Supernatural Noir

The first strike drops him. I feel the crunch of his skull all the way up my arm. He doesn’t make a sound, just collapses to the marble floor. I hear more screams, followed by the sound of one of the women ru

I raise the tire iron and bring it down again. It smashes through Michael’s face. Something tears in my gut, and then pain is almost blinding.

The rumbling becomes a roar. The lights strobe faster and faster.

I grab the snub nose and press it to Michael’s chest. Somehow, it continues to rise and fall. Not much, but enough that I have to be sure. When I jab the barrel against his sternum, something pushes back. Black veins travel across his flesh and then disappear.

I hold my breath and pull the trigger.

His body bucks hard beneath the blast and then lies still. I stagger backward, trying to figure my next move. Five women stare at me. This many witnesses can’t be good; I know that. Before I can make a decision, however, I hear glass cracking.

My eyes flash to the jar, to the fracture making its way from top to bottom. Tendrils of flame and blackness snake out from the crack, testing the air.

I drop the tire iron and push the hand to my bleeding gut. The women scream and scream, and I back toward the door, wanting to tell them to run, but unable to do a damn thing but hiss through bared teeth.

I make four stumbling steps toward the door before the jar shatters. Black clouds veined with fire and lightning roll forward, growing. The redhead with the gashes shrieks and hits her knees, and as I reach the door I can only watch as the cloud rears back like a snake and then strikes her, a tendril of black and red wrapping around her skull.

Her reaction is awful and instantaneous. Her body jitterbugs for a terrible, violent second, and then something flashes through her. When it’s done, she falls apart, ashes scattering across blood-spattered marble.

I run. More screams follow me, but they die one by one. Afraid of getting lost in Michael’s gigantic home, I return to the window and crawl out.

By the time I reach the Mercury, the snub nose still clenched in my fist and my lap slick with blood, the cloud has started billowing out of the mansion’s windows. Shelly tries to examine my wounds, but I yell at her to drive, just drive, goddamn it.

She speeds away from Michael’s home, and Hell follows.

——

Shelly walks me into the motel room—a flop worse than my place back in the city—and I sink onto the bed. I’m cold, freezing, and the only warm things in the room are Shelly’s hands against my face.

“It’ll be all right,” she tells me, and I’m happy she cares enough to lie.

“Maybe . . . for you.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I’ll say a lot more, babe.”

Her hands leave my face, and suddenly she’s busy ripping up sheets that have probably seen more sex than soap. “We just have to get you bandaged up,” she says.

“No!” The shout runs a spike of hot iron straight through me, and I scream.

Shelly freezes. “Baby?”

“You gotta go.”

Her lips tremble. I know what she wants to say.

“I can’t let . . . you die with me,” I tell her. “I’m not go

Shelly stands there, tears ru

“I love you, baby.”

“I love you. Now go.”

She kisses me again and disappears out the door.

So that’s it. I listen for the Mercury’s engine, for the sound of tires peeling away over hot asphalt. When I hear it, when I know she’s safe, I close my eyes and listen for the other sound, that rumble that turns into a roar.

Soon, the light begins to flicker, only this time it’s nothing in the room. It’s the sun. Everything shudders.

As I wait for Hell to arrive, I think of Shelly, of her pale skin and dark curves. I think of what I’ve done for her, and I think of everything I’d do if I could, and the last blister on my heart breaks.

——

Nate Southard’s books include Red Sky, Just Like Hell, Broken Skin, He Stepped Through, This Little Light of Mine, and Focus, which was co-written with Lee Thomas. His short fiction has appeared in such venues as Cemetery Dance, Thuglit, and the Bruce Springsteen–inspired anthology Darkness on the Edge. Nate lives in Austin, Texas, with his girlfriend and numerous pets. He loves food, cigars, and muttering under his breath. Look him up at NateSouthard.com.

| THE ABSENT EYE |

Brian Evenson

—

I

I lost my eye back when I was a child, ru

I do not remember exactly how I got home. Perhaps the boy and girl took me, perhaps they carefully led me home and rang the bell before fleeing, but nobody had seen them do so and this was not, in any case, what I remembered. All I remembered was standing stu

There was, a doctor informed me, no choice but to remove the eye, which was, for all intents and purposes, already removed. At first they left my socket exposed—to allow the wound to heal, I suppose. The optic nerve, confused, continued to collect information, sending my brain random, broken flashes of light.

Later, I was issued a patch, a cheap cotton affair dyed black and affixed with an elastic band. If the patch got wet, its dye would bleed, staining a black circle around my eye and, when wet enough to seep through, within the socket itself. I wore this patch for several months, continuing to see flashes of light when I removed it. At times these cohered into something that gave the semblance of an image. Through my remaining eye I would see the real world around me—would see, for instance, the solitary and spare confines of my bedroom, the even line of the top of my dresser and, above it, the even line of the ceiling. But the optic nerve would impose upon this other, twisting shapes, initially incomprehensible in form and aspect but, as the weeks and months went on, slowly becoming more articulated.

When I told the doctor what I saw, he just shook his head at me as if I were a fool. And yet even as he did so, I could see a smoky and blurred figure congealing around him. A floating figure which, as I watched, resolved into clarity and revealed itself to be his bloated double. It looked not unlike the doctor, though its legs faded into the air as indistinct smoke. It floated there, for a moment clear, and then hard to discern, and then clear again. It had something like an arm wrapped tight around the doctor’s shoulder. Its other hand, I saw, was at his throat. As I watched, the hand tightened.

The doctor, unaware of the creature itself, touched his throat and coughed. I watched his double smile and let go. I threw up my hands in surprise, much to the doctor’s puzzlement, and that was when the creature clinging to him turned and stared. It saw me, and knew it was seen by me. Both of us remained motionless, waiting for what the other would do. And then, very slowly, I watched its blurred mouth stretch into a grin.