"It isn't a fetish. Don't make it sordid. I collect them," he pouted.

"As a hobby?"

Arthur bobbed affirmation. "Pebbles," he bluntly a.s.serted.

"Collecting stones isn't unusual. Hobbies can be rewarding."

"Not nice stones. Plain ugly gravel," he insisted. "And pencil shavings. I grind them myself. I don't even use the pencils. It's wasteful. I'm single-handedly destroying the forests!" he complained.

"That is a problem," she agreed.

"Are you humoring me?"

"No. But these things aren't terrible, Arthur."

"I eat too many marshmallows! It's all I eat."

She smirked. "That is bad. For your health. But it isn't terrible."

Arthur's mood plunged. "I won't be patronized!!!" he yelped. Fists clenched in fury, marching frantically, the man glanced at the head on the desk. Its eyes seemed to be watching him. Accusing.

"I'm afraid, Mister Chiaroscuro, your time is up." The psychiatrist adopted a formal tone.

"It's Chiaroscoro!" he railed.

"I distinctly heard Chiaroscuro on the phone," Doctor Winnow refuted.

"I think I know my own name!" Arthur heatedly contended.

"Well, do you or don't you?" Mildred scorned.

Arthur halted, shifting to a baffled disposition. "I haven't told you why I'm here yet," he said with a peevish flare of indignation.

"It doesn't matter. You're clearly beyond help," the doctor dismissed.

Arthur gawped at her forlornly.

"I'm going to share a secret." Mildred walked to the mystery door and grasped the k.n.o.b. "I have a collection too." She wrenched the door wide.

Human heads tumbled forth, preserved with lacquer, rolling in every direction. Various faces wore masks of pain. A number were frozen in terror.

Jaw flapping, Arthur uttered an astonished "No!"

"It's actually a compulsion," Doctor Winnow chortled.

Bleating, a palm clamping his mouth, Arthur pointed to the head mounted on the desk. It wasn't a statue!

The psychiatrist savored his epiphany . . . then grew impatient. He should have fainted, or been reduced to a shuddering wreck if she had gauged him correctly. Sometimes she commanded a victim to swallow sedatives and call her in the morning. They succ.u.mbed to a drugged stupor and were easily overpowered. This one, she estimated, could be subdued by shocking him. But he wasn't cooperating.

She had a similar case last week. A green-clad woman who thought she was turning into a frog. She wouldn't take the pills. She didn't have the brains to be alarmed. She kept hopping around. Mildred had to pursue her until they were exhausted. She then tried to strangle the woman into submission. The loon thrashed so violently, she knocked Mildred against her desk. The doctor hit her head. Briefly unconscious, she woke to behold that her prey had departed. Mildred unsteadily tracked the nut to a park. The silly nitwit was half-jumping, half-loping through the gra.s.s. They wrestled and clawed, grappling for dominance. b.u.ms spectated, whistling and wagering. Mildred finally tugged off a shoe and was about to hammer the woman's cranium but hesitated, reluctant to damage the specimen. It was a sensible shoe, she decided. And clobbered the frog-lady till her hair was black and blue.

She'd better not have any grief tonight! She was getting a migraine.

"There were ancient cultures that displayed the heads of their bravest and strongest enemies as trophies," she expounded, sidling to her desk where a knife was stashed as a precaution. "I prize the warped minds of my most disturbed patients. It's the supreme conquest. The ultimate addiction! We all have our needs, Mister Chiaroscuro, and I need your beautiful addled head. It isn't doing you much good." She sc.r.a.ped out a drawer to wield a bra.s.s letter opener.

"You'll be interested to note I'm a Cat Lady also," she preened. "My home is filled with felines. Except for the aviary. I'm a bird-lover as well. Raptors and owls. If I'm not careful my house could become a war zone. Fur and feathers flying."

Composure regained, Arthur reached beneath his overcoat and withdrew a sword.

Mildred released her meager blade. It landed on the floor.

A grin split the patient's narrow countenance. "What do you do with the rest of them?" he avidly inquired. "The bodies? I collect those. From the neck down. It began with mannequins. I would smuggle them from stores. They were my friends. My peers. But I couldn't tolerate their eyes, unblinking, always looking at me day and night. So I disposed of the upper portions. Eventually I graduated to cadavers, looting them from cemeteries, digging up graves, leaving the heads in the coffins. Their bodies smelled awful. I had to switch to homicide and stow my companions in a freezer at night. They stay fresh longer. There's just the th.o.r.n.y predicament of what to do with the heads!"

