Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked Read online

  SOMETHING BORROWED,

  SOMETHING BLOOD-SOAKED

  CHRISTA CARMEN

  This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental.

  Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked by Christa Carmen

  Paperback Edition: 978-1-989206-00-3

  Copyright © 2018 UNNERVING

  “Thirsty Creatures” © 2017, first published in Strange Beasties, Third Flatiron

  “Red Room” © 2018, first published in Unnerving Magazine Issue #5

  “Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked” © 2017, first published in Fireside Fiction

  “Souls, Dark and Deep” © 2017, first published in The Haunted Traveler, Weasel Press

  “All Souls of Eve” © 2016, first published as “Four Souls of Eve” in Frith Books

  “Liquid Handcuffs” © 2017, short story version first published in Tales to Terrify

  “Lady of the Flies” © 2018, first published in Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked

  “Flowers from Amaryllis” © 2018, first published in Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked

  “The Girl Who Loved Bruce Campbell” © 2016, first published in Corner Bar Magazine,

  reprinted in Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, Volume 2 and Horror Hill, Chilling Tales for Dark Nights / The Simply Scary Podcast Network

  “A Fairy Plant in Grief” © 2017, first published in Ghost Parachute

  “This Our Angry Train” © 2017, first published in DarkFuse Magazine

  “The One Who Answers the Door” © 2016, first published in wordhaus, reprinted in Space Squid

  “Wolves at the Door and Bears in the Forest” © 2018, first published in Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked

  “This beautifully macabre collection of urban legends and ghastly encounters is a cold whisper, a dripping axe, a shattered camera lens. Walk carefully into Carmen’s night. But if you hear flies, run.”

  —Stephanie M. Wytovich, Bram Stoker award-winning author of Brothel

  “Christa Carmen is undoubtedly one of horror’s most exciting and distinctive new voices, and her debut collection absolutely proves why. From hardcore to heart-wrenching, these tales run the gamut, with each one of them taking hold of you and not letting go. Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked is one incredibly wild ride. Hold on tight.”

  —Gwendolyn Kiste, author of And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe and Pretty Marys All in a Row

  “Christa Carmen’s Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked is a gorgeous foray into the dark inner world of her layered, complicated characters. Her beautiful, languid prose pulls you in from the first line and keeps you there, mesmerized as she vividly constructs a brand new universe around you:

  ‘Your smiles are two gardens, and the moss-covered walls around them have begun to crumble.’

  —Christa Carmen

  “Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked is like a wild and thrilling roller coaster. At the end, you won’t want to get off the ride but keep on going, over and over.”

  —Christina Sng, Bram Stoker award-winning author of A Collection of Nightmares

  SOMETHING BORROWED, SOMETHING BLOOD-SOAKED

  FOREWORD

  THIRSTY CREATURES

  RED ROOM

  SOMETHING BORROWED

  SOMETHING BLOOD-SOAKED

  SOULS, DARK AND DEEP

  ALL SOULS OF EVE

  LIQUID HANDCUFFS

  LADY OF THE FLIES

  THE GIRL WHO LOVED BRUCE CAMPBELL

  A FAIRY PLANT IN GRIEF

  WOLVES AT THE DOOR AND

  BEARS IN THE FOREST

  THIS OUR ANGRY TRAIN

  THE ONE WHO ANSWERS THE DOOR

  FLOWERS FROM AMARYLLIS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  FOREWORD

  Cold feet. The term used in conjunction with approaching nuptials covers all manner of anxieties about the big day, as well as the relationship itself. Though we like to consider “true love” our end-all-be-all motivation for joining our lives with another, there are innumerable reasons people seek relationships—and just as many reasons they run.

  Try to pry that truth from your lover's lips, however, and you risk getting bitten. If there's anything we value more than the idea of true love, it's the need to protect our secrets.

  But Christa Carmen isn't interested in silence, and her collection Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked isn't looking to lead you calmly down the aisle. Your path is littered with temptations that test the strength of your mind, heart, and stomach, and over thirteen tales of death and dependency, Christa Carmen has you questioning whether love is real or just another addiction.

  Don't run, lovers. You can't. This aisle is warm and sticky and it's going to devour you from the toes up. By the end of this collective ceremony, you'll never have cold feet again.

  Jessica McHugh

  THIRSTY CREATURES

  The trees were fire and the sky was panicked birds and the horse was made of bone.

  She knew the horse would not walk forever. She also knew that when the horse could go no farther, she would trade her Hell on Earth for one beyond her capacity to conceive.

  —

  On the day the water turned to poison, she had done the bad thing again. When her father appeared before her, she was certain it was to scold her for her atrocious, perverted ways. But when her father opened his mouth, a river of red ran out in place of reproach. In a revelation of horror, she remembered her father guzzling the glass of water from the faucet, and she gripped her favorite stuffed creature—a gift that she had not deserved—as the gore rushed from between her father’s lips, hiding her face in its fur so she would not have to see.

  She heard the muffled thwump when her father’s body hit the floor. By then, her brother had drunk the water too,

  (by then, who hadn’t?)

  and when he saw their father in a frothy sea of unrelenting red, he opened his mouth to scream. His insides came out instead of sound.

