The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13

by Stephen Jones

  Precisely at that moment the untoward took place. Or perhaps I should say the apt, as it had happened before, and neither of us could now miss its significance.

  A party of three gentlemen and two ladies had just now been coming across the terrace, and had taken their seats to my right. So it was that I heard, from behind my right ear, a stifled little cry, and next the splintering crash of a water glass dropped on the paving.

  Jeffers and I both turned sharply, in time to see that the second young lady of the party, ashen in colour, was being supported by her friends. As they fussed and produced a smelling-bottle, and called loudly for spirits, Polleto darted to his feet and went gliding quickly from the terrace.

  ‘Now I fancy,’ said Jeffers, ‘you’ve witnessed something of this sort before. And I too, in a way, since you told me of it.’

  ‘You mean Daffodil King, who fainted at the church tea?’

  ‘Just so.’

  ‘You imagine that she, and the lady over there, swooned for a similar reason – that they had seen Mr Polleto?’

  ‘Don’t you imagine it?’ asked Jeffers laconically.

  I thought, and answered honestly, ‘Yes. But why?’

  ‘I wonder,’ said Jeffers, infuriatingly. Then he added, ‘No, I’m not being fair to you. You see, I’ve read of the case, and viewed a rather poor photograph once, in a police museum, in circumstances I shan’t bore you with. When you first pointed him out, I had a half-suspicion. But in the light of both ladies fainting at the sight of the man . . . Recollect, Austria is only over the border here. I believe you told me that the charming Daffodil had been in Austria once, and said she had seen something there so awful that it had taken her six years to recover from it?’

  ‘Yes, or so her sister informed me.’

  ‘What she saw then was that same man, Polleto, in the street probably, on the day that the people of a well-known Austrian spa almost lynched him. I have no doubts the other lady, to our right, saw him in a similar style. Unless she had the singular misfortune to have met him.’

  ‘Then he’s notorious?’

  ‘No. Of course, his real name isn’t Polleto. I was never told what his real name was. The documents referred to him only as the Criminal. And the crime too was hushed up in the end, and rich acquaintances got him away to avoid a most resounding scandal, which would, I believe, have brought down the Austrian government of the hour.’

  ‘In God’s name – what had he done?’

  Jeffers shrugged. ‘That’s the thing, Frederick, what had he done? No one would say. Not even the file on him, which I was shown, would say anything as to the nature of his crime. Not even the policemen I spoke with. It was something so vile, so disgusting, so inhuman, that no scrap of it has ever been revealed by anyone who knows. They won’t – can’t – speak of it. They try to push it from their minds. And if they see him, like that lady across the terrace, some part of them withers. There now, she’s looking a little better. All the better, no doubt, since what made her ill has left the vicinity.’

  I sat staring at him.

  Presently I said, ‘Are you then saying to me what I suppose you must be?’

  Jeffers stretched himself in his chair, and smiled at me. ‘Even you,’ said he, ‘asked yourself whether or not something of great perceived virtue, like a church bell, could halt Amber Maria, should she set her sights on it. But it wasn’t virtue she avoided, was it? She loved the earth and all the people in it. I, too, Frederick, have heard of the Lilyite sect, and of course she must have been a member of it. No doubt Josebaar Hawkins let her have her meetings in his house, and protected her afterwards by lying. But maybe, in later years, he feared that in her too, that she was one of the Lilyites and put the teachings of Jesus before all other things. What did she do but love others and want to help them with her precious gift of seeing, from which she herself had never tried to profit? She saw good and beauty in all men and all things, and loved them like – loved them better than – herself. And where have you heard such philosophy before, save from the lips of Christ?’

  I was shocked a little, to have missed this clue. Humbly I waited for him to go on. He did so.

