Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

The seeds of this story were planted by one of Feral House’s classic books. Their second edition of Apocalypse Culture contains a fascinating article on various spiritual applications of gluttony and anorexia in history, plus select Gnostic groups’ penchant for amputating whatever they could spare. It also referenced porn actress Long Jean Silver, whose missing foot inspired one of the story’s tenderest moments. I’ve since had occasion to view one of her taped performances, an experience I can’t particularly recommend, but if you insist, it’s … memorable. Not long after the story’s original publication, I was contacted by a representative of an amputee fetishist society in Chicago wanting to know one thing: “Do you have any MORE stories like this?”

Being as she was a woman who prided herself on walking her own deliberate path, imagine, then, the irony: Her horizons were forever broadened by the ecstatic man with no legs. She was Ellen by day, and knew the aisles of the bookstore as well as the creases in her palm, the smoky gray of her eyes, the finely-wrought lines that inscribed the corners of her mouth and lent it warmth and wisdom, as if etched by a loving sculptor. She walked the aisles with her modest skirt brushing against her knees and could smell every page along the gauntlets of spines. For the patient customer it was a trip well rewarded. Every book should be so matched to a loving home.

There had been nothing different about that day right up to the very moment they left the bookstore, she and Jude letting the evening clerks take over. With that taut facelift, Jude could have been an older sister, or so she thought. Thought she knew what made Ellen tick. A common mistake, but then Jude’s idea of a deep read was Danielle Steel over Jackie Collins. Jude already had the endings worked out for most anyone she could ever meet.

They left together for the parking lot down the street. The bookstore’s neighborhood was like much of the city itself: old and charmingly crumbled by day, not a place most would want to walk alone at night. The peeling doorways, the odd bricks set just out of step with the others, the derelict and sagging smokestacks and chimneys … they hooked strange shadows that worsened as day dwindled into evening, and the shadows gave birth to night people.

They joined the flow, Jude’s brisk footsteps clicking at her side. Urban minnows, that’s what they all were, and god forbid anyone should fall out of step. Were it not for nights, Ellen knew she would one day tear out her hair, an allergic reaction to this sunlight world and the pre-fab molds it demanded.

“… and then do you know what that little doofus asked me?” Jude was saying. “He asked, ‘Do you have The Old Man and the Sea in Cliff’s Notes?’ I told him the original was barely a hundred pages, so why didn’t he read that, and he just looked at me—”

They approached a break in the buildings, the mouth of an alley that gaped back like a dirty, leprous throat. Yet inviting, all the same, with mysteries lying just behind those crusty locked doors. Back rooms often tweaked her curiosity.

“—just looked at me, like I’d suggested, ‘Here, why don’t you bite this brick in half.’ So I said, ‘Listen, I can summarize it for you in fifteen words or less: Man catches fish, man battles fish, man loses dead fish to hungry shar—’” Jude froze, except for her arm, as she began to point along the alley. “Oh. My. God.” Her arm recoiled back to her side. “Don’t look, Ellen, just don’t look.”

It was the wrong thing to say, and too late anyway. Ellen wouldn’t have missed anything that got Jude to interrupt herself.

The man looked to be in his early forties, and she’d never have mistaken him for one of the street people, one of those who cruised around in their wheelchairs with sad stories of cause and effect: car wreck and loss of livelihood; war wounds and loss of stability. From this distance—say, twenty feet along that wall?—his clothing looked neat and new, his hair well-barbered. He might have been any reasonably attractive man who’d made the best of his life after losing both legs at the hip.