The Master, the Count, drags himself around the chamber to each one of the portraits in turn. His slick eyes drink in the color and form of the women. His gaze profanely burns the spirits there in those pictures. Some of the portraits are tweaked and ever-so-lightly torn by the razor tips of his bone claws. Others are clouded by his acrid breath. Still others feel the rasp of a meaty thing which had once been a human tongue.
After he looks at each of the portraits in turn, the Count drags himself to where the painter genuflects on the stone floor. Segmented sections of the Count’s body wrap around the painter, claws decorated with jagged hooklike scales press cruelly against the painter’s old skin. The painter smells air which is not quite breath, but which nonetheless has been expelled from deep within the body of the Count.
“I know that there’s one missing. Can you explain yourself, boy?” the Count says.
The painter looks up and locks his fullest concentration on the light, which is so dim as to almost be lost.
“Some things even you are denied, Master,” he said.
Dragon’s Blood is exceptionally sensitive to light.
LOST ALLEYS
by Jeffrey Thomas
Jeffrey Thomas is the other half of the Thomas brother act in this volume of The Year’s Best Horror Stories. Yes, Jeffrey, there is a conspiracy. Watch for the coffee reference, as Thomas confesses alclass="underline"
“I was born October 3, 1957, in Marlborough, MA. My dad is a painter/poet whose verses, mostly inspired by his Navy service in WWII, have received a lot of local attention. My mother used to write a column for a local paper, as did my sister, and one of my two younger brothers is Scott (“Memento Mori”) Thomas. I am married to a lovely deaf woman and we have a one-year-old son, Colin, who likes to grimace and contort like a Scanner, and laughs when he ‘blows up’ his dad or Uncle Scott.
“I have sold stories to the magazines Gorezone, Strange Days, and so on, one of my stories having been reprinted in the hard-cover ‘best of’ collection Quick Chills II. An SF story of mine will soon appear in Jerry Pournelle’s theme anthology Liberty and Justice for All. I am also a published artist, cartoonist, and poet, and am editor of the small press publication The End.
“I have a yin and yang tattooed on each hand, live life one coffee at a time, and aspire to be the Elvis Costello of horror.
“‘Lost Alleys’ was written under the inspiration of three of my favorite authors: H.P. Lovecraft, D.F. Lewis and W.H. Pugmire.”
There are places in cities only the drunk, drugged, or insane can find. Even if you have been there before, you will not find them again if sober—assuming you are one who occasionally regains sobriety. The angles and planes, the layout of buildings, conspire to direct you elsewhere, to more prosaic destinations. It may be this design is intentional. Streets point you past these alleys, and more conventional alleys bend eye and foot past the narrow suballeys. Magician’s misdirection and the psychology of art—but also our fear and inhibition of straying from the path—keep these places hidden.
I have found such secret or forgotten corners in several cities; I can usually remember what I saw at these places, but not always which city I found them in. I can’t always remember straight off in the morning which city I’m currently in. I suppose my proclivity for finding these shadowy caves in the mountain range of a city has to do with the fact that I am usually either drunk or drugged, and perhaps always insane.
Somehow tonight I had found my way back to a courtyard I had visited before in my somnambulistic wanderings. You never actually forget anything; your mind simply blots out what is unnecessary, or unwanted. But part of me must have wanted to return to see another of the battles in this tiny arena.
The walls were of brick, and stretched high, windowless. Perhaps it had been a great chimney; there was a black iron door, low to the ground. They kept some of the contestants in there. That other night, I had watched an Oriental dwarf battle a thylacine, one of those supposedly extinct Tasmanian tigers. Crates and cinder-blocks piled shoulder-high enclosed the fighting ring. When I arrived this night, several dozen dark forms ringed the ring. Only two chickens wearing spurs presently went at it.
I can’t stand cruelty to animals; I had been glad when the thylacine won. I stood back smoking a cigarette until more willing opponents were brought out. These two had made a decision to enter the ring. Not necessarily a rational decision, but they weren’t innocent victims. Well, victims yes, of many unknown tortures from without and within, but too far gone to merit much concern from me. I didn’t ask for their concern, either.
They were two naked men. One was tall and skeletal, the other short and even thinner. The tall one wore brass knuckles with spikes on one hand, in the other gripped a baling hook. His opponent held a railroad spike and a broken bottle with a much-taped neck for a handle. The short one was black, and had blacker keloids of scar tissue, primarily on his face, but I didn’t know if they were decorative or the wounds of past exhibitions.
I insinuated myself close to the ring’s barrier. Someone squeezed my ass but when I didn’t look they stopped, and anyway the battle had begun.
The gladiators sprang away from each other, the tall one swinging his brass-knuckled fist up into his own face, the short warrior gouging his bottle into his own inner thigh while pounding the dull chisel-point of his spike into his sternum. I leaned onto the wall; I’d never seen this before.
No one cheered them on. These matches were always nearly silent. Even the dying didn’t scream. A man in a three piece suit on my right clutched foreign-looking money in his fist, whispering encouragement to one of them under his breath.
The tall one had hooked himself in the leg and tore upward with terrible jerks. His blood was very distinct, if black, on his cadaverous skin. But now the black man charged him, linked arms with the man and wrestled him to the ground, the tall man’s ripped leg too agonized or damaged to resist this. The black man got his arms around both of the other’s and forced his face into the floor. Holding the tall man’s arms inside his elbows left the black man’s hands free to jab his bottle under his jaw and swing his forehead down onto the spike he clenched, hammering deep gashes into his own dark skin.
I understood now. The combatants were to combat themselves; one had to inflict more damage to himself than the other could do to his body, while preventing the other—without harming him—from mutilating himself. The black man had taken charge quickly, perhaps a running champion. But now the tall one twisted half free, and he had extricated the baling hook from his leg. He swung it up into his throat, and wrenched his arm out to one side with great force for so emaciated a creature. I heard a hiss of approval from the spectators, and a hiss of blood.
The black man bore all his slight weight down onto the other’s arm (he obviously wasn’t allowed to let go of either weapon to use his hands) but the wound was already too wide. The tall man quickly became mostly as dark as the black man, in the dim light. I felt a damp mist on my hand. The tall man convulsed under the smaller. Ah, now I knew. The black wasn’t the running champion, but the running loser, and the fight with one’s self had been to the death.
There were more contests. Two spirited adolescents one would have imagined engaged in a video game challenge instead. Two men wrestling to rape each other. A man with a spear in a wheelchair against two pit bulls which had been firmly lashed together so that they faced in opposite directions. All three lost, I understand, but I had then turned away to do the drugs I had brought with me.