Best British Horror 2014 Read online

  When I woke up on the floor of the conference room, the first thing I realised was that the cleaner’s contraption was no longer thrumming in my head. The panic question of how I’d got there kicked me fully awake and I jolted involuntarily, eyes popping open, legs flailing in all directions as I discovered a gag in my mouth and wire or some kind of plastic flex tying my wrists together behind my back.

  I crabbed, spidered, Catherine-wheeled with my left buttock as a pivot until my shoulder blades hit the wall.

  Kotwika sat opposite me, semi-slumped, legs out straight on the carpet tiles, the tread of his shoes facing me. As I squirmed wildly and fought for breath he merely picked up a greasy bundle of paper smeared with chilli sauce and devoured what remained of a half-eaten doner kebab, remaining non-plussed as I writhed, wiggling as best as I could towards the door, struggling to hoist myself to my knees and attempting whilst keeping my balance to head-butt the door handle and effect my escape.

  The most he did was to lick the chilli sauce from his fingertips and squint slightly in irritation at my gyrations. He knew of course – as I was soon to discover – that escape was impossible. It only took a few bangs with my chin and nudges with my cheek-bone to deduce the door was locked. I could see through feverishly blinking and de-focused eyes that the open-plan office beyond was swathed in darkness, and I was trapped with – for want of a better word – a fucking madman.

  Needless to say my futile attempts at screams for help and miserably stifled howls of anguish fell on deaf ears. Kotwika let them pass like a wind through the trees, with a degree of patience under different circumstances, I might have found laudable. Not that my exertions got me anywhere, geographically or psychologically. They resulted only in a drastic lack of breath within minutes and I concluded the very minimum I needed to stay alive was to keep breathing. Easier said than done, when you’re trussed up like a Christmas turkey in the company of an insane person. Then I saw the legs.

  As my shoulder slid down the door, the sound of a moan that wasn’t mine made me twist awkwardly. From this position I could see a man’s lower limbs under the boardroom table on the far side. He was standing up but leaning over, the upper part of his body – which I couldn’t see from that angle – outstretched on top of it. Flanked by an avenue of chairs, the legs were bare and pale and sparsely hairy, pin-striped trousers and white boxer shorts bunched at the ankles over lime-green spotted Happy Socks and slip-ons. Even without the moan, which was distinctively bovine behind its gag, the Happy Socks were a clear identifier that the person was Brian Innox.

  I yelped in a voice shrill as a woman’s, straightened my spine in a snap, scuttling away from the sight, bringing my knees up sharply when I reached the corner to stop myself from keeling over on my side.

  ‘I’ll open the door for you, sir. I’ll carry your lunch, sir. Warm your seat sir? Third floor, sir? Like the taste of your Kiwi, sir. Open your zip sir? Shake it for you now, sir?’ Kotwika crouched to look me in the face. ‘Do you know how irritating that was? How sick it made me feel – Every, Single, Day?’ I felt the cold O of the barrel of the pistol – later identified by the police as a Glock 9mm – against the centre of my forehead: from my eye-view it looked like a silver Boeing 757 had embedded itself into my pineal gland ‘“But don’t worry, everyone’s suffering in this economic climate.”’ The pupils of his eyes shone like nail heads. ‘No. You’re going to suffer, arse-licker!’

  I felt my scalp give a little as he dragged me on all fours to the far end of the conference table, the gun to my skull the whole time. Then he hoisted me by the hair so that I was forced to a kneeling position and slapped me lightly on the cheeks as if to ensure my fullest attention. Only when he moved aside, clearing my line of sight did I truly understand what was happening. Only then did I grasp the full extent of his lunacy.

  What faced me was Innox’s naked arse, in all its pallid glory, its flesh textured with gooseflesh now it was exposed to the elements, albeit warmed by the hot breath of the fan heaters overhead. I was facing two dunes separated by a tight-lipped crack, each puckered and dimpled by the herniation of subcutaneous fat and age-old blackhead craters as well as fresher eruptions, a few in the constellation turning acid yellow at their tips. Below and between, where his underwear must have gathered too tightly, I could detect a blush of chaffing not unlike nappy rash.

