Hotter Blood: More Tales of Erotic Horror

hoops could be driven through. From the angle of her broken neck, he figured she had hung herself. The kids must have found her, taken her down.

He touched his wife's dead face: eyelids, cheeks, chin. Her skin felt like warm putty, as though it might adhere to his fingertips and pull away like flesh taffy when he removed his hand.

'Don't touch her! You'll wake her up.'

Blair stalked into the room. She kept her eyes fixed on the twirling snow outside the window, not looking at the contents of the bed.

'I told her she could take a nap till dinner, then do her homework. You can help her with her algebra.'

'Christ Jesus, what —?'

'We have to raise her right, you know. Do the right thing. Parenting isn't easy.'

The words were achingly familiar. He'd uttered them himself or some pious variation in the late-night conferences with Jess before the two of them stopped speaking in any meaningful way, before Radell and Johnnie Walker became the official consorts.

'Jesus, what's happened? Why didn't you tell me?'

'She probably didn't think you'd give a fuck,' said Woody, stepping into the room beside his sister. He was wearing Derek's gabardine suit — much too big for him — and the paisley tie Blair had given Derek last Father's Day. In one hand, he held the wooden bat that had hit the winning home run against Martin Luther High the spring before.

Blair looked her brother fondly up and down and made a little tie-straightening gesture, which Woody ignored.

'Goddammit, Woody, what's happened?'

'We found her last night. She'd been on the phone with your girlfriend. I listened in on the extension for a while. Your bitch was telling Mom about the time you picked her up and carried her around the hotel room, fucking all the way —»

'Stop it.'

' — and how you have this favorite thing she does to you with high heels —»

'Stop!'

' — and how you keep your stash of porno locked up in a briefcase in —»

'Nooo!'

He lurched up from Jess's body, screaming in his agony, and saw, an instant before he felt it, the worse and coming agony as Woody raised the bat and swung it. Crack! A brutal, lancing pain slashed up his arm, deadening it to the elbow. The next blow pulverized his kneecap, the third broke ribs. And still the muscled arms were coming up, again and again. The shadow of the bat loomed on the ceiling…

'It's good the children are asleep now,' said Blair as she put dinner on the table.

'Blair, come out of it,' said Woody. 'It's Mom and Dad up there. They're dead. We killed them both. You gotta hold on to reality.'

'You mustn't say such awful things, even kidding. No one's dead. The children are just tired.' She spooned lima beans onto his plate. 'Do you think we'll be good parents? I hope we will. Maybe we should have another child.'

She moved to where her brother stood gazing out at the deepening snow and snuggled up against him, cooing sounds of comfort both maternal and seductive. 'Woody?' she whispered finally. 'We're all we have now. Please?'

Her brother gave a little sigh, took her in his arms and kissed her. The snow fell and they were all alone.

PEARLDOLL John Shirley

It was one of those nights that releases trapped odors. The August heat steamed the reek of rotten fast-food grease and urine from the alley behind the Fatburger place on Santa Monica Boulevard. It made the smog seem to coagulate in the air, so a breeze that should have been a relief reeked of benzene and monoxides and ozone. The heat brought out the deepest layers of human sourness from the tramps slouching in the doorways. When you passed the discos, it summoned the hidden tincture of animal glands in the perfume of the fantastically coiffed ladies who stepped out of white limos, the underscent of lab-animal suffering and caustic chemicals in the cologne worn by their golden-chained escorts. It seemed to emphasize the cyanide and carcinogenic tars in cigarette smoke; it cooked the sewage under the streets…

And the semen left over in your pussy, or so Candy thought.

She'd douched after that creep Guido had come in her, but she couldn't quite get it all out, imagined she could smell it cooking and curdling in her…

It's too fucking hot.

She was walking down Santa Monica Boulevard, wishing she hadn't worn pumps, wondering if maybe there were some flats in the trunk of her car she could put on.

Sometimes you can't remember a dream — until later on. When something calls it up. Prompts it from the back of your head somewhere. She was passing a boutique, tight stripped-back leather skirts and tops for women in the window. Standing in front of it were these two skinny blond hustlers. One was wearing a Levi's jacket with some sort of rock-band emblem on the back. And she heard that one talk about the Face Eater. 'It's no shit, Face Eater got Butterbuns and Darla, got both of 'em, put 'em on a pentagram thing and tied 'em down and ate their fuckin' faces, man —»

'Bullshit,' the other guy squeaked.

'No, for real, dude!'

For real? She'd always thought the Face Eater was something in a movie or… but now that she thought about it, she remembered seeing some headlines… Some sick 'Night Stalker' type in Hollywood who… She didn't even want to think about it. She glanced at the hustler as she passed to see if the guy was, like, serious or what. He looked serious… And then she saw the window reflection, and it made her stomach jump like a scared cat. Because it was something she'd seen in a dream. A dream about Frank. The snarling, toothy, bloody mouth superimposed over a girl's face. Took her a full two seconds to realize it was a reflection of the rock-band logo — a wide-open shark's mouth — superimposed by reflection against the face of a mannequin in the store window. She'd seen that in a dream, hadn't she? A dream about Frank? Frank… She tried to remember… and couldn't quite.

Hurrying past the store, she glanced up at a different mannequin in another store window — and thought she saw another reflected face, this time superimposed over the mannequin's crotch…

Frank's face. She turned and looked for the source of the reflection. He wasn't there.

Big surprise. He couldn't be there. Frank was dead.

She took a long, ragged breath, and walked on. Think about something else.

She passed the black dude with the badly conked hair who was selling his phony sensimilla, which was just California pot dusted with PCP, and her feet hurt, and she still couldn't make up her mind what bar to go to… when she saw Frank. For real this time.

God damn it, Frank, you're dead.

She stopped in front of Bleeding Heart Records, under the big animated bleeding-heart logo, neon blood dripping on her head, and stared down the street at Frank Cormanstadt, and said, 'Oh I'm sure. I mean is this too weird or what?' to herself. Bleeding Heart Records was open, it's open late, and Metallica was smacking the air from the record-store speakers. She guessed it was one of those Arthur Koestler synchronicity things her spacey brother Buster talked about because they're talking about the dead on the song — and here comes Frank.

Okay, so he's not dead. After all, she never saw his body, never heard it from anyone but people on the street. But it just felt so right she never questioned it. I mean, everyone was expecting Frank to die, from one thing or another, right? Drunks or drinking and driving or something. AIDS, maybe, from some whore.

But Frank was coming down the street wearing a kind of David Byrne oversize suit, forties-type thing, blocky