Free Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories by Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Ramsey Campbell, Paul Tremblay, Mercedes M. Yardley, Richard Thomas, Damien Angelica Walters, Kevin Lucia

woman’s legs were wrapped around his hips; Hannah couldn’t watch them, it made her hurt to watch them, but she did. The woman wanted her to. The woman’s cheeks were wet. The bed thumped against the wall. Her eyes, soft and deep, locked with Hannah’s.
    The fireworks popped like gunshots over the church. Upstairs, wings fluttered like flames, catching and spreading.
    She heard Mason say, Who’s there?
    He said, Who are you ?
    The bed was empty, now, lit blue and cold by her headlamp. The sheets and comforter were pulled halfway down. The mattress was darkened along one side, stained wet and black in the shape of a crescent. Smoke was pooling around her ankles.
    The woman was at her left, now, at the end of the hallway, where it joined the living room. Mason was in the house—the dining room, she thought. The woman had her hands on the shoulders of a young boy. His face was heartbreakingly pretty and pale and his hair was blond and he was crying—
    Jesus Christ, Helen, Mason said. His voice odd. Deeper. Don’t make me come find you.
    The woman had gone. Hannah crossed the living room, her feet barely touching the floor, listening, keeping herself at all times on the opposite side of the house from Mason. Now she was near the front doorway again, at the foot of the stairs. The woman stood near the top, smiling down at her.
    Hannah lifted her feet, placed them, pushed down. The wooden steps had give to them; old nails groaned.
    Mason said, Woman, I’m gonna stripe your ass, and Hannah didn’t know what that meant, but she did. She climbed more quickly.
    His footfalls—he must be in the kitchen—were heavy, narcotic, his words slurred and too loud. Hannah pulled closer to the woman with every step, even though the air, here, was buzzing and thick with dust. Hannah gagged. And then the woman was just above her, and Hannah could not, would not, look at her face; she did not want to know what the woman really looked like—because though the woman was kind and beautiful and smiling, another face lay beneath that one; she knew, deep down, that she could not bear to see it, because she knew that the house had burned—the woman had burned it, after—she knew how all this ended, and the woman needed her to, and smoke was in the air and she smelled—
    In the back hallway Mason said, Fucking Christ, Helen, tell me why I married you if you’re going to be like this. Each word sharp and full of hatred.
    They were in the upstairs hallway, now. The hall was short; one door to the right, and one to the left. The woman stopped, stricken, in front of the closed right door. John was playing in there, and had angered him. John always angered him. Through the door she heard Nick shouting, she heard the boy’s cries, heard her own name being called—
    Then the woman was carrying the child in her arms, through the doorway to the left.
    Helen! Mason bellowed, from down below, in the living room.
    Hannah followed the woman and stood in the doorway. In her headlamp’s beam was a small bed, and over the bed was a model biplane, or an owl, hanging from a thread, and behind it, in the sky, fireworks burst, and below on the bed was the boy, lying on his back atop the covers, and beside the bed knelt the woman, and Hannah joined her, gagging, and John’s face was swollen and red, blood crusting his nose and lips, and the woman stroked his hair and kissed his forehead, remembering unbidden his tiny mouth at her breast—at once gentler and more forceful than Nick’s mouth had ever been; she remembered pushing the boy through and out of her, she remembered the smell of his hair and the way his cries became a fishhook in her heart, moving her from place to place; she remembered taking him, every year, to see the fireworks; she thought that even now, like this, he looked more like his father than her, and how unjust that was, that he would have this father, this father who—
    I’m gonna make you sorry you were born, Mason said, from the