Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

She stood then, and stretched, a lithe cat of a woman. Running her fingers across supple, muscular skin, she drank in herself inch by inch in a shard of mirror across the room. Her body was whole, tan, California style—no lines. Her lips were shiny pink, an erotic complement to the nipples of her perfectly brown breasts. She flipped a strand of sand-blonde hair away from her face, ice-blue eyes flashing with abating lust, sweat drying on her forehead, lips pursed in humorous consideration. Gazing back at the bed, she saw the eyeballs in Tony’s meatless cranium staring back at her, still with a longing, and, she felt, appreciation of her new form. She’d best finish the job.

She sighed and bent over him, tongue lasciviously ready. When she rose the skull was sightless, the bones no longer vibrated on the floor. A long transparent tube of skin trailed between his femurs. She pulled it off with a rip and swallowed it. “Every last drop,” she murmured and licked her lips.

She pulled on his jeans, cinching the belt to its furthest hole. It left her thighs baggy and ill-defined, but it would do for now. She fastened one button of the short-sleeved blue cotton shirt, and tied the rest across her belly, leaving her midriff and much of her chest exposed. She pulled at the uncomfortable weight on her behind and came up with his wallet. Thumbing through $20s and $10s, her white canines flashed hungrily. Good. She didn’t relish hanging around this dump any longer. As she went to flip the wallet closed, a snapshot of a woman caught her eye. She was raven-haired, dark-eyed, with high cheekbones and an intense look of vibrance in her mouth. The woman was hot. Just looking at the photo made her mouth dry, and even after its recent use, her groin ached with desire. Probably his wife, she speculated, checking his license to find an address. She knew where this house was, she realized, as Tony’s cannibalized cells merged and shared their knowledge with her own. It had taken her too long to find a host after the Gentech engineer had abandoned her here to wither away. She laughed, thinking of his reward if she could track him down. Sex goddesses were hard to find—or make! And she intended to feed regularly to keep her full goddess form from now on. Maybe he could be one of her snacks.

Kicking the sated bones under the moldering bed, she wondered, in the meantime, if Tony’s wife liked blondes. Opening the door to step with anticipation into daylight, she resolved to find out.

Blind in the House of the Headsman

Mehitobel Wilson

“Blind in the House of the Headsman” first appeared in Brainbox 2: Son of Brainbox, edited by Steve Eller, 2001.

‡

Mehitobel Wilson has been publishing horror fiction since 1998. She is a Bram Stoker Award nominee, and many of her stories have been granted Honorable Mentions in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series. Recent stories appear in Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues, Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead, Sins of the Sirens, Damned: An Anthology of the Lost, and Dead But Dreaming: New Excursions in the Lovecraftian Universe, and selected stories have been collected in Dangerous Red. If you can’t pronounce her name, call her “Bel.”

May was inside the wall, and her eyes were open. Better on her back than on her knees; the shards of paneling would cut her throat, and her bruised knees couldn’t take her own weight anymore, much less his.

Maybe, baby, Maybe, she heard, his name for her.

Maybe, baby. She blinked and stared at the clean studs, still fragrant, packed with nubby gray insulation that puffed lint into her eyes with each Maybe thrust. The back of the paneling was satiny and printed with blue letters, the closest ones clear, the rest shadowed. The few she could read ran through her head, AST, and she tongued her palate, chanting the letters silently.

Maybe. Maybe he had punched through her face instead, and her brain’s best guess at peace was this space inside the wall. Maybe she was vibrating on the verge of death, the stabbing at her nape the last sparks of her spinal conduit. When death came, she would no longer remember him looming redfaced over her as she crabbed back onto the pillows, pressing her head against the wall, pulling his fist back and slamming it beside her face, catching one of her curls and tearing it from her skull as he punched through the paneling. Maybe, baby, maybe he hadn’t gnawed her jawbone, steered her bloodied skull into the hole with a sustained bruise of a kiss, bitten her trachea and pressed her chin back with his hardboned face, shoved her head through, let the hole’s edges score her forehead, her neck.