Suspended In Dusk by Ramsey Campbell, John Everson, Wendy Hammer Read Free Book Online

through the glass, the world beyond was an edgeless dark that grew thicker as she watched it. Thickened like cooling blood, like mud, like water freezing over. By the time he was done, it had grown impenetrable, impassable, pierced only by the tiny fires of stars lit within the cold. They winked at her, calling down to her and the beast she hid inside.
    She dressed, went back to the room that held the booze, coke, and assholes, and Radouane greeted her with a smile and a joint. She was exotic tonight. Américain , they all insisted, and Esther didn’t bother to correct them. She was the import, along with the whisky and the guns. The temptation to let her mask slip had rarely been stronger; her fingers itched for the feel of skin tearing beneath them, and the hunger for blood-salt made a home in her mouth. She wondered, as she often did, what they’d think if they knew what she was. Men like these did not believe in monsters. They always thought they were the scariest thing in the world—the biggest, the toughest, the meanest—as if their violence made them narrow, hemmed them in on all sides by its hardness.
    The thought amused Esther. It almost made her want to hold out against temptation, to do all the things Radouane wanted tonight, and then to leave under the shadow of the next darkness… a quiet darkness, instead of one raging with blood.
    For a while, she tried. She held onto the thought of the money and let the smoke curl around her, hoping it would numb the beast without gnawing away at her resolutions. Even monsters had to know restraint, and she wanted to believe she was capable of that.
    After all, if a shadow is only given definition by the light, then a monster must find its shape outside the darkness.
    She put the joint to her lips, and watched the dance the humans made, each one of them so convinced of his own superiority, as if they weren’t all so fucking transparent. Radouane smiled, the sleeve of his black leather jacket skimming his chunky gold watch as he reclined back against the couch, his other hand a possessive weight on her thigh. Esther looked down at it as if his flesh was an improbability, a nothing blown against her like a fallen leaf caught in the breeze. Perhaps she should never have tried to believe that she could be a part of their world. No matter how secret she kept herself, how tightly she locked her hunger away, she was not of their kind.
    She had no place among them. Perhaps the time to pretend anything different was past.
     
    * * *
     
    Michele
     
    There was blood everywhere. I couldn’t get past that. So much of it, smeared across the windows from the inside… and not just blood. Flesh, bone, maybe brain matter? I didn’t know. I was no doctor, no mortician, no fucking psychopath who looked at the carnage we saw in there and thought it could have been wrought by human hands. Bodies lay on the beige carpet, the pale couches spattered red and the faded wallpaper redesigned with arcing spots and streaks of blood.
    “Fuck, mec …” Antoine shook his head as we surveyed the mess inside.
    The front door was unlocked, and nothing halted our progress as we moved through the gîte, encountering corpse after corpse. Men in black leather and gold, women with their bare breasts bloodied. It was a mess, a degeneration of flesh torn apart, laid out wet and glistening, and the stultifying air was thick with the smell of meat and copper.
    Shots had been fired. At least three of the men in the main room still held their guns—Glocks, like Antoine’s, and he laughed at that, motherfucking laughed —but no bullets could do the extent of what had been done here. I wanted to puke, to get out, to run away, but Antoine gravitated to the low coffee table in the centre of the room, smiling at the plastic-wrapped kilos streaked with red and brown. His head moved from side to side—that snake-strike dance—and he laughed to himself as he looked down at the body of the man slumped against the