Dark Rainbow, Anthology of Queer Erotic Horror

Dark Rainbow© Andrew Robertson 2018

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This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

All stories published with permission of the authors who hold individual copyrights.

For more information contact:

Riverdale Avenue Books

5676 Riverdale Avenue

Riverdale, NY 10471

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Cover art by Scott Carpenter

Digital ISBN: 9781626014848

Paperback ISBN: 9781626014831

First Edition October 2018

Table of Contents

Introduction Andrew Robertson

Pip and Estella Valerie Alexander

Goldilocks and her Undead Bear Julianne Snow

Think of Me Lindsay King-Miller

Odd Man Out Derek Clendening

Affliction Spinster Eskie

His Type Sèphera Girón

The Life Model Jim Towns

The God Modulation Kimberly Gondrella

Monday Benjamin Johnson

The Dark Gem Lisi Damette

The Christ of St. Jozef Church Angel Leigh McCoy

Eye Contact Jeff C. Stevenson

Broken Lines of Salt and Flesh Robert E. Furey

The Grave of Lilith Harry F. Rey

The God of Small Favours H. P. Medina

About the Editor

About the Authors

Introduction

I’ve always been drawn to horror, darkness, outsiders and underground culture. Like a moth, the undeniable flame of everything and everyone that is weird, dark, feared and even despised lures me in.

I was about ten the first time a black and white horror film lit up the TV at my parents’ house. It was Tod Browning’s vampiric masterpiece starring Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula based on Bram Stoker’s legendary novel. Dracula was clearly a monster, but there was so much more. He was irresistible, handsome, powerful and nearly immortal. Growing up knowing that you are queer and feeling society’s judgment being cast on you before you even come out makes power like that so very attractive. The next day I was at the local hobby shop purchasing a glow-in-the-dark model of that same character, soon to be followed by Frankenstein, and the Wolfman.

I would sit on my bed in the dark, watching the green glow cast by those models like a magic mist in the corner of the room, wondering what my future could hold, and when I would finally get to be a vampire too.

When it comes to horror, I think that many queer people have a special place in their heart for all the freaks and weirdos that populate the screen during a midnight madness screening. That goes for both the heroes and the villains. Some of us feel disjointed, like a half-assembled Frankenstein’s monster waiting for something to complete us. Others long to turn into a bat and fly away to something better. Some of us just want revenge, cause growing up as a queer in this world is never easy. Maybe you long to become your bully’s nightmare, like a rainbow-striped Freddy Krueger, or to be an immortal and untouchable vampire god, like Lestat.

As the years passed, I discovered films like Frankenhooker, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Doctor Gore and Friday the 13th, before my all-time favorite, Clive Barker’s carnal horror masterpiece Hellraiser. Soon after came the 1980s erotic experimental films of Richard Kern, which challenged the viewer in ways I had never experienced before. Did I feel almost guilty watching them? Well, we are all guilty.

My personal library grew to include books by Anne Rice, Anaïs Nin, Lydia Lunch, Stephen King, Tricia Warden, Evelyn Lau and Henry Miller, and my personal soundtrack came via albums by Siouxsie and the Banshees, Throbbing Gristle, Coil, The Cramps, Skinny Puppy and Ministry.

One of the threads that tied all those works together was the darkness that they brought to the light…that the line between sex and violence, lust and love, queer and straight, horror and delight were often blurred. At times, they became the same thing, and that is as uncomfortable as it is attractive. That is also the thread that binds the stories in this anthology.

This book is by no means a comprehensive study of what it means to be queer, or meant to define erotic horror in that context. In these pages are imaginative, dark and unsettling works that explore these themes under a queer lens, and dare to weave those often contradictory threads together. Queer erotic horror is a nascent genre, and my aim with this collection is to give the reader 15 unique tales to help that genre grow.

I hope you enjoy what you discover at the end of this dark rainbow.

—Andrew Robertson

October 2018

Pip and Estella

Valerie Alexander

Some men fall in love so easily. It robs me of the sport of it. I can’t be a champion of heartbreak if these men succumb too rapidly. My date tonight falls in one swoop when I unhook my bra in his car.

You’re so beautiful, Estella.

