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i
PRAISE FOR BRYAN SMITH AND HOUSE OF BLOOD!
"Smith promises unimaginable brutality, bile-inducing fear, and unfathomable despair;
and then delivers monumentally!"
--Horror Web
"Bryan Smith is a force to be reckoned with!"
--Douglas Clegg, author of The Attraction
"A feast of good old-fashioned horror. Don't pass this one up!
--Brian Keene, author of Ghoul
"In the vein of Bentley Little and Edward Lee...sometimes scary, sometimes amusing,
House of Blood is a quick, enjoyable read suitable for all fans of horror and dark
fantasy."
--Michael Laimo, author of Dead Souls
"Bryan Smith has a knack for taking the standard horror tale and turning it inside
out to show you the dripping viscera at its core."
--Randy Chandler, author of Bad Juju
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UNDER HER CONTROL
Craig felt the metallic solidity of the guardrail against the backs of his legs.
He considered vaulting over the guardrail, but something kept him riveted to the
spot. There was an alien presence in his head. He let out a whimper as he felt its
intrusion into his psyche.
Craig whimpered again and his voice emerged as a pitiful whine: "P-please ..."
There was another thunk from within the car, caused this time by someone pulling
the passenger side door handle. The door creaked slowly open, and a woman'
s long, elegant, stockinged leg appeared. Her exquisitely shaped calf tapered down
to a thin ankle and a foot encased in a black stiletto heel.
Then the woman began to rise out of the car and walk toward Craig. The rest of her
body delivered on the sensual promise of that first glimpse. The short black skirt
and the tight silk blouse further enhanced the impression.
The thing that ruined the picture for Craig was her head.
Her extra one.
"Lady," Craig said, beginning to feel dizzy. "You've got two heads."
One of the heads, the pretty one, laughed.
And that perfect body moved still closer.
Craig attempted to turn away from the insane, impossible vision, but he still couldn't
move. The two heads--one radiantly beautiful, the other withered and hideous--
grinned in a most unsettling manner.
The ugly head licked its cracked lips and hissed like a snake.
Then Craig knew--that was the one inside his head.
Craig couldn't move, but he could still talk. There was no point in playing at diplomacy
now. "Swear to God, if I had a knife right now, I'd cut out my own eyes just so I'
d never have to look at you again."
The pretty head's sparkling blue eyes widened with delight. "What an excellent idea.
Show me ..."
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Bryan Smith
iv
Other Leisure books by Bryan Smith:
DEATHBRINGER
HOUSE OF BLOOD
v
THE
Freakshow
BRYAN SMITH
NEW YORK CITY
vi
This one's for Rachael,
for helping me get through this
freakshow called life.
A LEISURE BOOK®
March 2007
Published by
Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
200 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is
stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither
the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."
Copyright ©2007 by Bryan Smith
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording
or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission
of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
ISBN 0-8439-5827-8
The name "Leisure Books" and the stylized "L" with design are trademarks of Dorchester
Publishing Co., Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.
Visit us on the web at www.dorchesterpub.com
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always, much thanks to my family, including my mom and brothers Jeff and Eric.
Thanks also to my friends Keith Ashley and Shannon Turbeville. Let'
s all go have a beer at the Villager Tavern. Shout-outs must also go to all the supercool
Hypericon people, including Darryl and Fred and Stephania Grimm, and to Tod Clark,
for the cool books and the place to crash. Thanks again to first reader and friend
Kent Gowran, and also to David T. Wilbanks and the whole rockin
' crew at Shake It And Break It!
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The Freakshow
1
Strange signals in the night.
Dead silence.
Then...
... a burst of white noise.
Followed by a high-pitched squeal, a warbling sound that rises higher and higher
before abruptly flattening out, becoming the low drone of a primitive audio device
locking on the strongest detectable frequency.
A six-fingered hand reaches for a dial.
It twists the dial ever so slightly.
Silence again.
