He found the cemetery without any trouble. From this knoll, you could see for miles and miles over the rolling countryside. It reminded him of a Grandma Moses painting, the fields and outbuildings arranged like patchwork.
He got out of the car and paused a moment, surveying the cemetery.
It was unexpectedly tiny, a postage stamp of graveyards. The only smaller one he recalled ever seeing was one near Concord, Mass., where a handful of Revolutionary War heroes were buried together under white headstones whose inscriptions had worn off over the years. He counted, unconsciously using his finger as a measure. There couldn’t be more than a dozen families buried here. One of them was hers, the Andersens. He remembered her telling the story of how the family had come over from Sweden during the great wave of Scandinavian immigration a century ago. They’d been carpenters and masons, these Andersens, and they’d done all right for themselves in the New Land.
The wind had picked up since the truck stop and it was insistent now, brisk but not harsh. In a few short weeks it would deliver the sleet and the snow, but today, on the cusp of fall, it brought only a final reminder of summer. In great sheets, it came whipping across the flat landscape, fragrant with a sweet agricultural odor he did not recognize. He stood, letting the wind caress him. He looked out over the stones, the torn veterans’ flags, potted geraniums wilted by the autumn’s first frost. The cemetery was surrounded by fields. They were brown, their life gone silently underground to await a more encouraging season.
The heartland. He’d probably eaten food grown around here, maybe from one of these very fields.
****
Carrying the green bag he’d picked up in the Palmer House lobby, he opened the rusted iron gate and walked uncertainly into the cemetery. That shaky feeling had returned. His lips were dry. He felt suddenly alone, inexplicably embarrassed, like the man in the dream who finds himself in public without any clothes. Let’s get it over with and get out of here, he thought. He went directly to the Andersen plot, past the Birds, the Bergmans, the Mondales, the Thompsons. The featured Andersen stone was a towering obelisk, at least twice his height, cut from what appeared to be gray marble, polished and mirror-smooth. The shadow from a leafless tree fell across it in an abstract pattern. Somebody had paid a small fortune for this display, he could tell that. He remembered her father, Ambrose Andersen, a tall, stern man he’d met once. Andersen had made a small fortune in construction, and like many newly wealthy people, he enjoyed spending. He’d probably footed the bill.
Laid out in front of the obelisk were perhaps 25 flat stones, each roughly the size of a hardcover dictionary. All that had been inscribed on any of them were names and the two most important years in anyone’s existence. “Mother, 1845-1912.” “Father, 1840-1905.” “Henry, 1884-1944,” and so forth. On the extreme left-hand perimeter of the Andersen territory, almost into the Birds’, was the stone he was looking for.
“Baby Bryce,” it read, “1976-1976.”
He opened the green bag and laid what was in it, a single white rose, atop the stone. His fingers were clumsy, his breath more labored than it should have been. He didn’t have any of the thoughts he had expected would be haunting him right now; maybe they would come on the return trip to Chicago, or the plane home tomorrow to Boston. Nothing about what might have been, how he might have been playing Little League baseball, what he might have looked like, what his favorite subject in school might have been. None of that. Only a nagging sensation of having done wrong, and never being able to make contrition, even if he wanted to.
He didn’t hear the pickup. Didn’t see her approach from the field.
When he looked up, she was there, barely 20 feet away.
He looked at her, startled initially. Time had gotten to her. It had to him, too, he couldn’t kid himself. She looked unkempt, haggard, as if she never got enough sleep any more. Her clothes looked freshly laundered but worn, as if she’d had them too long. For an instant, their eyes locked. It was impossible to say what was exchanged between them in that moment. Recognition, but more. Loneliness. A glimmer of what might have been, perhaps. A rush of memories, none well defined. Then it was gone. Her eyes went as cold as the gathering evening. There was nothing to say.
She came closer. He didn’t move. He hadn’t expected it to play out like this.
