The Best New Horror 3

by Stephen Jones

  The wind blew hard and constantly, and the cold lay upon the land. The springs seemed all too short, the summers increasingly parching. The autumns became as arid as their marriage bed.

  The winters savaged them.

  Of course I love her. Logan stared at the outside of the kitchen door until the wind nearly rocked him off balance. He clutched at the firewood and cradled it close to the warmth of his body. Of course.

  He reached out with a stick of pine and tapped on the door, knocked harder, finally beat on the slab fiercely until the dark door became an oblong of light and heat. Opal stood in the doorway staring at him for what seemed a long time. Then she stepped back and beckoned him enter.

  Logan could not feel his fingers or toes.

  “Doesn’t look good,” said Opal.

  Logan protested.

  His wife sat him down in the ladder-back chair by the kitchen stove. She shoved two of the sticks he’d brought in with him into the stove, then put on a pan of water to heat. “Get them off, and right now,” she mumbled, grabbing the boots in question, one at a time, and wrestling them off his feet. “How do they feel?” she said, peeling the socks loose. They stank.

  “Can’t rightly feel nothing at all.”

  “Fingers too?”

  “Same thing,” Logan said.

  “Give them here.” Opal took his right hand between her own two hands and rubbed. At first there was no sensation. Then Logan saw the gray flesh begin to grow pink, then glow a flushed red. Opal rubbed his left hand with the same result. Steam was beginning to rise from the pan on the stove. The woman set it down on the floor and put Logan’s feet in the water. Sensation was slow in coming, but eventually it did arrive.

  Finally, Opal stood from her ministrations and said, “You wait right here.”

  “Wasn’t going nowhere.” Logan didn’t crack a smile. Needles of pain lanced through his fingers and toes.

  His wife put on his coat, slipped on her own gloves. “Won’t be gone but a few minutes,” she said. She slipped out the kitchen door, seemingly opening it so narrowly that only a small amount of snow sheeted in. Opal was a skinny woman.

  She told the truth. She was not gone long. When she returned, Opal dropped the large armload of cut wood on the floor by the stove, took a few deep breaths of warm air, then turned and headed out the door again. She brought back two more loads of firewood.

  “That ought to be enough,” said Logan after the third trip. “It will get us through tonight. You’d better stop, or pretty soon I’ll be out looking for your frozen carcass in the blizzard.”

  Opal surveyed the pile of pine splits. Snow and ice had melted in a shallow puddle around the wood. “Reckon you’re right.” She turned toward him. “Ready for some coffee?”

  Logan nodded. Opal slipped another piece of wood into the stove and slid the coffee pot over the hottest iron lid. It was still the breakfast brew. What she finally poured into her husband’s cup was black as coal and smelled vile. Logan hunched over the coffee until it was cool enough to sip.

  Opal scraped a patch of frost off the kitchen window-glass and stared out at the constant snow. “You know something,” she said, “you lose your fingers or your feet, and you’ll have the makings of a mighty poor dryland farmer.”

  “Rancher,” he corrected automatically. “We’re ranchers now.”

  “Rancher,” she said. “No matter. We’d do poorly.”

  “So?”

  “Maybe,” Opal continued slowly, “it’s time we thought about moving on to the Wasatch Valley over there in Utah, or maybe even go clear on out to California.” She paused. It was a long speech for her.

  Howling, the wind whipped around the eaves of the small house.

  “So you think we should go?” said Logan. “And save my hands, my toes?”

  She stared back at him mutely.

  “Or perhaps you feel if I lose those limbs, we’ll have to leave the Shirley Basin.”

  “That’s not what I said.” Opal’s eyes seemed for a moment to gleam the milky white of their namesake. Then they were blue again. The wind’s howl rose in pitch and volume.

  Logan felt suddenly obstinate. “If we don’t live here,” he said, “we will die here.”

  The wind screamed.

