The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII

BLOODLETTING by Kim Antieau

Anna’s blood began speaking to her soon after she was hit by the car, soon after she began reading about all the killings.

Someone in the city park gunned down ten people. Another person took a shotgun to the top of the Cramer Building, began shouting “Bang! Bang!” and killed twenty people. Then there was the mother of two from Manchester who tried to kill the governor, and the teenaged boy who killed his entire family one evening after an argument about which reruns to watch: Barney Miller or M*A*S*H*.

Anna had noticed a few murders here and there before her accident. As she sat every morning sipping her tea and cutting her toast into small pieces before eating them, she would occasionally glance at the front page of the paper. More often than not, however, she flipped past the first page, scorning the headlines. “What country are we invading this week?” she would say. Then she’d turn to the Living or Entertainment sections. She liked reading the book reviews the best, planning which book to buy for her weekend reading.

Sometimes, on the way to the books, a headline would catch her eye. She would skim the article and shake her head, wondering how this woman could have killed her own children, or that man his wife.

Everything changed after the accident. Anna had been walking down Fourth Avenue on her way to her job as a secretary in an ad agency when she decided to stop at the bakery across the street. She remembered later that she had looked for cars—she was certain of it. In any case, a car hit her. She was rushed to the hospital with internal injuries. They hooked her up first to one solution and then another. For hours—days?—she watched the deep red liquid dripping into her veins.

The ad agency sent her a bouquet of flowers and a get-well card signed by everyone in the office. They told her they missed her “quiet sweetness” and wished her a speedy recovery. Her father came up from the country and offered to take her home. “The city’s no place for a hurt girl,” he had said. “I can’t take care of you here.”

She kissed his cheek and told him not to worry. Her neighbor Bev had promised to look in on her when she got out of the hospital. Besides, it would be like a vacation.

“I can sit around the house and just read and watch television,” she said. “It will be a great rest.”

Anna was grateful to be alive and even more grateful to finally leave the hospital. She had the newspaper delivered to her home every morning and began watching the early morning news shows.

“I don’t want to lose touch with the real world,” she told Bev when she brought over a poppyseed cake for Anna one morning.

Sometime later, Anna’s blood began speaking to her. She didn’t know what it said, exactly. It just seemed to buzz at her. She told herself it was her organs readjusting themselves after the accident. She told herself this as she read the front page of the morning paper. Someone else had been killed in a park in a different city. Later the buzzing grew, and she turned up the evening news to drown out the noise.

And then she remembered that she had someone else’s blood inside of her. Was that why her blood was buzzing? They had put someone else’s blood into her body. Someone she didn’t know. Someone who could have been sick. She had heard of people getting diseases from transfusions. Perhaps this was what was happening to her. Her blood was not talking to her. She laughed in the quiet of her apartment, kicking at the newspaper she had dropped at her feet. Talking blood was nonsense. She would ask the doctor about it all when she went in for her check-up.

The doctor listened to Anna’s story of buzzing blood.

“I really can’t explain it,” she said, grinning widely, letting the doctor know ahead of time that she knew how foolish she sounded. “It just buzzes. Could I have caught some strange disease during my transfusions?”

The doctor checked her out thoroughly—that was how she put it. “I have checked you out thoroughly,” she said, “and I really don’t think there is anything wrong. You’ve had a terrible shock to your system. You need time to rest. That’s why you’re at home, Anna. You haven’t let those little devils at the ad agency talk you into doing any work at home, have you?”

Anna shook her head and smiled shyly, waiting for the doctor to pinch her cheek or give her a lollipop or something. She had been silly, hadn’t she?

The days passed, and Anna read her papers and watched television. The man who killed the people in the park said voices in his head had told him to shoot those people. The man in the Cramer Building said the same thing. A woman who had killed her children said little. She pounded on her chest and cried, “Mea culpa, mea culpa!”

Bev brought over another poppyseed cake.

“Have you noticed all the crazy people lately?” Anna asked. “There are a lot of maniacs out there.”

“Yeah? They’ve always been out there.”

“No, I would have noticed,” Anna said.

“I tell you they’ve always been there,” Bev said, cracking her gum. “Haven’t you heard? The entire world has been slowly going crackers since the industrial revolution. Losing touch with the earth or something.”

Bev nibbled at her cake and looked bored. Anna stared at her. She had never noticed how harsh Bev looked before. She wore too much makeup and looked bored most of the time.

“I would have noticed,” Anna said again. She wrapped the poppyseed cake in tin foil and put it in the refrigerator. This marked the end of Bev’s visit.

Anna’s blood buzzed louder as her neighbor left the room. That night she squeezed her eyes shut and put her fingers in her ears, trying to stop the noise. That only shut out the other sounds, and all she could hear was her heart pounding and the blood coursing through her veins, talking to her, talking to her.

Her blood began telling her to do things. Bad things. She called her doctor, but she was out of town.

Anna sought solace in the papers. Perhaps she could find an answer there. The Cramer Building man had been in an auto accident before he began shooting. The man in the park had had his appendix removed a week earlier. She hurried through the papers, looking back, trying to find more clues. Maybe they had all been in the hospital; they could have all gotten blood. Maybe it had belonged to just one maniac and now it had spread and they were all going crazy. Or perhaps it was a conspiracy. Some other country was trying to sabotage the U.S. through the blood supply. Of course! She read the papers; she listened to the news. She knew there were plenty of people out there trying to get her and everyone else.

She picked up the phone and began dialing the subscription departments of several newspapers, one on the East Coast, one on the West, and one in the Midwest. She blocked out the sounds of her blood and waited for the papers.

When they arrived, she read them greedily. She knew, after she had finished, that the bad blood had gotten everywhere. People out there were listening to their blood, telling the police afterwards that they hadn’t been able to stand it anymore. They had to do what the voices told them to do.

Anna called her father.

“Anna, you were always crazy,” she heard him say. “Even as a child. Especially as a child. It’s no wonder you’re having these crazy ideas.”

She hung up on him, wondering why she had not seen earlier how cruel he was to her. In fact, she had not noticed a lot of things. She hadn’t been paying attention and look what had happened to the world.

She asked Bev over but when she saw her she had an overwhelming desire to do something bad to her, so she shoved a half-eaten poppyseed cake at her and told her to leave and never come back.

Anna sat alone in her apartment, waiting for the voices to stop. They kept telling her where she could get a gun or a knife. Be like the man in the Cramer Building, the blood said. Or go to the park. Find a politician. The voices pounded and flowed through her.

She chewed her fingernails. She could do what the voices said. Bad things. But then she would be like all the rest. And who was to say that that would make the voices stop? They might ask her to do other things.

There was only one thing to do. She went into her bathroom and took out a package of razor blades. She nicked her pinkie with one to make certain the razor was sharp. Then she sat in the living room, surrounded by her newspapers, with the evening news on in the background. Beginning at her wrists where her talking blood pulsed, she made two long deep lines down her arms.

It was time for a bloodletting.