Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

Tony hesitated. He listened to the sounds, stared into the darkness between the fires. There were exits at the far end of the cavern, and Tony imagined a network of tunnels spreading out under Brooklyn and the rest of the city. Lisa could be anywhere. Real, or unreal, there was a chance this vision of Guy might help.

He sat down next to his old roommate.

“You look worse than a tourist, Tony,” said Guy, with a touch of sadness. “You look like prey. What happened to you?”

Tony sighed and passed a hand over his face. His palm and fingertips came away slick with grimy sweat.

“Please, don’t tell me,” Guy continued, breaking into a chuckle. “Please don’t tell me you fell in love.”

“Not quite. Not in love. But I fell into something.” He searched for words to capture what he had with Lisa. “Safety, companionship. Maybe I just fell into sex. But there’s nothing now, there’s just emptiness.”

“That’s all there ever is, especially for people like us. You just don’t realize it. You don’t know the emptiness, how deep it runs. That’s why you never made the move to being a real player. But don’t feel bad. Even I didn’t understand the emptiness completely when I was alive, and I was a player there, towards the end. We thought that empty feeling we had was a hunger for something other people could give us. It didn’t bother us most of the time ’cause we thought we were filling ourselves up every time we came. What a pair of sharks we were, cruising our own little scenes. You know what it was that let us live so well together? We were the same kind of people underneath all the bullshit. Predators. We went after the same kind of people. Hollow little nobodies who didn’t know their asses from their pricks, or cunts. But the beauty of us being together was that we had our own little territories. You went after the cunts, and I went after the pricks. Tell me about those times, Tony. I want to remember, I want the details. There’s nothing inside of me anymore. No feelings, no memories. It’s all shadows and emptiness.”

Guy stared at him without blinking, as if ghosts forgot to blink. His mouth hung open, his hands lay in his lap, palms up. He looked like a child waiting to be fed.

Tony closed his eyes and trawled for memories, eager to put Guy to rest. The specter’s talk of emptiness and predators had only made his own need for Lisa stronger. And if this ghost could not help him find her, at least its guilty presence would not distract him while he caught up to Lisa and tried to win her back.

Names from his own adventures as well as Guy’s returned to him, and their faces. Anne, Shanelle, Kiko. Thurman, George, Larry. Episodes he hadn’t thought about in years came back: sex on the dorm roof, in the closet while others listened and commented outside, using the early model video recorders the college owned. There were the games of humiliation, the games of pain, and the entertainments in costume. Simple and complex, he had repeated them all with Lisa. But he had discovered them first with the disposable partners he and Guy had enjoyed. He began to talk, and as the memories rushed out Tony opened his eyes and looked up, letting the words flow, the past catching up to him.

And as the past flooded him, the darkness beyond the fire seemed to lighten. He began to see what was happening between the fires. He looked away, at first. He spoke quickly, felt as if he were babbling, but Guy did not interrupt or ask him to be clearer, only sat and watched him with his blank expression, his dull, lifeless eyes. The more he talked, the clearer the air became, until he could not help but see the expression on the face of the squirming woman being hauled by giggling men up to the ceiling on a hook and length of chain; until he could see the sweat running down the body of the man suspended at an angle by his outstretched arms and legs, desperately thrusting his erect penis into a fat, laughing woman dancing wildly to the electronic howl of a band that had just started playing; until he could see the broken bones pushing against muscle and skin, warping the smooth lines of the bodies of the two wrestlers fighting and screaming in a pool of water to the cheers and jeers of a few people standing near.

Blood spurted from a nearby atrocity and sprayed across his face, tickling his lips. Shocked, he raised his arm to wipe the blood away, to spit and rub his skin and shield his face from any more splattering. A sudden impulse made him stop. The blood was hot on his flesh, like Lisa’s sweat mingling with his own when they made love. His tongue darted out like a snake’s, licked his lips as he would Lisa’s body. He tasted coppery saltiness, then swallowed. Surprised by his act, he shuddered. The emptiness within him yawned, threatened to take him. Expecting a surge of fear, he was even more surprised when he became excited by what he had done. His erection pressed against his pants’ zipper, as if he had just heard the click of Lisa’s heels on ceramic tile.