Fierce as the Grave: A Quartet of Horror Stories Read online

  Published by John Hornor Jacobs

  Fierce as the Grave v3.3

  Individual stories Copyright 2011 by John Hornor Jacobs.

  All rights reserved.

  Except as permitted under the US Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  First eBook Edition: August 2011

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living, dead, or somewhere in-between, is coincidental and not intended by the authors.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  VERRATA

  HEAVEN OF ANIMALS

  BONE CHINA

  SNEAKING IN

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Consider love.

  I know. This is a collection of horror stories. But bear with me and think a little bit about love.

  You’ve felt it, right? You look at your spouse, your lover, your child and you feel it, right? You’ve felt the pure wash of emotion that sweeps over you like a flood, a tide? It burns like a fire? You’ve felt it, right?

  Think about it a little. Love.

  You ever lost it? Have you ever been spurned, or betrayed, by someone you loved? And how did that emotion twist inside your chest – still as powerful? Did it turn? Did it curdle?

  Sometimes love goes bad.

  Think about love for a moment.

  It’s the most powerful emotion – the progenitor of all other feelings - and can bind us together, or tear us apart. The lack or loss of love creates hatred and revenge.

  Love gathers itself like some great storm on the horizon heading towards an unwary shore and calves off whorls of emotion that come ripping at the fabric of our lives, sometimes in wonderful and delightful ways, other times with heart-stopping devastation.

  This quartet of stories are about the unquiet dead, and how love transforms us all. Sometimes for the worst.

  Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is strong as death, as fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of the lord. – Song of Solomon, 8:6

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John Hornor Jacobs has worked in advertising for the last fifteen years, played in bands, and pursued art in various forms. He is also, in his copious spare time, a novelist, represented by Stacia Decker of the Donald Maass Literary Agency. His first novel, Southern Gods, was published by Night Shade Books and released nationally in August, 2011. His second novel, This Dark Earth, will be published in July, 2012, by Gallery/Pocket Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. His young adult series, The Incarcerado Trilogy comprised of The Twelve Fingered Boy, Incarcerado, and The End of All Things, will be published by Carolrhoda Labs, an imprint of Lerner Publishing.

  VERRATA

  My slug itched, the flesh around it tender, red.

  Cyn glanced over her Softscreen, watching me scratch my arm around the bioComp chassis, where its mouth met my skin.

  "You should put some Bactine on it. That might help," she said, moving her fingers over the fabric. "Have you been modding it?"

  I shook my head, scratching. A trickle of pus oozed from the bioComp's edge. Its antennae waved slowly, probing the ether.

  "No," I replied, wincing. "You know I can't afford its genome. It's been generating some weird verrata. I'll have to go through bioCare or try to tinker with it myself. And they haven't made Bactine for, like, twenty years."

  "Have fun scratching." She smiled and stood, stretching. Leaning over, she grabbed her Softscreen, rolled it up and tucked it under her arm. She kissed me on the ear and slapped the back of my head. "See you after work, Assburger."

  "Yeah. Bring dinner." She ignored me, walking towards the door.

  As the door shut behind her, the world went blue and black for a moment, the slug filling my sight with phantom visual errata. A figure swam into my v-space, hair floating all around her like the braids of kelp in a dreamy underwater farm, billowing. Eyes dark, mouth open, her hands clawed at the air. Then the bioComp reasserted itself and the slug's phantom errata vanished, leaving me looking at the space Cyn's derrière just vacated.

  Ever since this infection, I hadn't been able to trust my vision.

  I scratched some more.

  Cyn's Asperger comment didn't bother me too much. It's something I've lived with all of my life. It's me. I take medicine and don't go OCD on the workings of watch gears, or parsing the of lines of code. At least I don't anymore. I have intense interests.

  We share a flat in a old antebellum house in the Quarter. Ever since Katrina in '05 and Evan in '13 the new has worn off of New Orleans. It's now an alligator riddled swampland filled with gun-toting crips, old Southern families grown rich off prostitution and gambling since the ArkLaTex secession in '22, and movie stars making period-piece pornos.