They embraced. For his part, it was instinctive. Reflexive. There was no more thought to it than drawing a breath. She was warm, her breath intoxicating. Through her coat, he could feel the swell of her breasts. Suddenly, the memories had taken on sharp definition. Now he remembered them making love the first time, the way he’d eased inside her, the softly building passion that had finally exploded one Saturday evening when his roommate was away.
He didn’t see her knife.
She plunged it into the back of his neck.
The first blood fell in perfect splatters on Baby Bryce’s stone, like drops of wax from a flaming red candle. It was only a surface wound, calculated and deliberate. Alone, it might have stopped bleeding. He wasn’t even sure at first that he’d been stabbed. He thought maybe she’d dug her fingernails into him. The tenderness he’d started to feel escaped him like steam. He was tempted to slap her. He’d never wanted to hit a woman before. He did now. Self-defense. But he didn’t. He turned, headed for the car. A trickle of warmth ran down the inside of his shirt. The crazy fucker.
She roared toward him, her cutting arm a scythe of blurred motion. This time he saw the blade. It was a pocket knife, the kind young punks smuggle into school. The blade couldn’t have been four inches long. In that instant of confused terror, he remembered something his mother had told him as a kid. It wasn’t about knives. It was about drowning. You can drown anywhere there’s water, she’d said. Even in your own bathtub, even in an inch of water.
This time, she connected only once, a long, violent gash that sliced through his coat sleeve into his forearm. The fabric was quickly moist from the inside out. The pain was immense. She meant to kill him. It was like being kicked in the stomach, realizing that, but he knew it was true. He was suddenly breathless, fevered. With his good arm, he grabbed his wounded one, holding it fiercely, as if that would stop the bleeding. She came at him again. For a second, he saw her eyes. There was nothing there but emptiness. He ducked to one side, and she charged past him, almost falling.
He hesitated. For a second, he thought of fighting back. He was bigger than she, stronger. And she was out of her mind, a crazed psychotic with a knife. He looked wildly around, but there was nothing he could use as a weapon, no branch or loose rock. The best bet was to get the hell away. The bleeding wasn’t bad, but he’d have to see a doctor. Then he would go to the police and have the crazy fucker arrested. That’s what he was going to do, goddamn it. Have her put behind bars for good.
He took a step, a step that brought his foot into contact with Baby Bryce’s stone.
He felt something lock around his ankle. Tiny, vice-like.
He looked down. There was nothing there, of course, only grass and that flat polished marble stone, blending into the shadows of approaching evening. He could taste bile as his panic rose.
He tried to move.
He was locked in place.
“What the–”
She was back, blade whistling. Her aim was more precise than before. He saw the knife, heard it, tried to roll out of its trajectory, but his foot was stuck. He did the best he could, twisting and squirming to one side. It was not enough.
She made contact, again and again. His shoulder. His side. His thigh. His right hand. He felt each cut. None was deeper than tendon level. It was more like being pricked with a needle or stung by hornets than being stabbed. After each cut, the warm moisture. Death by a thousand cuts.
His ankle.
He grabbed at it, like a mink caught in a leg hold trap. There was nothing there, of course. With his other hand, he tried frantically to fend her off. She was nimble. She seemed able to anticipate him, dodging when he lashed o
ut, closing back in when he tried unsuccessfully to get to his feet.
Maybe he could crawl. In his panic, that new thought was delightful. It was like being born again. He was on his belly and maybe he could crawl. Maybe he’d broken his ankle, that was all, and he could slither away from her.
But he couldn’t crawl, not more than a few inches. His foot was frozen.
She was in no hurry. There was still plenty of daylight remaining, 15 minutes or more until blackness settled over them. She was nicking him. Little flicks of cuts, counting toward a thousand. It was uncanny how she kept missing all the major arteries and organs, the ones that would have ended it quickly. She seemed to know anatomy, seemed to have studied it until she was sure what to hit, what to avoid. He was bleeding everywhere but gushing nowhere. His central nervous system only gradually was shifting into shock.
