The Best New Horror 3

by Stephen Jones

  There are only a few city blocks in Patpong, but to trudge up and down them in the searing heat, questioning, observing every face for a trace of the remembered grail . . . it can age you. I stopped shaving and took recreational drugs. What did it matter anyway?

  But I was still fine, I wasn’t coming down with anything.

  I was fine. Fine!

  And then, one day, while paying for a Big Mac, I saw her hands. I was looking down at the counter counting out the money. I heard the computer beep of the cash register and then I saw them: proffering the hamburger in both hands, palms up, like an offering to the gods. The fingers arched upwards, just so, with delicacy and hidden strength. God, I knew those hands. Their delicacy as they skimmed my shoulder blades, as they glided across my testicles just a hair’s breadth away from touching. Their strength when she balled up her fist and shoved it into my rectum. Jesus, we’d done everything that night. I dropped my wallet on the counter, I seized those hands and gripped them, burger and all, and I felt the familiar response. Oh, God, I ached.

  “Mister, you want a blowjob?”

  It wasn’t her voice. I looked up. It wasn’t even a woman.

  I looked back down at the hands. I looked up at the face. They didn’t even belong together. It was a pockmarked boy and when he talked to me he stared off into space. There was no relation between the vacuity of his expression and the passion with which those hands caressed my hands.

  “I don’t like to do such thing,” he said, “but I’m a poor college student and I needing money. So you can come back after 5 p.m. You not be disappointed.”

  The fingers kneaded my wrists with the familiarity of one who has touched every part of your body, who has memorized the varicose veins in your left leg and the mole on your right testicle.

  It was obscene. I wrenched my own hands free. I barely remembered to retrieve my wallet before I ran out into the street.

  I had been trying to find Dr Frances Stone since I arrived, looking through the files at the corporate headquarters, screaming at secretaries. Although the corporation had funded Dr Stone’s project, the records seemed to have been spirited away.

  At last I realized that that was the wrong way to go about it. I remembered what Mike had told me, so the day after the encounter with Keo’s hands, I was back in Patpong, asking around for a good V. D. clinic. The most highly regarded one of all turned out to be at the corner of Patpong and Soi Cowboy, above a store that sold pirated software and videotapes.

  I walked up a steep staircase into a tiny room without windows, with a ceiling fan moving the same sweaty air around and around. A receptionist smiled at me. Her eyes had the same vacuity that the boy at McDonalds had possessed. I sat in an unraveling rattan chair and waited, and Dr Stone summoned me into her office.

  “You’ve done something with her,” I said.

  “Yes.” She was shuffling a stack of papers. She had a window; she had an airconditioner blasting away in the direction of all the computers. I was still drenched with sweat.

  The phone rang and she had a brief conversation in Thai that I couldn’t catch. “You’re angry, of course,” she said, putting down the phone. “But it was better than nothing. Better than the cold emptiness of the earth. And she had nothing to lose.”

  “She was dying of AIDS! And now I have it!” It was the first time I’d allowed the word to cross my lips. “You killed me!”

  Frances laughed. “My,” she said, “aren’t we being a little melodramatic? You have the virus, but you haven’t actually come down with anything.”

  “I’m fine. Fine.”

  “Well, why don’t you sit down. I’ll order up some food. We’ll talk.”

  She had really gone native. In Thailand it’s rude to talk business without ordering up food. Sullenly I sat down while she opened a window and yelled out an order to one of the street vendors.

  “To be honest, Mr Leibowitz,” she said, “we really could use another grant. We had to spend so much of the last one on cloak-and-dagger nonsense, security, bribes, and so on; so little could be spared for research itself . . . I mean, look around you . . . I’m not exactly wasting money on luxurious office space, am I?”

  “I saw her hands.”

  “Very effective, wasn’t it?” The food arrived. It was some kind of noodle thing wrapped in banana leaves and groaning from the weight of chili peppers. She did not eat; instead, she amused herself by rearranging the peppers in the shape of . . . “The hands, I mean. Beautiful as ever. Vibrant. Sensual. My first breakthrough.”

  I started shaking again. I’d read about Dr Stone’s great-grandfather and his graverobbing experiments. Jigsaw corpses brought to life with bolts of lightning. Not life. A simulacrum of life. Could this have happened to Keo? But she was dying. Perhaps it was better than nothing. Perhaps . . .