  ‘Amber Maria looked with her eating eyes through her window, and after the blocked-up bricks and pins, she had the glass, and then, as you said, the trees, the air and the Lane. And next she ate up Steepleford with her eyes. And it would have gone on like this, like rings spreading from a pebble thrown into a pool, and God knows where it could have ended. But ended it must have done, at last. For in this world, along with all those who, despite their colossal failings, carry in them the seeds of goodness and beauty, there are a few, only a few, I trust, who have nothing like that inside them. Who are composed only of the grossest and most foul of atoms, who are, though human, like things of the Pit. In them there is not, I dare say, one hint of light. Perhaps there is no soul. And meeting one of these persons, Amber Maria, who fed on goodness and beauty and drained it to dust, fed instead upon the worst poison, that which would scald away the psychic core of any such vampire. It was Polleto, you see, Polleto, that little ghastly human demon, whose crime is so unspeakable that it is never spoken of, Polleto who had come to live in the town, placating it by helping it buy a bell, Polleto that at last her devouring eyes reached. Like everything else then, she tried to eat him up. And then she must have tried to spew him out. But it was too late. She had touched and tasted in a manner only vampires know. She who had once loved God and once loved others as herself, until they let her die in that atrocious manner. And after that she who hated and would have eaten the world, save in due course she came to Polleto and ate at Polleto. Polleto! And it killed her, Frederick, in each and every way. It killed her, sending her to a death more deep than any grave, more cold than any stone.’

  GLEN HIRSHBERG

  Struwwelpeter

  THE FOLLOWING STORY ORIGINALLY APPEARED on SciFi.Com, and has been selected for The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fifteenth Annual Collection as well as this volume of The Mammoth Books of Best New Horror.

  Glen Hirshberg’s novelette, ‘Mr Dark’s Carnival’, which received its first printing in the Ash-Tree Press anthology Shadows and Silence and later appeared in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourteenth Annual Collection, was nominated for both the International Horror Guild Award and the World Fantasy Award. He also has stories in Dark Terrors 6 and The Dark. His first novel, The Snowman’s Children, is published in the United States by Carroll & Graf. Currently, he is putting the final touches on a collection of ghost stories and working on a new novel. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son.

  About ‘Struwwelpeter’ the author notes: ‘Ballard is an actual section of Seattle, but the neighborhood portrayed here bares little resemblance to it except for the rain and the duplexes and the lutefisk smell. This story is dedicated to Phil Bednarz, wherever he is, for taking me bell-ringing.’

  ‘The dead are not altogether powerless.’

  – Chief Seattle

  THIS WAS BEFORE WE KNEW about Peter, or at least before we understood what we knew, and my mother says it’s impossible to know a thing like that anyway. She’s wrong, though, and she doesn’t need me to tell her she is, either.

  Back then, we still gathered, afterschool afternoons, at the Andersz house, because it was close to the locks. If it wasn’t raining, we’d drop our books and grab ho-hos out of the tin Mr Andersz always left on the table for us and head immediately toward the water. Gulls spun in the sunlight overhead, their cries urgent, taunting, telling us, you’re missing it, you’re missing it. We’d sprint between the rows of low stone duplexes, the sad little gardens with their flowers battered by the rain until the petals looked bent and forgotten like discarded training wheels, the splintery, sagging blue walls of the Black Anchor restaurant where Mr Paars used to hunker alone and murmuring over his plates of reeking lutefisk when he wasn’t stalking 15th Street, knocking pigeons and homeless people out of the way with his dog-head cane. Finally,
we’d burst into the park, pour down the avenue of fir trees like a mudslide, scattering people, bugs, and birds before us until we hit the water.

  For hours, we’d prowl the green hillsides, watching the sailors yell at the invading seals from the top of the locks while the seals ignored them, skimming for fish and sometimes rolling on their backs and flipping their fins. We watched the rich-people sailboats with their masts rusting, the big grey fishing boats from Alaska and Japan and Russia with the fishermen bored on deck, smoking, throwing butts at the seals and leaning on the rails while the gulls shrieked overhead. As long as the rain held off, we stayed and threw stones to see how high up the opposite bank we could get them, and Peter would wait for ships to drift in front of us and then throw low over their bows. The sailors would scream curses in other languages or sometimes ours, and Peter would throw bigger stones at the boat-hulls. When they hit with a thunk, we’d flop on our backs on the wet grass and flip our feet in the air like the seals. It was the rudest gesture we knew.

