The Best New Horror 3

by Stephen Jones

  The view couldn’t be appreciated today, not even from the attic window. Fog pooled above the valley floor, suspended from the hills like a sagging spider-web. God, but it was a perfect place for stories. Maybe Pa had been thinking too small when he bought the Nash. Maybe we should have bid on the house.

  The idea gnawed at me. For the second time in so many hours, I felt disappointment in someone I’d admired.

  A car door slammed in the distance. I came across the sagging porch and spotted a glowing fire in the east orchard, a speck of orange nestled in a foggy blanket.

  A spider lurked among the fruit trees. I was sure of it. A big red spider with an engine of bone and seats of human flesh, or so the stories told. And somewhere near the spider, two little flies who believed.

  I reached into my pocket, my fingers closing on five-o’clock-shadow stubble and bristly eyebrows. Starting down the muddy path that descended to the east orchard, I slipped the undertaker’s face over my own.

  No fruit hung from the gnarled branches. It was the wrong season. The oranges had fallen unpicked, and I had to watch my step, weaving a path through clumps of shriveled black fruit that reminded me of the rubber shrunken heads that hung in the Castle of Horrors.

  I moved fast, noisily, waiting to be noticed.

  The Mink Lady stood on the other side of the fire, daintily prodding Larry’s clothes into the flames with a long stick. The Death Car was parked behind her; there was no sign of Perry Martin. A steamy sizzle rose from the blaze. Maybe the wood was green. Or maybe it was Larry’s blood burning.

  She tossed Larry’s boots into the flames. Oily smoke curled from the rubber soles; her eyes followed it up and she noticed me. “What are you doing here?” she asked, blinking as the smoke turned and wafted into her face.

  I stopped short, safe in the fog. “Where’s the suitcase?” I asked.

  Her answer came fast. “What suitcase? What are you talking about?”

  Beneath her father’s face, I smiled. They were two of a kind, this pair; she knew nothing more of his activities than he’d known of hers.

  Perry Martin came around the Death Car, a shovel gripped in his right hand. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Who are you talking to?”

  “Perry, it’s my daddy.”

  They stared at me, cringing like guilty children. Daddy wasn’t supposed to know about his little girl and Perry-the-stud, let alone these goings on.

  I waited for them to make a move. The fire crackled and hissed. Rubber dripped from Larry’s boots; the laces burned like fuses. I daubed my left eye with a handkerchief. For now, I would stay in character.

  She was the first to speak. “We have to tell him, Perry.”

  “No!”

  “But he can help us, and I promise he won’t tell.”

  I nodded.

  A sheepish smile spread across Perry’s face. He dropped the shovel and came through the smoke, stories pouring from his mouth. “It was a fair fight,” he lied. “The guy was asking for it. He jumped me at the carnival— ”

  Fair. Yes. Larry was drunk. That made it fair.

  “—really thought that he was hot shit— ”

  Fair. Fair to use your little whore to lure him into town.

  “It was kind of an honor thing. I wanted to show him that— ”

  Fair to kill him in his own car, with his pants down around his ankles.

  “—and strangers just can’t walk into Fiddler and act like they own the place. We live here. We own it.”

  I sucked a deep, clean breath through the undertaker’s lips. My picture of Larry’s death wasn’t exaggeration. It wasn’t imagination. It was the way it must have happened.

  It was the death of a gawker.

  Perry stopped short. He looked at my face, closely.

  “Jesus,” he whispered. “You’re a fuckin’ dead man.”

  I stared at his terrified expression, realizing that revenge was a grinny thing. A gawker’s itch. It couldn’t be bothered with.

  All the hate spilled out of me then. The shoulder seams of the undertaker’s suit popped as my open palms hit Perry’s chest; he whuffed a sharp exhalation and tripped into the fire.

  The Mink Lady screamed. “Daddy! You’re crazy!”

  “I’m dead,” I corrected.

  Perry rolled away from the flames. I jumped over him and grabbed the shovel. Swinging hard, I belted him between his shoulderblades. He cried out and tried to rise, but my second blow landed lower, in a soft place, and Perry dropped, screaming something about his kidneys.

