Suffer Hard: An Extreme Horror Novella (6 page)

“Stop yer whimpering boy, lucky for you I just got me rocks off so I is in a
happy
mood.”

Craig’s crying grew louder in his own ears.

The old man began clattering around, doing things that Craig didn’t want to know about.

The sound of an engine revving and spluttering into life after two or three attempts made him involuntarily swivel his head round.

Bish had a chainsaw. The circular blade of the thing whizzed round at speed. The old man threw him a toothless grin and turned his attention to the decapitated, hanging corpse of Craig’s dead love.

He started on her
leg first. As the metal teeth of the noisy machine sliced through the flesh, Craig noticed that Jessie’s head had been placed by his feet.

She lay on the side of her face and stared accusingly up at him.

You bastard, you should’ve saved me.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

Bish
hadn’t heard him. He must have reached the femur, for his frail shoulders looked locked tight and his entire body shook with the effort of sawing through her young, healthy bones.

Oh God, those noises…

He cried louder so he didn’t have to listen. The cries turned into screams, blending with the revs of the chainsaw in a grotesque duet. A distant, still sane part of his mind warned him that he was hysterical.

The engine of the chainsaw cut out just as the leg thumped to the floor. There was so much blood. It didn’t spurt
in hard jets from her stump like he expected it to, but then, she was a corpse. It just kind of
dropped
out of her, a red puddle growing around her solitary ankle.

Bish
leaned over to pick up the leg. His old, thin arms trembled with the effort and he groaned when he straightened his back.

He staggered over to Craig and dumped her leg sideways across his lap. Their stumps touched in a grotesque greeting and Craig felt those pesky giggles making
a reappearance. 

“Shit, I’m too old for this,”
Bish moaned, revving up the chainsaw once more.

Craig laughed and stared up at the ceiling as
Bish set about dismembering Jessie.

Craig didn’t think things could get any worse.

But they would, before the night was over.

CHAPTER FOUR.

During the hour that Jessie met her demise, Beth was living
a nightmare all of her very own.

Her nightmare, however, was of an entirely different kind.

Unlike her boyfriend, who came to on a table in a shed, Beth came round on a bed.

She must’ve drunk a
shit load
last night because her head was pounding with a hangover from hell and she couldn’t remember anything.

It was
pitch black and Beth was deeply disorientated.

A bad, bad feeling gnawed in her guts but she couldn’t place
it.

What happened last night,
she thought uneasily.
And what
is
that smell?

The bad odour hung all around her, rancid like rotten eggs. Her arms were thrown above her head and she went to bring them into her body but they wouldn’t move.

A horrible vision flashed behind her eyes. The fat, bald man in the blood splattered apron throwing her over his shoulder and pulling down her knickers…

She tried to sit up and realised fully for the first time that her wrists were bound above her head.

This isn’t my bedroom. And this isn’t that dive of a B and B in Cornwall either…

“Hello dear, how did you sleep?”

A voice, in the darkness. Her heart tripped in terror.

As her eyes acclimatised to the dark she could make out a
short, wide figure looming over the end of the double bed.

Beth screamed.

“Oh, don’t start screaming, I’d hate to cut out your tongue, you’ll be needing that to service the men folk.”

The figure moved away from the bed and suddenly the room was bathed in brilliant light
which stabbed her retinas.

In a split
second she took in the room, and her predicament.

It was Margaret, the crazy bitch from the pub i
n the room with her. The room had been so dark because the window was boarded up with planks of wood.

Ther
e was nothing in the small room apart from the bare, double mattress on the wrought iron bedframe on which she was lying on the right hand side. The room was a shithole. The wallpaper was peeling off the walls and the floorboards looked as though they hadn’t seen water and soap for years.

Most alarmingly of all, she was n
aked, her hands tied with rough rope to the iron headboard. She peered over her breasts at Margaret, who stood at her feet. Beth kept her legs tightly pressed together, at that moment more mortified than she was scared.

The smell
seemed to be getting worse, making her want to puke.

“What do you want with me?”

“Your young, fertile body, dear. You’re going to make babies for us. You could say we need a dose of fresh blood brought into the family.”