The serial slashers locked gazes. They were the perfect couple! If only they weren't driven to kill.

The rapture of discovery and connection faded.

Defenseless, the doctor wisely fled. She pulled the bookcase ajar and escaped the office. Arthur chased her, roaring, his lengthy saber brandished aloft.

His initial victim had been the deaf man who never smiled. Who spoke with his fingers, coiled into rocks, and vented his frustrations on an innocent son-a child unfairly blamed for his own mother's death.

Although she had been killed in a cyclone! Struck by a refrigerator with wings.

The son had pleaded for years to be loved, respected, forgiven for an accident that wasn't his fault. The tyrant never listened to reason. Of course, the old man was deaf . . .

He teased the boy, told him he would love him if he stole a purse. Only to torment him the next day with the same bribe, the same promise. Or another. Bring him cigarettes. A pair of shoes. It was always something. Another condition. Another shattered vow!

Arthur skidded at the center of a clandestine chamber lined in sheets of plastic, like painter's drop cloths, and drums of a foul-smelling liquid, ostensibly her head glaze . . . then whirled to confront the woman.

"This is my murder vault." Beaming madly, Mildred clutched an axe that had been leaning near the threshold. "I've dubbed it my Red Room. You'll see why in a jiffy."

The pair of slayers swung their weapons in unison, harmoniously aiming for each other's necks from contrasting angles. Both neglected to duck, so obsessed were they with the h.o.a.rding of people parts.

Sadly, the only cure for their addiction was to meet their match.

And their maker.

Liked Lori's story? Check out her story collection: OUT-OF-MIND EXPERIENCES.

By Lori R. Lopez.

Thirteen quirky, often humorous, sometimes twisted tales ranging from Horror to Fantasy to Science Fiction!

Website: http://trilllogicinnoventions.com/Product Page: http://trilllogicinnoventions.com/node/206 Back to TOC.

It's interesting to note how many addictions start by noticing someone else's ritual...something that's clearly toxic and wasteful (smoking cigarettes, or freebasing comes to mind)...and then you end up doing it anyway. It's rumored that Rick James saw another musician freebasing, and afterwards he held a band meeting and told everyone "None of us will EVER do that!"

A few days later, they were all doing it.

If you were just to simply find some angel dust, would you even know what it was? Would you be tempted to try it, having heard of the hideous strength it imposes? What if you tried it and discovered it was really...

Devil Dust.

By C.D. Bennett.

The night is a cruel mistress. For every secret desire granted under her dark countenance, another soul lay broken by her graces. How far must we fall before we succ.u.mb to the dark inside ourselves? Can we indeed hold on to our humanity in a world that has forgotten the very meaning of the word? Lies have become our tenets, and our currency, blood.

In the bowels of the city, in that d.a.m.nable pit of squalor, where dreams suffocate under a mask of grime, where the dead pa.s.s unnoticed and unheeded, Tomas wept. Another faceless soul swallowed by dest.i.tution, another forgotten denizen of a city that tossed away its less fortunate citizens like the trash that littered its ghettos. He wept, for all he had to offer the city that deserted him were but his tears and his soul. He had a life once, a loving wife and a young son that was his greatest gift to the world. He had everything a man in this modern world could want, but like so many of us, Tomas had dreams, secret desires that the antiseptic American Dream could not fulfill. Alone there in the filth and the dark, Tomas reflected on those days lost so many months ago, his mind awash in torment.

She came into his life like a G.o.ddess draped in the pa.s.sions of a thousand lifetimes. He never meant to be unfaithful to his wife, but there was something in her eyes he couldn't resist, and somewhere within her dark, longing gaze he was lost to her charms. Innocent flirtation soon gave way to a burning in his soul he had never before known, and he surrendered completely. In the months that followed, it was a secret he could no longer bear, and he came to his wife in hope of forgiveness. He would find none. She cursed his name, d.a.m.ned the very day they met. Her cries of anger filled the house, and from his room upstairs, Tomas' young son Jacob shut his ears to their shouting.

In the alley, Tomas clenched his fist at the memory, pounding the wet ground in anger. He smashed his fist again and again, his knuckles bleeding with each strike. In his mind, he could still see his son standing at the top of the stairs, Tomas' own gun in tow. His wife had always begged him to get that d.a.m.n gun out of their house, but there it was, trembling in their ten-year-old's tiny little hands. They barely had time to scream before they heard the shot.

