The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13

by Stephen Jones

  I didn’t turn around. Not then. What for? I knew what was behind me. Even so, I couldn’t get my legs to move, quite, not until I heard a second thud, closer this time, as though the thing on the porch had stepped fully out of the house, making its slow, steady way toward me. Stumbling, I kicked myself forward, put a hand down in the wet grass and the mud closed over it like a mouth. When I jerked it free, it made a disappointed, sucking sort of sound, and I heard a sort of sigh behind me, another thud, and I ran, all the way to the woods.

  Hours later, we were still huddled together in the Andersz kitchen, wolfing down ho-hos and hot chocolate. Jenny and Kelly and Peter kept laughing, erupting into cloudbursts of excited conversation, laughing some more. Mr Andersz laughed, too, as he boiled more water and spooned marshmallows into our mugs and told us.

  The man the bell had called forth, he said, was Mr Paars’s brother. He’d been coming for years, taking care of Mr Paars after he got too sick to look after himself, because he refused to move into a rest home or even his brother’s home.

  ‘The Lincoln,’ Peter said, and Mr Andersz nodded.

  ‘God, poor man. He must have been inside when you all got there. He must have thought you were coming to rob the place, or vandalize it, and he went out back.’

  ‘We must have scared the living shit out of him,’ Peter said happily.

  ‘Almost as much as we did you,’ said Kelly, and everyone was shouting, pointing, laughing again.

  ‘Mr Paars had been dead for days when they found him,’ Mr Andersz told us. ‘The brother had to go away, and he left a nurse in charge, but the nurse got sick, I guess, or Mr Paars wouldn’t let her in, or something. Anyway, it was pretty awful when the brother came back. That’s why the windows were all open. It’ll take weeks, I bet, to air that place out.’

  I sat, and I sipped my cocoa, and I watched my friends chatter and eat and laugh and wave their arms around, and it dawned on me, slowly, that none of them had seen. None of them had heard. Not really. I almost said something five different times, but I never quite did, I think because of the way we all were, just for that hour, that last, magic night: triumphant, and windswept, and defiant, and together. Like real friends. Almost.

  That was the last time, of course. The next summer, the Macks moved to Vancouver, although they’d slowly slipped away from Peter and me anyway by then. Mr Andersz lost his job – there was an incident, apparently, he just stopped teaching and sat down on the floor in the front of his classroom and swallowed an entire box of chalk, stick by stick – and wound up working in the little caged-in accounting office at the used-car lot in the wasteland down by the Ballard Bridge. And slowly, over a long period of time, it became more exciting, even for me, to talk about Peter than it was to be with him.

  Soon, I think, my mother is going to get sick of staring at the images repeating over and over on our tv screen, the live reports from the rubble of my school and the yearbook photo of Peter and the video of him being stuffed into a police car and the names streaming across the bottom of the screen like a tornado warning, except too late. For the fifteenth time, at least, I see Steve Rourke’s name go by. I should have told him, I thought, should have warned him. But he should have known. I wonder why my name isn’t up there, why Peter didn’t come after me. The answer, though, is obvious. He forgot I was there. Or he wants me to think he did.

  It doesn’t matter. Any minute, my mother’s going to get up and go to bed, and she’s going to tell me I should, too, and that we’ll leave here, we’ll get away and never come back.

  ‘Yes,’ I’ll say. ‘Soon.’

  ‘All those children,’ she’ll say. Again. ‘Sweet Jesus, I can’t believe it. Andrew.’ She’ll drop her head on my shoulder and throw her arms around me and cry.

  But by then, I won’t be thinking about the streaming names, the people I knew who are people no longer, or what Peter might have been thinking tonight. I’ll be thinking, just as I am now, about Peter in the grass outside the Paars house, at the moment he realized what we’d done to him. The way he stood there, vibrating. We didn’t make him what he was. Not the Macks, not his dad, not me – none of us. But it’s like he said: God puts something shaped like that in the world, and then He expects us not to ring it.