Then a baritone voice:
"This is Radio Ether, coming at you live to the Meatside for the first time in almost
a year. I know the wait seems like an eternity for many of you, each frozen moment
like an eon. But rejoice, brothers and sisters, freaks and geeks, gimps and
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beasts, for the time has come round again and another Assimilation will soon begin."
Another brief period of crackling silence.
Then that smooth, rumbling voice resumes after a deep exhalation of breath: "Right
now things are quiet. It'
s the stillness before the storm. Take solace in knowing that the trap has been set
and will soon be sprung. Any moment
now..."
A low, throaty chuckle makes the ancient speaker cabinet vibrate.
"This moment. Listen ... yes ... can you hear their screams? Mmm, what beautiful
music they make." More throaty laughter. "I
wish you could see the shock on their stupid faces as they leap off the bleachers
and stampede for the exits.
..."
And the announcer falls silent a moment.
The faint sound of terrified screaming issues through the speakers.
"So gullible. So like sheep. They deserve to die this way, don't you think?" A satisfied
sigh, followed by a groan of pleasure.
"Yes, yes, yes. The Freakshow has come to town and now the freaks have come out to
play-ay."
The thing with the six-fingered hand nods and grins.
Then it turns off the old radio and ventures out to join in the fun. ...
3
Chapter One
Mike Garrett held his breath and waited for the sounds of the tall man's echoing
footsteps to fade.
CLIP ... CLOP.
Clip ... clop.
The sound triggered a childhood memory of standing on a sidewalk and watching a lone
horse walk down the middle of Main Street near the end of the Dandridge High homecoming
parade. And that thought triggered a flood of painful memories of his youth in his
doomed hometown. A year ago, everyone in Dandridge died when terrorists detonated
a dirty bomb, an inexplicable attack on an ordinary, sleepy town essentially in the
middle of nowhere. There had been rumors ever since that the dirty bomb story was
purely a government fabrication, a handy cover for something else they couldn
't explain--
and a way to exploit the lingering post-9/11 paranoia that still gripped the heartland.
Mike had moved to nearby Pleasant
4
Hills only months prior to the tragedy, and his dreams since had been haunted by
nightmarish visions of walking corpses and leering, radiation-scarred mutants straight
out of a 1950s sci-fi B-movie.
His therapist chalked the recurring nightmares up to "survivor'
s guilt." Which made a lot of sense, actually, but knowing this on a rational level
had little effect on the nightly torture sessions his fragmented sleep had become.
None of the drugs prescribed by his psychiatrist had done any damned good, either.
He
'
d felt at the end of his rope for months now, desperate, about to give up any hope
of knowing peace again.
But now the true reason for the endless nightmares seemed clear.
Though the ceaseless stream of horrifying images likely had been initiated by the
terrible angst he'd experienced in the wake of his hometown'
s bizarre demise, he was sure their continuation was a kind of precognition. Some
primitive part of his mind, a part accessible only in the murky depths of sleep,
had sensed that a similar doom was coming to Pleasant Hills. For all he knew, what
was happening now was precisely what had
really happened in Dandridge.
He shuddered and barely managed to rein in a whine as the images flashed through
his mind in rapidfire fashion, jerky, like the jump cuts in a faux-edgy rock video
--
the grand entrance of the Ringmaster under the big top, music swelling and blaring
as the crowded bleachers rock with applause ... the subsequent arrival of many hideously
deformed "freaks" (as they called themselves) ... those strange, leering clown-things
... a brief but dazzling display of aerobatics, ending in the decapitation of a "normal"
(by comparison) man ... the shocked silence of the still
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crowd ... the freaks rushing into the bleachers, tearing into the spectators, killing
and mutilating them in swift, shocking fashion ... the disembowelment of Chuck Follett,
his best friend since grade school, ropes of intestines spilling on the metal bleacher
seats as Chuck
s eyes flash pained disbelief ... then that sense of being swept away by the screaming,
fleeing crowd ...