  I felt sick. I heard the fridge open and close behind me and a bottle top hush as it unscrewed and Kotwika emptied a bottle of orange juice over my boss’s exposed behind with the panache of a chef adding olive oil liberally to a salad.

  I had to fight to stop my gorge rising in my throat because I didn’t want to suffocate, but I emitted strange strangulated sounds of protest.

  The liquid ran into the V-shaped cleft at the coccyx and followed the down-guttering to stripe the legs, dripping onto the floor, chased by a generous squirt of the soda siphon that was always on the drinks table, delivered with a painterly flourish. Innox’s buttocks clenched and shuddered as the force of air and water hit them. After the tsunami the skin shone like Michelangelo marble. I half expected the next phase to be a swift buffing by Polish windscreen-cleaners with chamois leathers. But no . . .

  Kotwika yanked the gag off me and presented to the tip of my nose a thin slice of lemon held in small metal pincers kept beside the ice bucket.

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘Yes. Oh yes . . .’

  Turning away from me, he slid it into the crack of Innox’s behind, where it hung precariously, half-in, half-out.

  ‘Do it, Arse-Licker. Do what you’re best at. Go on! Do it and I might just let you live!’

  He stood behind me and shoved the gun barrel against the back of my head.

  For a second I wondered if having my brains blown out might be preferable to the obscene act he was asking me to perform – and perhaps others would have made a different decision – but I realised instantly, or pretty instantly, I had no choice. My mind was racing but I couldn’t afford it to be racing. Racing wasn’t going to help me. I had to concentrate. No, I had to stop concentrating, stop thinking, and just do it. Just do it, I thought. Just stop becoming dead. That was my priority. Anything else can wait. What you feel about it can wait. What you feel afterwards can wait. Don’t even go there. Make my mind blank. Blank.

  For Christ’s sake – just do it!

  I shuffled forward on my knees, level with Innox’s arse. It grew closer. It loomed. I could see his back buckling, the tails of his shirt and jacket rolled back. I saw the back of his bald head and the fact that his arms were tied down by rope from the blinds, but as I hobbled closer I lost sight of that and his rear end became my sole focus as it had to be. The arse with the soda water dripping off it was all. All I dared think about. All I dared consume in my brain. I couldn’t allow in anything else. Any sliver of guilt, regret, reluctance, repugnance, revulsion . . .

  My stomach heaved. I made noises like a crow. Like I’d swallowed a crow. I couldn’t help it.

  My nose inches away, its contours hypnotised me. Then became uncannily sharp and vivid. My mouth and lips became desert-dry. My eyes fixed and dilated. I felt I they were exploring the foul landscape like an ant on the face of God. Or God roaming the cold, shivering flesh of a plucked chicken at Tesco’s. I was almost touching it . . .

  I tried to empty my mind as my face approached the white, hairy, pimply, surface. I licked it, tentatively at first. My tongue retracted involuntarily. My body buckled and spew shot out.

  I regained my composure, telling myself it was just water, water and orange juice, water. Nothing, nothing at all.

  My insides were having none of it. Coiled like a cobra, my cheeks filled up and I vomited a second time, spraying my knees and forming a puddle on the carpet before me. It came out like a stop-valve had been released. I felt light-headed as colourful spittle hung from the chair-backs.

  I forced my tongue out a second ti
me, extending it fully. It was unbearable. The very idea was repulsive. Appalling. Obscene. But what could I do? I was at the mercy of a total maniac. How did I know what he might do if I refused? People got abducted, tortured, kept prisoner, for weeks sometimes. Awful things happened to them. Unspeakable things. How did I know what he would do if I didn’t do this?

  This was the least of evils, the very least of all possible evils. I knew that. I definitely knew that. And I had to embrace it.

  And so, I went in. Feverishly now, to get it over with. Like a dog at its bowl. I ignored the grunts and whimpers coming from the figure bent over the table, quivering as he was, shuddering with impotent rage. I simply stuck to the task in hand, went over every inch of that arse with my tongue extended, rasping against the whiskery flesh like sandpaper. Ignoring the vile stabs that spiked at my taste buds. Ignoring the fact that everything in my biology was telling my stomach to retch yet again – but I couldn’t let that stop me. I had to go on. And soon it would be over. The stink of fear expelling from his bowels would be over. The stale nitrogenous urea on my tongue would be over. The heady intoxication of terror as I rubbed the tongue against the full, mythic power of the glutei maximi to lick the last droplets of liquid would be over . . .

  And finally – it was.

  ‘Arse-Licker!’

  I fell back on my knees, gasping, my chest lurching. I think I may also have been sobbing like a baby when he pulled me up by the hair again.

  ‘You think you’re done, Arse-Licker? We’re not done. We’re not even started yet. That was just an aperitif, an amuse bouche. Now we have the main course.’

  Which was when he opened the tin of baked beans.

  I whimpered.

  ‘Go on. Go for it, Arse-Licker. You know you want to. You know you love it. Licking the old arse . . .’

  The sweet sugar of the tomato sauce hit the air and I refused to even think about it this time. I went right in, with a certain sort of defiance. I didn’t even look at him. I got my nose right in, starting at the top of the left leg where the beans were running down as if chasing each other, and flicked my tongue at them individually, chameleon-like, working it in long, lingering diagonals, then figures of eight, finally diverting in the latter strokes into short dinky lapping like a cat. All the while thinking of the beauty, because if you thought of the ugliness you were lost. Ugliness would destroy you. Only the beauty would help. Only the beauty would keep you strong.

  Gradually the artificial sweetness from the can was displaced by the all too human odour of putridity, sweat and stale urine of my colleague’s nether regions. Gradually my roaming pink protrusion delved down to the wrinkles behind his testicles, wiggling at the tufts and warts and dangleberries ensconced there, his gelatinous backside pushing against the orbit of my eyes.

  When it was done I keeled back then buckled, hunching forward, exhausted, mentally and physically drained. And wept.

  ‘No, please. No more. Please.’

  ‘What do you mean, Arse-Licker?’ He was grinning. ‘You don’t want to miss out on dessert.’

  I swayed on my knees and heard the hiss of the aerosol, and tilted my body forward to lick the squirty cream off Innox where the baked beans had been. Truth is, I never liked spray cream. But it wasn’t a question of liking, it was a question of surviving.

  And I realised then, as my retching subsided, that nothing was too far for me any more. I could do anything. Be anyone. Do anything. And that, as I closed my eyes and licked my lips, frightened me.

  I had no idea what time it was now. It might have been midnight. It might have been the early hours of the morning.

  ‘Can I go home now, please?’

  ‘You are home, Arse-Licker. Don’t you know it yet?’

  I think I did. I really think I did.

  Then I heard the ping of the microwave, and the smell hit me as its door opened.

  Over the next half-hour he spoon-fed Innox a hefty supply of instant curry mixed with laxative, leaving the Vesta and Ex-Lax packaging in my eye-line as an act of sadism. I didn’t give him the satisfaction of being horrified. In fact, perhaps surprisingly, a pleasing numbness descended on me as I contemplated the inevitable.

  Trying to keep it in, Innox contorted, belly-down, in agony, his suffering made all the more poignant by the fact that the gag stopped any full expression of his feeling being vented as his digestive system protested against the onslaught. What was vented in the fullness of time was his unrestrained bowels, in a stuttering explosion of loose, khaki-coloured shit.

  The ‘hung for a sheep/lamb’ analogy sprang to mind. When you had licked baked beans and squirty cream from a grown man’s arse, it was but a small step to lick shit from it too. It was an extreme to which I’d never dreamt I’d go, an action to which I never in a million year imagined I’d descend. But such is life. Full of little surprises. And sometimes we have no real idea of our true potential, but we find it.

  I waddled forward and stuck out my tongue once more.

  A line was crossed. I crossed it.

  I subsumed myself in the task. The awfulness overwhelmed me. I was sickened, yes, but I went beyond the sickening. Beyond the foul and the fetid and forbidden. Beyond what society and civilisation labels with words like obscene and repellent – reaching, in that heightened moment at the bum-hole of my managing director, a kind of epiphany.

