The Best New Horror 3

by Stephen Jones

  The post office had no forwarding address.

  He was about to give up, when he remembered the real estate company on the sign.

  “We don’t give out that kind of information,” a suspicious woman told him over a cluttered desk.

  Don’t you recognize me? he thought. Monday through Friday at two o’clock, the most popular show in its time slot? But judging by the mound of papers in front of her, the realtor did not have time to watch afternoon television. Or perhaps she did and mistook him for Madsen, the despicable character he portrayed. Could that be it?

  “I’m their son,” he explained.

  The way he delivered the line he had trouble believing it himself. Even his driver’s license would not prove it. He had changed his name years ago.

  “Please,” he said, allowing his voice to break with a hint of desperation.

  “Well,” she said, “there is a box number. So we can send them the escrow papers. That’s all I have. It’s the way they wanted it. I’m sorry . . .”

  The box number turned out to be a mail drop in Santa Maria that shared space with a parcel delivery service and an instant-printing franchise.

  The clerk there was no help. The man refused even to admit that he had a list of names and addresses for those who rented his postal boxes. It was not hard to understand. The one thing such a business had to sell its customers was anonymity.

  What else was there to do? He was not ready to quit. It was Saturday and he did not have to be at the studio. He had told Claire he would meet her after the engagement shower tonight, but that was still hours away.

  If he did not find them today, what then? A letter? He had come out to tell them the good news in person. They would want to meet his fiancée and her family. There were details to be worked out—the reception, the guest list. He could have his secretary do it all. But his parents deserved to be involved. He owed them that much. He had waited too long already, and the wedding date was closing fast.

  “Excuse me,” he said again to the man at the counter.

  The clerk finished loading a ream of bond paper into the photocopy machine.

  “Something else I can do for you?”

  “Listen.” He felt like a spy attempting to buy secrets behind enemy lines. He took another look at the clerk, the distracted eyes that bulged from the sharp scent of solvent, the ink-stained fingers. “I’ll make you an offer. You don’t have to tell me anything.”

  “Right,” said the clerk, “I don’t.”

  “All you have to do is take a break.” He reached for his wallet. “While you’re away, let’s say somebody slips behind the counter and gets a peek at your files. By the time you come back I’m gone. You didn’t see a thing. How does that sound?”

  He took out a twenty and held it casually between two fingers.

  “Sounds like you’re a cop.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Bill collector, then.” The clerk’s eyes fixed on him. “Are you skip tracing?”

  “That’s right.” He lowered his voice as an old man from the laundromat next door entered and headed for the locked mail compartments, key in hand. He fished out another twenty. “I’m skip tracing. Now can you help me? Or do I get a court order? That would be a lot of trouble. For both of us.”

  “Then I guess you’ll have to get your court order,” said the clerk, his back straight, his face steely. “It’s hard enough to make a decent living without your kind.”

  Frustrated, he leaned across the counter. “Okay, I’m not a bill collector. I already told you—I’m looking for my folks. I don’t know where they live.”

  “How come you don’t know a thing like that?”

  “They moved.”

  “Sure.”

  It was no use. He put the money away, defeated.

  As he made for the door he passed the old man with the laundry bag, who was fumbling with his letters and relocking his box, one of hundreds of numbered metal compartments set into the wall.

  He stopped and faced the clerk again.

  “I’ll wait, then,” he said defiantly. “They have to come in to pick up their mail sooner or later.”

  The clerk lumbered out from behind the counter. “I don’t want you in here. I’ve seen you before, hanging around.”

  “You’ve never seen me in here.” You’re confused, he thought, like everybody else. I’m not Madsen. “I’m an actor, for God’s sake. It’s only a part.”

  “My son was an actor,” said the old man.

  He was startled by the voice. He looked at the balding head, the stooped posture, the gray skin. It was difficult to believe that anyone could have changed so much.

  “Dad?” he said.

  “I wouldn’t have recognized you, son.”

  “Never in a million years,” said his mother.

  “No?” He forced a laugh. He had grown the beard three or four years ago, for the show. Didn’t they remember?

  “Does it itch?” asked his father.

  “A little. I guess I don’t notice it anymore.” He cracked his knuckles and sat back in the Winnebago, then leaned forward again. At his spine was his dad’s laundry bag, a pillowcase spilling clothes yet to be folded, socks and underwear and shirts.

  “Let me move that for you,” said his mother.

  “It’s all right,” he said.

  “I used to hang everything up before it wrinkled,” she explained. “But we can’t do that now. The laundromat is seven blocks, and there’s never a place for the RV . . .”

  “Don’t they let you use the washer and dryer?” He parted the curtains at the back of the motor home’s kitchenette, pointing at the apartment complex adjoining the lot where they were parked. “After all, you’re paying for this space.”

  “Oh, we’re not renting,” said his mother. “You see, the nice couple who manage the building are friends of ours. We don’t even have a proper address.”

  “Retired folks,” added his father with a wink. “Like us.”

