Stephen Jones: Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Book of Horror

Something weird was happening on TV. Justin had walked out of Club 312, a cosy bar with Sinatra on the jukebox that was normally his favourite place to relax with a drink before starting the search for company. Tonight 312 was empty save for a small crowd of regulars clustered around the flickering set in the corner. He couldn’t tell what was going on, since none of the regulars ever talked to him, or he to them.

But from the scraps of conversation — eaten alive, night of the living dead — and edgy laughter he caught, Justin assumed some channel was showing a Hallowe’en horror retrospective. The holiday fell next week and he’d been meaning to get some candy. You ought to have something to offer trick-or-treaters if you were going to invite them in.

He heard a newscaster’s voice saying, ‘This has been a special report. We’ll keep you informed throughout the evening as more information becomes available. ’ Could that be part of a horror filmfest? A fake, maybe, like that radio broadcast in the thirties that had driven people to slit their wrists. They’d been afraid of Martians, Justin remembered. He downed the last of his own martian and left the bar. He didn’t care about the news. He would be making his own living dead tonight.

The Wounded Stag had no TV. Pictures were passé here, best left to that stillborn golden calf that was the other Hollywood. Sound was the thing, pounds and pounds of it pushing against the eardrums, saturating the brain, making the very skin feel tender and bruised if you withstood it long enough. Beyond headache lay transcendence.

The music at the Stag was mostly psycho-industrial, Skinny Puppy and Einstürzende Neubaten and Ministry, the Butthole Surfers and Nine Inch Nails and My Bloody Valentine. Justin liked the names of the bands better than he liked the music. The only time they played Sinatra here was at closing hour, when they wanted to drive people out.

But the Stag was where the truly beautiful boys came, the drop-dead boys who could get away with shaving half their hair and dyeing the other half dead black or lurid violet, or wearing it long and stringy and filthy, or piercing their faces twenty times. They swept through the door wrapped in their leather, their skimpy fishnet, their jangling rings and chains, as if they wore precious jewels and ermine. They allowed themselves one contemptuous glance around the bar, then looked at no one. If you wanted their attention, you had to make a bid for it: an overpriced drink, a compliment that was just ambiguous enough to be cool. Never, ever a smile.

Like as not, you would be rejected summarily and without delay. But if even a spark of interest flared in those coldly beautiful black-rimmed eyes, what sordid fantasy! What exotic passion! What delicious viscera!

He had taken four boys home from the Stag on separate nights. They were still in his apartment, their organs wrapped neatly in plastic film inside his freezer, their hands tucked within easy reach under his mattress, their skulls nestled in a box in the closet. Justin smiled at them all he wanted to now, and they grinned right back at him. They had to. He had boiled them down to the bone, and all skulls grinned because they were so happy to be free of imprisoning flesh.

But skulls and mummified hands and salty slices of meat weren’t enough any more. He wanted to keep the face, the thrilling pulse in the chest and guts, the sweet slick inside of the mouth and anus. He wanted to wrap his mouth around a cock that would grow hard without his having to shove a finger up inside it like some desiccated puppet. He wanted to keep a boy, not a motley collection of bits. And he wanted that boy to smile at him, for him, for only him.

Justin dragged his gaze away from the swirling depths of his martian and glanced at the door. The most beautiful boy he had ever seen was just coming in. And he was smiling: a big, sunny, unaffected and utterly guileless smile.

Suko leaned his head against the tall blond man’s shoulder and stared out the window of the taxi. The candy panorama of West Hollywood spread out before them, neon smeared across hot asphalt, marabou cowboys and rhinestone drag queens posing in the headlights. The cab edged forward, parting the throng like a river, carrying Suko to whatever strange shores of pleasure still lay ahead of him this night.

‘Where did you say you were from?’ the man asked. As Suko answered, gentle fingers did something exciting to the inside of his thigh, through his ripped black jeans. The blond man’s voice was without accent, almost without inflection.

Of course, no one in LA had an accent. Everyone was from somewhere else, but they all strove to hide it, as if they’d slid from the womb craving flavoured mineral water and sushi on Melrose. But Suko had met no one else who spoke like this man. His voice was soft and low, nearly a monotone. To Suko it was soothing; any kind of quiet aimed at him was soothing after the circuses of Patpong and Sunset Boulevard, half a world apart but cut from the same bright cacophonous cloth. Cities of angels: yeah, right. Fallen angels.

They pulled up in front of a shabby apartment building that looked as if it had been modelled after a cardboard box some time in the 1950s. The man — Justin, Suko remembered, his name was Justin — paid the cab driver but didn’t tip. The cab gunned away from the curb, tires squealing rudely on the cracked asphalt. Justin stumbled backwards and bumped into Suko. ‘Sorry.’

‘Hey, no problem.’ That was still a mouthful — his tongue just naturally wanted to rattle off a mai pen rai — but Suko got all the syllables out. Justin smiled, the first time he’d done so since introducing himself. His long skinny fingers closed around Suko’s wrist.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’s safer if we go in the back way.’

They walked around the corner of the building, under an iron stairwell and past some garbage cans that fairly shimmered with the odour of decay. Suko’s foot hit something soft. He looked down, stopped, and backed into Justin. A young black man lay among the stinking cans, his head propped at a painful angle against the wall, his legs sprawled wide.

‘Is he dead?’ Suko clutched for his Buddha amulet. The man’s ghost might still be trapped in this mean alley, looking for living humans to plague. If it wanted to, it could suck out their life essences through their spinal columns like a child sipping soda from a straw.

But Justin shook his head. ‘Just drunk. See, there’s an empty bottle by his leg.’

‘He looks dead.’

Justin prodded the black man’s thigh with the toe of his loafer. After a moment, the man stirred. His eyes never opened, but his hands twitched and his mouth gaped wide, chewing at the air.

‘See?’Justin tugged at Suko’s arm. ‘Come on.’

They climbed the metal stairs and entered the building through a fire door wedged open with a flattened Old Milwaukee can. Justin led the way down a hall coloured only by shadow and grime, stopped in front of a door identical to all the others but for the number 21 stamped on a metal plate small as an egg, and undid a complicated series of locks. He opened the door a crack and ushered Suko inside, then followed and turned to do up all the locks again.

At once Suko noticed the smell. First there was only the most delicate tendril, like a pale brown finger tickling the back of his throat; then a wave hit him, powerful and nauseating. It was the smell of the garbage cans downstairs, increased a hundredfold and overlaid with other smells: cooking oil, air freshener, some caustic chemical odour that stung his nostrils. It was the smell of rot. And it filled the apartment.

Justin saw Suko wrinkling his nose. ‘My refrigerator broke,’ he said. ‘Damn landlord says he can’t replace it till next week. I just bought a bunch of meat on sale and it all went bad. Don’t look in the fridge, whatever you do.’