The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror by Paula Guran

splattered on the floor and had dried in humped up blisters. The guitar had blood stains all over it.
    A record player, plugged in, setting on a nightstand by the bed, was playing that strange music. I went to it right away and picked up the needle and set it aside. And let me tell you, just making my way across the room to get hold of the player was like wading through mud with my ankles tied together. It seemed to me as I got closer to the record, the louder it got, and the more ill I felt. My head throbbed. My heart pounded.
    When I had the needle up and the music off, I went over and touched Tootie. He didn’t move, but I could see his chest rising and falling. Except for his hands, he didn’t seem hurt. He was in a deep sleep. I picked up his right hand and turned it over and looked at it. The fingers were cut deep, like someone had taken a razor to the tips. Right off, I figured that was from playing his guitar. Struck me, that to get the sounds he got out of it, he really had to dig in with those fingers. And from the looks of this room, he had been at it non-stop, until recent.
    I shook him. His eyes fluttered and finally opened. They were bloodshot and had dark circles around them.
    When he saw me, he startled, and his eyes rolled around in his head like those little games kids get where you try to shake the marbles into holes. After a moment, they got straight, and he said, “Ricky?”
    That was another reason I hated him. I didn’t like being called Ricky.
    I said, “Hello, shithead. You’re sister’s worried sick.”
    “The music,” he said. “Put the music back on.”
    “You call that music?” I said.
    He took a deep breath, rolled out of the bed, nearly knocking me aside. Then I saw him jerk, like he’d seen a truck coming right at him. I turned. I wished it had been a truck.
    Let me try and tell you what I saw. I not only saw it, I felt it. It was in the very air we were breathing, getting inside my chest like mice wearing barbed wire coats. The wall Tootie had painted and drawn all that crap on, shook.
    And then the wall wasn’t a wall at all. It was a long hallway, dark as original sin. There was something moving in there, something that slithered and slid and made smacking sounds like an anxious old drunk about to take his next drink. Stars popped up, greasy stars that didn’t remind me of anything I had ever seen in the night sky; a moon the color of a bleeding fish eye was in the background, and it cast a light on something moving toward us.
    “Jesus Christ,” I said.
    “No,” Tootie said. “It’s not him.”
    Tootie jumped to the record player, picked up the needle, and put it on. There came that rotten sound I had heard with Alma May, and I knew what I had heard when I first came into the room was the tail end of that same record playing, the part I hadn’t heard before.
    The music screeched and howled. I bent over and threw up. I fell back against the bed, tried to get up, but my legs were like old pipe cleaners. That record had taken the juice out of me. And then I saw it.
    There’s no description that really fits. It was . . . a thing. All blanket wrapped in shadow with sucker mouths and thrashing tentacles and centipede legs mounted on clicking hooves. A bulb-like head plastered all over with red and yellow eyes that seemed to creep. All around it, shadows swirled like water. It had a beak. Well, beaks.
    The thing was coming right out of the wall. Tentacles thrashed toward me. One touched me across the cheek. It was like being scalded with hot grease. A shadow come loose of the thing, fell onto the floorboards of the room, turned red and raced across the floor like a gush of blood. Insects and maggots squirmed in the bleeding shadow, and the record hit a high spot so loud and so goddamn strange, I ground my teeth, felt as if my insides were being twisted up like wet wash. And then I passed out.
    When I came to, the music was still playing. Tootie was bent over me.
    “That