After death, p.24
After Death..., page 24
His sharkish memory recalled what happened just a dozen hours ago. The freak storm, the way the ship capsized, the frantic scramble of its passengers for the inflatable rafts. Eventually, the sea became tranquil again. A mist formed above the water, white phantoms drifting through the evening gloom. The survivors had paddled with their hands in order to bring the life rafts close to one another. In one inflatable craft were two humans—Glenn and Ruth.
The hammerhead/Damian gently rose against the underside of the flexible membrane that formed the floor of the raft. He felt the shape of two bodies pressing against the soft material. Glenn and Ruth. They reacted in horror as they felt an unseen marine creature press against them.
Their thoughts pulsated in flashes of purple hysteria. ‘Shark! Shark! Shark!’
The human mind had, by some inexplicable twist of fate, now been fully reawakened in the shark. What’s more, there were echoes of earlier incarnations. An artillery officer in a bottle-green coat yelling in French as a Russian cavalryman emerged from a swirling blizzard to cut him down with a saber. The reflection in a stream of a grunting bull as its bovine eyes looked into his. Then he was a boy, running with a basket of green figs. Nearby, stood a village of mud-brick houses, which overlooked a brown river where boats with red sails glided serenely downstream. Damian gazed deeper into the well of his own existence, seeing hundreds of previous incarnations. A cantankerous ape that became angry with the hard pebble it tried to sharpen with a rock. A bird soaring over jungle. A green lizard sitting on a rock . . .
He turned his attention away from those ghosts of his former selves that still remained inside the central core of his nervous system. Instead, he focused on his sense of touch as he lay beneath the life raft, feeling the tightly inflated material against his dorsal fin, and there he began to absorb the thoughts of its male and female occupants. Despite the terror of knowing that a predator pushed itself against their fragile little vessel, the male still felt hot sparks of desire when he glanced at the way the woman’s T-shirt clung to her body. The hammerhead also drank in the thoughts and emotions of the woman. He remembered when he’d laid this close to Ruth Constantine all those years ago. The way her body warmed his blood—that was one of the most powerful memories from when he was a man: her body heat filling him with such a wonderful contentment.
Now he caught strands of thought: ‘For God’s sake, of all the people to find myself alone with in a life raft? Glenn Harrap . . . I can’t bear to be near him. How did he come to be so repulsive? Ever since Damian vanished I can’t help but think that Glenn had something to do with it. Those sidelong glances he gives me. Guilt, guilt, guilt—it bleeds from his eyes. I’m sure he knows what really happened to Damian . . . if only I had proof.’
The hammerhead moved slightly, caressing the female shape on the other side of the raft’s skin. He wanted the love he felt to reach her, just as her thoughts reached him. The movement, however, alarmed her so much it drove her to the edge of the inflatable.
This time he picked up sound waves traveling through the water.
Ruth shouted to the other survivors in the neighboring boats, “There’s a shark down there. I can feel it pushing up against the raft.”
Glenn hissed, “Ruth, keep still. If we don’t move it’ll lose interest and leave.”
‘Shut up, Glenn. You’re a murderer. You killed my fiancé. I don’t know what you did to Damian, but I know you made him disappear.’ Ruth didn’t say those words aloud, but her thoughts reached the hammerhead. Along with the words she thought, there were images of Ruth grieving for Damian, the man she loved. It was as if he saw a montage of her suffering: ‘Ten years ago, Damian went missing . . . nobody knows what happened . . . nobody, that is, other than Glenn. I’m sure Glenn knows. He was always the jealous type . . . Every instinct tells me he killed Damian.’
The membrane that was the inflatable’s floor deformed as feet pressed against it. His senses interpreted this as Glenn standing in the middle of the craft. Two heavy feet pressing down against the flexible material. He opened his mouth lined with sharp teeth.
Just one bite. Open up the membrane, Glenn would plunge down through the hole to where the hammerhead waited. VENGEANCE. The word pulsated with a wonderful ruddy light. VENGEANCE . . .
Even as he contemplated the attack—claiming the man who killed him, while ensuring Ruth remained safe—everything changed. Pale shapes darted from the depths below. The bull sharks were back. They were determined to rip the inflatables apart before attacking the humans that had survived the shipwreck.