  I accessed the slug, closing my eyes.

  For me, accessing my bioComp is living with ghosts. The real world is overlaid with phantom images, prickling my consciousness. Wisps of information and data fill my vision, strange voices whisper inside my head about the newest penis enlargement drugs, or how to get laid by just thinking about it. Brainshare programs babble that they want a piece of my wetware processing power. Of course, everyone knows sharing brainpower is tantamount to taking a slowboat to zombietown.

  Any space I enter clouds with ghosts; extrapolated bios of the previous owners, featured advertisers, avatars of CEOs and salesmen, specters of receptionists telecommuting from the San Joaquin valley. Visually and aurally I perceive everything that gets pushed my way; a max-fi backbone connection keeps me wide open and transmitting, my little buddy's antennae always probing the ether.

  My biofunctions, however, are firewalled ten ways till Sunday.

  On the inside, when I close my eyes, the world goes away and the ghosts remain, blue streamers coalescing into shapes, images. Physical sensations even, if I choose to allow. My slug can send a shock to my system, overloading my 'circuits,' causing me to produce enormous amounts of adrenalin so that I can overcome pain, stress, fear, fatigue. And that's why I'm firewalled; should someone get through to my wetware, I'll truly become the old joke. A meatpuppet.

  I probed the edges of the slug, looking at the infection, forming a query in my mind. Blue mist floated up from the pus.

  "Query: bioComp Model Greentooth, Genome A4TX-730M-4L93-64HD. Support, newsfeed, article or forum discussion. Physical infection. White pus. Itching at point of contact. Verrata. Possible causes."

  After a moment, the results returned, coalescing beneath my closed eyes.

  Nada. Zip. A small blue circle swam in front of me, signifying nothing. Then less relevant search results started filtering into my v-space and I discarded them with a blink and glance to my right.

  And there it went again, the verrata, hanging in the air with blue tendrils creeping around it. The image of a girl, young, budding breasts but still innocent, hair in a wild yet inexorably slow swirl around her head. Eyes pitch-black like holes, mouth empty, open, dark. She clawed at the air moving her arms like she was trying to part curtains or push something aside.

  I scratched at my bioComp, digging my fingernails under the red, irritated edge. Some of the pus dampened my fingers, but scratching felt too good to stop. After a long while, the verrata ceased moving, staring at me with black eyes, mouth open, fading.

  Disturbing, to say the least. Everyone talks about bioComp errata, but few eve
r experience it. They call it verrata, a visual error generated by the slug. Aurrata are...you guessed it...auditory phantoms. Serrata are supposedly the worst of the three, disjointed sensations throughout your body that usually preclude a swift death.

  My little buddy worked well enough, despite the veratta, so I accessed my daily production log, found the location of my next inspection. I'm a levee and sluice-work inspector for the great City of New Orleans which involves me spending a lot of time in hip waders walking along the levees, looking for animal burrows, erosion points, grass death. Now that New Orleans is about forty feet below sea-level, someone's got to make sure the pumping stations keep pumping, that the levees have no flaws.

  Before leaving the flat I unscrewed the lid from a small metal container, using two fingers wiped pure Deet on my cheeks, my neck, my arms. Pretty much every inch of exposed skin I possess. This brave new swamp-world we inhabit does its best to fill the skies with new mutant mosquitoes and noseeums that can leave welts the size of ArkLaTex half-dollars. I happen to be extremely allergic to mosquito dental work. One bite will make my throat swell horribly, cutting off my air. So, I take my chances with raw Deet and always keep a syringe of epinephrine on my person. And pills. Mosquito netting hats. Gloves in the summer. Other folks walk around nude, tits hanging out, I'm always dressed for winter.

  After I smeared my skin, it stings some.

  I don't swallow too much Deet.

  I don hip boots, which are much more comfortable than waders to walk in, especially in the New Orleans heat (and my unfortunate outfit). I pull on skin-tight gloves and my mosquito netted hat. You have to take it slow down here otherwise you'll be drenched before you walk a hundred yards.