Tears streamed down Beth’s face, blurring her vision.

This couldn’t be happening.

But it is. You have to calm down.

“Where are the others?”

“You’ll be seeing them all again soon, don’t you worry about that.”

“Let me go, Margaret.”

“No dear. You live with us now.”

Beth’s head flopped back on the mattress. She stared up at the mould ridden ceiling, trying desperately to calm her wildly beating heart.

Margaret doubled over suddenly and let out a low groan through gritted teeth, clutching her swollen stomach.

Beth raised her head to watch her, taking that moment to tug violently at the rope binding her wrists.

All she got for her
efforts was rope burn.

Margaret straightened up and Be
th stopped struggling.

“Michael!” she shouted. “The baby’s coming!”

Beth stiffened in fear when she heard footsteps creaking on what sounded like a flight of stairs.

The door burst open and she cringed when Michael’s huge bulk entered the room. He was still wearing that blood splattered apron and the mere sight of him made her want to scream.

She was sure his apron was painted with more blood than before.

She remembered how easily he had swept her off her feet, the sheer brute strength of him.

“Michael,” Margaret said as she doubled over once more. “The contractions are closer together, it will be here soon.”

Michael put his arm around his wife and gently steered her towards the door.

“No, no, no,” she said. “I want the baby
here.
I want Beth to see why we need her.”

With that she howled in pain and grabbed hold of the footboard on the bed.

Beth peered down the length of her body at the woman. Michael lifted up her long skirt and threw it over her back like a blanket.

At least I’m spared the sight of the baby coming out…

Margaret howled, gritted her teeth, and pushed with all her might.

Beth watched the grotesque spectacle in wide eyed horror.

Michael, who was ever silent, diligently rubbed his wife’s back and continuously peeked at her backside to check for the imminent arrival.

“Oh God,
it’s coming!” she panted.

Michael crouched down behind her, and then the room was filled with the sound
of a baby’s cry.

He handed the baby to his wife, neatly wrapped up in his blood soaked apron which
he had removed from his torso.

Margaret cradled the infant to her chest, sitting next to Beth on the empty side of the bed by her head.

Both mother and baby were blood soaked.

Beth’s gaze was helplessly drawn to the child. It wasn’t just ugly. It was
wrong.
Its head was too big and lumpy, and even through the covering of blood and slime, she could see the thing was the colour of milk.

Margaret struggled out of her billowing top, discarding it completely. Her sa
ggy breasts hung down her fat, if slightly deflated stomach.

“I’ve had myself plenty of
babies,” she said, guiding the child’s mouth onto one brown, saucer like nipple. “and after a while it’s like popping out a big shit.” She sighed deeply, and critically eyed the child. “This one is the same as all the rest. Shame. Still, at least we have you now.”

Beth was
hyperventilating, she could barely catch her breath as the bawling infant was silenced by the nipple.

“Darlin
g, could you go and start dinner? Me and Beth are going to have a little chat.”

The infant suckled at his mother’s breast and Margaret leaned her head back and closed her eyes for a second.

Michael left the room, throwing Beth a final, hungry look that made her shudder.

Margaret yelped, making Beth jump.

When she saw why Margaret had screamed, she recoiled in disgust.

The baby had drawn blood. Margaret’s nipple was ringed with red, and blood dripped from the infant’s mouth. But still Margaret let the baby suckle.

Jesus Christ, are those fangs? What kind of fucking baby has fangs
?

When the kid lifted up its hand to stroke its mother’s breast, Beth saw that its fingers were
webbed.

“Like I say, we need you,” Margaret said, squirming with obvi
ous discomfort as the kid sucked down the blend of milk and blood. “Our babies have a hunger of a different kind, and the older they become, the stronger their hunger gets. Don’t get me wrong, me and my family have always had that particular kind of hunger, but we knows how to control it. We ain’t stupid, it’s just a special treat and we have it when we can. But the kids, they can’t control it, they’d do anything to have it so we have to keep ‘em in check. And I love my babies, I do, but it’s real lucky they can’t have children. Heaven knows, they’ve tried...” she shook her head, as if too saddened to finish the sentence. “Look, I’ll be completely honest with you Beth. My family sticks to their own. And it’s never been a problem up ‘til now. It’s just the next generation that are suffering.”