The memories haunted him every day, drowning him deeper into his own private h.e.l.l. He lost his family, his job, his every reason to live. Tomas knelt in the filth of the alley he called home, resigning himself to watch his tears drip into a shallow pool on the ground between his legs. Let the city take his soul, he pleaded, he had nothing left.

Gunshots. They were close. Tomas snapped out of his misery. Though he had lived in the streets less than a year, he had heard this particular chorus a dozen times over. Someone was running through the abandoned warehouse just beyond Tomas' trash-strewn hovel. He could hear the fevered clacking of shoes against wet concrete and the incoherent squelch of a police radio. Tomas backed into a corner next to a large green dumpster and tried to conceal himself in the shadows. It wouldn't have been the first time that the police had come down to the ghetto to drive out the vagrants.

"Tomas! Tomas! What the f.u.c.k's goin' on?" Tomas heard someone shouting from somewhere down the alley. f.u.c.kin' Sal. He never did know when to keep his mouth shut. Tomas leaned out from his hiding spot and motioned angrily to Sal to get out of there.

"What?" Sal shouted back, "C'mon man, what's goin' on?"

Tomas shook his head at the words. Sal was a good guy when you needed someone to talk to besides the rats, and he did know how to make a mean rat burger, but Christ, was he stupid, and lately he had become even worse. Tomas would catch him muttering to himself or talking to shadows in the alley, and every now and then he'd see something strange in Sal's eyes, like there was another person in there. He was a mess, but he was a good guy, and the streets were no place for a good man to call home.

"Sal, quiet! It's a roller!"

Sal dove behind a pile of trash and pulled a length of wet newspaper down over his head. He stared wide-eyed into the dark, fumbling to pull a small plastic baggie out of his shoe. Sal had never been a brave man, but like too many tortured souls in the ghetto, he found his courage at the bottom of a bottle, or in an unsuspecting bag of 'treats'. Sal shoved the baggie over his nose and mouth and huffed as hard as he could. It was too fast. He fell back into a pile of old wooden pallets and rusty tools, scattering garbage everywhere as he choked uncontrollably. The racket he was making was bound to attract attention.

"Sal! SAL!" Tomas yelled, "For f.u.c.k's sake, shut the f.u.c.k up!"

Sal could hear the shadows again. He grinned an awkward smile and even managed a little chuckle. The voices would know what to do, they never let him down. The shadows demanded that he be still, and Sal would oblige. He shrank back into his corner and waited.

Tomas was quiet as a ghost, he dared not even move.

The approaching footsteps stopped at a steel loading dock just across from where Tomas was hiding. He could hear someone nearly out of breath, panting from their exertion. Fists and feet pounded against the steel door, trying to knock it off its hinges and break through. The ringing sound echoed down the alley. It was slow and rhythmic, and for a moment Tomas could almost hear Metallica's For Whom The Bell Tolls rattling around his head. He was sure he was going crazy. All those months drinking from puddles and eating rat burgers had finally made him snap.

BANG! BANG!.

Gunshots ripped through the metal bar that held the door shut, then someone kicked it open like the Terminator. Tomas was right. Cops. For all the time he found himself being kicked around by those p.r.i.c.ks, Tomas had begun to amuse himself by giving each of them their own little pet names. Something to keep his mind off of the beatings and the humiliation that he had suffered at their hands. In the ghetto there was no law, no real law. The cops were just as corrupt as all the other miserable dregs down here, except that they had the guns, and the b.u.ms were an easy target for them to work through their 'Daddy' issues with. Tomas remembered this one. Short-cropped hair, thousand-yard stare and dumb as a f.u.c.king stump. He called this one Officer Friendly, one of Philly's finest public servants.

Tomas bit back his tongue. He wanted nothing more than to tell good 'ole Friendly exactly where and how he could stick himself, but something was wrong. Friendly's eyes were wild and bloodshot, darting all over the place. Even though Tomas was surrounded by garbage he could just smell him standing there, like death itself had washed over him.

Officer Friendly could feel his whole body shaking. He looked around the alley like a mad dog, foaming at the mouth and mumbling incoherently. The shadows whispered ancient curses at him, swirling around him like some d.a.m.nable fog. He flailed his arms to keep them back, but they just kept coming. Then he remembered. He had a gun.

