Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

Five years ago when Milo was only thirteen he cut his mother’s old bear rug into strips and then sewed these pieces to his flesh. It had taken the better part of one night of suppressing his cries of pain as he threaded the needle time and again with thick woolen thread and pushed it through in loop after loop to secure the fur to his body. It had become quite slippery with his blood but this only served to give it and him a magical sheen when he looked into the mirror afterward.

I have entered the pelt of an animal.

I have become the beast.

Then he ran away to join Fatima’s Freak Tent outside the city limits. All the comely mutant ladies welcomed him, clucking and tittering with a singsong babble of delight. They touched him with their stumps and flippers, ran their bearded cheeks across his beardless ones, held fast his gasping face between their breasts that were either skeletal or mammoth mounds of perfumed fat. They cooed over Milo’s ruined flesh and counterfeit hide, crawling around him on all fours, proclaiming,

“You are the king of the wolves!”

Then his mother came to drive him home before her with a stick, haranguing him every mile of the way.

If only she’d beaten him with her own hands, scratched at him until he bled. But she never touched him.

Had she ever touched him? Milo couldn’t remember the feel of her hands ever. She pushed food at him, had even pushed the bottle toward him when he was a baby. Had left him, naked for days at a time, in his own excrement, before finally hosing him down.

But she must have touched him at some time. To teach him to walk, to take care of himself so that she wouldn’t have to make contact. He didn’t remember.

Had he wanted to be an animal? He’d seen the tantalizing women of Fatima’s and he needed to be touched. He had always been too perfect. Milo wasn’t only a handsome boy, he was a flawless beauty. It might have made him popular in his exquisiteness if it hadn’t been such a dark beauty, so keenly edged that he seemed to have been carved from dark bone. And it would likely have helped his cause if he’d been willing to speak to people. But Milo mostly growled at folks, deep within his velvet throat like a beast. Most people around probably didn’t know he could talk. And he never talked to his mother. What would he say if he did? Touch me! Hold me? Use your fists and teeth until I am raw with you.

His mother hissed, “Devilchild.”

She’d left him on a dozen different doorsteps when he was an infant but the sheriff had always made her claim him. Why hadn’t she left him at Fatima’s then where he’d been so immediately accepted—even if he’d had to alter himself to do so? Was it because she’d become accustomed to brutalizing him from a distance? Had this granted her an outlet and an excuse for the ruin her own life had become?

Milo sat crosslegged before the mirror, butt naked on the cold floor, watching as his punctured skin slowly healed without scarring. No, he was too gorgeous for the holes to stay cut into his flesh. He wished the marks had remained, that he was pocked forever, for perfection marked him as being apart from all else. It made him furious, sitting there scratching himself, raking the elegant half-moons of his nails over his arms and face, desperate for touch, for sensation. Sometimes the need to be handled grew so frantic that mauling became a parody of contact. He dreamed of being torn apart by animals and that had to be a symbol of closeness burned in effigy. He healed, every time. The king of the wolves slunk ignominiously from Milo’s sad life.

Fatima’s special ladies turned away from him without recognizing him at all when his Uncle Rabe treated him to the carnival a few months later. They paraded their luscious deformities on the simple, ramshackle stage, shaking jelly mounds of flab or being wheeled on geek carts or doing perverse double-jointed calisthenics as they stared blankly into space. Smiles were frozen on their faces, refusing to acknowledge his presence at the foot of the stage, pleading up at them, craving a grope of their voluptuousness, wishing for any tidbit they might deign to grant this miserable, lonely boy.

Could it be that they had known who he was but realized that he wasn’t one of them after all? He wanted to reassure them that he hadn’t been laughing at them. It hadn’t been a charade.

“I wasn’t mocking you, Lizard Lady,” he whispered as the pucker-fleshed damsel wriggled by. “I love you. I only want to stroke and be absorbed by your travesty.”

She didn’t look his way but did seem to slow down as she slithered past him in the procession.

“You say something, Milo?” Rabe asked in surprise. He’d never heard the kid speak before.

Milo growled a response, felt it itch in his throat.