And since then, hiding wherever he could, frantically ducking here and there like
a soldier trapped behind enemy lines, cowering and cringing every time he heard another
scream ...
... Clip ... clop ...
The tall man'
s footsteps sounded far away now. Mike at last let out a big breath. He palmed a
sheen of sweat from his forehead, wiped it on his jeans, and began to emerge from
his hiding place. He gripped the edge of the platform above his head with shaking
fingers, waited until he had a firmer grip, then began to slowly rise. His head rose
above the level of the platform. He looked left, then right, and let out another
sigh.
The midway was empty.
The tall man was gone.
Mike made an involuntary sound that was somewhere between a strangled sob and mad
laughter. He lifted a partition board, stepped out of the Punch & Judy booth, and
moved carefully into the middle of the deserted midway. Each side of the midway was
lined with concession and amusement booths. Their garishly painted facades seemed
to leer at him like materialized phantoms from his nightmares.
Mike felt an abrupt welling of tears at the corners of his eyes. It was horrible,
what had happened. Of
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course it was. But it was also kind of funny, if only in a purely insane way. Because
he was awake now. The world around him, despite its phantasmagorical qualities, was
real, tactile. The ground beneath his feet was real ground. Solid. Definitely not
something that would turn to quicksand with his next step. His heaving breath, proof
of life and bodily function, fogged the fall air.
And yet, even in his wakefulness, he could not escape the country of nightmares.
It felt like the universe was taunting him. Perhaps he'
d done something unspeakably awful in a former life, and this was God
s way of punishing him. He laughed again, and now the tears spilled forth, etching
trails of glittering wetness down his cheeks.
He clenched his fists, digging the fingernails he'
d forgotten to trim for too long into the soft flesh of his palms, digging until
the flesh yielded beneath the pressure. Blood welled in the grooves. More proof of
life. The self-inflicted pain he felt now reminded him of how tenuous life was at
the moment. He had to get a grip. Had to stop tittering like a fucking madman. Because
if he kept it up, the sound would surely draw the tall man back in this direction.
And he did not want that.
Oh, no.
He had to get out of here. Now.
Obviously. What wasn'
t so obvious was the most efficient way of doing that. The grounds of the Flaherty
Brothers Traveling Carnivale and Freakshow were laid out as if there had been some
dark design behind the haphazard, sprawling placement of the midways and the tents
housing the various grotesque attractions, a design calculated to confuse and disorient.
Oh, hell,
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no "as if" about it. Given what he'd seen and experienced so far, the sinister intent
was obvious.
The taint of evil was all around him. Not just in the amusement booths and tents,
but in the very air he was breathing. The air was cold. Too cold by far for late
September in Tennessee. The grounds of the carnival had its own atmosphere, an alien
intrusion that displaced the Tennessee warmth so completely Mike could almost believe
he
'd been transported to some other entirely different (and terrible) realm the moment
he'
d stepped through the entrance after buying his ticket. Come to think of it, that
didn
't seem out of the question. Not at fucking all.
Mike swallowed a rising scream.
He's coming back!
Clip-clop.
The sound was coming from the right. Mike glanced in that direction and thought he
saw a hint of long shadow at the far end of the midway. In another moment or two,
the ghastly ringmaster of this hellish parody of a real carnival would come around
a corner and see him. Mike knew he
d be as good as dead if the tall man saw him. Or worse. Worse was a definite possibility
here. He
'd seen the awful proof of that up close, hadn't he?
He had two choices. He could either duck back behind the Punch & Judy booth, or he
could sprint into the deeper darkness to the left. He imagined hiding again behind
the rickety booth while waiting for the tall man to clomp slowly by, with only the
deranged-looking faces of the abandoned hand puppets for company. He shivered again
at the memory of the puppets
' strangely angular and fleshy faces, their eyes gleaming
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so fiercely in the moonlight, hinting at sentience and life. It should have been
an absurd notion, but for Mike the line between the absurd and reality had blurred
to near meaninglessness.
