Steamy Screams: Anthology of Erotic Horror

LIFE TO THE LIFELESS Lawrence Conquest

At 9:45pm on the 24th of September 2010, after twenty-six years of happily married life, the spark between Sally and Jim Macmillan went out. There had been no prior warning, no gradual fading of their affections for each other—it simply disappeared with all the finality of someone turning off a light. One moment it was there, the next moment it was not.

Surprised and concerned, husband and wife lay together in their suddenly too-narrow bed and tried to figure out just what had gone wrong. The last of their three children had recently grown up and left the nest. After years of feeling like guests in their own house, Sally and Jim finally had the freedom to attend to each others’ needs. This was the moment they had been waiting for. So what had gone wrong?

“Do you still love me?” asked Sally.

“Of course I still love you,” replied Jim, his tone suggesting that the very idea of doubt was absurd.

“Prove it then,” Sally responded, prodding a finger at the shrivelled lump of flesh that currently lay lifeless between his legs. Jim’s flaccid penis failed to rise to the bait. It appeared to have slipped into a coma. “You can get pills for that, you know,” said Sally, turning her back to him.

Jim assured his wife that he would visit the doctor the very next day. There was nothing to worry about, really. She’d see.

But Doctor Macready told Jim that the little blue pills weren’t available on the National Health Service, at least, not for someone of his age and condition. Of course, he could write out a prescription, but Jim would have to bear the costs himself. “That’s quite all right,” Jim replied, reaching for his credit card, but that evening’s events didn’t go as planned. When Jim tried making love, it wasn’t Sally that he saw, just a bottomless money-pit gaping open beneath him. Jim may have had the heart of a lover, but he had the soul of a miser. The moment was lost. Other measures were called for.

They tried dressing up. Role-play. Jim would don a stick-on moustache and toupee before driving out to pick his wife up from some pre-arranged seedy spot. Anything to add to the charade. A steady stream of scantily-clad policewomen, nurses, French maids and nuns were soon seen entering the Macmillan household. Neighbors raised eyebrows. Complaints were voiced. They needn’t have worried. It was all to no avail.

Husband and wife tried watching blue movies together. Pornography of every flavor that the cable company could provide. Jim would squirm in his seat like a man in the dentist’s chair, pulling at his too-tight collar and painfully aware of his dearly beloved sitting beside him. For her part, Sally seemed to be indifferent to the displays of sexual prowess before her. “Hasn’t she got lovely nail varnish?” she’d say during one obscene close-up. Or, “Do you remember my sister used to have wallpaper like that?” as bodily fluids arced across the screen. Jim wasn’t sure if she was trying to put him at ease or had some kind of roving blind spot. Either way, the very last thing the movies put him in the mind of was sex.

Catalogues were consulted. Orders for devices that buzzed, purred, tickled and teased were placed. The postman soon found himself struggling under an avalanche of plain, unmarked boxes. Multi-colored machineries of joy soon filled every spare surface in the Macmillan bedroom, their plastic noses ranged at the sky like exotic miniature rocket ships. The devices were tested and tried. But, despite the cunning of their designers and their many diverse shapes, not a single one could fill the void that lurked in Jim Macmillan’s soul.

In desperation, Sally even tried arranging a threesome with a casual acquaintance from work. After a futile five minutes, Jim just lay there and let them get on with it.

Nothing they tried seemed to make the slightest bit of difference. Jim’s libido remained indifferent, aloof.

Mr. Macmillan apologized to his wife a thousand times. He did love her, truly he did. He began to show his affection in other ways, ways that he hadn’t since their marriage was newly minted. Jim began to bring Sally flowers. He made her breakfast in bed. He wrote silly, sentimental poems and slipped them into her handbag. They went on endless dates: to the park, to town, to shows. Jim telephoned Sally from work, on the hour, every hour, just to see how she was. He complimented her endlessly on her appearance and attire.

And it wasn’t enough. A certain coldness seemed to creep into the Macmillan household. A chill in the air that no mere words could subdue.

By day, Mr. and Mrs. Macmillan began to avoid each other in a careful ballet. Aware of the strain on their relationship, they hesitated to touch each other, each fearful that the other might break.