  Cyn likes to say I look like a beekeeper in my outfit. I always make her pay for that. I sting.

  Outside on the cobblestone street, E-Z-Go golf carts buzzed up and down Rue Toulouse, music bumping from subs too big for the cart's power, speakers too big for the chassis. Blue streamers tickled my vision, staying at the periphery since I was moving. I snagged a streamer trailing the E-Z-Go and went to the website for that model of cart, a Electro-Glide sedan. Specifications and electrical consumption rates appeared in neat blue tables. The avatar of a salesman popped up on the cobblestones in front of me, spiky hair contrasting with his dark suit. Somehow he avoided my pop-up blocker.

  "Hey, hey!" He paused for a moment, most likely accessing my IP and getting my name from registry. "Mr. Thibault! What'll it take to get you into one of these Electro-Glides? Huh?"

  "It's pronounced T Bo. T Bo."

  "Well that's great Mr. T Bo. Why don't you come on down to the..." Again he paused, accessing more data, locating the nearest E-Z-Go dealer to my IP. "...our lot on Basin Street and let you take one for a spin? Or if you'd rather, we can set you up in the new model Surface-Tension flat-bottom. Sweet and fast. Perfect for the person who needs..."

  I banished the salesman and re-instated the block. His phantom evaporated, smoke dissipating.

  More adverts and salesmen demanded my attention. I paused for a moment and let them crowd in, filling my v-space. One streamer pulsed green indicating the route to my first inspection. I closed my eyes, queried the address, then banished the phantom. The blue tendril whipped away like the tentacle of some ghostly Hentai monster pulling back its prehensile penis.

  I turned down Royal, walking slowly, admiring at the ornate French ironwork on the upper galleries of the houses, the scrollwork on the corners, windows. There's about a million variations of the fleur di lis in New Orleans, and before I began taking my medicine, I indexed nearly all of them. I still have the binders to prove it.

  If you walk any street in the Quarter, you can see the water-marks on some of the estates, twenty thirty feet up on the facades, from when Evan hit in '13. In the tight streets, cobblestones echoing the clop-clop of my boots, a low mist hung over everything, a pall darkened the air. New Orleans, before the world became so much hotter and wetter, already possessed an air of decay. Even as a child, I knew it was an old town, with a history of lechery, lost hope and despair. Fallen. An old-world carnival dressed up with pretty plastic beads and the whiff of semen on its breath.

  An E-Z-Go buzzed past me and I found myself alone on the street. Off in the distance I heard the call of seagulls on the Mississippi or Pontchartrain, and smelt the ever-present scents of mud and sewage. My slug itched. I scratched the edges of it through my shirt.

  Again I lost control of my v-space, the same verrata filling my vision. But this time, she floated, unmoving. She hung suspended in space, hair spread around her like a halo, bright and full of light, but her eyes and face appeared dark. Looking at them made me cold, even in the heat of the morning. My teeth began to chatter and, overcome by a powerful chill so deep that I felt like I'd been encased in ice with only the top of my head exposed, I stopped walking. My arms and legs responded sluggishly. The floating girl lifted her arm, index finger outstretched, and pointed at me. My arm lifted in time with hers and pointed not back at her, but off to my right, down Orleans, toward Jackson Square, strangely mirroring her movement.

  I frantically tried to query my bioComp, to reach out and contact Cyn, mother, anyone. No response.

  This was getting out of hand. I don't mind a few hallucinatory verrata. Hell, I did acid in high-school, just like everybody else. But serrata? A whole different breed of cat.

  "Cortez," she said, in a cold and distant voice.

  I found myself turning, turning away from where I need to go - my duly appointed rounds inspecting the levees of New Orleans - and walked down to Rue Orleans and into the red-light district, following my outstretched arm. My v-space remained strangely absent of phantoms or informational streamers and I felt naked, stripped of the slug-given part of my humanity, my telepathic link to fellow man, my Internet connection.

  It looked like I'd caught the slowboat to zombietown without even knowing it. Firewall be damned.