CLIP-CLOP.
So close.
Cold sweat streamed down Mike's face as he began backing away from the growing shadow,
and away from the Punch & Judy booth. He saw the tall man'
s cartoonish top hat appear over the top of the tent at the far end of the midway
and willed his feet to move faster. He stumbled, but somehow managed to maintain
his balance. He knew the sensible thing would be to turn around and really put on
a burst of speed, but a whispering voice of paranoia made him believe the tall man
would be on him in a heartbeat if he turned his back on him.
His heel dipped into a small hole in the ground and he pitched backward. His arms
pinwheeled wildly, but this time he'
d been put too badly off balance. He hit the ground and let out a cry. A fresh burst
of nerve-frying terror followed immediately on the heels of the involuntary squeal.
A sound emanated from the far end of the midway.
An insane, echoing laugh.
Another involuntary cry slipped through his terror-constricted vocal cords. The cry
was followed by the helplessly repeated words "Oh god ohgodohgod" as he scooted backward.
Now another voice spoke in the darkness. A breathy whisper that nonetheless filled
the night. This is what the tall man said:
"Sweet, sweet, lovely meat, how I love to eat
human meat!"
The insane laughter came again, louder this time,
9
filling all the dark corners of the midway. The sound rang in Mike'
s ears like a relentless tolling of some hellish bell. The sound that came from his
own mouth now was more of a whimper than a cry. He sounded like a whipped and terrified
dog.
Like something defeated.
Something within him rebelled at the thought, a last hidden reservoir of strength
and courage he hadn'
t suspected he possessed. His body went still. He took a steadying breath and got
to his feet. He stared for a moment at the now clearly visible form of the tall man
at the far end of the midway.
The lean outline of the ringmaster'
s body looked from this distance like something sketched quickly with a pencil. He
stood more than twenty feet tall, and at first Mike had thought he walked on stilts.
But that couldn
t be the case. His legs were too obviously flexible, and there was none of the stiffness
Mike associated with a stilt-walker. That the tall ringmaster was no ordinary man
had been clear almost from the beginning, and now Mike was nearly certain he wasn
t even human. What sort of creature he might be, Mike couldn
't fathom. The ringmaster, along with all the other bizarre beings and ghastly events
d witnessed over the last several hours, was something beyond his admittedly feeble
store of knowledge of things supernatural.
The tall man (or thing,
his cracking mind insisted) strode rapidly down the midway, closing the gap between
them at an alarming rate. But now he was running rather than walking; a weirdly gangly,
loose-limbed jog.
CLIPCLOPCLIPCLOPCLIPCLOP! There was a hallucinatory quality to what he was seeing,
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like something glimpsed in the flashing midst of an acid trip. Mike at last spun
on his heels and began to run.
His legs churned beneath him as he bore down with a focus of will and energy exceeding
anything in his experience. Though Mike was reasonably fit, he wasn'
t an athlete, nor did he run regularly. But now he moved with a speed approaching
that of an experienced track runner, slicing through the cold night air with the
relentless momentum of a locomotive screaming down gleaming railway tracks.
The tall man (Thingthingthing!) laughed again.
And again came that breathy, insinuating voice that felt like a graveyard whisper
against his ear:
"You run like the wind, human meat, but I blow like a hurricane."
Mike squealed in panic, freaked out by the tall man'
s ominous words. He had no clue what they might mean, but it had to be something
really fucking bad. Then he heard something he at first thought was the hugely amplified
sound of a vacuum cleaner. In the next millisecond he realized it was instead a mammoth
intake of breath. There was a pause and Mike cringed, bracing for the exhalation.
A rumbling wind, the ringmaster
s expelled breath, rolled down the midway, buffeting the booths and shaking free
several loose pieces of wood that went sailing into the sky, vanishing for a moment
in the blackness, then tumbling down to be swirled about by the rushing air.
A single shattered wood plank sailed over Mike'
...
Januszek66