Instantly, the hammerhead was in the center of a whirling vortex of frenzied sharks. He tore at their muscular flanks. Dorsal fins crunched between his teeth. Sharp teeth ripped his own flesh, but he still fought to drive the bull sharks away from the little flotilla of rafts. And as the battle raged, he picked up the stuttering black flashes that signaled the death throes of the creatures he’d mortally wounded. All his senses: smell, sound, sight, touch, and even electrons striking the receptors in his skin, conveyed the fury of this shark-on-shark combat. He would do everything in his power to save the life of Ruth Constantine.
Even as he fought, he realized that flashlights were shone into the water. He heard shouts.
“There’s a hammerhead down there! It’s driving away the bull sharks!”
“I’ll take care of you, Ruth. Come here. I can protect you.”
“Don’t touch me, Glenn. Don’t put one finger on me.”
“Ruth, what’s come over you?”
“I know you killed Damian. He disappeared after you went up on deck together.”
After the bull sharks fled, the hammerhead rose to the surface. Its widely spaced eyes captured the panoramic view of a lone raft. Clearly, it had become separated from the flotilla and drifted away into the gloom. Glenn, the blond man, gripped Ruth by the throat.
The hammerhead divined the angry man’s train of thought: ‘If she dies now she’ll never tell anyone. Once she’s dead no one will ever know that I killed Damian. The sharks will get rid of her body.’ The man would easily push Ruth overboard. He’d claim he tried to save her, of course . . . only she became deranged with fear.
The hammerhead’s tail began to sweep back and forth. All that muscular power of the body became focused on moving the twenty-foot creature through the water. As its speed increased, the creature’s eyes locked on the two figures struggling on the tiny craft.
Seconds later, the shark broke free of the water—sheer velocity carried it up into the air in an arc over the raft. Just for an instant there was a vastly enlarged view of Ruth’s face. Ten years older but still Ruth—beautiful, gentle Ruth.
The hammerhead swung its massive head to the right. Glenn Harrap filled its field of vision. The creature’s jaws opened, then snapped shut, catching the blond man by the right arm, just below the elbow. Momentum carried both the shark and the human higher into the air before both man and fish crashed down into the ocean.
The hammerhead retained the image of Ruth as she fell to her knees. Shaking, breathless, astonished, yet safe . . . forever safe.
The shark, with the man in its jaws, swam downward. Within moments, the pair had reached a depth of a thousand feet.
Even as Damian’s murderer died, the shark’s mind began to revert to its sharkish nature. Yet, in the moment before the human mind retreated completely, he gazed into the face of his killer from ten years ago, and he also saw the face of the Russian cavalryman that cut him down in the time of Napoleon. And he saw the features of the bandit that strangled him—back when he was a boy who carried the basket of figs beside the Nile, when boats with red sails floated on the water. And he saw those same eyes in the face of the tiger that pounced as he chipped flint into the shape of a spearhead.
Glenn was dead. But not for long . . . not for long.
He knew, without knowing how, that in the future the two adversaries would continue to meet in
different flesh and with different names. Whether as victims or as killers, they would meet, again and again.
Simon Clark has been a professional author for more than fifteen years. When his first novel, Nailed by the Heart, made it through the slush pile in 1994 he banked the advance and embarked upon his dream of becoming a full-time writer. Many dreams and nightmares later he wrote the cult horror-thriller Blood Crazy, and other novels including Death’s Dominion, Vengeance Child, and The Night of the Triffids, which continues the story of Wyndham’s classic The Day of the Triffids.
Simon’s latest novel is a return to his much-loved Vampyrrhic mythology with His Vampyrrhic Bride.
Films, news, and tips on writing can be accessed at his website.
Simon lives with his family in the atmospheric, legend-haunted county of Yorkshire in England.