  Logan didn’t know from where the idea had come to him, or, indeed, when it had come. Maybe it had always been there. He listened as the wind keened wildly and the snow rattled against the walls, the shake roof, the frost-blinded windowpanes.

  He had picked up a cold from his sojourn out to the barn and back. His nose ran continually now; the rag he used as a handkerchief had grown sodden. The wracking sneezes were the worst, though.

  And every time, Opal smiled thinly, sympathetically, and said, “Company’s coming.”

  If company was indeed coming, it would not be for a while yet. The storm had continued through the afternoon and into the evening. In the lantern light, his father’s watch said that the time was past midnight. The wind did not abate. The shrieking was like the red-hot prickles he had felt earlier when his fingers and toes defrosted. The sound entered his head and stayed there, even when the wind varied its pitch.

  He could not sleep.

  Logan watched his wife slumber. Opal’s gentle snores indicated she was able to ignore the blizzard and sleep.

  Unless—The thought came to him and lodged in his head like a straw driven by a tornado. Unless she was pretending.

  Why would Opal pretend such a thing?

  Logan puzzled over that a long time, almost until his concentration on the problem had brought him close to uneasy sleep. But he was brought up short by the realization: Opal could not possibly be sleeping. The storm forbade that. She must be pretending in order to fool him, and she was fooling Logan so that he would not know what she truly felt and thought.

  He watched her for the remainder of the long night. He stared at Opal, waiting for his wife to make the slightest mistake. He knew she would trip herself up sooner or later. All he had to do was to be patient.

  His patience was inexhaustible as the hours ticked away and some distant dawn approached invisibly.

  One mistake and he would have her.

  The wind screamed triumphantly.

  It happened after breakfast.

  Opal had fixed a platter of flapjacks, with a plate of salted beef on the side. She had also brewed a fresh pot of coffee that tasted slightly better than yesterday’s preparation.

  The taste of the food almost allayed Logan’s suspicions.

  The knife-edges of wind in his head kept him from hearing most of Opal’s slender pronouncements as the morning wore on with no apparent respite from the storm. This portion of Wyoming still reeled.

  After breakfast, Logan pushed back from the table and said, “I’ll be getting some wood now.”

  Opal nodded, fixed him for a moment with her alien and intense look, and said, “Will you take that out?” She gestured toward the bucket of scraps and trash.

  Logan remembered the previous day when he had had to manage both the empty bucket and the wood. He recalled what had happened to fingers and toes. He could walk today, and he could touch things.

  He knew suddenly that what Opal really wanted was for him no longer to be able to do those things. With no fingers or toes, perhaps even without feet or hands, then they would have to move on. They would be obliged to move to a more temperate place, some foolish golden paradise as California was reputed to be, a heaven on earth where oranges and other fruit would be free for the plucking from the tree.

  But at what cost to his soul?

  The wind—

  “All right,” said Logan. “I will take it out.”

  And he did. He did it carefully and quietly and without argument, so that she would suspect nothing.

  And then he brought back three loads of wood from the barn, one after another, the painful product of following the rope back and forth as ice crystals flayed the exposed flesh of his face.

  “
That’s enough for now.”

  Opal smiled agreement. “I will get some more food stocks from the cellar.” She put on her cold-weather clothing.

  The wind—

  Logan got the door for his wife. He braced his legs and held the back door open for her. A wind gust exposed the length of her to his sight; then the snow closed in and she was gone.

  Her husband glanced at the thermometer. There was no mercury in the gauge. The bulb had shattered. It could never be colder than now.

  Logan didn’t even think about what he was doing. He looked down at the three ropes fastened to the porch. It was far too cold to fiddle with the ice-encrusted knots. He took the clasp knife from his pocket and unfolded the blade. Then he sawed at the right-hand rope. He didn’t hesitate when the final strands began to ravel. He sliced across them with the knife. Tension whipped the free end of the rope into the storm.

  It was gone.

  The man chopped at the center rope, the one that led to the outhouse. He could make do for the duration of the storm. It was what the bucket really was for. Cut through, this rope also vanished in the snow.