  She watched as the mundane setting of their living room became an estuary of brackish blood, her brother’s red mixing with her father’s. The book that had taught her about brackish water and estuaries and other interesting, scientific things lay open on her desk upstairs. It would remain there now, for an eternity. Unless the water cleared and there was anyone left to drink it.

  When the bottled water had been reduced to a wasteland of empty plastic, she braced herself to venture outside. Outside, where the world rained ash and the wind blew pain. It was also where the well ran deep, and if she was lucky, ran clean.

  She was desperate for a drink, but recalled the book on her desk, extolling the scientific method and the testing of hypotheses. With her tongue like a shed carapace in her mouth, and her innards like sand in a sieve, she crouched behind the stone wall and settled in to observe.

  When to delay another second would be a fate worse than what waited for her in the kitchen tap, a raven fluttered down to perch on the bait: a bucket of water exhumed from the well’s depths. The great black bird lowered its head to sip, and splashed water over its wings. She held her breath, waiting for a rivulet of red to spew from its throat, to wrack its fragile, feathered body. The raven opened its beak, but only a song emerged, and she wept with relief. The salty tears made her thirstier than ever.

  She filled every container she could find with unspoiled water from the well. An old tomcat mewled and hissed and spat, and though she lamented his misfortune, she could not share such a precious commodity with a cat. She reminded herself that she was
wicked and depraved, and this allowed her to stomach her cruelty more easily.

  She carried bucket after bucket of crisp, cool water to the barn, delivering the stores to a single stall. Encompassed in the narrow space was her father’s former show horse, the strongest horse on the farm, of the most impressive breeding. The horse that would fare the best when it came time to abandon their home.

  Without water, the milk cow and the donkeys and the other horses fell. Their already dehydrated corpses withered and shrunk, their eye sockets widening to gaping, fly-infested chasms. She was not privy to the noises their bodies made when they collapsed, but she imagined they sounded like her father had. Like her brother. All things sounded the same when they fell in death.

  The morning the well ran dry, the air was thick and smelled of sulfur. She tacked up her mount and filled the saddlebags with bottles and canteens. She left the farm, not bothering to say goodbye. She did bring along her favorite stuffed creature, holding it before her on the horn of the saddle. A sleight of hand to delude herself into believing she did not ride alone.

  The earth was blood red and bone dry. She saw no one in the weeks and months after setting out, would have almost welcomed the inconvenience of defending her water supply from fiend or foe. With no one to contend with, the caches of hydration were infinite; abandoned grocery stores reigned over empty parking lots, and households were rife with bottles of uncontaminated liquid, foregone by the fallen for the poison-spouting spigots.

  There were no budding blossoms or kaleidoscopic foliage with which to judge the passing of the seasons. The horse had long become accustomed to the endless road, its body changing, shifting, ridding itself of useless things like tissue and muscle and flesh. Now the once-show horse was a chrysalis of dust and bone, its ribcage a steel trap that held its heart hostage.

  Her own skin had fused with the horse’s hellish hide. She had ridden the wretched beast to the ends of the Earth and back, and would repeat this journey over and over, with no end in sight. The stuffed creature, too, persisted, its body worn to nothing by the friction of her hands, its face erased by kisses from parched lips. It was a tether to the past and a clue to her future. The faceless, nameless being, a blueprint for her soul.

  At first, she prayed to the deities of water, of wells and springs and fountains and rivers, and to the god and queen of the sea. She pleaded with them to release her as they had all the others. But she knew that to pray was to sin, for she knew her punishment was just. It was her fate to have all the water in the world, and no way to douse the fire.

  Time disintegrated, and it came to her that she had not required a drink in as long as she could remember. Somewhere along the purgatorial path, she had ceased to possess those qualities that made her human. Water was no longer essential. As it were, every drop had long since dried up. Her thirst, however, was torturous and vast.

  If she could only take back the bad thing, she’d have done so in a heartbeat. She would have drunk the poisoned water in her brother’s place a thousand times over, and the river of red would have poured from her mouth in place of all her lies.

  But…

  The trees were fire and the sky was panicked birds and the horse was made of bone.

  And she was one with the horse, an empty web of regret. Like the stuffed creature in her arms, her last link to a long-gone world, she was faceless. Formless.

  And so very, very thirsty.

  RED ROOM

  The flash that dissolved the alcohol-sodden trappings of Marci’s hangover-cocoon was blinding white and machine-gun sharp. Marci flinched, still half-asleep, and tried to shield her eyes from the onslaught.

  “You legit look like the Bride of Frankenstein,” Caleb said. He stood over her with cell phone in hand, snapping photos and looking grotesquely pleased with himself.

  Marci mumbled something incoherent, and explored the straw-stiff ropes of hair that had prompted Caleb’s observation. In addition to her coiffure à la electrocution, she felt at least two bobby pins she’d overlooked the night before, jabbing her scalp through the hairsprayed strands like the pincer claws of hard-shelled bugs.