  The Mink Lady slapped me and I pulled her close. I let her see my mask, and then I took it off and showed her who I was. She tried a half-hearted lie but gave it up the first time I shook my head. When I opened the trunk, I didn’t have to tell her to climb inside.

  Perry wasn’t in a chatting mood, but his words were heartfelt. Between the fuck you’s and the screw you’s he told me a lot about the Martin family. Unfortunately, he didn’t have much respect for his father, let alone any involvement in the family business, and he certainly didn’t know anything about Fort Knox.

  Soon it dawned on Perry that I was interested in his old man. His eyes glimmered with hope. I guess he figured that he might get out of this alive.

  Perry Martin was that stupid.

  I hit him in the face until he was unconscious. He came to in the hole he’d been digging, face to face with Larry’s naked corpse. He begged me to let him out, but a wave of the shovel told him that I wasn’t having any of it. He still had his hunting knife, but he had no ideas about using it on me. I had to beg him to unsheathe it, and even then he thought I was trying to trick him.

  He was right, of course. I made up a story about voodoo rites, rattling on about zombies in New Orleans. Then I told him the truth about his father and Fort Knox, playing up the money angle. I explained that we were going to be partners, at least for a while.

  “Man, you’re crazy,” he said, but he did as he was told, and, truthfully, I believe he enjoyed the assignment I gave him.

  I warmed my hands over the fire while Perry worked, wishing that I had his letterman’s jacket. But it was up the hill, neatly folded on the Caddy’s front seat, an expressionless Frankenstein mask in its pocket. Then I thought about Larry’s dead face, lips so straight, ungrinning, looking like me, or at least the part of me that worried and scraped by, knowing that there was something better to be had from life. I wondered if his wearing that expression meant that Larry finally understood me. I hoped so. I hoped that in death my brother had lost the grinny madness that always held him back.

  Held us back.

  When the fire died down, I climbed into the Death Car and turned on the heater. Down in the hole, Perry was about half finished with the task I’d given him. In the trunk, the Mink Lady shifted, trying to get comfortable.

  I found a fifth of bourbon in the glove compartment. There was a box of fishhooks, too; and a Mickey Spillane novel that Larry had been reading.

  The book was called I, the Jury. I took a drink and turned to page one.

  Three hours later, I cut through Caul’s orange grove and worked my way back to the highway. If anything, the fog was thicker now, and I sniffed gas fumes long before I spotted the service station. Fact is, I nearly bumped into the attendant, a bent little man who smelled of Pennzoil.

  “Got a pay phone?” I asked.

  He pointed. I didn’t like the way he looked at me. I didn’t like his eyes.

  “Where’s yer car?”

  “I don’t need gas. I need some change . . . I’ve only got a five.”

  He grunted; you’d think I’d asked him for the moon. Then he disappeared into the fog and returned with a greasy handful of bills and coins. “S’pose you want me to dial yer number for ya, too,” he said.

  I turned away, cringing as if I’d been slapped.

  “Willie Martin,” the voice said.

  “It’s me, Willie. It’s Hank Caul.”

  A barking laugh. “Oh, sure.
Hank Caul. You just dig yourself out of the grave, Hank? You gonna move into town, or are you gonna spruce up the old homestead?”

  “I’ve got Perry. I’ve got your son, sheriff.”

  “Now wait one damn min— ”

  “I’m done waiting, sheriff. I guess I don’t have to tell you what you did the other night made me pretty mad. Pretending to sell my skin and all, I mean. Unless you bring me the money you stole, I’m going to carve your little Perry like a Halloween pumpkin.”

  “Listen to me, asshole. This is one of you carny assholes, isn’t it? If you hurt my boy you’re as good as dead.”

  “This is Hank Caul. I’m already dead, sheriff. And I do have your boy.”

  Silence.

  “Okay, then, where do we stand?”

  “Jed’s Gas out on 198. Be there at midnight, alone, with the money. Wait for a sign.”

  “No soap. Let’s do this thing right now.”