  Of course, most days it was raining, and we stayed in the Anderszes’ basement until Mr Andersz and the Serbians came home. Down there, in the damp – Mr Andersz claimed his was one of three basements in all of Ballard – you could hear the wetness rising in the grass outside like lock-water. The first thing Peter did when we got downstairs was flick on the gas fireplace (not for heat, it didn’t throw any), and we’d toss in stuff: pencils, a tinfoil ball, a plastic cup, and once a broken old 45 which formed blisters on its surface and then spit black goo into the air like a fleeing octopus dumping ink before it slid into a notch in the logs to melt. Once, Peter went upstairs and came back with one of Mr Andersz’s red spiral photo albums and tossed it into the flames, and when one of the Mack sisters asked him what was in it, he told her, ‘No idea. Didn’t look.’

  The burning never lasted long, five minutes, maybe. Then we’d eat ho-hos and play the Atari Mr Andersz had bought Peter years before at a yard sale, and it wasn’t like you think, not always. Mostly, Peter flopped in his orange bean-bag chair with his long legs stretched in front of him and his too-long black bangs splayed across his forehead like the talons of some horrible, giant bird gripping him to lift him away. He let me and the Mack sisters take turns on the machine, and Kenny London and Steve Rourke, too, back in the days when they would come. I was the best at the basic games, Asteroids and Pong, but Jenny Mack could stay on Dig Dug forever and not get grabbed by the floating grabby-things in the ground. Even when we asked Peter to take his turn, he wouldn’t. He’d say, ‘Go ahead,’ or ‘Too tired,’ or ‘Fuck off,’ and once I even turned around in the middle of losing to Jenny and found him watching us, sort of, the rainy window and us, not the tv screen at all. He reminded me a little of my grandfather before he died, all folded up in his chair and not wanting to go anywhere and kind of happy to have us there. Always, Peter seemed happy to have us there.

  When Mr Andersz got home, he’d fish a ho-ho out of the tin for himself if we’d left him one – we tried to, most days – and then come downstairs, and when he peered out of the stairwell, his black wool hat still stuck to his head like melted wax, he already looked different than when we saw him at school. At school, even with his hands covered in yellow chalk and his transparencies full of fractions and decimals scattered all over his desk and the pears he carried with him and never seemed to eat, he was just Mr Andersz, fifth-grade math teacher, funny accent, funny to get angry. At school, it never occurred to any of us to feel sorry for him.

  ‘Well, hello, all of you,’ he’d say, as if talking to a litter of puppies he’d found, and we’d pause our game and hold our breath and wait for Peter. Sometimes – most times – Peter said, ‘Hey’ back, or even, ‘Hey, Dad.’ Then we’d all chime in like a clock tolling the hour, ‘Hey, Mr Andersz,’ ‘Thanks for the ho-hos,’ ‘Your hat’s all wet again,’ and he’d smile and nod and go upstairs.

  There were the other days, too. A few, that’s all. On most of those, Peter just didn’t answer, wouldn’t look at his father. It was only the one time that he said, ‘Hello, Dipshit-Dad,’ and Jenny froze at the Atari and one of the floating grabby things swallowed her digger, and the rest of us stared, but not at Peter, and not at Mr Andersz, either. Anywhere but there.

  For a few seconds, Mr Andersz seemed to be deciding, and rain-rivers wriggled down the walls and windows like transparent snakes, and we held our breath. But all he said, in the end, was, ‘We’ll talk later, Struwwelpeter,’ which was only a little different from what he usually said when Peter got this way. Usually, he said, ‘Oh. It’s you, then. Hello, Struwwelpeter.’ I never liked the way he said that, as though he was greeting someone else entirely, not his son. Eventually, Jenny or her sister Kelly would say, ‘Hi, Mr Andersz,’ and he’d glance around at us as though he’d forgotten we were there, and then he’d go upstairs and invite the Serbians in, and we wouldn’t see him again until we left.

  The Serbians made Steve Rourke nervous, which is almost funny, in retrospect. They were big and dark, both of them, two brothers who looked at their hands whenever they saw children. One was a car mechanic, the other worked at the locks, and they sat all afternoon, most afternoons, in Mr Andersz’s study, sipping tea and speaking Serbian in low whispers. The words made their whispers harsh, full of z’s and ground-up s’s, as though they’d swallowed glass. ‘They could be planning things in there,’ Steve used to say. ‘My dad says both those guys were badass soldiers.’ Mostly, as far as I could tell, they looked at Mr Andersz’s giant library of photo albums and listened to records. Judy Collins, Joan Baez. Almost funny, like I said.

