Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories (9 page)

Not one of them wanted to see what was happening to her. What she had to endure.

She followed the woman down the hallway, as far as she could from the stairs. The woman pointed at the floor, and Hannah saw, then, the sagging, rotted floorboards in the center of the hall; she edged around them to the left, then stood with her back pressed against the charred wallpaper.

The fireworks sounded like gunshots, like her heart beating.

She could only see the light on his forehead as he reached the top of the steps. Just as he could see hers, at the end of the hall, blinding and obscuring.

His voice was clotted, at once angry and terrified.

Hannah? Is that you?

She thought of him in the tent, pressing her down.

It’s me, she said. I’m here.

He walked to her, his footsteps heavy. The floorboards cracked and broke beneath him, and he dropped away into darkness as though yanked there by a hand.

***

She descended the stairs, her palm flat against the ashy wallpaper. She could barely breathe; her throat was coated with dust and smoke.

Outside Kyle and Beth were laughing, calling for them.

She was tempted to go to them right now, to tell them there’d been an accident. But she had to see. She owed him that.

She picked a path through the living room to the rear of the house. Her feet and hands tingled, as though waking. Her headlamp revealed the charred carpet, the scars in the burned beams and exposed bracing, the rot and muck. She entered the back hallway, went to the doorway of the room with the stained bed. But the bed was gone—there was only a jumble of wood and plaster in the center of the room, and on top of it was Mason, his limbs as broken as the boards beneath him. A cut across his forehead had slicked his face with blood. In his fear he looked younger than he was. A boy, not much older than her.

The woman was kneeling beside him.

Please, he said. Don’t.

***

She was running from the house, now, toward Kyle’s and Beth’s voices; her footfalls and her body had weight again; what a relief it was to be herself again, to fill her lungs with air, and she told herself she must always remember it; the woman had given her this; it was a gift.

She’d given a gift in return, too. She must always remember that as well.

Mason, his breath quickening; the laughter and fireworks in the distance; the woman bending close, her hair made of smoke.

Mason seeing her face, knowing her, truly knowing her, as she reached down and gently passed her hand over each of his eyes.

WATER THY BONES

Mercedes M. Yardley

There’s a loveliness to bones. Their shape. Their weight. Their strength and fragility.

A body uses them to run. Uses them to stand timidly against a wall. They hold a person upright, if they’re working correctly. They’re a framework for an entire system, a complete body, and the significance of that is very nearly overwhelming

Yet at the same time, bones are so exceptionally frail. They can be broken. Sawed through. Pulverized. Bleached. Painted. Kept. Valued. Destroyed.

Remembered.

Taken.

Oh, yes, they can be taken. While the victim still hangs on them, a skinsack of meat. Veins still connect, blood still carries oxygen back and forth like it’s a precious thing, and at that point it still is.

That’s when their beauty becomes something real. When bone is exposed to the air for the first time, and the marrow gasps as it breathes in deep. The rest of it, the tissue, gristle, and muscle is pulled away, and the skeleton is allowed to be free.

That’s the part Michael Harrison liked the best. Peeling away the stinking red refuse and letting the white parts glitter and shine through. It’s the most awe-inspiring kind of birth, the most natural. Give all of us time and nature will do it for us. But sometimes nature needs a push.

***

Nikilie was a strong, beautiful thing. She suffered from pain that pressed behind her eyes like delphiniums, but she still got out of bed and moved around the world as living things do. Her tongue was red and her eyes the warmest of browns. Eyes you could fall into, dark skin smooth as butter. It invited the unwanted stares and hands of men and women everywhere she went. At least it used to, until she started taking razor blades and serrated knives to her body in the dim quiet of her bathroom.

“You’re so lovely, Nikilie,” friends told her. She cut and sawed at the skin on her thigh, leaving tight, slim lines beaded with blood. Jewels on the skin of a goddess. That was beauty. That was purity, right there.

“Baby, come here.” Cat calls on the street and lascivious glances turned into something genteel, something finer under her blade.

“I want you,” her boss told her behind his office door. He was one of many, simply another person abusing authority. His hand slid up and under her shirt. “A gorgeous woman such as yourself should never be lonely.”

“I never am,” she replied, but her whispers disappeared under the sound of fabric ripping, her favorite top turned into rags. Her words, though, shone as she carved them into her skin in the silence of night.

Never lonely. Never. Never never never.

Fabric can be rent, and so can skin, but at least she made the choice this time. Pried under the coating. Saw what lay underneath.

She wasn’t simply her face or her skin or the smooth Island accent of her words. She was herself. Nikilie. She was what ran under her skin, not merely the features built out of it. She wanted somebody who would love her from the inside out.

The first time Michael saw Nikilie, he stopped and stared at the aggressive way her skull pressed against the paper-thin skin of her face. She pursed her lips and worked her jaw, the bones moving in such a way that Michael had to stifle a groan.

“What is your name?” he asked her. She sat on the hard, plastic seat of the subway, an exotic flower growing from the cracks in the pavement. He stood next to her, holding loosely to the straps above.

“Trudi,” she said, not meeting his eyes.

“I don’t blame you for lying. I’m a stranger on the subway. My intentions may not be honorable.”

Her eyes flicked up, then, warm and wet. He saw moss and flowers and lovely things growing in their humidity. A tropical paradise.

“You’re not from New York,” he said, and then blushed.

This made her laugh, and she scratched at her wrist. It always itched.

“No, I’m not. But you are. And yet you’re easily embarrassed. How can this be?”

He shrugged, grinning, and she smiled back. Beautiful white teeth, strong, and one overlapped the other just a bit. Perfection.

He wanted to run his fingers across them. He wished to wear them as pearls.