  And now there’s only one thing left to do. As soon as my mom finally lets go, stops sobbing, and stumbles off to sleep, I’m going to sneak outside, and I’m going to go straight down the hill to the Paars house. I haven’t been there since that night. I have no idea if the sheds or the house or the bell even exist anymore.

  But if they do, and if that eye in the grass, or any of its power, is still there . . . well, then. I’ll give a little ring. And then we’ll know, once and for all, whether I really did see two old men, with matching canes, on the porch of the Paars house when I glanced back right as I fled into the woods. Whether I really did hear rustling from all those sideways sheds as I flew past, as though, in each, something was sliding out of the ground. I wonder if the bell works only on the Paars family, or if it affects any recently deceased in the vicinity. Maybe the dead really can be called back, for a while, like kids from recess. And if they do come back – and if they’re angry, and they go looking for Peter, and they find him – well. Let the poor, brilliant, fucked-up bastard get what he deserves.

  ELIZABETH HAND

  Cleopatra Brimstone

  ELIZABETH HAND GREW UP IN New York and lived in Washington, D.C., for a number of years before moving to the coast of Maine, where she now lives. She is the author of six novels, including Black Light, Glimmering and Waking the Moon, as well as a short-story collection, Last Summer at Mars Hill. Her work has received the Nebula, World Fantasy, Tiptree and Mythopeic Society awards, and ‘Cleopatra Brimstone’ won the International Horror Guild Award in 2002. She recently completed a novel called Mortal Love.

  ‘This story was written when I had to cancel a long-planned (and much-anticipated) research trip to London and the West Country in October 2000,’ recalls the author. ‘To ease my disappointment, I picked up on an old story idea I’d abandoned, changed the setting to London’s Camden Town (where I’ve spent a good deal of time in the last six years), and for two weeks devoted myself to recreating the place where I should have been.

  ‘I have a lifelong fascination with insects, butterflies and moths in particular, but I must admit that I’ve never found my amateur’s knowledge of lepidoptery terribly useful as a dating tool.’

  For Mike Harrison

  Her earliest memory was of wings. Luminous red and blue, yellow and green and orange; a black so rich it appeared liquid, edible. They moved above her and the sunlight made them glow as though they were themselves made of light, fragments of another, brighter world falling to earth about her crib. Her tiny hands stretched upward to grasp them but could not: they were too elusive, too radiant, too much of the air.

  Could they ever have been real?

  For years she thought she must have dreamed them. But one afternoon when she was ten she went into the attic, searching for old clothes to wear to a Halloween party. In a corner beneath a cobwebbed window she found a box of her baby things. Yellow-stained bibs and tiny fuzzy jumpers blued from bleaching, a much-nibbled stuffed dog that she had no memory of whatsoever.

  And at the very bottom of the carton, something else. Wings flattened and twisted out of shape, wires bent and strings frayed: a mobile. Six plastic butterflies, colors faded and their wings giving off a musty smell, no longer eidolons of Eden but crude representations of monarch, zebra swallowtail, red admiral, sulfur, an unnaturally elongated hairskipper and Agrias narcissus. Except for the narcissus, all were common New World species that any child might see in a suburban garden. They hung limply from their wires, antennae long since broken off; when she touched one wing it felt cold and stiff as metal.

  The afternoon had been overcast, tending to rain. But as she held the mobile to the window, a shaft of sunlight broke through the darkness to ignite the plastic wings, blood
-red, ivy-green, the pure burning yellow of an August field. In that instant it was as though her entire being was burned away, skin hair lips fingers all ash; and nothing remained but the butterflies and her awareness of them, orange and black fluid filling her mouth, the edges of her eyes scored by wings.

  As a girl she had always worn glasses. A mild childhood astigmatism worsened when she was thirteen: she started bumping into things, and found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on the entomological textbooks and journals that she read voraciously. Growing pains, her mother thought; but after two months, Janie’s clumsiness and concomitant headaches became so severe that her mother admitted that this was perhaps something more serious, and took her to the family physician.