  “And there are families with children who need clean clothes every day . . .”

  “They can’t be that nice,” he said. “Jesus, it would be the least they could do.”

  He saw his mother avert her eyes. I shouldn’t have taken the Lord’s name in vain, he thought. Language, young man, he remembered her saying. He had said much worse when he was a teenager, but those three words from her were always enough; the words, and the catch in her voice, the disappointment. He was filled with regret. He wanted to reach out and take her hands.

  He cleared his throat.

  “You must be hungry,” she said.

  “Not really.” How ungrateful that must sound. “Unless you are.” Then he remembered Claire. “What time’s it getting to be?”

  “You’ll stay?” said his mother.

  He checked his watch.

  “Let me take you out to dinner,” he said.

  “Oh, no. The decent places are all so expensive . . .”

  “Even with our seniors’ discount,” his father said.

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s my treat.”

  “We couldn’t let you do that,” said his mother. “We know how hard it’s been.”

  “What do you mean? I can afford it.”

  His mother smiled indulgently.

  “Don’t you believe me?” he said. “Do you know how much they’re paying me every week?”

  “You have a regular job, then?”

  He almost laughed. “Well, I don’t know if you can call it that, but— ”

  “It’s all right,” said his father.

  “What is?”

  He did not understand. Unless they, too, had him confused with the character he played on “As the World Ends.” It was not possible. Was it?

  “You don’t believe that soap opera, do you?”

  Then he saw the portable television set, its antenna poking out between the cardboard cartons above the trundle bed. It was dusty with disuse. He was relieved, until he realized that they d
id not even know about the show.

  “It must have been hard,” his father said, “after you and Carol broke up.”

  His mother leaned closer. “She was never really one of us, you know.”

  He blinked. “Carol?” The girl he had gone with in high school. “That was—a long time ago.”

  “You had to find out for yourself,” said his father. “I know how it is.”

  “I could fix something to eat,” said his mother.

  “Later.” I’ll go out and pick up some food, he thought. Soon. Time was running out. Like irregular rows of stones, the tops of parked cars cast lengthening shadows across the apartment complex lot; the motor home’s shadow was the longest, extending to the side of the building itself, like the adumbration of something long forgotten whose presence remained inescapable. “Just some coffee for now,” he said. “If it’s not too much trouble.”

  His mother busied herself with plastic cups and spoons, heating water on the mini-stove. Above the hissing of a propane flame he heard children roaming free in the hallways between the nearby apartments, finding their own reckless way, making choices the consequences of which would not be felt for years to come. When she sat down with the coffee, she had a book under her arm.

  “I’ll bet you don’t remember this,” she said.

  “What?”

  Then he recognized the slender volume as his junior high school yearbook.

  “Mama, please,” he said.

  “Just you wait, now . . .”

  He braced himself for yet another look at his infamous full-page portrait as class president, the one with his hair slicked back in the geeky style of the times, his fly partially unzipped for all the world and posterity to see.

  Instead she flipped to the back of the book and the group photos.

  “Here.”

  Each side of the two-page spread contained a pair of homeroom classes. She tapped one of the wide-angle photographs.

  “This one.”

  His mother beamed.

  He scanned the back row of the panorama for his own scrubbed features, centered as always among the tallest in his age group. He did not find it. He checked the caption. Yes, it was his old homeroom, the 7-15’s. Had he been absent that day?

  “Where?”

  She laid a finger near the bottom of the page.

  Next to her fingernail was the front row, made up of the shortest students, mostly boys. The heads of the thirteen-year-olds were no larger than buckshot. How ridiculously young they looked, dressed in jeans with rolled cuffs and shirts picked out for them by their mothers, grinning toothlessly as though it all mattered.

  “I don’t— ”

  She tapped her finger.

  There, at the edge of the first row, one little boy stood apart from the rest. He posed with his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his rumpled, ill-fitting denims, his chin stuck out pugnaciously.

  Somehow, in that part of his mind where such things were recorded forever, he seemed to recall a similar T-shirt with faded stripes, the short sleeves too tight . . .

  But he had never looked like this. His clothes were always pressed. And by then he had already grown to most of his adult height. That was why he had been chosen for the Drama Club, so that he could play older characters.

  “Let me see this,” he said.

  He riffled to the portraits of class officers, found the right page and pressed it flat.

  “There. Remember now, Mom?”

  “What is it you want to . . .? Oh, yes! Wasn’t he the nicest young man? I often wonder what became of him. Maybe if you’d had friends like that . . .”

  He took the book away from her.

  There was the seventh-grade class president, wearing a letterman’s sweater and a world-weary smirk. If you looked closely you could detect the unforgettable half-opened zipper.

  Only it was not his face.

  It was another boy’s.

  “And this one . . .” his mother said.

  She brought out more yearbooks. He recognized the colors of his school, the dates. And yet each told a different story from the one he remembered. A very different story.

  “These books,” he said. “Where did you get them?”

  “I’ve saved them all,” she said. “They’re the only record of the past now.”