“I’m awkward,” he said, and lifted his shoulders again. A
what can I do?
gesture. The self-realization of a different man. “I say what I think instead of saying what I should. I don’t mean to make people uncomfortable. I just do. I’m no good at small talk.”

“Why is that? If you realize it makes it difficult to fit in?”

The movement of the subway shook them, made him dance and sway with unusual grace. His suit coat looked like bird feathers. He was something exotic, something from the islands, and for a second a look of recognition, of delight, shone from Nikilie’s eyes.
Ah, yes,
her eyes seemed to say.
This is something I’ve seen before.

“Life is too short, I suppose,” he answered. “There seems to be so little time. Yet we’re supposed to dance around this and barely mention that. I don’t understand it. In two minutes I’ll step off this platform and will most likely never see you again, so why shouldn’t I say what I’m thinking instead of wasting that time with faux pleasantries?”

“And what are you thinking?”

He could read her expectations in the lift of her brow, in the tiredness that suddenly came into her eyes.
You’re beautiful. Could we go out for coffee?
Or perhaps,
Such an exquisite face you have.
Something about her face, her lips, her eyes. About her body or long, long limbs. But he had caught sight of the black, healed skin on her wrists, under her bangles, and when her shirt fell off her shoulder just a bit, before she automatically pushed it back up, he saw the fresher wounds there.

“Your bones,” he said, and gestured with one hand. “Your elbows and knees. The things that make you
you,
underneath everything else. I’ve never seen anything more striking.”

Nikilie’s mouth fell open. The subway stopped and Michael was gone in a flurry of suit coats and umbrellas, moon boots and patchouli.

Nikilie stared at the floor for the remainder of her ride. That night she took a razorblade to her inner thigh, but the cuts were heartless and shallow.

***

They had coffee at a safe, generic, neutral spot. Nikilie thought about discussing the weather, but Michael had no interest in such niceties.

“Did you ever break your leg?” he asked. “You have a slight limp.”

She had, indeed, broken her leg a few years ago. Skiing, she told him.

“An island girl on skis is just as tragic as you’d think,” she told him, and when he laughed, she saw the fillings in his teeth. It made her heart hug close, just a little.

“When you are dead and gone,” he said, “they’ll look at your skeleton and be able to see that break. How it healed itself over. People will hold your bones and wonder what caused it. Running from a predator, perhaps? Or something that happened as a child? No, it didn’t heal correctly for that. It must have happened when you were a strong, adult woman. I bet they wonder. I bet they speculate. You’ll give them pause, and joy, and something to puzzle over.”

Michael talked so tenderly, so gently, of strangers holding and caressing her bones. It nearly made her frown. It made her want, and she wasn’t a woman accustomed to wanting.

“What’s wrong, Nikilie? Am I disturbing you with this talk?”

His eyes were open and very nearly alarming in their earnestness. She should demure. She should excuse herself and go back to her hopeless, helpless life. That’s the way society worked. That’s the way the script played out.

“No, you’re not,” she said, and the boldness and sheer honesty of her words shocked her. “It sounds strangely wonderful. Isn’t that an odd thing?”

“Not at all,” he said reverently. “You want to be loved and worshiped the way a woman should be. Not because of your airs or your face. Not because of the fine clothes and jewelry you wear. But because of you. Who you are at the heart. At your very center.”

His talk tasted so sweet that she turned down her boss the next time he made advances.

“What’s wrong, baby?” he asked. “Don’t be like this, a beautiful woman like you.”

“This bag of flesh is the very least of me,” she said, and quitting her job felt like the best thing in the world. She walked out of the building and blinked in the cold New York sunshine. She took off her high heels and walked all the way home.

Nikilie and Michael began to visit zoos and aquariums. Cemeteries. They twined their thin fingers close, bone rubbing against bone. When she curled up with her feet in his lap, he ran his hand down her ankles, caressing the tendons and scarring there.

“Tell me why you cut yourself.”

No judgement. No sad-eyed face of faux concern. Her Michael Harrison wasn’t like that, and he would never be like that. He just wanted to know, and Nikilie found she wanted to tell him.

“A few reasons, I guess. It makes me feel better.”

“How so?”

“My skin itches, for one thing. It tickles from underneath. Like there’s something below that is trying to break through the crust.”

“Like what?” His eyes were bright, dilated with interest and the strangest type of arousal. Nikilie briefly thought she should feel stupid or embarrassed, but she didn’t. She watched Michael run his tongue over his lips unconsciously, and she swallowed any would-be embarrassment away.

“Rivers, perhaps? Oceans. Stars. Lianas, maybe. May I have a drink of water?”

“Of course,” he said, and poured her a glass from the pitcher he always kept nearby for her. “Why else?”

She drank the entire glass of water without pausing, and then held the cool cup to her cheek.

“What? Oh. I . . . ”

The words really did fade away, then, because she simply didn’t know what to say.
Beauty is a curse,
perhaps, although that sounded so terribly arrogant. More importantly, it wasn’t what she meant.
I hate all of the trappings of being human
didn’t make sense, either, although it was closer.
I want to scrape it all off and be free.
That was the closest yet, but it made her feel quite mad and restless inside, even as the thought thrilled her.

So instead she sighed, and that was the best she could do. Sighed and fluttered her hand to her scars uselessly. She shook her head and searched out Michael’s eyes.

They blazed. They contained passion and desire and exquisite care and something so akin to purpose that Nikilie’s breath caught in her throat with hope.

“You’re trapped by something that covers you. Beauty, yes, but it’s like a cold, wet blanket draped over your true self. There’s something superb inside, the true you, but it’s shrouded in fluff and perfume and bubbles. Is this how you feel?”