The pain was building. Soon it was too big for screaming. He began to moan. A mortally wounded animal sound, back through the millennia to when ancestors walked on all fours. Hunter and prey. Victor and vanquished.
His vision blurred.
As consciousness drained away to nothingness, he thought he saw her.
Smiling, her face inches from his.
He thought he heard a new sound.
The sound of a newborn crying.
The sound of birth.
****
Remembrance by G. Wayne Miller
Back then – back before the modern Internet – back when Stephen King was just becoming big – this was how you broke into short horror fiction. You wrote your stories and sent them off with a hopeful cover letter to magazines you’d found in a directory or bought at a bookstore or newsstand. You enclosed a SASE: a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Then you waited.
And waited.
Sometimes it was weeks, even months, before an editor got back to you, if they ever did – and many did not. The waiting was frustrating and discouraging in the worst way, the form rejection letter like a slap in the face. Occasionally – very occasionally – an editor would send a handwritten note.
Or a letter of acceptance.
I received many of those in the mid and late 1980s from Dave Silva, a great publisher and editor. A writer himself, Dave was a wonderful friend of writers: an encouraging and supportive man who just happened to produce, four times a year, from his home in Oak Run, California (on a road called Misty Springs Lane, no less!), the best magazine of that golden era. Beautifully illustrated and designed, The Horror Show had no equal. And it was the work of but one man, who loved and nurtured it like a child.
The stories of Dean Koontz, Ramsey Campbell, Robert R. McCammon, Dennis Etchison, Beth Massie, Bentley Little, Poppy Z. Brite, Joe Lansdale, Paul F. Olson, editor of this volume, and many more, filled the pages of The Horror Show. I felt privileged and lucky to be part of that group – and nothing motivated me to keep going like seeing one of my stories in Dave’s pages. When I made it on the cover as one of five Rising Stars in the Fall 1987 issue, I was walking on air. Good stuff, my friends. Damn good stuff.
Dave rarely attended the NECON, World Fantasy and other conventions of the time, where we, what might be called his Horror Show stable, gathered to talk shop and drink beer (lots of beer). But he was there in conversation and in spirit. And when I finally met him, just once, he was exactly what I had imagined: a modest man with an outsized talent and a passion for writing and writers. A gentle man who always promptly sent a kind and encouraging handwritten note, even when he passed on a story.
Better weird than plastic, is how Dave signed his introduction to every issue of The Horror Show.
True enough, Dave. Thanks for everything. Rest in peace.
G. Wayne Miller
HIDE AND GO PEEK
Elizabeth Massie
Rosie Via was a vain old woman. There was no more vain an old gal than Rosie Via. She lived in the tiny, unincorporated town of Tonnie, West Virginia, high in the mountains beside the Tonnie Coal Mine and surrounded by pine trees, rocky outcroppings, and little trailers anchored to sloping yards with cinderblocks and heavy chains.
She was rich, our Rosie. Filthy rich. Her grandfather, Bondell Elmer Via, had been owner of the Tonnie Mine. It had been his land on which the coal was found and unearthed, his money that attracted the railroad to build switchbacks up to and down from the mine, his fortune that built the ungainly, three-story brick house overlooking the poor folk who dotted the piney landscape with their tin boxes. And when he shuffled off this mortal coil (or as most folks in Tonnie would say, “He’s done finished with the Sears-Roebuck catalog”), it all became hers.
Rosie’s mother, Dorothy, who grew up in the large house with her widowed father, secretly married a Tonnie boy known as Prickles. Bondell immediately banished the boy from town with promises of a thousand dollars if he never came back. Which Bondell never paid, though Prickles, likely enamored with the outside world, decided not to come back, anyway. Dorothy was already pregnant and gave birth to dark-haired little Rosie.
The child was the apple of her grandfather’s eye.
A plump, spoiled, and rotten apple, but their apple nonetheless.
