The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13

by Stephen Jones

  I could hardly make myself wait until midnight, but there was no way I could do anything at the morgue before then; too many people would be there. I gathered the other ingredients I needed and tried to make myself take a nap, but hunger pangs kept me awake. I fed the cats. I read more of the VODOUN book and learned that I was taking an enormous risk, not with Devlin, but with my own soul. I was tampering with the fabric of reality and would eventually have to pay a price. I didn’t care. With Devlin dead, I thought I might never be able to eat again, so I would soon be dead too.

  When midnight came, I forced myself to wait another half-hour. Then I packed up the things I needed and drove to work.

  I had been afraid that a traffic accident or a house fire would have caused a spate of activity, but everything was quiet; only the night assistant and the janitor were there. Even so, I wheeled Devlin into the decomp room. He hadn’t begun to decompose, but that room could be locked and there was no window in the door.

  First I sewed up the skin over his head wound. I realized I should have done this earlier, as the skin had begun to curl and shrink away from the edges of the wound, but I did as well as I could. I had already cleaned the area around the wound, but now I washed all the blood from his hair, head, and neck. I didn’t know what had happened to his shirt, so I had brought in the top of a green scrub suit. Rigor mortis had passed and his limbs moved easily, but I was not strong enough to wrestle him into the top. I put it on an instrument tray nearby.

  Finding the Lomotil, Cystospaz, and Uriced had been no problem. I crushed the pills, cut the scopolamine patch into tiny pieces, and mixed them with most of the other ingredients in an organ-specimen jar. The copy of VODOUN was open to page fifty-three on the counter, and I checked the recipe to make sure I had done everything right. I had only the last two steps to go.

  ‘The final ingredient,’ the text read, ‘is a finger bone taken from a living person.’

  I sterilized my hands, my bone saw, and a heavy kitchen cleaver I’d brought from home. I had been tempted to grab a couple of painkillers along with the other pills, but I was afraid they would make me groggy. I had to be absolutely aware of what I was doing. I splayed my left hand on the steel table, expelled a long breath, and brought the cleaver down on the first joint of my forefinger.

  This may seem senseless. The spell did not specify which finger to use, and I rely on my hands for my livelihood; why didn’t I choose my relatively useless pinky finger? I’m not sure. I was doing what I felt I had to do – had been from the moment I first saw Devlin on my table, really – and all I can say is that my pinky didn’t feel important enough. I didn’t know how the spell would work, if it did work, but I understood that the finger bone had to be taken from a living person because it was a sacrifice.

  I didn’t need the bone saw at all. The cleaver went through the flesh, through the bone, and the joint skittered across the table’s slick surface. It would have fallen to the floor if the table hadn’t had a raised lip for catching blood and other fluids. I only looked at my left hand long enough to sink a few clumsy stitches into the raw flesh and slap on a butterfly bandage. The stitches were the most painful part of the whole procedure. When I had stopped the bleeding, I turned my attention to the severed joint. The book didn’t say anything about meat, blood, or nerves: it said a finger bone, so I used a scalpel to dissect away as much of the other material as I could before dropping the slick little bone into the jar of ingredients.

  As I mixed everything together, I felt ravenous. Hunger, exhaustion, and shock were preying on me now; I think I believed Devlin was going to get off that table and immediately fix me a nice meal.

  It was ready. I had done everything else; there was only the last step to go. I tilted Devlin’s head back, pulled his lower jaw down, and poured the mixture into his mouth.

  Nothing happened.

  Maybe the mixture had to dissolve, I thought. It wouldn’t do so on its own because his mouth was so dried out. I ran some water into the jar and let it trickle between his lips.

  Still nothing.

  ‘Goddamn it,’ I said. ‘Devlin, you fucking asshole, come back here!’

  I guess that was why the title of the recipe was ‘Calling Back the Dead’. You had to actually call them. Because as soon as I spoke, Devlin opened his eyes.