  Of course, by this last Halloween – my last night at the Andersz house – both Serbians were dead, run down by a drunken driver while walking across Fremont Bridge, and Kenny London had moved away, and Steve Rourke didn’t come anymore. He said his parents wouldn’t let him, and I bet they wouldn’t, but that wasn’t why he stopped coming. I knew it, and I think Peter knew it, too, and that worried me, a little, in ways I couldn’t explain.

  I almost didn’t get to go, either. I was out the door, blinking in the surprising sunlight and the wind rolling off the Sound through the streets, when my mother yelled, ‘Andrew!’ and stopped me. I turned to find her in the open screen door of our duplex, arms folded over the long, grey coat she wore inside and out from October to May, sunlight or no, brown-grey curls bunched on top of her scalp as though trying to crawl over her head out of the wind. She seemed to be wiggling in mid-air, like a salmon trying to hold itself still against a current. Rarely did she take what she called her ‘frustrations’ out on me, but she’d been crabby all day, and now she looked furious, despite the fact that I’d stayed in my room, out of her way, from the second I got home from school, because I knew she didn’t really want me out tonight. Not with Peter. Not after last year.

  ‘That’s a costume?’ She gestured with her chin at my jeans, my everyday black sweater, too-small brown mac she’d promised to replace this year.

  I shrugged.

  ‘You’re not going trick-or-treating?’

  The truth was, no one went trick-or-treating much in our section of Ballard, not like in Bellingham where we’d lived when we lived with my dad. Too wet and dismal, most days, and there were too many drunks lurking around places like the Black Anchor and sometimes stumbling down the duplexes, shouting curses at the dripping trees.

  ‘Trick-or-treating’s for babies,’ I said.

  ‘Hmm, I wonder which of your friends taught you that,’ my mother said, and then a look flashed across her face, different than the one she usually got at times like this. She still looked sad, but not about me. She looked sad for me.

  I took a step toward her, and her image wavered in my glasses. ‘I won’t sleep there. I’ll be home by eleven,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll be home by ten, or you won’t be going anywhere again anytime soon. Got it? How old do you think you are, anyway?’

  ‘Twelve,’ I said, with as much conviction as I could muster, and
my mother flashed the sad look again.

  ‘If Peter tells you to jump off a bridge . . .’

  ‘Push him off.’

  My mother nodded. ‘If I didn’t feel so bad for him . . .’ she said, and I thought she meant Peter, and then I wasn’t sure. But she didn’t say anything else, and after a few seconds, I couldn’t stand there anymore, not with the wind crawling down the neck of my jacket and my mother still looking like that. I left her in the doorway.

  Even in bright sunlight, mine was a dreary neighborhood. The gusts of wind herded paper scraps and street-grit down the overflowing gutters and yanked the last leaves off the trees like a gleeful gang on a vandalism rampage. I saw a few parents – new to the area, obviously – hunched into rain-slickers, leading little kids from house to house. The kids wore drugstore clown costumes, Darth Vader masks, sailor caps. They all looked edgy, miserable. At most of the houses, no one answered the doorbell.

  Outside the Andersz place, I stopped for just a minute, watching the leaves leaping from their branches like lemmings and tumbling down the wind, trying to figure out what was different, what felt wrong. Then I had it: the Mountain was out. The endless Fall rain had rolled in early that year, and it had been weeks, maybe months, since I’d last seen Mount Rainier. Seeing it now gave me the same unsettled sensation as always. ‘It’s because you’re looking south, not west,’ people always say, as if that explains how the mountain gets to that spot on the horizon, on the wrong side of the city, not where it actually is but out to sea, seemingly bobbing on the waves, not the land.

  How many times, I wondered abruptly, had some adult in my life asked why I liked Peter? I wasn’t cruel, and despite my size, I wasn’t easily cowed, and I did okay in school – not as well as Peter, but okay – and I had ‘a gentleness, most days’, as Mrs Corbett (WhoreButt, to Peter) had written on my report card last year. ‘If he learns to exercise judgment – and perhaps gives some thought to his choice of companions – he could go far.’