  Another flash went off, and Marci propped herself up on her elbows. “Can you knock it the fuck off?” Her tone was mirthless. “I appreciate that my hair has whipped you into a photographic frenzy, but I’m nauseous enough from all the Fireball consumed last night that the presence of strobe lights in our bedroom can only hurt matters.”

  She groped around the nightstand before realizing that the cell phone Caleb held was her own. “Give me that. Why are you using my phone anyway?”

  Caleb tossed it over without answering. She thumbed the phone to life, dimming the too-bright screen before commencing her morning routine of email checking and Facebook perusing.

  Caleb flopped onto the bed and chugged from a giant bottle of water. “Goddamn. That was some party. Good thing we didn’t have far to drive home.” He rolled toward Marci and watched as she scrolled past pictures already posted from his sister’s wedding the night before. “Did you get any good ones?” He snatched the phone back and opened the photos app. “You should post one of us. You know… a preview for our own wedding in a few months.”

  Marci’s lips pursed, but Caleb was already scrolling, and quickly at that, past shots of pastel-bedecked bridesmaids, his sister in a white satin robe with Bride emblazoned on the back in glittering sequins, his fiancé flanked by two hairstylists for what would later become her morning-after-Bride-of-Frankenstein-‘do. He passed over photos of the ceremony with equal amounts indifference, but slowed when he got to the first of the shots from the reception, scanning the frame for a glimpse of his own, tuxedoed self.

  Marci pried the phone from Caleb’s fingers and gave him a stony look.

  She scrolled until she reached a photo of the wedding party on the front steps of the resort. Several of the bridesmaids had danced themselves into hairstyles that rivaled Marci’s current one, the men had all loosened their ties, and the best man and maid of honor flanked the group on either side, champagne bottles held to their lips, fists raised in celebration of a wedding done right.

  “Yup,” Marci said with a bitter little laugh. She grimaced at the full-to-the-brim martini she clutched in the photo. “Despite the personal bad decision to over-imbibe, that’s a pretty memorable shot to have ended the night on.” She looked, suddenly, as if she might be sick. She pressed her arms to the mattress in a feeble attempt to stop the room from spinning, and mouthed, don’t throw up, don’t throw up, as if those words were the trick to undoing the damage wrought by too much vodka.

  “You’re a real hurtin’ doobie, aren’t you?” Caleb asked, a strange sort of glee suffusing his features. “That makes the pics I just took all the more valuable. Let’s see ‘em.” He reached for the phone but stopped short, eyeing her intently. “You know, Bride of Frankenstein isn’t quite right. You actually look more like Medusa.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Marci said. She pulled the phone closer to her chest, out of Caleb’s reach.

  “Aw, come on.” Caleb wrapped his hands around the back of her neck and tried to pull her in for a kiss. “Let’s see how frisky you and your snake-hair can be.”

  Marci squirmed from his grasp and rolled onto her side. “What part of hungover don’t you understand?” She punched in the phone’s passcode and navigated back to her photos. “One more move like that, and this Medusa will have no choice but to turn you into—”

  The word died in her throat like a snake whose head has been severed by a garden shear. She stared at the image on her phone. Shock and confusion etched her corpse-pale face; the sooty remnants of her makeup ringed eyes as big as saucers.

  In the space between the last wedding photo of the night, and the ones taken by Caleb that morning, was a picture of a room. At first, Marci hadn’t realized that the cause for the room’s overwhelmingly red hue was the veritable sea of blood that covered its floor and walls. Once she’d overcome this optical hurdle, it was Ma
rci’s sense of reality that had to grapple with what she was seeing; this image of carnage that couldn’t be so.

  A single bare bulb lit the room, hanging from the ceiling by a twisted piece of wire. An old-fashioned claw foot tub menaced from one corner, though the room couldn’t reasonably be called a bathroom. The room couldn’t reasonably be called anything, really, except perhaps an abattoir, saturated like it was, and seemed always to have been.

  The tub was full of blood. Marci could see that it had overflowed, spilling its crimson contents onto the crimson floor. Blood dripped from the ceiling like seething, poison rain, where the arterial spray of the room’s victims had left not a single patch of plaster unstained. A row of jagged surgical instruments gleamed red from a blood-drenched counter and the man in the center of the photo’s frame wore a blood-speckled mask of singular concentration.

  The man in the foreground of the photo held something disinterestedly between gore-smeared fingers, a wet mass of blood-tinged hair, the scalp still clinging, thin and fragile-looking, like dampened tissue paper that will tear and clump at the lightest touch.

  There was a third subject in the photo.

  Stacked in separate piles of limbs and organs on a bloody wooden chair thread with a rusty chain, flesh pared from bone, skin from muscle, wet, yellow fat marbling meat.

  Marci sucked in a breath. “What the fuck?”

  Curiosity piqued at the shock in Marci’s voice, Caleb craned to regard the screen. “What?” he asked. “What is it?”

  Marci angled the screen so Caleb could see the gruesome image. “It’s at the end of all the wedding photos, but before the ones you took of me this morning.” She tapped the photo to bring up its details, squinting at the timestamp in the upper center of the frame. “It was taken at three twenty-eight AM.”