  I had the scalpel in my hand, not so much because I was afraid of him as because I was afraid for him. The book didn’t say anything about what the person would be like when they came back. I didn’t want a zombi, didn’t want him in some mindless state of animated limbo. That would be worse than staying dead – and I doubted very much whether a zombie knew enough to hold a haunch of meat over a fire, let alone make a foie gras crème brûlée. If he was merely animated - if Devlin himself wasn’t there - I was prepared to drive the scalpel into the base of his skull, doing essentially what the bullet had done before. I don’t know what I thought I would do if that didn’t work.

  But I never had to worry about it, because as soon as he opened his eyes, I saw the man I knew in them. And as soon as his gaze met mine, he said, ‘Dr Brite?’

  Then the mixture hit the back of his throat and he began to cough. Wouldn’t that have been cute, if I’d brought him back to life only to have him choke on my severed finger bone? ‘Devlin,’ I said, ‘swallow.’ He did, and the obstruction went down.

  ‘I feel terrible,’ he said.

  ‘We need to get you to a hospital.’

  ‘Where are we? What happened?’

  ‘You’ve been hurt. There was a terrible mistake, but it’s going to be all right.’

  And it was. There were questions, of course, but I stuck to my story that I’d found Devlin exhibiting vital signs after two days of refrigeration. It was highly unlikely but impossible to disprove, especially with the man sitting there, breathing and talking. Nobody ever connected my missing finger joint with Devlin’s resurrection. I just said I’d had an accident while cutting meat, which was essentially true. Seymour may have been a little suspicious of this story, since he would have expected me to save the severed joint in formalin as a souvenir, but he must have seen that I was in an odd mood when he returned from his camping trip; he asked very few questions.

  Devlin didn’t remember anything after leaving the Lemon Tree the night of the robbery. The version of reality that most people came to accept – because any other version simply stretched the mind beyond its capacity – was that the bullet had not penetrated Devlin’s skull at all, but had worked like a hard blow to the head, rendering him unconscious for a protracted period.

  Only Jeffrey knew otherwise. He saw Devlin’s body up close. He knows very well what a dead person looks like, and he knows me. But he has never said a word. That’s one reason he is my favorite assistant.

  For my birthday dinner, I had a Creole tomato aspic with lump crabmeat and sorrel, a dozen Kumamoto oysters topped with sevruga caviar, a plate of braised veal cheeks so tender they dissolved in my mouth, and a miniature heart-shaped chocolate cake with a chocolate sphere full of raspberry puree somehow concealed in the middle. The last item in particular made me think Devlin knew I had done something more than find him warm on the autopsy table. Like Jeffrey, though, he never said anything. He didn’t have to. He continues to feed me all the thanks I need.

  DENNIS ETCHISON

  Got to Kill Them All

  DENNIS ETCHISON HAS WON two World Fantasy Awards and three British Fantasy Awards. His short fiction has been collected in The Dark Country, Red Dreams, The Blood Kiss, The Death Artist and the e-collection Fine Cuts, a volume of stories about Hollywood available from Scorpius Digital Publishing. Talking in the Dark was a massive retrospective volume from Stealth Press marking the fortieth anniversary of his first professional sale, and his latest collection is Got to Kill Them All & Other Stories from CD Publications.

  As an acclaimed anthologist, Etchison has edited Cutting Edge, Masters of Darkness I-III, MetaHorror, The Museum of Horrors and Gathering the Bones, th
e latter an international anthology of new stories, co-edited with Jack Dann and Ramsey Campbell. He has also recently adapted 150 episodes of the original Twilight Zone television series as radio dramas, released on audio cassette and CD in 2002.

  ‘When I wrote “Got to Kill Them All”,’ recalls the author, ‘the latest American success story was the triumphant return of big-money quiz shows to prime-time network television. Such shows had been enormously successful in the 1950s, until a Congressional investigation revealed that some of them were fixed. It turned out that certain contestants, including the scholar Charles Van Doren, were provided with answers in advance to manipulate the outcome and guarantee ratings; when the scandal broke careers were ruined and such programmes quickly disappeared from the broadcast schedule. Eventually smaller, less serious game shows reappeared on daytime and syndicated TV, emphasizing humour and celebrity guests, but allegedly serious, intellectually challenging quiz shows remained lost to history for more than forty years.