BANG! BANG! BANG!.

Shots rang out through the alley at random, smashing into brick and pinging off the dumpster right next to Tomas' head. Officer Friendly looked right at him. Crouched in the shadows, Friendly could see Tomas staring back at him with eyes that burned like cinders. Friendly tried to shake off the image but it only got stronger. He watched Tomas rise to his feet, his eyes smoldering in his head while the shadows enveloped him in a h.e.l.lish cloak. Officer Friendly could feel the sulfur singe at his lungs. Tomas' hideous visage took a step forward and Friendly fired again.

In his hiding place, Tomas ducked to avoid the shot, even though it struck the wall behind him high enough that he would have to have been standing to be in any danger.

"What the h.e.l.l are you doing?!" Tomas yelled.

Officer Friendly shook his head. Tomas was getting closer, each step tainted with the stench of h.e.l.l. The words he spoke were twisted and horrible, and as Tomas opened his mouth rancid earth crawling with worms fell from his lips. Friendly watched as Tomas' face split apart and a cloud of darkness rolled out. It was as h.e.l.l itself had come to usher Officer Friendly home, and it wasn't about to go back empty handed.

Tomas sat there on the ground, dumbfounded by what he was seeing. Officer Friendly was waving his arms around furiously at something that wasn't there. He was like a man possessed, screaming at the shadows and p.i.s.sing himself.

"No no no no," Officer Friendly pleaded again and again, shaking his head. The voices in his mind were shrill and pitiless, and the darkness was swallowing him. He dropped his gun in desperation and began to weep like a beaten child.

Tomas reached out to him, leaving the safety of his hovel. He couldn't bear to watch any longer. Officer Friendly reached back, and for a moment saw a friendly face amid the seething blackness all around him.

"Take it," Tomas pleaded to him, speaking as if the words were meant for his own son, if only he could see his face again. "Take my hand. It's ok."

He almost managed a smile.

CRACK!.

Officer Friendly lurched forward, spitting a gout of blood over Tomas' face. He fell to the ground in a sickening slump. A man stood above Officer Friendly's body, wielding a rusty sledgehammer. It was Sal. His face was twisted into a menacing sneer, but it was his eyes that Tomas most felt he had seen before, it was the same look on Officer Friendly's face only moments ago.

"Please Sal, don't."

Sal looked down at Officer Friendly squirming on the ground like road kill that didn't know well enough to just die. He watched as maggots crawled out of every pore on Friendly's body in a writhing carpet of slime. Sal stared at the unfolding horror at his feet. He knew it was impossible but he couldn't look away. The maggots hissed and spat at him, oozing onto the wet ground in search of their next meal. They were taunting him, daring him to act.

Tomas was too terrified to move. He swallowed back his urge to vomit.

"Sal..."

Sal swung his hammer like he was breaking granite. The heavy weapon crashed into Officer Friendly's back with a pulverizing thud, hammering down again and again and again. Sal swung to beat down the darkness, to drive out the horrors in his mind.

Fighting his will to scream, Tomas shut his eyes to the carnage. The sounds were a resounding cacophony of snapping bones and the wet slap of b.l.o.o.d.y flesh against the pavement. When the sounds mercifully ended, Tomas opened his eyes to see a mangled mess of what used to be Officer Friendly lying before him. Sal looked down at him, covered in blood, his chest heaving in exhaustion. Before his very eyes, Tomas was changing. Tentacles slithered from where his arms should have been; his eyes split open and some horrible black oil poured from the empty sockets. Terrible voices a.s.saulted his mind. The darkness spoke to him, and he would oblige.

Sal raised his hammer.

Tomas had only seconds to act. He dove for Friendly's gun, rolling out of the way. Sal spun around to see Tomas bearing down on him, holding a smoldering black cross in his hand. Sal could hear Tomas' flesh sizzling.

"Sal. Stop. It's me." Tomas' body was swimming in adrenaline. He was shaking, his fingers fumbling with the blood-smeared gun in his hands. "It's me."

Sal heard only the guttural sounds of a madman. His eyes darted wildly. He swung.

BANG!.

Tomas fired, striking Sal dead in the chest. Sal stumbled backward and dropped his hammer. It clanked against the pavement. He raised a hand, touching the smoking hole in his chest. He couldn't feel anything. Sal looked back at Tomas, and for a moment he smiled.