  I couldn't control my legs even though my wetware still processed, still received signals. When I turned away from the girl - when did I stop thinking of her as verrata? - I remained aware of her "presence" without any serrata to back up the sensation other than the sensation itself.

  I can only imagine what I looked like, a bee-keeper in a khaki uniform wearing hip-waders, clomping down the street with one arm outstretched, pointing the direction I walked.

  I banked left when I hit Chartres, passed Jackson Park, the hookers and dealers hocking various activities involving hardware. For a moment I was happy that the slug had stopped broadcasting visual data despite my desperate situation; the Jackson Park dwellers bought banner airtime, their personal advertisements filling the park, gigantic blue phantom women with Volkswagen sized breasts fellating phantom businessmen, ecstatic dancers holding crack pipes and glowing syringes.

  Past St. Anne and Dumain, the whores and junkies disappeared as I entered the high-end red light district. Brothels, porn shops and video-studios lined the street, each with a muscle-bound brute standing guard by the front entrances.

  More carts and even a few mopeds buzzed about. Topless pedestrians, laden with beads, walked with lurid green and red Hurricanes.

  I tromped by, high-stepping almost comically. I stopped in front of a movie "studio" storefront. The front window displayed video of bizarre sexual situations, women bound and gagged while multiple men assaulted them with gigantic phalluses, some real, some not. Hog-tied and trussed boys received blowjobs from middle-aged women with pendulous breasts, sodomized by grannies wearing hand-carved wooden dildos. The words "Conquistador Productions" watermarked the video, accompanied by a smirking cartoon figure of a Spanish conquistador with a rampant erection.

  I turned toward the door, arm still straight-out and pointing. The bouncer - a greasy, muscle bound bruiser with a mullet and a slug he wore like a goiter - blocked my way. His arms rippled with tattoos.

  "Where the fuck you think you're going, bra? See that fucking light right there?" H
e pointed one stubby finger up, above his head, toward the light on the awning.

  I did nothing. What could I do anyway?

  "That light means they're filming inside, fucktard." He hooked his thumb towards the street. "So bolt."

  I shuddered. Lights popped and flashed in my eyes, little tracers swimming at the edges of my vision. I felt my body go rigid, every muscle contracting. My back cracked audibly. My dick hardened. As hard as Chinese arithmetic, the old saying goes.

  The man's eyes widened.

  At that point I knew I was in trouble. I'd short-circuited, my slug pumping my body full of adrenaline and endorphins. My tongue skittered around the inside of my mouth, looking for somewhere to go. It felt wonderful, so wonderful, I wasn't exactly worried that I was going to die very soon. What could I do? I was riding in the back-seat. Whoever was driving, I hoped to hell they knew what they were doing.

  My hand darted out, snatched the man's slug and ripped it from his neck. His mouth opened in surprise, and in the slow-time the adrenaline provided me, I could see his eyes searching for data that wasn't there anymore. I closed his eyes for him, twisting my body forward, pulling in my forearm and swinging my elbow forward to splatter his already lumpy nose, sending bright rivulets of blood streaking away from the center of his face, across his cheeks. Ain't nothing but a thing, chicken-wing.

  Inside it was dark, cheap neon lights buzzing in the front office. The place smelled like beer and urine, body odor and Pine-sol. The virulent light from the window display washed around the edges of the display itself, making shadows jump and waver. I walked into the hall opposite the front door. I saw a bright light coming from further back. As I approached I made out the casings of tungsten lights, up on c-stands, illuminating a cheap set. A generator hummed somewhere.

  In the studio, a poor imitation of a Japanese Shinto temple sat incongruously on the expanse of green painted cyclorama. Lit so brightly by the lights, it cast the rest of the studio in darkness, the black shapes moving slightly. On the set, a young girl - not Japanese - wore a Catholic school outfit, shirt open and breasts exposed. A middle-aged man - also not Japanese - stood above her, heavy make-up streaming his face. Painted white with blacked-out eyes, he resembled the Kabuki figures I'd seen on the web and in film; creepy and inhuman. I don't know how I knew he wasn't Japanese, I just did.