I used to think rich men would be harder to seduce but all men seem susceptible to the same witchcraft: my mouth, the Southern moon, my open-legged splendor on their laps. Which is perhaps why my date makes a strangled noise and comes out with, You’re my dream girl.

Of course I am, I want to say to him, I’m Estella Havisham, I was raised to be your dream and your destruction too. But then I think, Where’s my dream?

I’ve seduced construction workers, the high school baseball coach, some of the rougher studs at the local bar. All were for practice, none of them interested me. But now I am 19 and time is of the essence. The Havisham family funds are running dry, and so I practice my wiles on richer men. Learning their thinking, their vulnerabilities: practice for even wealthier, future victims and finally a very rich husband.

I kiss my date goodnight in his car at the end of my driveway, between the cypress trees. I have to go.

Can I come in?

No, my mother’s home. She doesn’t like men in the house.

He begins talking about me meeting his parents tomorrow night. He’s already so besotted that he’s willing to ignore the town rumors about those crazy Havisham women out in that decaying mansion. No doubt everyone has warned him. No doubt they’ve shared the rumors about my mother’s insanity and the occasional men who go missing. Probably he accepts that my mother is a lost cause but thinks that he can salvage me like a beautiful feral kitten.

All the men think that. Maybe not in so many words when I’m pulling up my skirt, but they all follow me down the same path of ruin. Even though I never feel anything for them.

* * *

The house is lit with candles when I come in. My mother comes floating through the living room in a tattered silk peignoir. In the darkened room, she looks almost like the supermodel goddess she was 20 years ago.

Her makeup-smeared eyes stare at me. Who was that one?

Tom. The new D.A.

She laughs a low guttural laugh of satisfaction. That’s my Estella. She assesses my eyes, my hair, my legs. I taught you well, didn’t I?

She drifts through the wreckage piled between the overstuffed sofas—the old copies of Vogue, the dusty crystal globlets, the framed painting of a tiger, the dead potted trees. The racks of chiffon beaded dresses. An enormous stuffed black panther hung with costume jewelry looms over the pearls scattered across the floor for the kittens to chase. To her, it’s a museum of preservation. To me it’s a mausoleum.

It’s time for breakfast. She disappears down the dark hall.

Only one meal is served in this house, and it is served in the dead of the night. Salmon benedict with roasted potatoes, bacon, muffins, coffee, juice: the wedding breakfast menu my mother devised 20 years ago for a ceremony that never was.

I’m pulling the muffins from the oven when the wheels roll up the hallway. My mother pushes the chair up to the table and smiles. A mimosa for me, darling. Your father’s joining us for breakfast today.

The brownish withered thing at the head of the table slumps slightly in his wheeled throne. My father’s broad shoulders have collapsed in the tailored suit, which has held up well for two decades. But the body within seems to hunch in on itself, no longer muscled or six-foot-three. His hands are mere stubbed claws curling on the tablecloth, his dessicated face puckered in a permanent, moon-sad ‘O.’

Hi, Daddy. I put an empty glass before him, a mimosa before my mother.

She eats vigorously, dispensing advice between bites. Your D.A. may be intelligent, Estella, but he’s a crude animal like any man, she says. Remember, nature made men physically stronger but made us more beautiful. It is our duty to break them so they can’t commit the arrogance and cruelty they would otherwise.

I know, Mom.

She muses on the rich victims ahead of me, the men who will spoil me with their fortunes. When I was a child, my mother would reminisce about her modeling days, when she traveled the world at 15 to be photographed by day and passed around by businessmen at night. But in recent years she’s focused on providing guidance intended to hone my predatory powers so I can stalk that ultimate quarry: a very wealthy husband.

It’s good that you don’t feel anything for these men, Estella. You can stay detached. A billionaire is the real game. And you’ll deserve every penny, because a beautiful wife is the ultimate gift.

My mother smiles at my mummified father, as if he did take her for his beautiful wife instead of rejecting her the night she told him of her pregnancy. As she speculates on which CEO or heir I might marry, her eyes glow. Her fortyish face is unravaged by time; she sleeps by day, walks the house at night, and hasn’t been exposed to the sun in almost 20 years. Her once-famous face still has the cheekbones and lips that got her on magazine covers once. But her eyes shine like green moons of insanity.