She fell
silent, the sound of the baby’s suckling filling the room.

Beth
was having a hard time computing her words. “Is Michael your
brother?”

“Yes dear.
My brother, and my father too. Oh, don’t look so confused, you’ll meet them all at dinner, and I’m sure you’ll be happy for your new role in life when you see the alternative.”

“You’re sick.”

“And you, my dear need to mind your mouth.” The blood trickled from her breast and she no longer seemed to care, staring wistfully into space. “It’s just such a shame that it’s all gone wrong for me and Michael. It’s like we’ve reached the end of the line, genetic wise. We need a fresh dose of genes to keep our family going.”

“Just let me go,” Beth sobbed.

“Don’t be like that, dear. I would love to stay and chat but I have just given birth. I’m going to go and lie down before dinner.”

The woman got up,
cradling her still feeding child to her breast and left the room.

The second she was gone, Beth stared wildly around the place, searching for something,
anything,
that might help her.

She saw nothing.

God damn you, Craig,
she thought, fresh tears of panic welling. She should never have agreed to come away with him on this stupid holiday. She should’ve listened to her gut instinct.

The gut instinct that said Craig
was in love with his housemate, Jessie.

She hadn’t realised the full extent of his crush until she had come away with them.
Which is why she had acted like a total bitch the entire time. He had made a fool of her, and Tim was a prick not to notice he was in love with his girlfriend. And as for Jessie. Wow. What a dumb bitch that girl was, because she genuinely didn’t seem to know.

And now she was going to die for not listening to her good sense.

Thank you Craig,
you complete cunt.

She forced herself to take a deep breath. Panic would get her nowhere. There
had
to be a way out of this.

The door creaked open and Beth shrivelled inside.

Michael’s bulk filled the doorframe.

“No,” she said, digging
her heels into the mattress, uselessly trying to scramble away from him.

He took a step towards the bed, his litt
le eyes shining with lust.

“Please,” she whimpered.

He smiled and closed the gap between them, sitting next to her and reaching out to tenderly brush a strand of long blonde hair off her face.

H
is hand travelled lower to cup a breast and her sizable chest was instantly swamped by his outsized palm.

His touch sickened her.
More than that. It made her want to crawl out of her skin. If she could’ve chopped her own breast off in that moment so he wouldn’t touch her, she probably would’ve been tempted.

All the while he stared at her with a little, beatific smile that made him look like a spastic child trapped in a giant’s body.

She looked down at herself, at the rapid rise and fall of her chest and the way the breast that wasn’t being pawed by the man-monster was sheened in sweat.

He smelt disgusting. As if it didn’t smell bad enough in here already. His white t-shirt was filthy and the rank odour that emitted from the dark patches under his arms made her tongue curl up atop a pool of mouth water.

When he lowered his face to kiss her, she couldn’t hold back the wail of abject disgust and terror. She screamed through pursed lips.

Oh God, the
stench
of him. His lips felt like slugs, pressing down on hers.

The bed squeaked when he lay down next to her, pressing his massive body against hers. Those disgusting, rubbery lips edged round
to her neck, where he snuffled like a pig. His hands roamed her body, surprisingly gentle but nonetheless abhorrent to her very soul.

Through her haze of disgust, the thought occurred to her;
he wants me to want him.

“Untie me,” she whispered, thinking clearly for the first time since
she had set foot in this fucking hell hole of a village.

He hesitated, his huge body falling still.

Going against every natural instinct she possessed, she lifted up a leg and ran her foot suggestively down the length of one tree trunk leg.

He grunted, and it sounded approving.

“Untie me, big boy,” she said again.

He straddled her and she whimpered. She wrapped her legs around him.

Oh God, what am I doing?

Surviving, that’s what…

His shovel hands engulfed her wrists. But he didn’t untie her, instead he just held his hands there and moved down to latch his mouth onto a nipple.