The Best New Horror 3

by Stephen Jones

  He did as much as he could, eight plastic-wrapped items, the head in the pot and the torso still floating in the tub. When he woke up the next morning, Tony had to have a shower. He couldn’t stand the feeling of dried blood on him, dried scum, and the bits of Snake’s flesh that had lodged beneath his fingernails. He had fallen asleep as soon as the last package was taped up. The only way he could have his shower was if he had it with the torso too, since there was nowhere to put it. Reluctantly, that’s what Tony did, heaving the ghastly thing as far back in the tub as possible and then standing directly under the showerhead. He had to clear the drain a couple of times, as it got clogged with greasy chunks of gristle and meat. Tony showered quickly, then sat on the edge of the tub and cleaned between his toes with running water.

  As he had done the night before, he filled the tub until the torso floated, and sprinkled pine-scented kitchen cleanser on it. To be on the safe side, he added two-thirds of a bottle of Canoe, the last of his rubbing alcohol (which was also useful in certain sexual scenarios) and a blue toilet tablet. That should keep the smell down for a while.

  Sleep had refreshed him somewhat. Tony didn’t need the Pied Piper to tell him what he had to do. Fortunately it was overcast outside. He put on his sunglasses and went to the supermarket to buy the largest and heaviest trash bags they had. He also bought a couple of rolls of sticky packing tape, more detergent, rubber gloves, alcohol and disinfectant. The store’s fluorescent lights were getting to him, even with his sunglasses on, so he picked up a pair of mirrored clipons that helped considerably.

  Tony had a couple of ideas. He now thought he knew the best way to get rid of the torso, and in the back of his mind he had a rough notion of how to escape the torments of the Pied Piper once and for all. But he would have to approach it carefully when the time came, never quite letting his thoughts settle on it, or else the demon might tune in and foil the attempt.

  It was a long day, taking four trips in all. A piece of arm and a piece of leg each time. He carried them in a gym bag, and he dropped them in litterbaskets, dumpsters, anywhere reasonably safe, where they were unlikely to be noticed and opened. He even managed to slip one forearm into the trash bin at Burger Billy’s, along with the remains of his lunch. By the end of the afternoon Tony was exhausted from all the walking he had done, but he also felt enormously relieved that much of Snake was scattered around the center of the city. Out of my life.

  Tony examined the trunk of Snake’s car, to make sure it had enough room for the torso. Some people fill a trunk with garbage and then just leave it there, God only knows why. Snake’s trunk had a well-worn spare tire, a jack and some small tools, and the puzzler: a beat-up copy of Elvis’s Blue Hawaii album. Good place to keep your record collection, Snake. Tony parked the car right in front of his building.

  He had a drink, though he didn’t need it to relax. He felt serene, almost—almost in some kind of control of his life once more. Tony had sailed through this horrible day, popping Demerol whenever the wave seemed to falter.

  What day was it anyway? Sunday. Time? A little after six in the evening. Good, perfect. People were eating, and in a few minutes they’d sit back to watch 60 Minutes. There would not be many cops on patrol at this in-between hour.

  Wearing the rubber gloves, Tony somehow got the torso into a large heavy-duty garbage bag. He knotted and taped it, then slid it into another one. Was a third bag necessary? Why not? There was no point in taking chances. Tony wiped a thin streak of scum from the outer plastic when he finished, and dragged the big sack into the living room. He removed the rubber gloves and carefully put bandaids on his fingertips. With the torso, at least, there would be no prints on the bags.

  Now. No need to carry it, even if he could. Tony looked up and down the hallway outside his apartment. All clear, nobody in sight, no sounds of activity. Tony tugged the garbage bag by its plastic loop handles, dragging the load into the hall. He locked his apartment, and then pulled the sack to the top of the stairs. Still no one about. Gripping the loop handles firmly, he tipped the torso over the edge and followed behind, letting it bump down the stairs but holding it so that it didn’t bounce noisily out of control. It was like walking the dog, Tony thought with a smile. No sweat. When he got to the ground floor he stepped over the bag and was about to drag it to the front door when Leo Jenks emerged from his apartment. He was okay, a middle-aged man who delivered bread for a local bakery, but Tony wasn’t at all happy to see him at that moment.