  “Midnight, Willie. One minute early and it’s pumpkin-carving time. I won’t be strong enough until midnight. I need the moonlight.”

  I looked into the fog, waiting for an answer. Pure bullshit, that moonlight stuff, but I could feel the gawker in him puzzling over it.

  “Okay. Midnight.”

  He was lying. I could almost see him reaching for his car keys.

  “You’d better be smart, sheriff. You’d better know that I mean what I say.”

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t lie, Willie. We’ve had enough of that between us, you and me. If you really want to do something right now, visit your local undertaker. You’ll see just how serious I am.”

  A deep breath. Then, “You killed him?”

  “I taught him what happens to people who fuck with my legend,” I said, and hung up before Willie Martin could reply.

  The attendant overheard the whole conversation. I palmed Perry’s knife and shouldered out of the booth. Before the old man knew what hit him, the blade slipped between his jawbone and the flesh of his left cheek.

  He didn’t scream. He grunted. And then he pulled away, one eye dancing.

  “You crazy sonofabitch,” he said.

  His eyes. The right one staring at me. The left one dead, bloody.

  My legs went to jelly. Pa’s eyes, shining with loathing.

  He held his slashed mask together with his right hand; blood coursed from the meaty wound beneath. I was about to apologize when a knife appeared in his left hand. “C’mon,” he said. “If you got any balls, that is. No one robs Jed Davis.”

  So that was the way he planned it—a sucker play, and he expected me to fall for it like a gawker in the Castle of Horrors. Pathetic.

  I shook my head. “You should have trusted me, Pa. I could have handled it.” I pulled the undertaker’s face out of my pocket and threw it on the ground. “You’ve got no secrets from me, so you can forget the act. It’s small potatoes, just the kind of thing that’s been holding us back all these years.”

  He stared at the face on the oily pavement and didn’t say a word.

  “It’s the money, isn’t it, Pa? That’s all you want, only you don’t want to share it with your own flesh-and-blood anymore.”

  “No,” the old man said, waving his knife. “You’re crazy. You ain’t my son. Any money around here is mine.”

  “Wrong, Pa. Larry lost the car, but you lost the money. But what’s worse is you lied. All that what-one-does-both-do stuff. Pure crap. Larry and I were different, Pa. We really were.” I inched forward. “Larry was always a gawker. That was his great weakness, and he died for it.” I tossed the knife from right hand to left. “Now you’re a gawker, too.” My hand tightened around the bone hilt. “That’s the truth, Pa. Any way you slice it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” he said, backing into a tire rack. “You’re nuts!”

  “Maybe, but at least I never bought a suitcase full of rubber. I’m not a gawker, Pa. I never will be. I’m thinking big now. Big time. Big stories. I’m thinking we should have bought Hank Caul’s house.”

  He nearly deflated. For just a moment he looked like a six-bit-a-head carny operator who’d just seen a profit sheet from Disneyland. I came at him then, almost sorry because he might have been something once. If he hadn’t believed the stories, he might have made us rich. But he’d let a small-town sheriff take him for a ride, and he’d blown our stake.

  And he’d kept me down for a damn long time.

  I kicked the knife out of his hand.

  His good eye danced, electric with fear.

  “Take anything you want. There’s money in the register.”

  I kept my head. I didn’t want to get grinny. “Six bits is what I charge,” I said, my voice strong and even. “Six bits a ticket. You know that, Pa.”

  “You gotta understand that I ain’t your— ”

  Blood geysered into the air as I worked the knife through the old man’s mask and face, slicing so fast that I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.

  At midnight I torched the Caddy. A great plume of orange fire roared into the sky, and I could only imagine the look on Willie Martin’s face as he watched from Jed’s Gas down in the valley.

  As I climbed the stairs I heard Perry screaming about the abuse he was taking as my partner, but his protest had all the half-hearted enthusiasm of a cranky child fighting bedtime. When he finally stopped whining, I opened the closet door. He’d finished off the bourbon just like I’d hoped—I’d left one of his hands untied and the fifth in his pocket—and then he’d been too drunk to try to escape. He hadn’t even thought to break the bottle and cut the ropes.