  “Anyhow. I was hoping you’d arrive soon, Mr Leibowitz. Because we’ve made up another grant proposal. I have the papers here. I know that you’ve become so important now that your signature alone will suffice to bring us ten times the amount you authorized two years ago.”

  “I want to see her.”

  “Would you like to dance with her? Would you like to see her in the Chui Chai one more time?”

  She led me down a different stairwell. Many flights. I was sure we were below ground level. I knew we were getting nearer to Keo because there was a hint of that rotting flower fragrance in the air. We descended. There was an unnatural chill.

  And then, at last, we reached the laboratory. No shambling Igors or bubbling retorts. Just a clean, well-lit basement room. Cold, like the vault of a morgue. Walls of white tile; ceiling of stucco; fluorescent lamps; the pervasive smell of the not-quite-dead.

  Perspex tanks lined the walls. They were full of fluid and body parts. Arms and legs floating past me. Torsos twirled. A woman’s breast peered from between a child’s thighs. In another tank, human hearts swirled, each neatly severed at the aorta. There was a tank of eyes. Another of genitalia. A necklace of tongues hung suspended in a third. A mass of intestines writhed in a fourth. Computers drew intricate charts on a bank of monitors. Oscilloscopes beeped. A pet gibbon was chained to a post topped by a human skull. There was something so outlandishly antiseptic about this spectacle that I couldn’t feel the horror.

  “I’m sorry about the décor, Russell, but you see, we’ve had to forgo the usual decoration allowance.” The one attempt at dressing up the place was a frayed poster of Young Frankenstein tacked to the far wall. “Please don’t be upset at all the body parts,” she added. “It’s all very macabre, but one gets inured to it in med school; if you feel like losing your lunch, there’s a small restroom on your left . . . yes, between the eyes and the tongues.” I did not feel sick. I was feeling . . . excited. It was the odor. I knew I was getting closer to Keo.

  She unlocked another door. We stepped into an inner room.

  Keo was there. A cloth was draped over her, but seeing her face after all these years made my heart almost stop beating. The eyes. The parted lips. The hair, streaming upward toward a source of blue light . . . although I felt no wind in the room. “It is an electron wind,” said Dr Stone. “No more waiting for the monsoon lightning. We can get more power from a wall socket than great-grandfather Victor could ever dream of stealing from the sky.”

  And she laughed the laughter of mad scientists.

  I saw the boy from McDonalds sitting in a chair. The hands reached out toward me. There were electrodes fastened to his temples. He was naked now, and I saw the scars where hands had been joined at the wrists to someone else’s arms. I saw a woman with Keo’s breasts, wired to a pillar of glass, straining, heaving while jags of blue lightning danced about her bonds. I saw her vagina stitched onto the pubis of a dwarf, who lay twitching at the foot of the pillar. Her feet were fastened to the body of a five-year-old boy, transforming their grace to ungainliness as he stomped in circles around the pillar.

  “Jigsaw people!” I said.

  “Of cour
se!” said Dr Stone. “Do you think I would be so foolish as to bring back people whole? Do you not realize what the consequences would be? The legal redefinition of life and death . . . wills declared void, humans made subservient to walking corpses . . . I’m a scientist, not a philosopher.”

  “But who are they now?”

  “They were nobody before. Street kids. Prostitutes. They were dying, Mr Leibowitz, dying! They were glad to will their bodies to me. And now they’re more than human. They’re many persons in many bodies. A gestalt. I can shuffle them and put them back together, oh, so many different ways . . . and the beautiful Keo. Oh, she wept when she came to me. When she found out she had given you the virus. She loved you. You were the last person she ever loved. I saved her for you. She’s been sleeping here, waiting to dance for you, since the day she died. Oh, let us not say died. The day she . . . she . . . I am no poet, Mr Leibowitz. Just a scientist.”

  I didn’t want to listen to her. All I could see was Keo’s face. It all came back to me. Everything we had done. I wanted to relive it. I didn’t care if she was dead or undead. I wanted to seize the grail and clutch it in my hands and own it.

