between the roiling swells like a diseased, water-bound pupa.

The engine complained and then roared in frustration as Ash turned the rudder towards the port side. His companions quickly removed gas-powered grapnel guns from their backpacks for use on the hulk’s rotten deck.

Will and Terry crouched and discharged their gun’s wire-cabled grapples, filling the night air with a pair of loud
pops
. Their jobs done, both grapnel guns were tied under the seats to keep the thieves’ escape route certain.