Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

going to death/butchershop chic/a little off the top …?

Her head comes off with ease, though the axe keeps slipping in your blood-greased hands. Like the cries of a kitten down a well, the beheaded woman’s mewling echoes somewhere in your backroombrain, psychic screams from a locked corridor. Then dead silence. You start to hum a tuneless stream of bluenotes as you sculpt meat & bone. With your eyes ablaze with blue fire, it’s easy to work in the dark.

He/you/she/IT … spiritflesh bliss blowing back eons … back to the bigfucking bang!

From your angle-less corner of the blinding blue galaxy you feel her ghost fly away.

You work blind, by feel, by the sound of rending flesh & grinding bone, by the light of an inner blue radiance, out where interstellar radio messages bleed into curved mirrors & broken space & time, keying a haunted memory of idiotic phone conversations breaking into your old reality like that CB breaker-breaker shit coming out of your TV & making you want to find those rednecked motherfuckers & make them bleed like stuck pigs. Ah, sweet memories. Whose memories …?

Bad to the last bone. Blistering blue heat bending mirrors, mirrors catching the bluenotes you hum as you do your best work. Monster art. Opening soon at your guerilla theater.

* * *

The satellite’s orbit begins to decay as it passes over Manila. Its inevitable entrance by fire into Earth’s dense atmosphere has not yet been calculated by those paid to monitor such things; when the Com-Sat’s demise is plotted, it will be deemed one more hunk of expensive space junk likely to shed a minimum of dangerous debris upon the planet. Scant minutes later, the doomed satellite passes high above & to the south of Hong Kong, &, eventually, over Miami, where Lucy Nation & Pynchon are coupling aboard her yacht Hellraiser, & several miles inland, where the squad car lurches to a stop in front of the coffee house 90 Night. If the satellite’s onboard equipment were still operational, its camera could snap pictures of the bloody, contorted corpse hanging by a rope from the roof of the coffee house, could zoom in on the horrified & sickened faces of some of the individuals in the crowd, gathered to bear witness to the bizarre abominations. But the Com-Sat is shut down, making its silent way to inevitable destruction somewhere over an ocean of the southern hemisphere, sometime after it flashes by the beaches of Galveston, its bulk visible only as a brilliant pinpoint above the extreme horizon where the sea meets sky …

It was the biggest goddamn fly he had ever seen. Not a horsefly, not a green fly, but a goddamn housefly so big that Officer Robbins thought it must be a goddamn mutant, what with all the pollution & shit in the air. & why was it, in unflylike behavior, still out making its rounds in the dead of night …?

Now he’s staring into the bloody cavern that the fly disappeared into a moment ago. That’s what the gaping wound in the girl’s chest reminds him of — a raw cavern. Christ! It could be two girls, Robbins thinks, the way all the body parts are hanging there, oozing all that gore & shit, the hand jammed up her ass so it looks like she’s shitting a fucking severed arm, & the head, oh Jesus, the head clamped between the thighs like she’s giving birth to her own fucking head. Some sicko had a field day with this poor babe. From what’s visible of her face she was probably a looker. Before the butcher worked her over.

A guy in a business suit steps up for a better look at the mutilated thing twisting a little on the rope as the salt-edged breeze from the shore seems to invest it with a momentary, mocking breath of pseudo-life.

“Get back,” Robbins orders the wide-eyed suit. “Something drops off her, you get it smack in the face.” He turns to the small crowd of onlookers & closet ghouls & says, “Everybody stay back. This ain’t a sideshow. Jesus!”

He lights a cigar & waits for the homicide boys to arrive. While he waits, he watches for that goddamned mutant fly to come out of that bloodyfucking cave.

Xipe EDWARD LEE

“Xipe” first appeared in The Barrelhouse: Excursions into the Unknown, Winter 1993, and later published in his collection The Ushers and Other Stories by Obsidian Books, May 1999.

* * *

Edward Lee is the author of almost fifty books and numerous short stories. Several of his properties have been optioned for film, while Header was released on DVD in 2009; also, he has been published in Germany, England, Romania, Greece, and Austria. Recent releases include Bullet Through Your Face and Brain Cheese Buffet (story collections), Header 2, and the hardcore Lovecraftian books The Innswich Horror, Trolley No. 1852, Pages Torn From A Travel Journal, Going Monstering, and Haunter of the Threshold. Upcoming works include the novel Header 3, the Lovecraftian novella The Dunwich Romance, and the story collection Carnal Surgery. Lee lives in Largo, Florida.

The smile — vast, empty — oozed across the back of his mind. Pudgy hands reached out for him through a rain of blood.

Smith’s eyes snapped open. The ceiling was rushing past; he was flat on his back. Dark faces, like blobs, hovered over him. He heard casters squeal and bottles clink.

A voice, a man’s, exclaimed: “Dese prisa!” Smith had a pretty good idea he was going to die. The smile again, huge, empty — what was it? He closed his eyes and saw a muzzle flash, smelled cordite. He saw twin figures falling through dark. Then he heard a scream — his own.

A sign loomed: STAFF ONLY/PERSONAL UNICAMENTE. Doors parted clumsily. The gurney wheeled into a padded elevator, and at once the breathless, jagged motion ceased.

Images dripped back into his head: memories. Smith’s heart shimmied.

I was set up, he thought, astonished. That swine Ramirez, he must’ve turned. The guy must’ve gotten himself fingered and was trying to deal his way out. There’d been a fed in the room, hadn’t there?

More pieces fell into place: a clawing weight on his back, a window bursting, the unmistakable kick of a.38 full of hot loads. But Smith carried a Glock. Did I shoot a Justice agent tonight? With his own piece? And good luck to that scum Ramirez if he thought he could spin on Vinchetti’s network. Smith couldn’t remember a whole lot, but he was sure of one thing: Ramirez was dead.

The elevator hummed. Smith felt dreamy. “What hospital is this?”

“San Cristobal de la Gras, Meester Smeeth,” said the blurred doctor. “We are taking you to where you will be safe.”

Great, Smith mused. More Mexicans. But what could he expect down here? At first he thought they must be taking him to the jail wing, but then a nurse said in a warm whisper, “The government men do not know you’re here.” She squeezed his hand. “We will protect you.”

Smith felt exorcized. Vinchetti must’ve arranged this, must’ve paid off the right people to have Ramirez protected. Otherwise, Justice would be all over the place.

Thank God, he thought.

Then, in a jolt, he remembered the rest. The face behind the empty smile, and the name.

Xipe.

* * *

“It’s Xipe,” said the barkeep.

Smith was staring at the tiny stone figure which sat atop the register. It was black. It looked like a Buddha with a feathered headdress. Squatting, it held its arms out and smiled.

“What?” Smith said.

The keep, rail-thin, enthused in a thick Mexican accent. “Xipe protects the faithful. He is the Giver of the