After breakfast I clear the dishes and she brings my father’s corpse into the living room for their nightly, one-sided conversation. A Brahms violino concerto has just begun to unwind its initial sweet notes out the windows as I go out the veranda doors, past the garden of tuberoses and hydrangeas, down to the small hexagonal summerhouse to watch the stars which, my mother named me after, to enforce my mission of staying beautiful and unattainable forever.

Maybe it’s the faint ache of the violin floating over the swamp night noises, but melancholy pierces me until I fetch the special powder from inside the summerhouse—a mix of mugwort, mustard seed, wormwood and pipsissewa. The local swamp witch makes it for me, just as she made my mother the mummification powder all those years ago.

I sprinkle it at the foot of the yew tree. Here is where I buried the brownish toe I snapped off my father’s mummy, so I could always conjure him forth.

He rises up, a businessman turned into a wispy specter no more substantial than mist. Hi, Daddy, I say for the second time that night.

Estella. He sounds so pitiful. What trouble have you stirred up now?

I just wanted to say hello. I miss you.

Why can’t you let me rest? Every time you summon me, you force me to suffer because I know you’re still her pawn.

My father’s ghost is always doleful, always bitter toward my mother. But he’s the only sane conversation to be had out here in this swamp kingdom of dripping Spanish moss and old Vogue magazines. The swamp witch isn’t one for socializing and she’s usually busy with her rituals besides.

I’m not her pawn, Dad. And I’ll be leaving soon to get married. There aren’t any truly rich men around here. And someone has to make some money, with all of her jewels long since sold off and her modeling money almost gone. I’ll be going to Los Angeles, maybe, or New York.

Don’t marry without love, he insists. You haven’t been in love yet. Once you have, you’ll know better.

I’m not going to fall in love, Dad. She trained me better than that.

Estella, you have to get away from her, he says. But first send me home. I can’t rest with my corpse in that house. Bury me up north, in Connecticut with the rest of my family.

This is the point of the night when I remember that my father didn’t want me to be his family. That he’s the married man who dumped my 19-year-old mother when she told him she was pregnant.

I’m your family too, I say. And I don’t know if we’d still be able to have these visits with your remains so far away.

Estella… He continues to whine, but my attention is caught by headlights traveling up the road, through the cypress trees. No one lives out here but us. Long past midnight, it’s too late for any deliveries, any visitors. So I creep back through the garden to see a man approaching our delapidated antebellum mansion. It’s Aaron, the software engineer I practiced on last week. Just a few nights ago he confronted me in town and demanded I stop ignoring him.

He walks up the porch steps and rings the bell. I watch from the dark.

I’m not leaving until she talks to me, he tells my mother when she answers. "Estella owes me. She promised me."

(That isn’t true but I know it feels like a promise: my opening arms, my smitten eyes and all those faked orgasms that convinced them I was falling in love also.)

Estella is done with you. My mother looks triumphant.

Aaron pushes the door open and stalks past her. Estella?

Oh no. Oh no, oh no, oh no. But it’s too late. His scream rips through the night and by the time I’ve run inside he’s on the kitchen floor, a wet gurgling noise in his throat while my mother stabs him in the stomach again and again. His brown eyes meet mine in helplessness and disbelief. But you’re good, his eyes say, you’re special and I wish he could live long enough to grasp that he mistook which of us was the mouse and which was the cat.

His eyes go empty. My mother looks up at me in her red-soaked pegnoir.

"They always intrude, she says. She’s trembling with indignation. Why do they do that? They leave when you want them to stay and they intrude when you want them to leave."

"Mom." I’m struggling not to vomit. A foul smell has filled the kitchen and Aaron’s dead eyes are still on me. Murder smells horrible, no one tells you that in advance. You can’t keep doing this. The police are going to figure it out.

She considers the size of him. You’ll have to take him in pieces.

My stomach lurches. I can’t.

Oh, Estella. So sensitive and delicate. There’s a note of contempt in her voice. Apparently I have to do everything.