  ‘Janie’s fine,’ Dr Gordon announced after peering into her ears and eyes. ‘She needs to see the ophthalmologist, that’s all. Sometimes our eyes change when we hit puberty.’ He gave her mother the name of an eye doctor nearby.

  Her mother was relieved, and so was Jane – she had overheard her parents talking the night before her appointment, and the words CAT scan and brain tumour figured in their hushed conversation. Actually, Jane had been more concerned about another odd physical manifestation, one which no one but herself seemed to have noticed. She had started menstruating several months earlier: nothing unusual in that. Everything she had read about it mentioned the usual things – mood swings, growth spurts, acne, pubic hair.

  But nothing was said about eyebrows. Janie first noticed something strange about hers when she got her period for the second time. She had retreated to the bathtub, where she spent a good half-hour reading an article in Nature about Oriental Ladybug swarms. When she finished the article, she got out of the tub, dressed and brushed her teeth, then spent a minute frowning at the mirror.

  Something was different about her face. She turned sideways, squinting. Had her chin broken out? No; but something had changed. Her hair color? Her teeth? She leaned over the sink until she was almost nose-to-nose with her reflection.

  That was when she saw that her eyebrows had undergone a growth spurt of their own. At the inner edge of each eyebrow, above the bridge of her nose, three hairs had grown remarkably long. They furled back towards her temple, entwined in a sort of loose braid. She had not noticed them sooner because she seldom looked in a mirror, and also because the odd hairs did not arch above the eyebrows, but instead blended in with them, the way a bittersweet vine twines around a branch.

  Still, they seemed bizarre enough that she wanted no one, not even her parents, to notice. She found her mother’s eyebrow tweezers, neatly plucked the six hairs and flushed them down the toilet. They did not grow back.

  At the optometrist’s, Jane opted for heavy tortoiseshell frames rather than contacts. The optometrist, and her mother, thought she was crazy, but it was a very deliberate choice. Janie was not one of those homely B-movie adolescent girls, driven to Science as a last resort. She had always been a tomboy, skinny as a rail, with long, slanted violet-blue eyes; a small rosy mouth; long, straight black hair that ran like oil between her fingers; skin so pale it had the periwinkle shimmer of skim milk.

  When she hit puberty, all of these conspired to beauty. And Jane hated it. Hated the attention, hated being looked at, hated that other girls hated her. She was quiet, not shy but impatient to focus on her schoolwork, and this was mistaken for arrogance by her peers. All through high school she had few friends. She learned early the perils of befriending boys, even earnest boys who professed an interest in genetic mutations and intricate computer simulations of hive activity. Jane could trust them not to touch her, but she couldn’t trust them not to fall in love. As a result of having none of the usual distractions of high school – sex, social life, mindless employment – she received an Intel/Westinghouse Science Scholarship for a computer-generated schematic of possible mutations in a small population of viceroy butterflies exposed to genetically engineered crops. She graduated in her junior year, took her scholarship money, and ran.

  She had been accepted at Stanford and MIT, but chose to attend a small, highly prestigious women’s college in a big city several hundred miles away. Her parents were apprehensive about her being on her own at the tender age of seventeen, but the college, with its elegant, cloister-like buildings and lushly wooded grounds, put them at ease. That and the dean’s assurances that the neighborhood was completely safe, as long as students were sensible about not walking alone at night. Thus mollified, and at Janie’s urging – she was desperate to move away from home – her father signed a very large check for the first semester’s tuition. That September she started school.

  She studied entomology, spending her first year examining the genitalia of male and female Scarce Wormwood Shark Moths, a species found on the Siberian steppes. Her hours in the zoology lab were rapturous, hunched over a microscope with a pair of tweezers so minute they were themselves like some delicate portion of her specimen’s physiognomy. She would remove the butterflies’ genitalia, tiny and geometrically precise as diatoms, and dip them first into glycerine, which acted as a preservative, and next into a mixture of water and alcohol. Then she observed them under the microscope. Her glasses interfered with this work – they bumped into the microscope’s viewing lens – and so she switched to wearing contact lenses. In retrospect, she thought that this was probably a mistake.