  Whose past? According to these he had never been elected class president, had never served on the student council or edited the school newspaper or starred in the senior play. He had never earned the grade point average that kept him at the top of his class.

  “How could you be proud of someone like that?”

  “We are,” said his father.

  “But— ”

  “You’re our only son,” his mother said softly. “You’re all we have.”

  He paced the short distance of the Winnebago’s interior.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You don’t remember the acting scholarship, the trip to New York, the auditions, the jobs? The reviews?” He had sent them copies, hadn’t he? “Then Hollywood and the series, the daytime TV?”

  “That was always your dream, I know,” said his mother. “You would have done those things if you’d had the opportunity. I’m sure of it. I only wish we could have helped you more.”

  “Then what do you remember? When was the last time I came out to see you, for example?”

  “At the old house?” His mother’s hands fidgeted. “Let’s see. It would be just after you and Carol—had that trouble. And you went away. Not that we blame you. She was a worthless piece of fluff.”

  “What else? What about your lives?”

  “Well, after your father’s operation there wasn’t anything left, of course, even with the Medicare, so . . .”

  “So we made the best of it,” said his dad. “The same as you. That’s life.”

  “You didn’t get the checks?” he said. “I told my secretary to mail them out.” I did, he thought, I swear.

  “You would have if you could,” said his mother. “We know that. But now you’re here, and that’s all that matters. We always knew you’d come back.”

  “Do you need a place to stay, son? Just till you get on your feet. There’s always room for one more.”

  “A family has to take care of its own,” said his mother.

  “Or we’re no better than animals,” said his father.

  His legs began to fail him. His head reeled under the low ceiling and his eyes lost focus in the dimness. He groped for the door at his back.

  “Excuse me,” was all he could say before he staggered outside.

  After six rings he gave up. He lowered the phone.

  Just before he let go of the receiver there was a faint click on the other end.

  “Post-Production.”

  He fumbled it back up to his ear. “Marty?”

  “Talk to me.”

  He felt a surge of relief. “Marty, thank God.”

  “Who’s this?”

  A tingle in the pit of his stomach, like the feeling in the middle of the night that wakes you up before you know why.

  “Who do you think?”

  A shuffling on the other end, Marty’s voice fading in and out. “Listen, we’re up to our assholes here, so— ”

  “Put me through to Jack.”

  “Jack’s not here. Who am I speaking to?”

  He was afraid to say his name. What if Marty did not recognize it?

  “Debbie, then. She’s there, isn’t she?”

  “Who?”

  “Debbie Conner.” My assistant, he thought. Or at least that’s the way I remember it.

  “You got the wrong extension. Dial again and— ”

  “Who’s in the booth?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Somebody has to be in the booth! Who’s directing?”

  “There is no director,” said Marty. “We don’t need a director. It’s Saturday—we’re doing sound cues. Bye.”

  The phone went dead.

  He stood
by the pay phone, between Beach Boy’s Chinese Food and Sinbad’s. To the east, new signs broke the skyline like alien coral. American Diner, Chiporama, Frostie . . . all unrecognizable. When had it happened?

  Shaking, he took out another coin.

  He could call his agent. Or his accountant. Or his secretary.

  But not till Monday morning.

  And he could not wait that long.

  There was still Claire . . .

  But what if she did not know him, either? Was he ready to face that?

  Instead he let the receiver slip from his grasp and leafed through the directory.

  Marcos, Morehead, Morel . . .

  Moreland, Carol.

  She was in the book, his old girlfriend. And the address was the same. She was still here. She had never moved.

  He could call her . . .

  When she answered, what would she say? And what would he say to her? That he had come back to make things right? Was that even possible now? What if she remembered a different past, too—what if it really was too late?

  His fingers closed and tore the page out.

  He walked on, feeling the boards creak and begin to give way beneath his feet.

  HELP KEEP YOUR PIER BEAUTIFUL, warned a sign. PLEASE USE RECEPTACLES.

  Without breaking stride he dropped the page into the trash can.

  My first love, he thought. So many years ago. And all this time I’ve told myself I was right to end it. That it was good for both of us to move on, following separate paths. I rationalized that there was more. For me. And for her. I thought she left for the city when I did. I told myself that.

  But she didn’t have the strength.

  Or the recklessness.

  People should look after each other. Or we’re no better than animals. I did that, didn’t I?

  No. I went off to find a way, my way. Everyone else be damned.

  And now the score is evening up . . .

  He raised his collar and continued walking.

  The Playland Arcade was still open. Bright lights, people of every age hunkered over the games: Genesis, Big Choice, Party Animal, Battle Zone, Bad Dudes, Banzai Run, Millionaire, Eight Ball, Forgotten Worlds, The Real Ghostbusters.

  He stopped to watch them. They were so intent on the play, as balls were lost in the machinery and points accumulated, to be added up or subtracted at the end, depending upon one’s control. He considered going inside. Then he noticed a sign at the entrance: