The Year's Best Horror Stories 13

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  Second warnings were for bad movies, too. Jack cut loose his bonus cartridge.

  The boom of the shot knocked more dust out of the curtains. It resonated inside the girderwork and made the steel cables securing the screen vibrate. Jack flinched. What even an unmodified .45 bullet could do to a human skull at medium close range was something seldom depicted in those movies, either. Basically, it made a little hole going in and a huge hole coming out. Frequently it could decapitate the aggressor. That was how Teller had bought it.

  A perfect black dot appeared on the dude’s forehead just over the right eye. The hair on the back of his head flew apart violently, followed by a cloud of brown, metallic chaff, like pulverized cardboard. It glittered in the air and settled. Then roaches began to boil out of the forehead hole. The grin stayed. The dude took another step forward.

  Jack fired convulsively after that.

  The eye exploded like zircon struck with a steel hammer. Dead teeth were blown east like stubs of shattered chalk. The head disintegrated into flaking quarters. Roaches flooded out from the neck stump.

  Jack swung, dropped sights, and put a slug through the new employee’s outstretched hand. No grimace of impact, but it spun him, and he lost balance and tumbled headfirst through the curtains into the orchestra pit. His buddy, sans head, was still tracking mindlessly toward Jack. Jack squeezed off, and the point-blank blast tore away everything below the dude’s left kneecap and sent it flying through the movie screen. He crumpled. Freed bugs scattered for cover.

  Hurdling along, pole-vaulting, actually, click-thump, he made it to the exit door without falling on his face. Roaches were crawling up his legs now. The case-hardened padlock hasp and tempered chain were no match for the bullet that kicked them apart, and Jack shoved the door, doubling it back against the outside wall with a crash. Outside, the paving was slick with rainwater; puddles gleamed back at him in the trapezoid of dim light surrounding his elongated shadow. Good. They hated water. He limped out into the alley.

  He never saw the new employee, flailing pathetically in a waist-high quicksand of chewing insects, struggling to stand. Nor did he see the new employee’s seams burst, to feed the flood tide now cascading over the fallen walking stick, testing, tasting, analyzing. Angrily.

  The .45 burned in his fist. The loss of the cane pushed him into overexertion. At least you’ve fought your last battle, soldier . . .

  Some guardian angel had abandoned a split haft of broomstick in a garbage dumpster, and that helped get him home. He stopped often to slap at himself, and after about ten minutes he heard sirens.

  The bottle of George Dickel’s finest on the countertop was thoughtfully notched so a potential drinker might view how much stock remained. Of the eight ounces inside when Jack burst into the apartment, four vanished before he even sat down.

  His leg relaxed at last, and he might have screamed. His breath whooshed out and he bolted down another shot straight and neat, letting his gut warm. Sweat dumbed up his clothing with dampness. He rested the .45 on the table, next to the open bottle, and in a few silent minutes he felt better, more relaxed. The gun had cooled.

  Bam, he thought. Bam, bam, bam, and the dude popped open and there they were, a hive intelligence, like the Cong, thriving under our noses, living off our garbage, our human garbage, and good old Jack Daniels Stoner had found out.

  He took another pull from the bottle. A slower-killing slug, he thought, looking again at the gun.

  A hair was stuck to it.

  Absently he moved to pluck it from the metal. It moved.

  His insides jumped. It was protruding from the barrel, brown and thin and wavering, and it was not a hair.

  He thought he saw a madly scurrying roach speed out of the mouth of the gun. Quickly, he slapped at the bare table surface and strained to check the underside. Nothing. It was his imagination dropping into overdrive, fueled by the octane of whiskey. Nothing. The gun was clean.

  But those little suckers sure run fast.

  He did last rites for the bottle and shuddered. Then, grimly, he started on the leftover beer. Soon he fell asleep on the sofa of his neat, ordered, vermin-free apartment.

  And when he woke he knew they had found him. He had ferried their scouts home with him, and now they had him.

  His good leg ached horridly. He remembered the aluminum crutch, ugly and unused, still in the foyer closet. Before being fitted with his plastic leg, he had learned to use the crutch as a surrogate. He tensed before jerking open the closet door, and something tiny and brown dashed out of sight behind the jamb. He was certain he had seen this one. He grabbed the crutch, and again his peripheral vision noted quick, dark movement, but in the time it took to turn his head and focus, it was gone—hidden, out of the light.

  The countertop! Leaning on the crutch, he humped feverishly across the room. More nothing.

  “Damn it!” Frustration and panic lay in wait.

  The pistol was still on the table, but not as he thought he had left it. Now its barrel was pointed at the chair where he had sat drinking. He knew there were at least three or four slugs still in the clip, minimum, and never in his life had he gotten bombed enough to leave any weapon idly aimed at himself, loaded or no.

  From the cabinets, the spaces beneath the counter tiles, the interior of the stove, they monitored him. It was a reasonable assumption. He stopped the childish bullshit of trying to catch them, and started to proceed methodically.

  He smacked a spare clip into the gun and reloaded the exhausted one before sliding everything back into the pea coat. He pocketed all the change he could scrounge. To leave became imperative—not to return to the Omicron, oh no, not unless one wanted to spend a few months posthumously helming the snack bar, but to get clear of the apartment before they had an opportunity to catch him napping. The quiet walls unnerved him now, pressed against him with the weight of a million tiny, impatient bodies. Most likely they were right above his head and he could not see them, like Teller.

  On his way to the door he thought he’d spotted one on the tabletop, maybe the one from the gun. He ignored it. He would never be fast enough to get the little mothers. But he could be fast enough, sharp enough, still to get out, to survive.

  The night was still black and set. Droplet patterns from the a.m. mist accreted on the metal of his crutch. He walked. He proceeded methodically, with nowhere to go but away.

  He was in the crosswalk at La Brea and Santa Monica when the headlights nailed him. An oilslick-black Buick Regal, filled with the resplendence of a coked-out pimp pilot and a pair of chromed hookers, stopped with its front tires over the white line. Jack saw that the riders were pretty jolly for three o’clock in the morning. He stared at them through the windshield, realizing they had no idea of what was happening.

  An angry black face bared teeth through the open driver’s side window. “Keep yo’ goddamn hands off the car, mothafuckin’ bum!” He floored the pedal. Jack heard the engine roar and jumped as the Buick ran the red and swerved back into the lane, ass-skidding like a slot car. The jibes, in high, ridiculing feminine voices, echoed behind.

  He stood in the crosswalk, arms open. “No!” They thought he was a derelict, more of the human garbage washed up on the streets of downtown Hollywood. Like the winos in the Omicron, like Fatigue Coat. “You’re wrong!” he shouted, and his voice bounced off the Thrifty’s and the Burger King and the car wash, and the bag lady sleeping on the bus stop bench paid no attention. They all thought he was just another loon, yelling in an intersection at three in the morning, and he felt the crushing weight of the need to tell everyone the truth.

  But the light changed, and he kept on moving because that was what he was trained to do. He was still the point man, the patrol’s maverick; his job was to make practical decisions fast and act on them instinctively. As soon as he made the curb he thought he spotted a stray roach struggling up his pant leg in the wet neon glow of the DON’T WALK sign, and his fist instantly responded, swooping down to smash i
t. His plastic leg resounded with its characteristic, drumlike thunk as his hand flattened the bug into nonexistence. He fancied he felt a reflex tremor from the leg nerves that no longer existed, either.

  His body skipped a breath and he froze. The sound his fist had made against his plastic leg was subtly deeper than usual—the difference in pitch between an empty glass and a filled one.

  Jack’s mouth dried up with amazing speed. His plastic leg was hollow, like the leg of a Ken doll. Lots of empty space down there where he could not see. Or feel.

  He tore open his pea coat and jerked loose the straps that held the prosthetic limb buckled fast to his ruined flesh. From somewhere down there another roach free-fell to land on its back, legs wiggling. Jack pivoted on the crutch and stomped in into the sidewalk cracks.

  Keeling madly forward, he grabbed the leg by its jointed plastic ankle and heaved it in a clumsy cartwheel toward a litter basket next to the stoplight pole. He did not see it crash-land; he was watching another roach scurry into the sewer grating, wondering if it had come from him.

  He left the leg there, jutting crookedly out of the litter basket, looking like a vaudevillian joke. By dawn some bag lady would scavenge it. Under the chancy light of the mercury-vapor lamps he had no way of telling whether the bugs he now saw scuttering about on his abandoned leg were from within the leg itself, or from the garbage already stinking in the overfilled basket. They swarmed and capered as though cheated.

  Using his crutch, rather proficiently he thought, he moved purposefully on into the slick, black night. His pantleg fluttered crazily because it was empty, and for that very reason he paid it no mind.

  Hands with Long Fingers by Leslie Halliwell

  Leslie Halliwell was born in Bolton in 1929, and he grew up against an industrial background in which splendid new cinemas contrasted with the poverty, unemployment and grime of real life. Since childhood Halliwell has been a film enthusiast. He ran specialized cinemas in Cambridge, became a journalist on Picturegoer, and was a publicity executive for the Rank Organization. In 1959 he joined Granada Television as a film researcher and later became program buyer on the long-running Cinema series. Since 1968 he has been buying most of the feature films and series screened by the ITV network, and he makes a number of buying trips to Hollywood each year in search of material.

  Well known in England for his books on television and film—these include Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s Companion, Halliwell’s Film Guide, Halliwell’s Television Companion, Halliwell’s Teleguide, Halliwell’s Movie Quiz, Halliwell’s Hundred, and The Filmgoer’s Book of Quotes—Halliwell would seem an unlikely author for a collection of horror stories. Or maybe not. After all, most writers of horror fiction also have a keen interest in films, so why not the reciprocal? Halliwell’s first collection of supernatural stories, The Ghost of Sherlock Holmes (fittingly, the author lives in Surrey), displays a deep affection for the traditional elements of the English ghost story, as well as a versatile and inventive talent of Halliwell’s own. Leslie Halliwell is currently at work on a second such collection.

  I don’t usually dream. What’s more, until I met Paul Binet I had never in my life had an experience which might be considered supernatural. I took life as I found it; I enjoyed my work and my pleasure; I expected a scientific explanation for everything. Anything of value which I have accomplished has been in the way of shedding further light on obscure historical or literary events. I don’t welcome mystery; I explain it away. In particular, I have exposed several frauds of a supposedly occult nature. Yet here I find myself setting down a series of events which defies rational analysis. Perhaps the very recapitulation of what happened, in chronological sequence, will help towards further clarification. But I suspect not.

  When Emmanuel Hilary died in October, I was surprised to find myself invited by his son John to attend the funeral. Very surprised indeed. I knew the son only slightly. We were at Sidney Sussex together, though I think he was in fact a year my junior. At any rate we went to some of the same clubs. The father I knew not at all except from once attending his course of lectures on Italian architecture. John introduced us, and we had a drink together in the public house at the bottom of Mill Lane. In his last years old Emmanuel acquired the reputation of being a bit gaga. He squandered quite a lot of his considerable fortune on the restoration of a crumbling eighteenth-century villa near Florence. He died there. At the time I happened to be living in a rented cottage not far away, in a village on the slopes of Monte Morillo. I was researching a book on Cagliostro: not really my line, but one must find a way of paying the butcher’s bills. When the invitation came, I hesitated for an hour, then sent a note of acceptance. In the circumstances, a refusal might have seemed discourteous. Besides, I felt instinctively that there was something behind the invitation. John must want to see me. Thirty years ago we had parted in Cambridge without so much as a handshake. Our only direct contact during the last decade was a club dinner after my series of radio talks on the occult; but I remembered him well as a man who did not suffer fools gladly, yet was himself more devious than intelligent. In urging me to visit his father’s mansion he undoubtedly had some motive more significant than wanting me to help eat up the baked meats after sitting through a doleful church service in a faith that wasn’t mine.

  The Villa Fabricotti was hidden from the road. However much trouble Emmanuel had taken, its situation was such that it could never suggest anything but damp and decay unless the thick wood which surrounded it were cut down. It was a rambling three-story affair with some rococo additions; the basic design was rather vaguely Baroque. Some greenish creeper covered much of the outer wall and almost all of the gatehouse. The inner grounds were an unkempt wilderness of neglected fern and shrub. Hardly a cheerful place to die in, I reflected as my elderly Fiat plowed its way along the muddy drive after a morning storm. Although we were well into autumn the weather had suddenly turned oppressive, and I noted with distaste almost approaching alarm the presence of clouds of great heavy insects, several of which crashed fatally into my windscreen, leaving nasty gray smears. It was nearly noon; I was the last to arrive. I noted with some amusement that the expectant beneficiaries were all present although none of them lived nearer than Westminster. They looked like people who would take no chances.

  John welcomed me with rather exaggerated bonhomie. It quickly turned out that one of his reasons for asking me was that he hoped I would join him and four others as pallbearers on the short procession to the local church and graveside. I nodded agreement, but thought he might have warned me: some people think they need only to have an idea to see it done. He introduced his wife Madeleine, a middle-aged charmer who looked well capable of getting her own way. Other so-called mourners included his elder sister Wanda and her husband Henry Marling, a beaky, avaricious looking pair. Then there was Reginald Bell, Emmanuel’s other son-in-law via a daughter long deceased; and Eleanor Cavendish-Warren, some sort of cousin, who was clearly approaching her eighties.

  We accomplished the business of the day as speedily as we could. A young male mute walked in front of the coffin, and all the women behind. Only the servants seemed genuinely moved; the family’s tears were of the crocodile variety. Afterwards there was a buffet back at the villa, giving me a further chance to observe my fellow guests as they masticated their rather disgusting hot osso bucco and cold garlic sausage, followed by what seemed to be a bread pudding of extremely leaden texture. For me the coffee and strega were the only enjoyable part of the meal, and after that I was thinking of taking my leave when John, perhaps sensing this, came over to sit by me and offer another drink. Whatever else was in his mind couldn’t seem to find expression, so to cover an awkward pause I asked:

  “Who is the little man in black with the long hands and pale eyes?”

  I gestured briefly at a sober figure dwarfed by the marble mantelpiece. He toyed solitarily with his coffee spoon. His well-cut coat was thigh-length and looked Edwardian; it was devoid of buttons or lapels. Y
ou couldn’t help noticing his hands before anything else: perfectly formed, with elegant fingers, they seemed to have been borrowed from a man twice his size.

  “That’s Paul Binet. He sat at the back of the church.”

  “Interesting-looking fellow. Is he French?”

  “Half that and half Spanish, I think. He kind of goes with the house. Father found him a few years ago in New York, working in one of the museums, and took him on as a sort of librarian-companion. It seems he specializes in occult manuscripts, of which we now have quite a collection at the expense of the family fortunes. Mostly quite unreadable and unsaleable, I think. As a matter of fact, that was my main reason for asking you over.”

  So it was out at last. I tried to look politely inquisitive.

  “I have to go back to London in a couple of days, and I’m afraid business must go on even in the presence of death.” I mentally confirmed my previous impression of John as a sanctimonious hypocrite. “After all, there are thousands of quite valuable books here, and I’m a complete Philistine. The family is rather afraid that Binet may try to get his hands on the choicest items, and I wondered whether . . . well, whether you’d be free to put some sort of valuation on them, give us a quick indication, anyway.” John was trying to smile. “You know, tell us which ones to lock away.”

  I raised an eyebrow non-committally. “I could do that, I suppose.”

  “I didn’t want to offend you by offering a fee, though do say if you’d like one. I thought you might prefer to take your pick of the books, say five hundred quid’s worth, or seven-fifty if you like. You might even enjoy yourself.”