Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

was still wet, the air humid. Tony glanced over his shoulder at the warehouse entrance. The two doormen returned his gaze. Behind them, Guy hung upside down, suspended by his feet on a length of chain, swinging back and forth like a clock pendulum.

“Do you feel it?” Guy asked, his voice pitched high, almost hysterical.

And in that moment, the emptiness within him opened up like a bottomless well. Tony felt himself standing by the well, leaning out over the edge, wind whistling by his ears. He licked his lips, searching for the taste of blood. His erection strained as if it wanted to break out of its confines and search for satisfaction.

“You want it?” Guy teased. “Tell me what that’s like, to want it. To want the nothingness. The extinction. Tell me first, what that emptiness is like. It’s so hard when you’re in it to understand. Tell me what the void is like, from the outside. Then tell me what it feels like to want it.”

“Tomorrow night,” Tony answered, his voice quavering. After you show me the games I’ll really like. After I become a player.

“Tomorrow night, sir,” the Asian doorman replied, with a slight bow. Guy was gone.

Tony went back to his car and drove home. He did not bother picking up his mail or answering his telephone messages. Though his fear was gone and he was tired, he still had trouble falling asleep. Excitement kept him up, until he began to relax as he gently stroked the back of his left hand with his thumb. Slowly, he fell asleep while caressing Painfreak’s invisible marks on his flesh.

Lover Doll

Wayne Allen Sallee

“Lover Doll” was first published in Little Deaths, edited by Ellen Datlow and published by TOR in 1994.

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Wayne’s most recent collection is Fiends By Torchlight, which was published by Annihilation Press in 2007, and one of the original stories, “High Moon,” will be reprinted in Best Horror of The 21st Century: The First Decade (Wicker Park Press). “Rail Rider” appeared in J. N. Williamson’s The Illustrated Masques (Gauntlet Press), and his novel, The Holy Terror, and a collection from 1995, With Wounds Still Wet, are available on Kindle (CrossRoads Press). His meta memoir, Proactive Contrition, and Can I End Now? are both exclusive works published in Germany by Blitz Verlag. He is currently writing a crime novel, City With No Second Chances, and a series of dystopian stories with their beginnings set in the recent future fraught of our current political climate. His website is www.wayneallensallee.com and his blog is www.frankenstein1959.blogspot.com.

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This is my favorite story in that the first part is almost entirely true, drawn from my childhood in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago.

She is asleep.

It is Memorial Day 1994, and perhaps it is fitting that I dwell on my past. Our past.

I stare out the window, the one facing east. Where dawn will eventually take away the night with cancerous washes of summer sun and lake breezes. The plasma-coloured digital clock blinks in three-second intervals. It is 4:57 a.m.

Celandine snuggles a little closer to me, caught up in her REM dreams. She tells me that she dreams in black and white. We rent an apartment on Wolcott Street, a common area for gangster films shot here in the forties and fifties. I dream in colour, and in my dreams, it always seems to be the hours before dawn. Like now. Streets deserted. My mind alert. I can hear my heartbeat in my nostrils, in my ears.

Celly has the sheets pulled down to her waist. She sleeps in the nude. I wear shorts and an old t-shirt. I hear soft snoring, a peaceful sound. Soft waves hitting the shores of Fullerton Beach.

I look over, recognizing the sound. More nasal than Celly’s.

The vestigial twin growing out of my lover’s ribcage is the one who is snoring.

The gentle sounds bring back memories.

I. 1959 Babies

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places—Hemingway

Crystal Street in those days was a world removed from the gang territory it is now. There were no burned-out tenements, no need for orange signs in each window of the three-flats telling passers-by that they were treading through a Neighbourhood Crime Watch Zone. There were social clubs. But we all saw The Blackboard Jungle and knew things were on the verge of change.

My parents were living off Crystal and Washtenaw when I was born. It was a Polish neighbourhood, the kind where nobody ever moved. They just died, and after that, their sons and daughters stayed until they married and moved to a bigger house in Bucktown or Logan Square. Or maybe they died as well.

The summer of 1959 was sweltering. I recall hearing this much later in my life from relatives who had gone to the World Series game to see the White Sox. It was ninety-eight degrees on my birthdate, September ninth.

My mother and two of her friends from the radium watch plant she worked at—painting the dials with the luminous ink, in ten-hour shifts—had gone up and down Division and Milwaukee to the shows to get out of the heat that summer. The Banner, The Royal, the Biltmore; they were all air-conditioned.

My mother had to work into her second trimester; back then, my father was pulling in barely enough to feed a family of two working as a security guard at RB’s, a now-defunct department store on Milwaukee. I fondly remember getting a Whamm-O Monster Magnet and a Rock-’em Sock-’em Robot from the store in honour of kindergarten graduation.

My father let me pick out whatever I wanted, and by the time I was six, the word monster was embedded in my brain.

My umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck when I was born, and I’m certain my mother’s exposure to the radium didn’t help. (The factory was eventually closed, after many years of court battles; if you stand on Ogden Avenue overpass, you can still look down and see the ghoulish lime-green glow in those windows that haven’t been painted black.)

In September of 1959, my mother and her friends went to the Biltmore on Division to see the premiere of Ben Hur. I’ve been told that she went into labour with me then and there.

The ambulance made it to Lutheran Deaconess in time. When I made my entrance into the world, my face was blue and there were traces of blood coming from my nose and ears. To give you an idea of how limited we were medically just thirty-five years ago, all the doctors could really tell my parents was that I had a degenerative muscle disease caused by trauma to the womb.

My mother blamed herself for many years.

When I was in grade school, one of the class trips was to Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum in Oldtown, where there was an exhibit of freaks from the Barnum & Bailey circus. Freaks was actually Phineas Barnum’s get-rich-quick term. His partner later referred to people like me and Celandine as “human curiosities.” Me with my bulging head and wrap-around eyes, Celly with the second head sticking out of her ribcage.

One of the displays was for Tom Thumb. His mother truly believed her son’s diminutiveness was caused by grief she held over her puppy drowning while she carried Charlie, the boy’s real name. I went home and told my mother this story, how Tom Thumb became rich and married a woman who told him he was just as beautiful as