  Logan hesitated, then sawed at the remaining rope that could guide him to the barn. The wood was there, and so was Indian, but the storm surely could not last another full day and night. He would not need the barn.

  The third rope parted, strand by strand, and was abruptly gone.

  The wind laughed as Logan retreated into the kitchen and shut the door. He paused a moment, then slid home the bolt that locked it.

  Logan spent much of the day reading old issues of the Laramie Daily Boomerang. He discovered himself always returning to the issue detailing Roald Amundsen’s arduous conquest of the Southern Pole. The entire account fascinated him.

  But he was equally intrigued by the subsidiary story detailing other polar expeditions. Logan had long been fascinated by the Englishman, Robert Falcon Scott, who had led a successful scouting expedition to the ice pack in 1900, twelve years before. There had been speculation that Scott might become the first man to trek to the South Pole. The Norwegian had apparently beaten him to that goal.

  “At least Scott is a white man,” muttered Logan. But then, it occurred to him, so was Amundsen.

  Logan wondered how Scott might feel, finding out that he had been beaten out by a longtime rival. Would it be like death?

  The light had begun to fail. Logan looked around him.

  Was twilight falling, the storm abating? He turned up the wick of the lamp, but the dark continued to encroach.

  Maybe he was just out of kerosene.

  Logan shook his head. He had felt himself begin to drift, nodding, perhaps beginning to catch up to the sleep that had eluded him for so long.

  Someone knocked at the back door.

  Logan jerked awake.

  He heard another knock. It was a solid rapping sound, discernible above the wind.

  Logan got up from the chair and tentatively started to cross the kitchen. He didn’t have to unbolt the door, after all. If that was Opal still out there . . . But it couldn’t be. He had cut the ropes hours before.

  He didn’t have to unlock the door.

  The door opened anyway.

  Logan saw the hand appear through the snow blowing into the opening between the door and jamb. The fingers were slender and gray, curving around the door’s edge. The wrist extended into the kitchen, the lower arm—

  The man hit the door with his shoulder, slamming it shut with all the hysterical strength he could muster.

  Shut.

  Sheared off below the elbow, the wrist and hand tumbled to the plank floor. The fingers shattered with the sound of tinkling crystal. Bright shards of icy flesh scattered across the floor like broken glass.

  Still hunched against the door, Logan stared down at the floor. The lamplight still flickered, but he could see ruby fragments melting.

  The ice-jewels became drops of blood.

  The light on the bits of flesh and bone and blood transfixed him, he didn’t know for how long.

  And when Logan came back to himself, still wedged against the door, there was no blood on the floor. There was nothing.

  And the door was still locked.

  From outside, the wind said everything. But the wind was inside now too.

  Dear Lord, he wanted to sleep.

  Logan thought it was morning. He was not sure because the watch had stopped during the night. At the time the door had been flung open and the hand thrust inside . . . No, because he had forgotten to wind it.

  He levered himself upright. He had been sitting on the floor beside the door. His muscles were cramped, his limbs stiff and sore.

  The man realized the fire in the kitchen stove had gone out. He clumsily stuffed wood into the grate, picked up some of the shavings used for tinder, tried to light them with the sulfur match that lay on the table. The match went out without passing on its flame.

  Logan couldn’t find another match. There must another one somewhere. There must be an entire box.

  After a while he gave up looking and hauled a comforter from the bed across the room. He draped it around his shoulders and sat down in the ladder-back chair. He needed to think for a moment. The wind didn’t allow him to do that.

  Logan realized that the kerosene lamp was out, yet he could still see. A gray light filtered dimly through the window.

  Was the blizzard over?

  He didn’t feel any warmer with the realization. He didn’t feel much of anything at all. His arms and legs felt much as they had upon completing that trip from the barn days before when he had gotten his frostbite. Had it been days?

  Logan wasn’t sure.

  But he was increasingly certain that the storm was abating.