  The ropes were tangled and the closet was dark, so to speed things up I broke apart the clothes rods and slipped the wood through the loops, ordering Perry to twist this way and that. When he was free, I fastened the manacles around his wrists and steered him out of the closet. Even drunk, he noticed the Frankenstein mask lying on the floor; light from the Caddy fire spilled through the moth-eaten drapes and swirled around it, orange light given physical presence by dust motes we’d kicked alive.

  “Boy, Frankie’s face looks so real,” Perry said. “I bet it’d scare fucking Boris Karloff!”

  I agreed. “Do you think it will scare your old man?”

  Perry nodded vigorously, rattling his chains like the ghost of Christmas Past. I reminded him of the money we were going to make and made him repeat the plan that I had no intention of following. Then I lit a candle and burned a lock of Larry’s hair, mumbling a phony voodoo chant for effect.

  Perry swayed back and forth, buying the whole routine.

  I slid the mask over his head.

  Jerked the rubber bolts from side to side.

  Two dozen fishhooks bit home.

  I could barely hear him over Perry’s screams, but I recognized the shouting voice as the one I’d heard over the telephone at Jed’s Gas. “Frank McSwain!” he yelled. “That is your name, isn’t it? This is Willie Martin. It’s time to deal.”

  Perry writhed on the dusty floor. I stepped over him and broke the windowpane with my elbow, the leather sleeve of Perry’s jacket protecting my arm.

  I peered through the torn drapes. Willie Martin stood below in the light of the Caddy fire—Perry with twenty pounds and twenty years. An old man stood next to him. I got a brief look at his face, and then both men disappeared behind a cloud of smoke.

  “I’ve got your father down here, McSwain. Maybe we can work out a trade.”

  I leaned into the shadows, biting back laughter. So Willie Martin wasn’t a gawker after all. No, he was a showman, but his little drama was wasted on me—I’d left Pa dead and faceless in an orchard of rubber shrunken heads, and this old geezer didn’t even have a good mask.

  “Frank?” the old guy called. “Larry, are you up there too? Listen, boys, they got us dead to rights, but they’ll let us live if you turn over the kid.”

  I had to hand it to the sheriff. The old guy’s voice was good. I pulled Perry to his fee
t, shoved him to the window, then yanked him away.

  “Jesus, boys,” the old guy in the mask growled. “This ain’t the spook show. Use your brains. C’mon down or I’m a goner.”

  I flicked Perry’s cigarette lighter and touched the flame to the drape.

  The rest happened too fast. Fire crawled up the drape and skittered across dry wallpaper, reaching for the ceiling. I grabbed the steel chain and pulled Perry to his feet. Shouts rang out below. The front door banged open as I came down the stairs, dragging Perry behind me. A flashlight beam zigzagged across the sheet-shrouded furniture and froze on me, a tight circle illumimating the scowling Spartan on my jacket. I yanked the steel chain, spinning Perry into the light.

  The cold beam haloed his blood-drenched mask.

  A gun barrel sparked.

  The mask sank away, into the dark.

  Perry hit the floor.

  Everything stopped.

  The flashlight beam lingered on Perry for a moment, then cut to me.

  I grinned at the man who’d turned my Pa into a gawker.

  “No,” Willie Martin whispered. “Jesus, no.”

  His gun came up but Perry’s knife had already left my hand. It caught the sheriff just under the right collarbone; he staggered backward. I wrestled the gun out of his hand, pushing him toward his son’s corpse.

  Then I left him there, alone and staring.

  The deputies were slow, and that was good, because Willie Martin’s gun was almost empty. I shot three of them. If there were others, they disappeared into the fog.

  The old man with the Pa mask couldn’t run. He was shot up pretty bad, but he wasn’t dead yet. Still, he wouldn’t tell me where Fort Knox was, and he kept to his Pa act the whole time. I kind of admired him for that—somehow it made up for the things I’d lost, including Fort Knox. I helped him into the back of Willie Martin’s patrol car and left him there with the heater running.