The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

They soon “coaxed” Morrigan into disrobing also.

They did a little mixing. Good hosts these girls were.

When at last all three collapsed in blissful languor, the Raven-masked brunette “popped the question” to her two newfound lovers: “I suppose this is a futile question, but when will you next bleed?” Morrigan whispered. “I long for the bright crimson rose blossoms of your flux…” Yet again, her teeth glittered whitely in the luring darkness of the mouth-slit.

“Well, a rather kinky request, I’d say,” Badb giggled, “but you are certainly in luck, My Dear Ms. M. Would you care to spend the night with us? You see, I am due tomorrow, or the next day, at the latest—”

“And my period is due two days hence,” Fea said. “We suffer together…”

The gossamer fabric billowed between drapes whose dark bulk suggested ancient standing stones. The rumpled satin sheets and coverlets of the bed were rippling surface of a chill, deep pool or a floe of glistening obsidian, mirroring the nightsky, appearing velvet-soft, yet deceptively razor-edged… All black as the glossy feathers of the Raven’s mask, poised above this sensuous interplay of light and shadows. Curves of snow-white flesh bared to her dark cravings in a tableau of Illusion precise in its every detail…

The dark eyeholes of the midnight-black mask burned fiercely. Her teeth glittered white, whiter than clean- stripped bone. Her tongue darted out, licking her lips, savoring the feral muskiness, the tang of salt and copper…

Her lips were brilliant red. Red as poppy blossoms. Red as hibiscus blossoms. Red as roses. Red with dripping effuvial rubies of poison-rich blood…

Her knowledge encompassed the jargonese term by which the ancient headshrinkers would have neatly pigeonholed her own desire: “Haematophilia” (blood loving) the clinical delineation for those possessed by the obsessive/compulsive fixation to indulge in bloodsucking. Or, more specifically, “haematomenophilia…”

But those were the Old Sciences, male-dominated, the same sciences that had raped and pillaged the Earth Mother through their self-serving greed, prejudice, and shortsightedness. Slaves. So ludicrously proud of their own intellect. Mindlessly serving their true masters. Lucifer. Mammon. And Baal Phegor (already long-corrupted to Belphegor).

Some would term her desire simply a perverse form of vampirism.

But Morrigan knew more. Far more. Morrigan was an adept.

Morrigan knew herself to be a savior. A martyr, yes. With the roots of her act of absolution traceable to ancient Knowledge of Blood, the legend of the Fisher King (a male-perverted interpretation of a far-older matriarchal parable), the menstrual cycles of the moon, and the Celtic ritual of Sin Eating… But even a martyr can temper the degree of her self-sacrifice, perhaps even temper it with pleasure.

Love can heal all wounds.

Through love, self-sacrificing, and sympathetic magick, the Earth Mother could be healed. The poisons purified. The soil and seas and air made whole.

So Morrigan at last found the blossoms of the lunar cycle she had sought for. And, able to indulge her need fulfilled twice over, she wasted no time moving in with the two sisters. And one may suppose they all lived and loved quite happily ever after, savoring (so to speak) their days of wine and roses.

At least until they reached that “midlife crisis.” But I quite suppose that is a story that will be later told.

HAUNTING ME SOFTLY by H. Andrew Lynch

I’m trotting, about midnight. My dad is with me and he’s only nine years old. He asks me, “Can we get some ice cream?” I tell him it’s too late and too cold. Lying casually, I add that if he comes back tomorrow, around noon, sure, we can get some ice cream.

Between dad’s napless head and a pair of rugged denim pants predating Sears’ Toughskins by three decades is naked torso. He’s wet from an arc of hydrant water he ran through earlier today, thirty-eight years ago. His smile is simple and predominantly toothless; it speaks of a snapshot in history when mamas were legend and the even summer heat of Georgia was welcome cover for the riots and fires in nearby Atlanta.

We come to an intersection. Dad looks both ways (gran’ma taught him well), and it’s almost cute. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice he’s licking his lips. He wants to find a Good Humor truck so badly I can smell his excitement in the cold. Doesn’t he know that it’s too damned late?

At this uneasy hour, Washington is darker than I’ve seen it since my runaway days. Tracts of streetlamps are out or on their way. Aspirant of New York streets, nearby manholes exhale steam. I feel a lot like the city. Too late for Good Humor.

When we reach the other side of the street, I glance to my left, down between a gray corridor of dark, warm homes. Someone shuffles drunkenly toward me—toward us. Me. Farther down, a cab streaks through a red light. When it’s gone, I hear a terrific screech, then nothing.

“What was that?” dad asks, awed by the echo. I ignore him because I don’t think he really expects an answer. Since he appeared earlier this afternoon, all he’s done is ask questions. I don’t like questions. I’ve answered too many of them. They remind me of the interrogations I weathered as a teenager. Unspoken questions, questions asked with a look and with the crisp snap of recycled paper as the world news buried my father’s face, but not his disgust.

We reach Parliament Circle. A trio of homeless polar bears argue at the stone chess stand that pokes out of the concrete. The fountain is dry, the statue, frostbitten and bleak. About seven benches around from the chess players, a punk rocker I’ve seen before is curled beneath other people’s trash. I hope she’s alive in the morning. If she is, I might bring her a blanket. For tomorrow night. “You know who that is standing up there at the center of the fountain?” I ask, unable to conceal boredom. Dad squints as if the statue were a solar eclipse. He shakes his head. “Benjamin Banaker,” I say, as if anyone cares. “He’s the idiot architect responsible for making Washington, DC, one of the easiest cities to get lost in. I think he went crazy over the cliche, ‘circles within circles.’ ”

“Benj’min Banaker, we heard about him. He’s black, ain’t he?”

“Does it matter?”

“Miss Green says it do.”

“Who’s Miss Green?”

“She’s the mu-lat-to lady who helps the principal at my school.”

“Oh,” I say. I look down at the back of my hand. In the cold, it’s pale blue, but in the summer, when I tan, I almost pass for a purebreed. Flexing my fingers, I wonder how a black bigot ended up marrying a white woman possessed of three times his moral fiber.

We sit at the edge of the fountain. Except for the arguing chess players, the circle is silent. A crisp breeze picks up the ends of my dark “white-man’s” hair and carries it from one shoulder to the other. I flick my head to correct the problem, then sniffle; I may be getting a cold. Dad’s restless, banging the heels of his too-short legs against the fountain’s cold barrier. The motion produces no noise, but it annoys me. When I was this Georgia boy’s age, dad told me I should never let the silly things other people do annoy me, that they’d try, and that I should be better than they because the Simpson men have always been proud and unbothered. I was in the fourth grade. A fat girl with a permanent pimple on the flap of her left nostril used to stare at me on the playground during recess and play with her budding nipples. I ran home after school and told my mother. She told dad. He told me not to worry about what the girl was doing. I remember wondering if he gave his girlfriend speeches like that.

“See this?” dad says. He points to a thin scar that runs from the crook of his arm to his wrist. Most kids are ashamed of deformities. They hide them, inspect them when no one is around. Dad is proud of the raised worm that wriggles when he forms a fist. “I was climbin’ over a fence and I fell down. My arm got caught on the metal and scraped me from here—all the way to here.” I hold very still and stare at the scar, which is a lie, I now see, a