The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

of a small case. She raised her hand. Metal flashed. She drew the metal across her forehead at her hairline, then down along the edge of her cheek and jaw. She tilted her head to do the other side of her face. She wiped the metal on her skirt and laid it aside, then stood up and walked over to me, bending close. The harsh light showed a thin bloody line edging her face. I cringed back against the plank.

She leaned closer, forcing me to see only her, then grinned, baring teeth stained by tobacco and worse. Her breath stank like a wind off a sewer. She put finger and thumb to both temples and tugged downward. Muscles and veins stretched and throbbed as her skin peeled away. Bile flooded my throat, gagging me. My muscles cramped with the need to get away from her.

She freed the straps and forced my head sideways. I coughed, spitting over the side of the plank.

“Keep breathing! We can’t have you dying now.”

“Look,” I gasped. “You’ve had your fun. I’m sorry if I trespassed. Just let me out of here. You can keep your secrets. Just let me go!”

“You lie, little thief. You see your fortune made by using me, telling your world all about me. Do you think you are the first?” She dangled the flayed skin in front of my face. I jerked my head aside, bile gushing into my mouth. “I think I will allow you the answers you seek. You know art. You recognize the skills I possess even in these poor times.”

She went back to the table and bent to lift something out from under it. It was a thin plastic mask, a mockery of a human face, the kind on sale for a few dollars at Halloween. She arranged the flayed skin over it, then lifted a spray can from under the table. She shook it, then sprayed the skin. She turned to grin at me. I flinched, eyes slamming shut.

“Fixative,” she said. “When I first began, there were no such marvels. My works would just rot away. Such a waste.”

Her works? My mind clawed its way back from the horrid implication. Row upon row of them, not the source of her inspiration, but the evidence of it? She carried the rigid skin to the wall, hanging it among the lower masks. The higher ones decayed, and that rotting smell… I shoved away the frightening answers. This was no kinky punker. She was insane!

“I see you begin to understand. They are all mine, all parts of me. My only solace.”

“What about the kids at the mall?” Maybe I could talk my way out of this. The paper had run an article on a woman who escaped rape and probably death by getting her attacker to talk out his violence.

“My little friends? Poor substitutes for past glories.” She picked up her chair and sat next to me, close to the lights. I had to watch her, had to be alert for her next move, but I shrank from every glimpse of those dead eyes bulging out of the raw meat on her skull. Why wasn’t she bleeding?

“Once there were temples in my honor. Priestesses to offer sacrifice, priests only too glad to maim themselves in my honor. An army of assassins making daily offerings, bringing me new worshipers.” She sighed, exhaling the stench of old blood. “The altars were never dry. The fires, the chanting, the screams… I miss it.

“This is what I am reduced to. Imitating the games of children with no real bloodlust. I wanted to go to England. To rip the pulsing heart from their smug queen, to take vengeance for my servants slaughtered to the gods of their morality… Yet here I sit, chatting with a frightened thief. I cannot even raise a proper pyre in this modern barn. The whole place would go up. I cannot risk my faces. They are my only believers now.” She sighed again. I held my breath, turning away.

“Look at me.”

I fought until I thought my neck muscles would snap. Yet my eyes opened and my head turned. Instead of raw flesh, I stared at scabbing which grew as I watched.

“A little longer and you will see a fresh canvas for my paints. Do you know me yet? Have you guessed that I cannot do these things and be human?” She threw her head back and laughed. The sweat froze on my body. Of course. That hideous laughter was hers.

She stared down at me, a slow grin cracking the scabs. She ran her fingertips across my forehead and down my cheek.

“Why, little thief, you have given me an idea.” She went to the table. The metal flashed in her hand again. She carried it back and sat down. “You tried to capture me in your little box. You want more than my faces—you want my soul. When my word was law, such arrogance would have you dragged bodily to the temple. My priestesses would lash you to the altar and rip the skin from your body, hacking off that dangling bit of flesh you men are so proud of. Then your chest would be split and your beating heart flung on the fires to appease me!”

The masks roared their chant, filling the warehouse with the echoes of their fury. She smiled on them, then raised a hand. They quieted, their chant the pulse of an enormous heart.

“I am tired of living like a beast, alone and unworshiped. You chose to invade what little peace I had. I could simply kill you, little thief.” She stroked my hair. My skin crawled from her touch. “And yet,” she crooned, “you have brought me a gift. I see now I do not have to be alone with only my own faces. Those stupid children will delight in the lesser of my rites. When the time comes, they will join my present worshipers. How am I to reward you, when all you deserve is agonizing death?”

I screamed. I kept screaming until my throat was raw. There would be no talking her into untying me. It had to be near morning. Somebody had to hear me!

“My editor knows I’m here. I told my girlfriend where I’d be. Let me go now and I won’t even call the police! If you don’t—”

“Silence!”

My voice died in my throat. Even the masks shut up. She glared down at me, looming taller and more ferocious than the body she wore. My soul begged to run from the unholy rage flaming in her dead eyes.

“Know what all who meet me know, little thief: I am the Destroyer! All that is created comes into my hands. You are mine now, as surely as the skin I wear. For you, there is… no… hope!” She dragged the seatbelt back over my mouth and lashed it tight. She stood back as I thrashed and kicked against the bonds. No belt gave even a fraction of an inch.

“Why such fury, little thief? My gift to you is one many have died to obtain.” She held up the glittering metal. She sliced across my forehead with the scalpel. I screamed, arching up against the merciless straps. The pain was hot and sharp. She cut downward through my cheek. Red wetness dripped into my eyes. Blackness smothered me.

Dirty yellow light. No more straps, no feeling at all. Chanting all around me, from me, through me. Over and over, words whose meanings I don’t know. I can’t stop chanting.

Below me, she crouches over the body still tied to the plank. She lifts her head from her feasting and smiles with her bloody mouth.

“Too long since blood has sated me! You have your reward, little thief!”

I am first among her new worshipers, in a new row on the wall.

AND SOME ARE MISSING by Joel Lane

The first time, it was someone I didn’t know. Inevitably. I’d gone out to use the phone box, around eleven on a Tuesday night. This was a month after I’d moved into the flat in Moseley. I phoned Alan, but I don’t remember what I said; I was very drunk. Coming back, I saw two men on the edge of the car park in front of the tower block I lived in. It looked like a drunk was being mugged. There was one man on the ground: gray-haired, shabby, unconscious. And another man crouching over him: pale, red-mouthed, very tense. As I came closer, he seemed to be scratching at the drunk’s face. His hand was like a freeze-dried spider. I could see the knuckles were red from effort. With his other hand, he was tugging at the man’s jacket.

Too far gone to be scared, I walked toward them and shouted, “What are you going?” The attacker looked up at me. His eyes were empty, like an official behind a glass screen. I clenched my fist. “Fucking get off him. Go on…” He smiled as if he knew something I didn’t. Then he got up and calmly stalked away into the darkness behind the garages. The man on the ground looked about fifty; from his clothes and stubble, he could have been a vagrant.