  “Hey, Tony.”

  “Leo, how’s it going?”

  “Good, and you?”

  “Okay. Just cleaning up.”

  “Yeah? Whaddaya got there?”

  “Newspapers and magazines. You want ’em?”

  Jesus, don’t get cute.

  “Not unless it’s Penthouse or Playboy,” Leo said with a sly grin. Like everyone in the building, Leo knew Tony was gay.

  “’Fraid not.”

  “The stuff piles up, huh?”

  “Sure does.”

  “Let me give you a hand,” Leo said, bending to reach for one end of the garbage bag.

  “No, don’t bother, Leo. It’s too clumsy to handle that way, but no trouble to drag, you know? Just leave the front door open for me, will you?”

  “Yeah, sure. See you, Tony.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  Fuck me pink, Tony thought when Leo was gone. If he had got his hands on it he’d have known right away that it wasn’t a bunch of newspapers and magazines. But it was no time to stand around, worrying about a near-miss. Tony hauled the sack outside to the edge of the curb as quickly as he could.

  “Jesus,” he groaned, heaving it up and into the car. Fucker must have weighed a quarter of a ton. Tony banged the trunk shut and allowed himself a casual glance around. The old geezer next door was sitting on his front stoop, but he was busy playing with his grandson. There were other people on the street, but none of them seemed to be watching Tony. He straightened his sunglasses, got into the car and drove away.

  “All right.”

  With the window rolled down and the radio playing, it wasn’t bad at all, especially since the humidity had fallen. Tony liked driving but he seldom got the chance to do any, so it was a treat for him to be out like this—in spite of the load he had in the trunk. He cruised through the neighborhood, then headed into the center of town. He circled The Green, drove out to the east side and checked the action along the commercial strip leading to the mall. Nothing much happening. Well, of course. It was a Sunday night, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Quiet.

  By nine o’clock Tony was ready to get it done. Better to do it while there was still some light in the sky. He drifted north into the woody hills near the highway, on the outskirts of town. There were few houses on these side roads that zig-zagged up the steep valley walls. A power company sub-station. A junkyard. A landfill transfer depot. Not much else. Aha, there it was, just what Tony was looking for: a clearing off to the side where folks dumped unwanted items. He stopped the car and got out.

  Nothing, only trees for a hundred yards in either direction. Tony listened carefully, but there was no sound of an approaching car. On the ground: an abandoned sofa, several bald tires, rusty wheel hubs, a corroded hand-wringer washing machine, and the best sight of all, plenty of garbage bags similar to the one Tony had.

  People. Makes you wonder, Tony thought with a smile. There was a junkyard down the road, and a landfill station. They could bring their rubbish to either place, but no, they’ve got to throw it here, along this nice woody stretch of land.

  Tony opened the trunk and took extra care not to rip the bag as he pulled it out. He dragged it across some of the other bags on the ground. Still no cars coming. He left the package behind a dirty but unscarred vinyl clothes hamper that had no doubt been discarded because of its ugly design.

  Sorry, Snake. We had our moments, one or two.

  The pot on the stove was a shock. For some reason, Tony had blanked it ri
ght out of his mind. But there it was. Okay, so he still had work to do. Tomorrow he would dispose of Snake’s head, and then he would deal with the Pied Piper.

  X

  The windowshade appeared to be on fire, which meant it was extremely bright outside. The sun has no mercy, he thought. Men have no mercy—not much anyway, and not often. Everything was supposed to be better now, but it wasn’t. Tony thought two days had passed, but it might have been three.