  At Argus College she still had no close friends, but neither was she the solitary creature she had been at home. She respected her fellow students, and grew to appreciate the company of women. She could go for days at a time seeing no men besides her professors or the commuters driving past the school’s wrought-iron gates.

  And she was not the school’s only beauty. Argus College specialized in young women like Jane: elegant, diffident girls who studied the burial customs of Mongol women or the mating habits of rare antipodean birds; girls who composed concertos for violin and gamelan orchestra, or wrote computer programs that charted the progress of potentially dangerous celestial objects through the Oort cloud. Within this educational greenhouse, Janie was not so much orchid as sturdy milkweed blossom. She thrived.

  Her first three years at Argus passed in a bright-winged blur with her butterflies. Summers were given to museum internships, where she spent months cleaning and mounting specimens in solitary delight. In her senior year Janie received permission to design her own thesis project, involving her beloved Shark Moths. She was given a corner in a dusty anteroom off the Zoology Lab, and there she set up her microscope and laptop. There was no window in her corner, indeed there was no window in the anteroom at all, though the adjoining Lab was pleasantly old-fashioned, with high arched windows set between Victorian cabinetry displaying Lepidoptera, neon-carapaced beetles, unusual tree fungi and (she found these slightly tragic) numerous exotic finches, their brilliant plumage dimmed to dusty hues. Since she often worked late into the night, she requested and received her own set of keys. Most evenings she could be found beneath the glare of the small halogen lamp, entering data into her computer, scanning images of genetic mutations involving female Shark Moths exposed to dioxane, corresponding with other researchers in Melbourne and Kyoto, Siberia and London.

  The rape occurred around ten o’clock one Friday night in early March. She had locked the door to her office, leaving her laptop behind, and started to walk to the subway station a few blocks away. It was a cold clear night, the yellow glow of the crime lights giving dead grass and leafless trees an eerie autumn glow. She hurried across the campus, seeing no one, then hesitated at Seventh Street. It was a longer walk, but safer, if she went down Seventh Street and then over to Michigan Avenue. The shortcut was much quicker, but Argus authorities and the local police discouraged students from taking it after dark. Jane stood for a moment, staring across the road to where the desolate park lay; then, staring resolutely straight ahead and walking briskly, she crossed Seventh and took the shortcut.

  A crumbling sidewalk passed through a weedy expanse of vacant lot, strewn
with broken bottles and the spindly forms of half a dozen dusty-limbed oak trees. Where the grass ended, a narrow road skirted a block of abandoned row houses, intermittently lit by crime lights. Most of the lights had been vandalized, and one had been knocked down in a car accident – the car’s fender was still there, twisted around the lamppost. Jane picked her way carefully among shards of shattered glass, reached the sidewalk in front of the boarded-up houses and began to walk more quickly, toward the brightly-lit Michigan Avenue intersection where the subway waited.

  She never saw him. He was there, she knew that; knew he had a face, and clothing; but afterwards she could recall none of it. Not the feel of him, not his smell; only the knife he held – awkwardly, she realized later, she probably could have wrested it from him – and the few words he spoke to her. He said nothing at first, just grabbed her and pulled her into an alley between the row houses, his fingers covering her mouth, the heel of his hand pressing against her windpipe so that she gagged. He pushed her onto the dead leaves and wads of matted windblown newspaper, yanked her pants down, ripped open her jacket and then tore her shirt open. She heard one of the buttons strike brick and roll away. She thought desperately of what she had read once, in a Rape Awareness brochure: not to struggle, not to fight, not to do anything that might cause her attacker to kill her.

  Janie did not fight. Instead, she divided into three parts. One part knelt nearby and prayed the way she had done as a child, not intently but automatically, trying to get through the strings of words as quickly as possible. The second part submitted blindly and silently to the man in the alley. And the third hovered above the other two, her hands wafting slowly up and down to keep her aloft as she watched.