Simon’s Website: www.nailedbytheheart.com
When I created my first anthology, Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations, I found there was one author that I particularly related to and who I could openly discuss publishing practices and marketing strategies. That was David Tallerman. In this anthology, I found my go-to person in the following author, Kelly Dunn. A well-respected name in the circles of Los Angeles horror authors, Kelly is also an editor as well as technical writer and novelist. Her next story is definitely on the darker spectrum of tales I accepted: A murdered man escapes the evil witchcraft that binds his soul by fleeing into the world the witchcraft is drawn from. Marvel at the Face of Forever is supernatural horror at its finest . . . and also earns the dubious distinction of being the “best-titled story” in this book.
Just after he passed out for the last time, Chandler Marvel found himself floating near the ceiling of the filthy shed. His screaming had short-circuited and gone silent. He still felt every severed nerve, every ruined limb, still tasted the clots and the mucus and bits of bone. The pain circulated through him like blood. Yet the nature of his fear slowed and shifted, congealing to slow-motion dread. Looking down, he recognized the flayed, mutilated thing on the ground as his own body. Somehow, Chandler’s awareness became an observer, while his physical self lay unmoving below. But Chandler did not dwell on this wonder; he was terrified that he might re-enter his body and wake up.
After what seemed an eternity of desecration, the murderer detached himself from Chandler’s body and stood. Watching from above, Chandler saw a deep-red pool, the flow from the body’s wounds, seeping into the dirt floor. The killer the others called El Cubano breathed deeply, calming himself. He smiled as he adjusted the hem of his caftan, covering himself once again. The blood and the fluids and the waste did not seem to bother him at all.
El Cubano yelled an order and two of his henchmen entered the shed. One man took hold of Chandler’s left wrist, and the other man grabbed his right. Both men kept away from the still-oozing stumps of what had once been Chandler’s fingers. Grunting, the two assistants dragged Chandler’s six-foot-two frame toward a dark corner. Chandler’s toeless feet traced a muddy trail along the way.
Why . . . ?
Chandler’s thoughts picked up speed, though his body no longer resisted. Please don’t please don’t please don’t please don’t . . . But the men’s attention strayed elsewhere. They looked furtively into the corner, even as they flipped his body on its back and stepped away. Chandler’s own face stared upward, as if seeking its soul. It was no longer a face, but a crimson skull with most of its flesh removed. Other changes had occurred. His blue eyes still stared, wide-open, but a cloudy film covered them. The whistling, burbling breathing noises had stopped. But if he had stopped breathing, that meant . . .
He tried to distract himself by following the men’s stare to whatever had caught their attention, but what he saw in the corner made no sense. A witchy cauldron, handcrafted and heavy-looking, hunkered in the shadows. Just a few hours ago—a faraway, fairytale lifetime ago—Chandler would have scoffed at the thing, would have told his frat buddies that it looked like a prop from a retro horror flick. But the long-ago Chandler had never known real suffering, or even real fear. Looking at the cauldron, he felt the mindless terror return.
El Cubano approached Chandler’s body and stood over it, cradling a thick-bladed knife with a white handle.
No! Deep down inside, Chandler knew he was dead, but he couldn’t accept the truth. It couldn’t end like this! Not with this angel-faced murderer standing over him, eyes glittering in triumph. Chandler willed his body to scream, to kick, to use its broken limbs, to fight for life. This was it, his last chance. But his body lay inert on the floor. Not a single twitch as El Cubano tipped Chandler’s head back and started hacking through his neck, seeming to glory in severing it from its body. Then he placed his hands on Chandler’s cheeks and lifted his head off the ground, holding it high.
Someone murmured in awe, “Ai, padrino. El poder de Palo Mayombe esta en ti.”
El Cubano laughed as he tossed Chandler’s head into the cauldron.
And Chandler’s observing awareness plummeted from the ceiling, following his physical remains into the cauldron’s interior. Straight down he dropped within the cauldron’s circular opening, descending in freefall as if he’d jumped out of a plane. Impossible. The cauldron could only have been several inches deep at most, yet he kept falling, falling through the murky muzz of a polluted night. As he fell, the air became warmer. Spread-eagled in emptiness, he sensed the sluggish rush of wind against his exposed wounds, as if he still possessed a physical body. Crimson mist spattered and scattered in the dark air. Scarlet rain, still warm, salty, and stinking of squandered life. He started counting. One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three . . . the endless numbers simply floated away, losing themselves in the thick unyielding atmosphere. He fell faster, tumbling, a plaything of darkness. His sundered flesh shrieked as he landed, hard, on his back.