  Where was his brain? The sun beat him, the moon laughed at him, nothing worked. He found it hard to keep track of anything. So much time, thousands of minutes, had been spent sitting still, trying to think, trying to focus his mind. Trying to find it.

  The Pied Piper had got him once—or was it twice? Hard to be sure. The Demerol helped and Tony had found some silence, but the demon voice jarred him from sleep, pried open his brain when his guard was down. No mercy.

  —Open a vein.

  “Fuck you.”

  —Get it over with. Best thing.

  Like that, juiced with spasms of pain meant to keep Tony in line. But he was learning. The Pied Piper couldn’t be there all the time. Even in a fog of Demerol, Tony managed to organize his thoughts into a rough plan. There wasn’t much chance it would do any good, but it was worth a try. Anything was better than going along with this shadow-life, twitching between drugs and torture, barely able to function.

  He remembered how he had at first been plagued with a lot of static and garbled bits of words. That had been bad enough, but not nearly as bad as the clear reception he had been getting ever since he removed his metal fillings. The metal had not aided the broadcast, as Tony originally believed, but instead had actually interfered with it, at least a little. So, a lot of metal would block out the Pied Piper completely. Maybe.

  The spaghetti pot was taken, unfortunately. Tony put on his doubled sunglasses and ventured outside. The glare was so fierce that his eyes were seared with pain from light leaking in at the sides, and he was nearly blind before he even got to the corner. The supermarket was three blocks away, too far to go. Tony dived into the cool, dark interior of the Sparta Mart, a neighborhood shop that carried groceries and a few basic items. Mrs Bandana, the wife of the owner, sold a lottery ticket to another customer and then directed her indifference to Tony.

  “You got any aluminium foil?”

  “Bottom left,” she replied curtly, pointing toward the rear of the store.

  Tony took two overpriced boxes. He also found some rolls of masking tape, which he figured should not be as harsh on his skin as the sticky packing tape he had at home. He paid, and insisted on being given a plastic bag to carry his purchases. Tony needed it for Snake’s head. Steeling himself to face the glare outside, he ran all the way back to his apartment.

  He put the pot in the kitchen sink and removed the lid. The smell was horrendous. He turned on the hot water and let it pour over the head, gradually rinsing away most of the muck. At least there were no worms crawling through the eyes and mouth, nor any other nightmare surprises that Tony had feared. When the water finally ran clear, he dumped the head into the sink and put the pot aside on the counter.

  You don’t look so bad now, he thought. What was your name? Alvin Doolittle, according to the driver’s license. How the hell could a person with a name like that ever get into the Legion of the Lost? Snake sounded better. In fact, he looked better dead than alive. A bit rubbery, but the color had washed out nicely. The skin had the bleached look of white marble, Tony thought, or a fish’s belly. There was no sign of trauma in Snake’s face. He looked calm, an admirable quality.

  Something Snake had said. The Doc this, the Doc that, trust the Doc, do what the Doc says. Hard to tell if it meant anything at all, since the whole scene had been mad, sick. But Snake told him to go see a shrink, and that seemed important. Tony had been sent to a shrink by the court, the weird guy with the weird name. All my troubles started after that. Maybe he can help.

  —Easy, slime.

  Tony shuddered. “Go away.”

  —Poor little plasmodium.

  “The Doc’ll take care of you.”

  —Maybe I am the Doc.

  Jesus, that was a thought. “Are you?”

  —You’ve got two heads now. You tell me.

  “I’ll find out, one way or the other.”

  —Will you indeed?

  “Believe it.”

  But the demon was gone, his parting shot a raucous laughter that erupted in Tony’s head. It took a moment to clear. Oh yes, I’ll kill you, he thought bitterly. If he could just get to see that shrink again, he might find an answer.

  Tony took a large, empty trash bag and dropped Snake’s head into it. Then he rolled the black plastic tightly, taping it to form a rough ball. When he was satisfied with his work, Tony put the head in the Sparta Mart bag and then picked it up by the loop handles. There. He looked like anybody carrying home a nice big cabbage or honeydew melon from the market.