She grew up with everything a little girl could want. While the daughters of the miners went shoeless to school and played with dolls made of braided rags, and sons of the miners slopped hogs and rolled their daddies’ cigarettes, Rosie had new toys and factory-made dresses brought in on the coal trains. Dorothy, still furious that young Prickles left her, disappeared when Rosie was four. Never sent a card or telegram. Never seen again.
Not that Rosie cared much. Her granddaddy Bondell made life heaven on a hilltop. “You are purty as a pansy,” he’d coo to her over breakfast on the summer porch. The cook made the best breakfasts, lunches, and suppers, cooking up pork and chicken, cornbreads, fried catfish, and puddings. Rosie loved them all, and soon there was quite a bit of Rosie. She even took to eating sticks of butter while wandering around the house, leaving greasy fingerprints on the walls and doorknobs.
“No one purtier’n you, honey,” said the cook under Bondell’s instruction, doing her best to disguise her irritation. “You the sweetest lil’ girl in Tonnie,” said the maid after Bondell threatened to fire her should she not dote on the increasingly intolerable child.
The maid and the cook had to play with Rosie, as she had no friends. The other children of Tonnie thought she was creepy and mean, and, of course, she was creepy and mean. She always had to win at hopscotch (though she could barely hop) and would scream if her rock landed outside the correct square, then demand a do-over. She would fall down when playing tag and blame the maid or cook for tripping her. Hide and go seek was the worst; she called it “hide and go peek,” and she was always the hunter, never the hunted. Often, Rosie would send the two women off to hide, then go play with her dolls for hours. The maid and cook would crouch in their hiding places and wait and wait and wait.
For her fifteenth birthday, Rosie asked her grandfather for one hundred mirrors (“The same numbers as stars in the sky,” Rosie said; she was not only mean and creepy, but she was also not very bright) and she hung them all around the big house so she could always see herself just by turning her head. She would wink at herself and sometimes kiss her reflection, leaving buttery lips marks. She talked to herself, and, yep, herself began to talk back. Good friends, they became.
Best friends.
Cross-my-heart and hope-to-die best friends.
Bondell died when Rosie was thirty-four. After calling the undertaker to haul the dried up ninety-year-old body away she quickly and dutifully covered all the mirrors with black cloths, which she left on for a week. She knew the danger in leaving a mirror uncovered following a death in the household. Anyone who caught his or her reflection in a mirror in that house before the week was up, would surely die.
Rosie didn’t want to die. She liked living, liked being pretty and rich. But she found the week to be almost intolerably long. She missed her friends in the mirrors. She could se
e herself in the window glass, but it was warped and made her creepy (sort of like she looked to everybody else.) The reflection in the shiny side of the toaster was no better.
Now a wealthy heiress, Rosie did as she pleased, when she pleased, where she pleased. She made a point every Friday of putting on her best dress and shoes and tappy-tap-tapping down to the one store in town. There she would swoop about, belittling her neighbors for their shabbiness, thumping the various shelved goods with a pink-polished thumbnail as if she could barely make herself touch them. Then she’d ask for something she knew the shop owner didn’t carry just so she could complain.
The cooks and maids Rosie hired quit in a matter of days. The parties she threw for coal mine executives at far-flung companies went unattended. The expensive lap dogs she bought through mail order sneaked away to find homes with the trailered folks.
Rosie’s only friends were herself, her one hundred reflections, hanging in the foyer, along the stairway, in the parlor, the bedrooms, the bathrooms, the dining room, the sitting room, the attic and cellar. So it was for another forty years. During that time, Rosie Via came to chat with herself often, and her reflections would chat back.
“Best company around,” she would say with a toss of her graying hair and a pursing of her outlandishly colored lips.
One or more would whisper back, “Oh, yes!”
“Do you like my hair?”
“Oh, yes, yes we do.”
“Isn’t this a lovely ring?”
“My, yes.”
“My granddaddy gave it to me.”
“It’s so pretty on your delicate finger.”
Better Weird: A Tribute to David B. Silva Page 19