It seemed that he lay in a field. An itching prickliness moved against him, angry grasses dried by an autumn breeze. Yet no breeze blew, nor did any cool relief come with the still-drifting blood-drizzle. Smells—somehow he could still detect odors—of cinnamon and hot chili peppers embraced the scent of rotting meat. Chandler sat up. Colorless clay beneath him, dry despite the rain. Ash-colored leaves in the dirt, rooted, yet rattling and restless. Several long thin sticks stuck up from the ground, spaced with care like a barren forest. Something dark lay near his feet: a black cat, shriveled into a grimacing mummy. In every direction the dull plain curved into lava-like fog at the limit of his sight. A circular mesa and, at its center, himself.
What were the last words he heard? El poder de Palo Mayombe esta en ti. The power of . . . Palo Mayombe . . . is yours. Palo Mayombe? He didn’t know what those words meant, didn’t know how any of this could be real. Had it all been—could it still be—some drug-induced hallucination? He knew this wasn’t so, but felt compelled to test the theory. In the reddish cast of the alien twilight, he held up his right hand. Yes, there were his fingers, each cut off at the second joint. All of it had happened and was still happening!
But his body had changed. As he moved his arm, the flesh wavered. He saw straight through the sinew and bone. Under the transparent skin of his ruined hand, another hand moved, perfectly in sync. The interior hand still had all its fingers, undamaged, the fingernails trimmed to the quick the way Chandler had always kept them in his sweet dream of a life before this nightmare.
He raised his left hand for comparison to its mate. The same. It seemed there were two parts to him now: his body as it had died—transparent now—on the outside, and his apparently undamaged self on the inside. Each joint and nerve of his dead body still sang its own song of agony. But seeing the undamaged body hidden beneath the dead one, he remembered the long-ago time. A time of parents, fond and smiling. A time of school and sports, swimming and hide-and-seek. A time of college, of friends, of dreams for the future. So many dreams . . .
“Get up.”
He jumped at the sound. The voice was deep, commanding. It spoke a foreign language, yet Chandler understood. And obeyed.
“Look at me, slave.”
A new kind of pain gripped Chandler, a searing nerve-tingling agony that ran the length of his back. He squeezed his eyes shut.
“I said, look at me.”
Chandler looked. Before him stood what had once been a splendid man in some long-gone human lifetime. Through the cloak of the man’s transparent dead body, Chandler saw a face that possessed the uniquely beautiful features of multiple ethnicities; cocoa-colored skin and wavy black hair that grew to his shoulders, an aquiline nose and almond-shaped brown eyes. He looked only a little older than Chandler, about twenty-five. His body, the body on the inside from before his murder, looked muscular and fit. But his murdered body, the one that clung like a sticky bubble to his former self—had been deliberately torn apart. Where the man on the inside boasted a proud, chiseled chest, the murdered outer shell showed a gaping, gory hole. His heart had been ripped out.
“Who—who are you?” Chandler asked.
“I am the Overseer. And you are now a slave, just one of many.”
“Overseer . . . ?” But even as Chandler formed the question, he saw the Overseer’s minions. They gathered behind him, their murdered bodies cloaking normal human forms: Grown men taken in the prime of their lives and mutilated. A pair of twin girls, savaged by the murderer and his crew. An entire household—a man, his wife, his mother, their bodyguards, their secretary, and two housemaids—their dead heads lolling off necks, still dripping water from the river that served as their mass grave. More of the dead crowded in behind them, and their number seemed countless. How could anyone destroy so much life and get away with it?
“He killed all of you? All of us?”
“He chose us, claimed our blood, called us to do his will. You will do his will, too.”
Chandler’s back spasmed. He fell. Even after the agony he’d already endured, pain still controlled his every movement. The Overseer looked on, impassive. Chandler’s nerves tingled, his muscles jerking him side-to-side, then upward in twisting contractions. “Why—are you hurting me?”