At night, they lay awake in the dark, their bodies close but never touching. Sometimes Sally wanted to reach out a hand, to touch her husband, for comfort if nothing else. But somehow it wouldn’t seem right. The house was empty, the doors were locked, but, when night draped its shadow over the house, the couple no longer felt alone. They felt as if they were being watched.

A silent intruder had slipped between husband and wife, some nameless presence that had crept in from the cold. They could feel its formless fingers caressing their flesh, leeching the heat from their limbs, planting the seeds of doubt in their minds.

One night, somewhere between waking and sleep, Sally half-opened one eye and looked the intruder full in the face. It was laying there in bed right alongside her, close enough to touch, its outline limned in blue-lagoon moonlight. It was the exact same shape and size as her husband, only shrouded from head to foot in white. It turned its sightless eyes upon her and let out an awful moan.

Sally stifled a gasp. The ghost of a still-born relationship lay between husband and wife, a loveless spectre that haunted the sheets.

When Sally received the phone call a week later, it took her several seconds to fully recognize the voice of her husband. She had been staying with her sister in Nuneaton, desperate to escape the chilly atmosphere that now pervaded the family home. After a tearful parting, the last thing she expected was to hear her husband sounding like this. The years appeared to have fallen away from Jim. He no longer sounded like a forty-six-year-old man grown somber from the weight of years. He sounded like a little boy. A little boy who has just re-discovered a favorite toy.

“It’s back, Sally! It’s back!” the high-pitched voice cried down the phone.

“What’s back, Jim?” Sally replied.

Her husband sounded giddy with excitement. “The spark, Sal—the spark!”

Jim went on to tell Sally how depressed he had been without her. How he had moped around the house like a ghost, with only his memories of her for company. Jim had tried to numb his brain in the wash of cathode rays night after night, watching everything, seeing nothing. Until that moment when a random news item broke through the fog. That was it! Jim thought. This was what he was waiting for. A means to recover his libido at last!

“What was the answer?” asked Sally wearily.

But Jim wouldn’t tell her. Not over the phone. She’d have to see it in person. He’d already had a trial run and the results had been very impressive. Sally should come home tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow. Pack her bags and come right home. He’d have a surprise to show her, alright. He’d already booked the week off work. He needed to make up for lost time.

Jim Macmillan had some serious loving to do.

Sally smiled as the taxi threaded its way through the familiar streets of Ealing. The sun was out, the birds were singing and she was going to see her husband again. She stifled a laugh as she remembered the madness of the other week. How she had awoken in the middle of the night and, in her confusion, mistaken her husband’s sheet-shrouded form for that of a ghost. The very idea! She must remember to tell Jim as soon as she saw him. She couldn’t wait to hear him laugh again.

The taxi cruised to a halt and Sally stared in amazement at the Macmillan family home. Her time away had somehow seemed to invest the humble semi-detached property with a new vitality. It looked warm, inviting—safe. Nothing evil could ever happen here. Looking at it now was like seeing it for the first time. She remembered their wedding night so many years ago, how Jim had gamely carried her over the threshold. Huffing and puffing, but above all laughing. Sally smiled at the memory, and felt a sudden warmth welling deep inside her, a faint echo of the lust of that long-ago night. Well, they say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, Sally thought philosophically. So why shouldn’t other parts of the body be similarly affected?

Sally hurried to the front door, eager to see her husband again, desperate to feel the warmth of his embrace after so many loveless nights. She slipped her key into the lock and crept quietly into the house. He wanted to surprise her? Well, she’d surprise him! She’d creep through the house, find him and throw herself upon him before he even knew what was happening. No time for words now. Only love.

And yet, despite her best intentions, Sally Macmillan’s efforts were in vain. Her husband was nowhere to be found. Jim wasn’t in the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom or spare. In a flash of inspiration, Sally raced to the garage, but only the bulk of his car waited silently in the gloom. He must have gone out on some errand, Sally thought, and contented herself with this for several hours. But when darkness fell, she checked the house again and found something that stopped her cold.

