999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [17]
He vaulted in and sloshed through the mess towards Kozintsev’s cubicle. Many partitions were down already, and there was a clear path to the Director’s workspace. Valentina pouted at him, then her eyes widened as she saw the assembled legs surrounding the Pool. The Amerikans began to topple in, crushing furniture and corpses beneath them, many unable to stand once they had fallen. The hardiest of them kept on walking, swarming around and overwhelming the technicians. Cries were strangled and blood ran on the bed of the Pool. Chirkov fired wildly, winging an ear off a bearded dead man in a shabby suit, and pushed on towards Kozintsev. When he reached the center, his first thought was that the cubicle was empty, then he saw what the Director had managed. Combining himself with his work, V. A. Kozintsev had constructed a wooden half skeleton which fit over his shoulders, making his own head the heart of the new body he had fashioned for Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin. The head, built out to giant size with exaggerated clay and rubber muscles, wore its black wig and beard, and even had lips and patches of sprayed-on skin. The upper body was wooden and intricate, the torso of a giant with arms to match, but sticking out at the bottom were the Director’s stick-insect legs. Chirkov thought the body would not be able to support itself but, as he looked, the assemblage stood. He looked up at the caricature of Rasputin’s face. Blue eyes shone, not glass but living.
Valentina was by his side, gasping. He put an arm around her and vowed to himself that if it were necessary she would have the bullet he had saved for himself. He smelled her perfumed hair. Together, they looked up at the holy maniac who had controlled a woman and, through her, an Empire, ultimately destroying both. Rasputin looked down on them, then turned away to look at the Amerikans. They crowded around in an orderly fashion, limping pilgrims approaching a shrine. A terrible smile disfigured the crude face. An arm extended, the paddle-sized hand stretching out fingers constructed from surgical implements. The hand fell onto the forehead of the first of the Amerikans, the officer. It covered the dead face completely, fingers curling around the head. Grigory Yefimovich seemed powerful enough to crush the Amerikan’s skull, but instead he just held firm. His eyes rolled up to the chandelier, and a twanging came from inside the wood-and-clay neck, a vibrating monotone that might have been a hymn. As the noise resounded, the gripped Amerikan shook, slabs of putrid meat falling away like layers of onionskin. At last, Rasputin pushed the creature away. The uniform gone with its flesh, it was like Valentina’s skeleton, but leaner, moister, stronger. It stood up and stretched, its infirmities gone, its ankle whole. It clenched and unclenched teeth in a joke-shop grin and leaped away, eager for meat. The next Amerikan took its place under Rasputin’s hand, and was healed too. And the next.
Joyce carol Oates
THE RUINS OF CONTRACOEUR
Joyce Carol Oates is a publishing phenomenon. Her list of credits is way too long to list here; on any given week you re likely to see a piece in The New Yorker, a penned review in the New York Times, or, perhaps, a new novel, a collection of short stories, an edited anthology, a book on boxing a play. Even if we restrict ourselves to the horror field the task becomes little easier, though we would do well to mention her collection Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, the anthology American Gothic Tales, and the novel Zombie, which won the Bram Stoker Award.