Dark Terrors 3 by David Sutton Stephen Jones Read Free Book Online

always there were cars.
     
    Far away at the next intersection, he made out a small group of figures straggling in his direction, bathed in a traffic light’s red glow. For a long moment he watched them come, trying to be sure they were really there, wondering what he should do. Then he started towards them. The blond man had done something awful to his head; he needed help. Maybe the figures would be able to help him.
     
    But when he got closer, he saw that they were like the things he had seen in the bedroom. One had a long fatty slash wound across its bare torso. One had been gouged in the face with something jagged; its nose was cleaved in half and an eyeball hung out of the socket, leaking yolky fluid. One had no wounds, but looked as if it had starved to death; its nude body was all bone-ends and wasted hollows, its genitals shrivelled into the pelvic cavity, its blue-white skin covered with huge black and purple lesions.
     
    When they saw him, the things opened their mouths and widened their nostrils, catching his scent. It was too late to get away. He couldn’t run, didn’t think he would even be able to stand up much longer. He stumbled forward and gave himself to them.
     
    The little group closed around Suko, keeping him on his feet, supporting him as best they could. Gouged Eyeball caught him and steadied him. Slash Wound mouthed his shoulder as if in comfort, but did not bite. Lesions nudged him, urged him on. Suko realized they were herding him. They recognized him as one of their own, separated from the flock somehow. They were welcoming him back in.
     
    Miserably, Suko wondered what would happen when they met someone alive.
     
    Then the hunger flared in his belly, and he knew.
     
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    Poppy Z. Brite has worked as an artist’s model, a mouse caretaker, a stripper and, since 1991, a full-time writer. Her three novels are Lost Souls, Drawing Blood and Exquisite Corpse. Short stories and articles have been published in numerous markets, including Rage, Swamp, The Village Voice, Revelations (aka Millennium) and The Best New Horror series. She is the editor of the vampire anthologies Love In Vein and Love in Vein II and her major biography, Courtney Love: The Real Story, was recently published. ‘The greatest horror of “Self-Made Man”,’ reveals the author, ‘is that it was written for Book of the Dead 3, an anthology that went through a series of delays, scandals, intrigues and near-lawsuits before sinking under the weight of editorial and publishing idiocy. As for the story itself, it was written when I was midway through my novel Exquisite Corpse, and I just had to get some of the Jeffrey Dahmer-mania out of my system before I could go on. Readers have said my characters in the novel are too influenced by Dahmer -wait ‘til they get a load of this baby.’
     
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The Price
     
    Neil Gaiman
     
     
    Tramps and vagabonds have marks they make on gateposts and trees and doors, letting others of their kind know a little about the people who live at the houses and farms they pass on their travels. I think cats must leave similar signs; how else to explain the cats who turn up at our door through the year, hungry and flea-ridden and abandoned?
     
    We take them in. We get rid of the fleas and the ticks, feed them and take them to the vet. We pay for them to get their shots, and, indignity upon indignity, we have them neutered or spayed.
     
    And they stay with us, for a few months, or for a year, or for ever.
     
    Most of them arrive in summer. We live in the country, just the right distance out of town for the city-dwellers to abandon their cats near us.
     
    We never seem to have more than eight cats, rarely have less than three. The cat population of my house is currently as follows: Hermione and Pod, tabby and black respectively, the mad sisters who live in my attic office, and do not mingle; Princess, the blue-eyed long-haired white cat, who lived