  Frances threw a switch. The music started. The shrilling of the pinai, the pounding of the taphon, the tinkling of marimbas and xylophones rang in the Chui Chai music. Then she slipped away unobtrusively. I heard a key turn in a lock. She had left the grant contract lying on the floor. I was alone with all the parts of the woman I’d loved. Slowly I walked toward the draped head. The electron wind surged; the cold blue light intensified. Her eyes opened. Her lips moved as though discovering speech for the first time . . .

  “Rus . . . sell.”

  On the pizzafaced boy, the hands stirred of their own accord. He turned his head from side to side and the hands groped the air, straining to touch my face. Keo’s lips were dry. I put my arms around the drape-shrouded body and kissed the dead mouth. I could feel my hair stand on end.

  “I see big emptiness inside you. Come to me. I fill you. We both empty people. Need filling up.”

  “Yes. Jesus, yes.”

  I hugged her to me. What I embraced was cold and prickly. I whisked away the drape. There was no body. Only a framework of wires and transistors and circuit boards and tubes that fed flasks of flaming reagents.

  “I dance for you now.”

  I turned. The hands of the McDonald’s boy twisted into graceful patterns. The feet of the child moved in syncopation to the music, dragging the rest of the body with them. The breasts of the chained woman stood firm, waiting for my touch. The music welled up. A contralto voice spun plaintive melismas over the interlocking rhythms of wood and metal. I kissed her. I kissed that severed head and lent my warmth to the cold tongue, awakened passion in her. I kissed her. I could hear chains breaking and wires slithering along the floortiles. There were hands pressed into my spine, rubbing my neck, unfastening my belt. A breast touched my left buttock and a foot trod lightly on my right. I didn’t care that these parts were attached to other bodies. They were hers. She was loving me all over. The dwarf that wore her pudenda was climbing up my leg. Every part of her was in love with me. Oh, she danced. We danced together. I was the epicenter of their passion. We were empty people but now we drank our fill. Oh, God, we danced. Oh, it was a grave music, but it contented us.

  And I signed everything, even the codicil.

  Today I am in the AIDS ward of a Beverly Hills hospital. I don’t have long to wait. Soon the codicil will come into effect, and my body will be preserved in liquid nitrogen and shipped to Patpong.

  The nurses hate to look at me. They come at me with rubber gloves on so I won’t contaminate them, even though they should know better. My insurance policy has disowned me. My children no longer write me letters, though I’ve paid for them to go to Ivy League colleges. Trisha comes by sometimes. She is happy that we rarely made love.

  One day I will close my eyes and wake up in a dozen other bodies. I will be closer to her than I could ever be in life. In life we are all islands. Only in Dr Stone’s laboratory can we know true intimacy, the mind of one commanding the muscles of another and causing the nerves of a third to tingle with unnamable desires. I hope I shall die soon.

  The living dead are not as you imagine them. There are no dangling innards, no dripping slime. They carry their guts and gore inside them, as do you and I. In the right light they can be beautiful, as when they stand in the cold luminescence of a basement laboratory, waiting for an electron stream to lend them the illusion of life. Fueled by the right fantasy, they become indistinguishable from us.

  Listen. I know. I’ve loved them.

  KIM NEWMAN

  The Snow Sculptures of Xanadu

  KIM NEWMAN is the winner of the Horror Writers of America Bram Stoker Award for Horror: 100 Best Books (with Stephen Jones), and the British Science Fiction Association Award for his story “The Original Dr Shade”. The author of such non-fiction studies as Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), Nightmare Movies and Wild West Movies, his novels include The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, Anno Dracula and, under the “Jack Yeovil” alias, several Warhammer and Dark Future gaming adventures. His recent short fiction is collected in The Original Dr Shade and Other Stories and he has co-edited the anthology In Dreams with Paul J. McAuley.

  The story that follows came about when Jonathan Carroll put an Austrian magazine who wanted an article on the 50th Anniversary of Citizen Kane in touch with the author. “Rather than the film-oriented think-piece they expected,” explains Newman, “I produced this, which they very handsomely accepted and ran”. The story was reprinted in this, slightly expanded, form in the special “non-fiction” issue of Interzone/Million, and was rated as one of the least popular stories published in Interzone that year in the annual reader’s poll (along with Elizabeth Hand’s “The Bacchae”).