  ‘The first of the new wave of retro quiz shows was Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? An American version of the British original, it debuted without fanfare as a low-budget, limited-run replacement series on ABC-TV. It became an unexpected hit, scoring such phenomenal ratings that it soon began airing several nights a week, opposite copycat shows on other networks, including a revived version of the infamous Twenty-One, another UK transplant called The Weakest Link, and even one simply and shamelessly entitled Greed.

  ‘At around the same time (February, 2000), one could not help but notice that millions of American children had caught Pokémon fever. The word is the name of a wildly popular Nintendo Gameboy game that also inspired a Japanese animé series and a range of trading cards that picture hundreds of cartoon “pocket monsters”. One of the characters is a boy whose job it is to protect the world by tracking down the “bad” monsters and defeating them in pitched battles with the “good” ones he’s trained for the purpose. His motto, the signature phrase of the Pokémon universe, is “Got to catch them all!”

  ‘It did not require much imagination to speculate that some shrewd, enterprising producer might attempt to combine these two hot trends and reach an even larger audience. Replacing the word “catch” with “kill” seemed obvious for the story’s title, even reflexive to a horror writer. And what would the show be called? Well, green is the color of American money, which is after all what commercial television is really about . . .’

  THE SKY WAS GETTING DARKER all the time.

  I set the red can under the glove box and drove away from the pumps, steering with one hand so I could gulp down some of the coffee. Then I hit the brakes before I got to the street.

  The can worried me.

  It was still upright but I heard the gas sloshing. There were a lot of turns between here and the house. What if it tipped over? I’d be sucking fumes before I got home.

  I reached into the back seat, grabbed the plastic bag from B&B Hardware and wedged it next to the can. But it wasn’t heavy enough. So I had to shut off the engine, climb out and make room in the trunk, between the spare tire and the suitcase. That way the can wouldn’t move around, no matter how fast I took the corners. I turned the key again and headed east on Washington, picking up speed, with only one question in my mind:

  Which of the following is a Burt Reynolds film? (a) Cannonball Run (b) Stroker Ace (c) Smokey and the Bandit or (d) The Night of the Following Day.

  I couldn’t remember the winning answer but it didn’t matter now. The gas station was history.

  The sky was so dark by now that I had a hard time believing it was still early afternoon. The clock on the dash said the same as my watch, a few minutes past three. Rush hour wouldn’t be for a while yet. I changed lanes, weaving in and out, flexing my fingers till the joints popped, the sound like little arcs of electricity below the windshield. I thought I saw a barricade of squad cars at the next corner, colored lights spinning, but it was only a road crew setting out detour signs. Their red vests glowed in the underpass. I shook my head to clear it and noticed that the coffee was almost empty.

  I worked my way over between the trucks and sport utility vehicles, heading for Venice Boulevard. It would have been a lot easier to take Sepulveda to Lincoln straight out of LAX. I’d be home now. But this way I had everything I needed. I could do the rest in my sleep. As I turned onto Venice another question flashed before me:

  In what film does William Shatner appear? (a) The Intruder (b) The Brothers Karamazov (c) Big Bad Mama or (d) Anatomy of a Murder.

  That one was easy. It was from Day Two, Show Five, the one we had just wrapped. How many hours ago? I could still see the answer on the card in front of me. I pretended to play the game, jabbing the steering wheel as if it were a buzzer. The horn went off and he glanced up.

  The first thing I noticed was that he might have been anyone.

  A beach boy, nothing special, the type you see around here all the time. Sun-bleached hair, sweat collecting in his squinty eyes, and a walk that said he was not going to slow down for anybody. He stepped into the street and one of us had to stop. I could tell by those eyes it had to be me. He glared back like a hot spot on the glass and didn’t move.

  Then he did something strange.

  He folded his legs and sat down right there in the crosswalk, daring me to hit him. I didn’t, of course. The light was red.