  As I visited and revisited it, like a shrine, like an icon, I began to see the arse – that arse and any arse – as something not to be loathed and rejected, just as Christ himself was loathed and rejected by those who misunderstood him, but as the holiest thing in creation. It was complete in its arse-holiness. It was the lowest thing in creation, the very mechanism of poison and detritus, not to mention sinfulness and sodomy – but could it not be exalted? Like the sinner who is embraced in Heaven?

  After all, as I often now say, does not the word ‘anus’ contain ‘us’?

  It began there in that conference room with a gun at my head. That’s when I saw the light. The light of that dark, dark passage that is part of every one of us.

  There were no rules. There was just the doing, the doing of the unknowable. And what came next didn’t even matter. All that mattered was the moment. Savouring the moment. Because you knew, you really did know, it meant freedom.

  I licked it off. Taking my time now. What time was it? There was no time.

  Kotwika placed an After Eight between the bum-cheeks. I teased it from side to side with the tip of my tongue and ­snaffled it up, rewarding Innox with two large, parenthesis-shaped licks either side of his rectum.

  I was saying it along with Kotwika now:

  ‘Arse-Licker! Arse-Licker! Arse-Licker!’

  ‘Almost done.’

  He put down the Glock and picked up a drill, which looked like a gun, but bigger and chunkier. It was in the rucksack he brought to work every day. He fitted it with the largest in a set of drill bits and tested it in the air. It whirred noisily as it spun. Standing with his legs apart with his back to me he inserted it into Innox’s exposed rectum and switched it on. The sound muffled Innox’s death rattle as his back passage split and blood splattered out as if from a plumbing leak on all sides of the figure blocking my view.

  ‘Arse licker.’ Kotwika said it like an invitation, turning to me, scarlet from the waist down.

  ‘Arse licker,’ I replied. It was like a language now. We didn’t need any more words. We were beyond that. We understood each other. Perfectly.

  This time I didn’t just lick, I immersed myself.

  The arse closed on me, like a communion. The blood from a hundred abrasions filled my mouth. The cup of my tongue did runneth over. The ravaged anus was a cavity. I buried myself in it gladly, bloody-buttocked-blind and at one with the universe.

  Which was how they found me, twelve hours later.

  My face pressed to the rea
r end of my dead boss.

  The police, that is. They had to prise me out. Literally. I didn’t want to leave. When the gun had gone off, I metaphorically buried myself in the dark. In the shit. In the blood. It was a safe place to hide.

  When I came out I hardly noticed the body on the floor with not much of its head left, Kotwika’s suicidal brains splashed over the wall. Not in a neat pattern but as if someone had thrown a pizza at it and some of the bits of peperoni still clung there. I was almost sad when the paramedics wiped the shit from my cheeks and nose with their antibacterial wipes, but I could hardly protest.

  At the hospital I was given a clean bill of health. The police officer in charge asked me what had happened in some detail. I think he expected me to break down in tears but I was quite good at describing the events fairly dispassionately. He and his sidekick, who wrote down everything, became increasingly pale as I gave them chapter and verse on what I’d been through. They said it must have been hell. I wasn’t about to tell them it was quite the reverse.

  In time a young counsellor asked if I thought about my ordeal much. I said I didn’t, but I lied. I thought about it all the time. He said I must be relieved that the judge imposed reporting restrictions regarding details of the crime. In fact, as he talked to me, I could think only of the arse secreted in his black slacks and what his buttocks might feel like under my tongue.

  I’ve moved on to a bigger and better company now. I have a bigger salary, a more commensurate pension plan, a hefty bonus structure and a far larger house, but the truth is, I’ve moved on from such petty concerns.

  My mission in life now is much more basic, and much more difficult.

  To find the ultimate experience of the kind that excites me.

  Luckily, my job takes me many places. Amsterdam. Copenhagen. New York. Hong Kong. Shanghai. Sydney. I go to high-powered meetings and trade conferences. Stay in four-star hotels.

  Fortunately, all over the world there are places that you go to do what I do, well known to the cognoscenti. I sniff them out, if that isn’t too vulgar a metaphor. Sometimes I don’t have to. Sometimes your eyes just meet across a crowded bar in Bangkok or Bolton, and you know without exchanging a word. You just read the signals. It’s pretty obvious, really.