  Observant readers will discover references to The Third Man, The Haunting of Hill House, The House on Haunted Hill, Suspiria, The Shining and Hell House, as well as of course Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, in this short but very unusual ghost story.

  There had been a private zoo here once, but now only mosquitoes thrived. In the thick, sweaty heat, they pestered Welles. During his lifetime, Charles Foster Kane had decreed Xanadu insect-free, as if the force of his unstoppable will—the power that had shaped the destinies of nations—were able to hold back the swamplands surrounding his Florida fastness. The Pleasure Dome had begun to rot while Kane still lived, as his powers ebbed and history slowly crept past him, and, with his death twenty-five years ago, the decay had begun to accelerate. The walls were breached like those of a besieged city that has finally yielded, the stinking cages of the menagerie held only dead animals, forty-foot windows were patched over with boards. Welles thought that if the place were left to nature, it would inevitably sink like the House of Usher into the giant tarn surrounding it.

  A fitting set for a ghost story.

  The former Boy Wonder stood outside the gates of Xanadu, the shadow of their wrought iron K motif falling upon him, and was conscious of how much he had changed since his last visit. In 1941, with an RKO contract to make a ground-breaking documentary about the Great American, he had stolen miles of footage in Xanadu as the Kane functionaries dismantled and inventoried the fortress’s infestation-like collection. Statues, books, paintings, furniture, uncategorizable mementoes, jigsaw puzzles, phonograph records, vehicles, tapestries: all boxed or burned. Welles had felt that there was no waste as long as the process was caught on film. No gesture or moment was insignificant once processed by Gregg Toland’s camera. Of course, he could not have foreseen that all his footage would end up like Kane’s collection, listed and buried in a vault.

  Up in the eaves of Xanadu, something with wings squawked, its cry like a jaguar’s snarl played backwards.

  Then, Welles had been slim and promising; now, he felt fat and thwarted. Charles Foster Kane Jr, a lifelong recluse crippled in the 1916 automobile accident that took his mother’s
life, had stirred the might of his inherited empire, and pressured RKO into abandoning American, just as they dissuaded News on the March from issuing its newsreel obituary. Junior, still nursing the hurt of his parents’ divorce, acted as if he wanted the memory of Kane erased, working diligently at squashing biographies with all the zeal of an Egyptian priest wiping a dissolute pharaoh out of the history books. Now, in 1965, few people remembered whether Kane had been a real person or a made-up character. His name was sometimes good for newspaper sales—as when, in 1949, it had seemed probable that an American black marketeer found dead in a Viennese sewer was the old man’s bastard son—but mainly, he was as shadowy a concept as his “Rosebud,” as forgotten a heap of detritus as his Xanadu.

  Down the coast, a white spurt shot up. Part of the old Kane Estate was now leased to Cape Canaveral. Junior’s passion was the sky, prompted by the cripple’s hope that even if he could not walk he could fly. Welles remembered Junior’s involvement with Howard Hughes’ “Spruce Goose” during the War, and his establishment of a Kane Aviation Company in the ’50s, diversifying into jet engines and prototypical rockets. Kane components would go to the moon one day, or bear the payload of man’s final war. And Kane papers and television programmes would bear the news of both events.

  Welles wondered again if the summons he had received was a hoax. Xanadu seemed from the outside to be completely deserted. Sun-bleached walls crumbled invisibly, and there was no sign of habitation. He looked back at the limousine, but the driver—half his face hidden by goggle-like glasses—betrayed nothing.

  As young men, Kane and Welles had been much alike, the sleek and dynamic Boy Wonders of 1894 and 1940, but they had aged differently, Kane becoming a shambling, bullet-headed mammoth, shunned by the rest of the tribe, while Welles buried himself in beard, bloat and B-movies, squandering his theatrical reputation on cameo appearances and cheap magic tricks. It all started with American, the dream movie, to combine fiction and documentary in unprecedented ways. The footage had never even been edited together, but still American, the masterpiece that never was, cast its shadow over all Welles’s subsequent, tidily completed but lesser-than-expected, works: The Ambersons, Heart of Darkness, Don Quixote, The Trial. If American had been finished, things would have been different. Welles would have been greater than Ford, than Hawks, than Hitchcock. Than Eisenstein, than Murnau, than Flaherty . .