  I opened the window.

  ‘Hey, you want to move it?’

  He shrugged. Not defiantly. He just didn’t care.

  Cars were stacked up behind me now and they didn’t like this game. The light changed. I heard a horn tapping. For God’s sake, I thought.

  ‘What’s your problem?’

  When I leaned out his eyes got big.

  ‘God, you’re him!’

  I shook my head. ‘Move your ass.’

  ‘Yeah! The guy on Green!’

  Busted. I didn’t even have my makeup on. Did I? No, that was hours ago, in Honolulu. I would have taken it off. I checked the rearview mirror. My eyes were like two cigarette burns. I had a hard time recognizing myself. The kid’s legs unfolded as he got up. But not to move out of the way. He started walking toward me.

  He was going to ask for my autograph.

  The rest of the drivers leaned on their horns.

  I had to make a decision fast so I unlocked the passenger door. I’d drive around the corner and dump him off once we were out of the intersection.

  When he got in I took a close look at him. New Nikes, clean T-shirt and jeans, no dirt anywhere that showed. He was not a beach bum and he didn’t really have an attitude. He had just plain given up. He probably didn’t know he was going to until that moment and then something – the traffic, the sun, all the people on the street who couldn’t care less – made him lose it. Now I could see that it wasn’t sweat under his eyes. He had been crying.

  He closed the door and wiped his face. ‘Shit, I’m sorry. If I’d ’a known it was you . . .’

  ‘What happened?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, nothin’.’ He tried a laugh to make light of it. ‘My old lady. We had a, you know, fight. She kicked me out.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Right here, in the middle of the street. Told me to fucking split. So I did.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said.

  ‘You do?’

  ‘She’s a bitch.’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Sure, she is. Acts like you’re always bothering her. No time to talk. When you call, she’s never home.’

  ‘How did you know that?’

  Which is proof that your wife is cheating? (a) Staying out all night (b) mysterious stains on her clothing (c) phone calls from someone who hangs up when you answer or (d) frequent trips to see her ‘mother’ in the hospital.

  ‘They’re all the same,’ I said. ‘Think about it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, as if it had never occurred to him, ‘I guess they are . . .’

  Now we were close to Admiralty Way a
nd the grid of side streets by the marina. It was hard to tell them apart in this light. Got to bear down, I thought.

  ‘Where do you want me to drop you?’

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘What do I do?’

  What should you do once you know she is unfaithful? (a) Make her account for every hour of her day (b) hire a private detective (c) hide a Global Positioning Device in her car or (d) kill her.

  ‘Only one thing to do,’ I told him, ‘isn’t there? How about the corner?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Where’s your house?’

  ‘I can’t go back there.’

  ‘Maybe you should.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To make it right.’

  ‘I don’t know how.’

  ‘Yes, you do. Think about it.’

  ‘Okay. I will.’

  He squinted at the shadowy rows of condos as we neared the end of the boulevard. We both saw sparks of light like tiny fires starting between the buildings. It could have been the sun on the ocean except that the sky had closed over.

  ‘I have to let you out,’ I said.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I can’t take you with me. Not where I’m going.’

  ‘That’s cool. The market, okay?’ There was a Stop ’N Start ahead, at the corner. ‘I need some stuff.’

  That was cool with me. I could get a refill on my coffee, as long as it didn’t take too long.

  I pulled in between a brand-new Land Rover and an exterminator’s truck. The mannequin on the roof had a tux and top hat and a big rubber mallet behind his back and he was standing over an innocent-looking mouse. On the way to the glass doors I saw the little rat out of the corner of my eye, twitching his whiskers and scooting away over the hood. Go on, I thought. You can run but you can’t hide.

  Inside the convenience mart I poured a big 22-ouncer, black. The kid was in the aisle where they keep the dog food and soap and aspirin and Tampax, for when you’re running late and she gave you a list and you promised. I popped a lid on the coffee and left a dollar bill on the counter, thinking: Which method is best for a crime of passion? (a) Gun (b) rope (c) knife or (d) gasoline.