His shoes. His size-nine leather shoes, slightly worn with age but polished with all the dedicated care that only an ex-army man could bring. They sat there, next to his slippers, in the front hall. How had she not noticed them earlier?

Sally had shoes. She had an entire cupboard filled with assorted colors and styles, for every possible season and event. But Jim, sensible and spendthrift Jim, had only the two pairs: his indoor slippers, and his outdoor shoes. She was looking at them both. So how could he have left the house without them?

Perhaps he’d simply bought a new pair, she thought. Yes, that was it. Obvious, really. Sally tried to ignore the other voice in her head. The quieter voice, but the one whose whisper was so much more insistent. The voice that said Jim had slipped down the stairs, broken his neck and been carted off to the hospital in his pyjamas. She really didn’t need negative thinking like that.

In the end, Sally found her husband’s corpse strung up in the bedroom wardrobe.

Jim was hanging up amongst the shirts and trousers, as though his body had been just another garment to discard at the end of a tiring day. One of her stockings was tied tight about his neck, whilst the other end of it looped about the coat-hanger rail. Another stocking ligatured Jim’s hands together behind his back. Sally couldn’t see Jim’s face. It was partially hidden behind a semi-transparent Sainsbury’s shopping bag. All she could make out was his mouth, which was open in a silent scream. If she looked close enough, she could even see the drops of moisture that peppered the inside of the bag. The remnants of her husband’s final exhale, captured for all eternity.

Apart from the bag over his head, Jim was completely naked. Sally stared at her husband’s corpse with a growing sense of hysteria. At least one part of his surprise plan had worked. His erect penis pointed at her like an accusing finger, rigid and cold.

In the days that followed, Sally drifted through life like a ghost. She went through all the daily motions of life—shopping, cooking, eating, cleaning—yet she felt increasingly disconnected from her surroundings. Her senses had been numbed. Anaesthetised. In some curious way, it was as if it had been she who had died, not her husband.

Sally thought about Jim constantly, her mind replaying the discovery of his death time and again, as if by doing so she could somehow undo what had been done. She tried to banish these thoughts, to think pleasant thoughts instead, to remember the good times. But her husband’s smiling face was obscured in her memory, his features occluded by a semi-transparent plastic bag.

All she could think of, time and again, was his strangled body bucking in the air. Jim’s hips thrusting forwards in a cruel parody of sex as his air-starved body fought for life. His erect penis thrusting violently at nothing, impotent at the last, dying in the very moment of its new-found life.

Despairing of reality, Sally tried to find solace in drug-induced sleep, but no refuge was to be found. Her husband waited for her even in this unreal state, his final moments in her presence cruelly replayed as a mocking farce.

In Sally’s dream, as in life, Jim’s body had been laid out for formal identification at the police morgue, a plain-clothes officer waiting at a respectful distance to one side. However, in life, where his face had been the only part of him uncovered, the opposite was true in her dream. Jim’s body was naked, but his face still remained hidden behind plastic, one of Sally’s tights still tied about his neck like a too-tight cravat.

In her dream, Sally tried to look closer, to make out the man behind the mask, but her husband’s features resolutely failed to resolve. It was as if Jim’s face had become void in her memory, as if this were some insignificant trifle unworthy of remembrance. Only his penis seemed worthy of that accolade, its proud head jutting aimlessly up at her its final resting place.

In Sally’s dream, it seemed entirely logical for her to disrobe. After all, wasn’t this why she was here anyway? Not to identify the body, which any idiot could do, but to honor it? Sally turned to stare at her police escort as if daring her to object. The bereavement officer met her eyes for a brief second, then shyly turned away.

Sally focused her attention back on Jim. She clutched at him as she climbed atop the corpse, twisting and pulling to gain purchase on his meat. Jim felt so real. How could he be dead? The thought that all these years of growth would soon be reduced to ash, to a mere handful of dirt to scatter on the wind, it all seemed wrong. Far more wrong than the act she was about to perform.

Sally gripped the familiar length of her husband’s cock and guided it inside. His penis was as cold as death, but she would warm him on his way. She began to ride up and down upon his shaft, their bodies punctuating each meeting with a meaty slap. Soon Sally was panting with exertion, her efforts gifting his corpse with the illusion of warmth.