Together we drag his body down the veranda steps and onto the grass. I bring her the electric saw and go inside, plugging my ears. But nothing completely blots out the enthusiastic roar of dismemberment. When the saw goes quiet, I bring her rags from a trunk of old clothes. Then it’s back down to the mosquitos and the cypress, the thick pungent stench of swamp water filling my nose. It’s barely visible in the dark but I find the swamp witch’s house and knock on her door.

She looks at my bloody bundles. Again? is all she says.

She calls the alligators as she calls the owls, the snakes, the cats. Speaking the language of animals isn’t witchcraft, she says, but a forgotten art. The gators rise to the swamp surface, their eyes gleaming, as she unwraps the severed limbs and tosses them forward like so many treats.

My father’s ghost flickers next to me, a phantasm glowing in the swamp darkness. Look what you’ve done, he says. How many men will the two of you kill?

Other corpses flash through my mind, the baseball player’s head rolling across the foyer, the dentist’s chest ripped open with an axe in the driveway. I killed no one. She did it.

The swamp witch frowns and dismisses my father with a wave of her hand; she dislikes his whining. She’s told me before that she believes the dead are meant to serve and obey. I understand your mother’s bitterness, she says. But there’s more to life than hurting men and marrying money, Estella. Give real love a chance.

It’s hard to take life advice from a woman who’s chosen to live alone in a swamp. But I humor her. Real love? Men bore me.

The swamp witch produces a twisted root from her pocket. In the faint starlight filtering through the cypress, it looks like a spindly hand. Then look for who you do love. She traces the root across my face and then drops it into my hands.

I head back home in the moonlight to collect Aaron’s torso.

* * *

The next night the cops come out, faintly annoyed that they’ve had to visit us yet again. They stand out in the yard because they know my mother doesn’t like them in the house. The insect zapper turns their faces golden in the humid Southern night.

Aaron’s friends say he was talking about you a lot, says the oldest cop. His car was found up the road. Any idea how it got there?

Well, he was spying on me, obviously, I say. I was on a date last night, he was probably trying to see who I was with.

One cop asks wearily if Aaron had gotten violent with me. I watch one of the kittens disembowl a mouse on the porch and say no. He was just a pest.

Is your mother around? We’d like to talk to her.

Please no, not that, but I retrieve her from her boudoir of cosmetics and delusion, and she comes out in a brocade robe of emerald green and jade. Black mule slippers with one broken heel taped together. Gentlemen, she says seductively.

Ms. Havisham.

They ask if she’s seen Aaron and her enormous green eyes are liquid insanity as she says, Oh, the boy that was hounding my daughter. I can’t tell one from another.

A cop makes a good suggestion: shrubbery so my obsessive ex-boyfriends can’t see from the road into the windows. One calls his friend Joe the landscaper and asks if he can come pronto to protect the beautiful and hunted Estella Havisham. He can’t, he says, but his assistant Pip can be there tomorrow.

* * *

A new man is a fresh conquest. In the afternoon sunlight I watch a dark-haired boy climb out of a battered truck. I go out in my white cotton dress to give him a head tilt and dazzling smile. I’m Estella. Thanks for coming.

Then Pip turns and I realize she’s a girl. She’s my age, about 19 and tall, with tanned muscled arms. She’s cute in a punk rock way, with lots of tattoos and a face that’s suspicious and adorable at the same time

She looks me up and down like she’s never seen anything like me before. Why are all you dressed up? she says finally, with the air of someone who’s taken a long time to think of something to say.

I’m not. I like wearing dresses in the summer.

I don’t know how to charm women, even handsome butch girls like this. An unusual energy is surging through me, followed by confusion: should I vamp it up or play the initiator? Come on, I’ll show you where we want the shrubbery.

Pip tells me her story as she works, how she’s going to school in the fall but came here to help out while Joe recovers from a heart procedure. I express interest, bring her glasses of sweet tea. I only flash her once, at the end of the day. Accidentally of course, by bending way over a ceramic pot and giving her a full look at my pussy. When I straighten up, she’s rooted to the grass, face flushed.

But we’re still on the front lawn and that won’t do. I should show you the summer house. Come on.

I beckon her through the wild