  The wind still shrilled, but the sound of snow raking the side of the house was no longer there. Yes, the blizzard had dwindled.

  That meant he was no longer trapped. That meant people could come to the house.

  That meant—

  Company’s coming.

  His nose tickled.

  Logan tried to get up from the chair, could not, sank resignedly.

  “Opal— ” he said. He could say no more.

  He began to sneeze uncontrollably.

  NANCY A. COLLINS

  Raymond

  NANCY COLLINS won the Horror Writers of America Bram Stoker Award for her first novel, Sunglasses After Dark (1988) and the British Fantasy Society’s Icarus Award for Best Newcomer.

  Born in rural Arkansas, she moved to New Orleans in 1982 and currently lives in New York City with underground film-maker/musician Joe Christ. Her subsequent novels include Tempter and In the Blood, and her short fiction has appeared in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies, such as Cemetery Dance, Pulphouse, Midnight Graffiti, There Won’t Be War and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourth Annual Collection. She is also the current writer for DC Comics’ Swamp Thing series.

  Like much of Collins’ fiction, “Raymond” takes a familiar horror icon—in this case the werewolf—and stands it on its head.

  I REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME I saw Raymond Fleuris.

  It was during Mrs Harper’s seventh-grade homeroom; I was staring out the window at the parking lot that fronted the school. There wasn’t anything happening in the parking lot, but it seemed a hell of a lot more interesting than Old Lady Harper rattling on about long division. That’s when I saw the truck.

  Beat-up old trucks are not what you’d call unusual in Choctaw County, but this had to be the shittiest excuse for a motor vehicle ever to roll the streets of Seven Devils, Arkansas. The bed overflowed with pieces of junk lumber, paint cans, and rolls of rusty chicken wire. The chassis was scabby with rust. It rode close to the ground, bouncing vigorously with every pothole. The front bumper was connected to the fender by a length of baling wire, spit, and a prayer.

  I watched as the truck pulled up next to the principal’s sedan and the driver crawled out from behind the wheel.

  My first impr
ession was that of a mountain wearing overalls. He was massive. Fat jiggled on every part of his body. Thick rolls of it pooled around his waist, straining his shirt to the breaking point. The heavy jowls framing his face made him look like a foul-tempered bulldog. He was big and fat, but it was mean fat; no one in their right mind would have ever mistaken him for jolly.

  The driver lumbered around the front of the truck, pausing to pull a dirty bandanna out of his back pocket and mop his forehead. He motioned irritably to someone seated on the passenger’s side, then jerked the door open. I was surprised it didn’t come off in his hand. His face was turning red as he yelled at whoever was in the passenger’s seat.

  After a long minute, a boy climbed out of the truck and stood next to the ruddy-faced mountain of meat.

  Normally I wouldn’t have spared the Fleurises a second look. Except that Raymond’s head was swaddled in a turban of sterile gauze and surgical tape and his hands were covered by a pair of old canvas gloves, secured at the wrists with string.

  Now that was interesting.

  Raymond was small and severely underweight. His eyes had grayish-yellow smears under them that made it look like he was perpetually recovering from a pair of shiners. His skin was pale and reminded me of the waxed paper my mama wrapped my sandwiches in.

  Someone, probably his mama, had made an effort to clean and press his bib overalls and what was probably his only shirt. No doubt she’d hoped Raymond would make a good impression on his first day at school. No such luck. His clothes looked like socks on a rooster.

  By the time the lunch bell rang, everybody knew about the new kid. Gossip runs fast in junior high, and by the end of recess, there were a half-dozen accounts of Raymond Fleuris’s origins floating about.

  Some said he’d been in a car wreck and thrown through the windshield. Others said the doctors up at the State Hospital did some kind of surgery to cure him of violent fits. Chucky Donothan speculated that he’d had some kind of craziness-tumor cut out. Whatever the reason for the head bandages and the gloves, it made Raymond Fleuris, at least for the space of a few days, exotic and different. And that means nothing but trouble when you’re in junior high.