In her dream, Sally closed her eyes and gently rocked her way towards orgasm. And suddenly, she felt him. Jim’s corpse was clutching gently at her buttocks, his spiny fingers kneading into her flesh. Rock-a-bye baby, she thought, willing a mother’s gift of life upon this lifeless corpse. Her husband’s body began to buck and jerk beneath her, pushing itself into her with an urgent need of its own.

Sally laughed and opened her eyes. Her husband was here with her, pulled back from the brink by the strength of her love. His recently deceased body seemed to glow with a healthy vitality, droplets of sweat peppering and sheening his flesh. More than that, Jim seemed to be regressing through time. The wiry grey hair upon his chest became blackened and coarse, whilst long submerged sandbanks of muscle were exposed by a rapidly departing tide of flab. Still riding her husband, Sally reached her hands up to her own face, and felt the wrinkles of age being swept clean by the backwards hand of time.

Sally smiled down at her now youthful lover and reached down to remove his mask. Jim was moaning within its suffocating embrace, his sexual exertions transformed into a single word repeated over and over: a plea, a prayer to his one true Goddess: “Sal! Sal! Sal! Sal!”

When Sally awoke, the bedroom was dark. With a guilty start, she realized she had been touching herself, clutching at the warmth of her body, the only heat left in this cold night. The ghost of a nightmare fluttered by her—something about Jim—only to slip from her grasp before she could fully catch hold of it.

A sound from downstairs brought her back to reality. It sounded like someone calling. Someone a thousand miles away, the voice muffled and faint.

Sally sighed and tried to get back to sleep. But the moment was lost. Her mind, now awake, fastened upon the distant sound as though awaiting some prearranged signal. And there it came again, a muffled syllable repeated over and over, but closer this time. Now it sounded like it was coming from inside the house. Downstairs, in the hall. Rising slowly now, the voice was punctuated by the muffled creak of foot against stair.

Angry at her own overactive imagination, Sally sat up in bed and flicked on the bedside light. She pulled herself from beneath the covers and flung her dressing-gown about her. Rising to her feet, she threw open the bedroom door, eager to see her nightmares evaporate in the harsh glare of reality.

Instead she stopped, dumbfounded, at the sight that awaited her. For there, standing in front of her upon the landing, was the figure of Jim Macmillan.

Sally tried to tell herself that she was still dreaming, but this reality could not be denied. The figure that stood before her was nothing like the erotic fantasy figure of her dream. No easily roused sleeper this, but a gone-off, loathsome thing that belonged in a grave. Jim’s naked flesh appeared marbled and grey. The veins on his naked body stood proud, as though trying to uproot themselves from his skin. A dark sheen of blood seemed to have gathered about his head, painting the deflated plastic that still shrouded him a dull crimson. My husband looks like a toffee apple, Sally thought deliriously, and started to cry.

Sally stumbled backwards into the bedroom. Her husband followed after her, his movements unnaturally fluid and lithe. Only Jim’s penis seemed affected by the touch of rigor mortis. Its swollen length thrust before him like the prow of a ship. Backing away, Sally found herself flat against the far wall. Jim stopped before her. Her dead husband’s expression was unreadable beneath his mask of plastic. Jim reached up and pulled the bag from his face, and Sally finally began to scream.

She tried her best to struggle as Jim lifted her in his arms, but he had always been the stronger. He carried her to the wardrobe, ignorant of her pleas. Sally cried for help, desperately hoping that a neighbor might hear, but the words died in her throat as Jim pulled a stocking tight about her neck.

As Sally struggled for breath, her vision began to fade. She became aware of her heartbeat, roaring louder and louder in her ears. How long did she have left? she wondered. How long until she joined the abomination before her in death?

And then, the strangest thing happened. Despite the nightmare before her, despite the rapid approach of her own mortality, Sally felt something moving deep within. Something was blossoming inside her, some fragile flower flickering into being at the very moment of her death.

Staring into the vacant gaze of the corpse before her, Sally Macmillan put her hands between her legs and felt the spark.