Jeff Gelb: Hot Blood: Tales of Erotic Horror

I turned as she recoiled and grabbed my hand. I saw the asshole. Any humanity he might have claimed was obliterated by the vision of a huge, green check for an exclusive article that lit up his eyes. A pod man. Someone had recognized us in the restaurant last night, and sent him to ambush us in the name of the public's right to know. He brandished a huge audio microphone at us as though it was a scepter of power. It had a red foam windscreen and looked like a phallic lollipop.

Her scream sliced his question neatly off. She scrambled backward, hair flying, trying to interpose me between herself and the enemy, clawing at her head, crushing her eyes shut and screaming . That sound filled my veins with liquid nitrogen.

The son of a bitch was behind us. From the instant we had stepped into the sunlight, he'd had us nailed in his viewfinder. The video rig into which he was harnessed ground silently away; the red bubble light over the lens hood was on.

And Tasha screamed.

Maybe she jerked her hand away, maybe I let it go, but her grip went foggy in mine as I launched myself at the cameraman, eating up the distance between us like a barracuda. Only once in my whole life had I ever hit a man in anger, and now I doubled my own personal best by delivering a roundhouse punch right into the black glass maw of his lens, filling his face up with his own camera, breaking his nose, two front teeth, and the three middle fingers of my fist. He faded to black and went down like a medieval knight trapped by the weight of his own armor. I swarmed over him and used my good hand to rip out his electronic heart, wresting away porta-cam, tape and all. Cables shredded like torn ligaments and shiny tape viscera trailed as I heaved it, spinning, over the pier rail and into a sea the same color as Tasha's eyes. The red light expired.

Her scream… wasn't. There was a sound of pain as translucent as rice paper, thin as a flake of mica, drowned out by the roar of water meeting beach.

By the time I cranked my head around — two dozen slow-motion shots, easy — neither of her was there anymore. I thought I saw her eyes, in Arctic-cold afterburn, winking out last.

"Did you see —?"

"You're trespassing!" bellowed Dickie Barnhardt, wobbling toward the asshole with his side-to-side Popeye gait, pressed flat and pissed off. The asshole's face was flash-frozen into a bloodless bas-relief of shock and disbelief. His mouth hung slack, showing off a lot of expensive fillings. His mike lay forgotten at his feet.

"Did you see… did… she just…"

Dickie bounced his ashwood walking stick off the asshole's forehead. He joined his fallen mike in a boneless tumble to the planks of the pier. Dickie's face was alight with a bizarre expression that said it had been too long since he'd found a good excuse to raise physical mayhem, and he was proud of his forthright defense of tenant and territory. "You okay?" he said, squinting at me and spying the fresh blood on my hand.

"Dickie… did you see what happened to Tasha?" My voice switched in and out. My throat constricted. My unbroken hand closed on empty space. Too late.

He grinned a seaworthy grin and nudged the unconscious idiot at his feet. "Who's Tasha, son?"

I drink my coffee left-handed, and the cast mummifying my right hand gives me something to stare at contemplatively.

I think most often of that videotape, decomposing down there among the sand sharks and the jellyfish that sometimes bob to the surface near Dickie's pier. I think that the tiny bit of footage recorded by that poor, busted-up son of a bitch cameraman would not have mattered one damn, if I hadn't shot so much film of Tasha to prove she had nothing to fear. So many pieces. I pushed her right to the edge, cannibalizing her in the name of love.

The black plastic cans of film are still on the shelf down in my darkroom, lined up like inquisitors already convinced of my guilt. The thought of dunking that film in developer makes me want to stick a gun in my ear and pull the trigger, twice if I had the time.

Then I consider another way out, and wonder how long it would take me to catch up with her; how many pieces I have.

I never cried much before. Now the tears unload at the least provocation. It's sloppy, and messy, and unprofessional, and I hate it. It makes Nicole stare at me the way the street bum did, like I've tipped over into psycholand.

When she makes her rounds to fill my cup, she watches me. The wariness in her eyes is new. She sees my notice dip from her eyes to her sumptuous chest and back, in a guilty but unalterable ritual. I force a smile for her, gamely, but it stays pasted across my face a beat too long, insisting too urgently that everything is okay. She doesn't ask. I wave my unbroken hand over my cup to indicate no more , and Nicole tilts her head with a queer, new expression — as though this white boy is trying to trick her. But she knows better. She always has.

Graham Masterton is the author of fifteen horror novels, including the filmed The Manitou , and has won awards from the Mystery Writers of America and the West Coast Review of Books. He is highly qualified to appear in a collection of erotic horror, having served four years as executive editor of the British edition of Penthouse and having authored four how-to sex manuals.

Regarded as a seminal author of modern horror since the early '50s, Matheson has sold more than ninety short stories, fourteen "Twilight Zone" scripts, eleven novels, and six short story collections, and has written close to twenty produced screenplays. Matheson is currently preparing two screenplays and is over eight hundred pages into the manuscript for his latest novel.

McCammon burst on the horror scene in the early '70s and has already left his mark, with nine novels to his credit, including Swan Song and Stinger . His most recent novel is The Wolf's Hour .

Wilson, who grew up in New Jersey glued to Zacherley TV reruns, is the author of three science fiction novels, two horror novels (including the filmed The Keep) , a supernatural medical thriller, and his latest novel, Black Wind . When not writing, Wilson practices medicine. "Menage a Trois" has been significantly revised for this collection and has never before appeared in this form.

Born in 1953, Matheson, who readily cites his father as his mentor, cut his fiction teeth on short stories and then moved on to screenplays for TV and film production companies including Universal, Columbia, Warner Bros., MGM, and UA. In 1988 he began his own production company for development and production of features.

Williamson is the author of four novels and short fiction that has appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, Playboy, Twilight Zone and Fantasy & Science Fiction . "Blood Night" is his attempt at "the ultimate wet dream story — this is the one my wife is embarrassed about."

Garris rose to prominence as a story editor for Steven Spielberg's "Amazing Stories" TV series, for which he wrote several teleplays and directed an episode. His film screenplay work includes Fly 2 and batteries not included , and he rewrote and directed Critters 2 .

The president of the British Fantasy Society and a full-time writer since 1973, Campbell has won two World Fantasy awards and three British Fantasy awards. He is also author of a collection of his own erotic horror fiction, Scared Stiff .