Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

I asked him what the hell he was talking about.

He told me that halfway back to the Plaza, I got out of the cab and said I wanted to go back to Belladonna’s. Then he told me to go do something about my breath.

* * *

We got back to Denver okay. Part of me wanted to go back to Vegas, to Celly. But I was embarrassed, shocked, even sickened at the depths I had lowered myself to. I took some spare Tegretol for my headaches. I tried for months to forget what I had seen at Belladonna’s.

I watched the WGN superstation for Chicago news after the Cubs and Bulls games. Read about The Painkiller, killing wheelchair victims in the Loop back in Chicago in late ’88, and of Richard Speck (still unrepentant) dying a day before his fiftieth birthday, bloated from distended bowel, although the cause of death was listed as emphysema, in December 1991. Everyone felt cheated that the drifter who had mutilated eight nurses in 1966— around the time Celly and I were getting to know each other better—got off so easily.

Norm Brady and I hung around The Lion’s Lair in the evenings and I spent my days rereading old medical textbooks from the Denver Library on Seventeenth. I also read the Rocky Mountain News, my native city showing up increasingly as the civil war in the former nation of Yugoslavia continued unabated. My home town was indeed a melting pot, much of the coverage came from the Chicago wire services. Items about the Midwest in general, the Mississippi flooding from the Quad Cities to St. Louis, a crazed gunman killing patrons at a Kenosha, Wisconsin restaurant. A skinhead shooting a plastic surgeon who “dared” change someone’s Aryan features; what would the neo-Nazi think of myself or Celly?

I dreamt about hot neon the colour of clotted blood, of deformed faces that looked as if they had been squeezed between unrelenting elevator doors. Sometimes I would realize that I had been awake and staring into a mirror.

Occasionally, I would come across copies of The Chicago Tribune at the library. Usually they only carried West Coast papers like the Seattle Intelligencer or the Vallejo Vestry.

One day six months ago, I read of a scandal involving a prominent Chicago network newswoman. Rumours circulated of a lesbian affair with a woman with an acardiac twin. This particular shit was slung because the woman was up for a national news desk spot. But, still. I flew back on United to see if the Tomeis were back in town.

Josephine and Celandine had been back in Chicago since the summer of 1991. Someone besides me had seen her in Vegas and knew an even better way to use her. A local writer exploited her for shock value in one of his novels, saying that she had become one of the highest paid call girls in the city, and that the head under the ribcage was dead and often mutilated.

The guy in Vegas was right. The head feels no pain.

But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to fix it.

* * *

She is asleep.

I stare out the window, the one facing east. Josephine Tomei died this past Christmas. It is just me and Celandine. I called Norm and told him I had family matters to take care of here.

I left things open.

She is asleep because she still is taking the drugs that she started on in Vegas. The only reason she hasn’t lost all of her self-esteem. I swear I will get her straight. It is 5:30 and the sun is coming up.

I play the Elvis soundtrack to Jailhouse Rock. “I Wanna Be Free”; the title song. Finally, “Lover Doll.”

I listen to the younger, pre-bloat King of Rock ’n Roll, singing about how he loves his lover doll madly.

I pull the sheets gently away from Celandine’s drugged form. The head is still watching me. Dawn’s light slashes a diagonal across Celly’s black pubic hair. I pull off my shorts.

I reach forward, kissing Celly’s closed mouth. It doesn’t open. I lick her breast, the left one, then the right.

I reach into her cunt with my hand, one finger at a time. I can put three fingers in comfortably. She does not respond. My dick is still limp.

“… let me be your lover boy …”

I take my fingers out of Celandine and stroke the head’s hair. Its mouth opens. The eyes have a certain curiosity.

I swear I will get Celly off the drugs, get our lives together. Take her back to Denver with me.

I move towards the head, my dick growing to half-mast. There is early morning traffic outside. In the real world. Our real world.

Straddling Celly’s sleeping body in a half-assed way, one foot on the ground, the other leg’s knee near her armpit. Positioning myself over the head. Guiding my dick into its mouth.

It is not hard to believe that it begins sucking.

(For Denise Szostak)

The Spirit Wolves

Charlee Jacob

“The Spirit Wolves” was first published in Into the Darkness #4, 1995.

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Charlee Jacob has published in the horror field for twenty years. Once a prolific writer, her disabilities and multitude of meds have forced her to stop writing. For a bibliography of her work, see her website at charleejacob.com

Five years ago when Milo was only thirteen he cut his mother’s old bear rug into strips and then sewed these pieces to his flesh. It had taken the better part of one night of suppressing his cries of pain as he threaded the needle time and again with thick woolen thread and pushed it through in loop after loop to secure the fur to his body. It had become quite slippery with his blood but this only served to give it and him a magical sheen when he looked into the mirror afterward.

I have entered the pelt of an animal.

I have become the beast.

Then he ran away to join Fatima’s Freak Tent outside the city limits. All the comely mutant ladies welcomed him, clucking and tittering with a singsong babble of delight. They touched him with their stumps and flippers, ran their bearded cheeks across his beardless ones, held fast his gasping face between their breasts that were either skeletal or mammoth mounds of perfumed fat. They cooed over Milo’s ruined flesh and counterfeit hide, crawling around him on all fours, proclaiming,

“You are the king of the wolves!”

Then his mother came to drive him home before her with a stick, haranguing him every mile of the way.

If only she’d beaten him with her own hands, scratched at him until he bled. But she never touched him.

Had she ever touched him? Milo couldn’t remember the feel of her hands ever. She pushed food at him, had even pushed the bottle toward him when he was a baby. Had left him, naked for days at a time, in his own excrement, before finally hosing him down.

But she must have touched him at some time. To teach him to walk, to take care of himself so that she wouldn’t have to make contact. He didn’t remember.

Had he wanted to be an animal? He’d seen the tantalizing women of Fatima’s and he needed to be touched. He had always been too perfect. Milo wasn’t only a handsome boy, he was a flawless beauty. It might have made him popular in his exquisiteness if it hadn’t been such a dark beauty, so keenly edged that he seemed to have been