  —Die, you slime.

  “Oh fuck . . .”

  —Lie down and I’ll help you die. It’ll be easy, it won’t hurt at all. Lie down. Now.

  “No, no . . .”

  But Tony could feel the demon taking hold of him. The blood in his veins felt like broken glass, slashing him apart, churning his insides into a massive hemorrhage. As he started to fall, he grabbed the box of aluminium foil from the counter, ripped it open and fumbled to unroll a length of it. He hit the floor, rapidly losing strength. He couldn’t even tear the foil, but he did yank enough of it out of the box to pull over his head—and suddenly the Pied Piper was silenced. Not completely gone, for Tony could still sense his presence, but substantially muffled. He pressed the aluminum foil to his skull, adjusting it to fit more tightly, and then he waited anxiously. Was the demon voice merely toying with him, allowing Tony to think he had won, before unleashing the final assault? It would be just like the sadistic bastard to do that.

  But nothing happened, and Tony gradually became aware of a distant, very faint static buzz. There you are, little buddy. A minor irritation, nothing more. No pain. No words. No torture. Tony laughed out loud, shocked with relief and joy.

  “It works! It works!”

  Now you know you can beat the guy, Tony told himself. It’s always something simple, easy to overlook or misunderstand. Like the common cold that wiped out the Martians in that old movie.

  Less than an hour later Tony was ready to go. You look like a crazy, he thought sadly as he checked himself for the last time in the bathroom mirror. But that didn’t really matter because he would be walking through the south end, where half the people out on the street looked damaged one way or another. Maybe he should have kept Snake’s car, instead of abandoning it in the lot at the train station. No, the car was a major risk. He’d done the best thing he could with it. Now Tony would just have to walk, and if people stared—let them.

  Tony had fashioned an aluminum foil skullcap, which he kept in place with an ordinary headband. For extra safety he had tied a couple of dozen thin foil strips to the headband, making a long fringe that hung down as far as his jaw on both sides, and around the back.

  It would be better to wait until evening, but he was anxious to get rid of Snake’s head. Besides, Doctor Ladybank wouldn’t be at his office later. Now that the Pied Piper couldn’t reach him, Tony was full of good ideas. He’d looked up psychiatrists in the Yellow Pages, and discovered an Ian Ladybank. His office address was in the center of the city. That was the shrink Tony had been sent to, no doubt about it. He called to make sure that Ladybank would be in all afternoon, but he didn’t give his name or ask for an appointment. It seemed a safe bet that when he walked in with this headgear they’d lead him right to the shrink.

  Tony’s doubled sunglasses did a pretty good job, but all the light leaking in at both sides was enough to wear him down fast, so he taped the shades to his face with masking tape, overlapping the strips until he had built up a thick screen that tapered down across each of his
cheeks. That should do it, he thought. Block out most of the unwanted light and you’ll be okay. He could hear the Pied Piper still clamoring to get in, but faint and far away. Oddly, it was good to know the demon hadn’t vanished.

  Tony walked a couple of blocks with no difficulty. The tape worked fine, his eyes were still okay. No sweat. Well, no, that wasn’t exactly true. It was a hot day, very humid, and Tony was perspiring already. But that was a minor inconvenience. He felt good for the first time in ages.

  Was he the only person on earth being tormented by the Pied Piper, or were there others? Strange, how Tony had felt a sudden urge to ask Snake if he heard the voice. A very strange thing to do—you just don’t ask other people if they hear any mysterious voices. It didn’t matter, because Snake had so much metal in his head that he most likely wouldn’t hear anything even if the Pied Piper did broadcast to him.

  That old movie came to mind again. Was it possible that the Pied Piper was really a Martian, or some other alien? Could this be part of a plan to take over human minds, Tony wondered. Drive us crazy, turn us into slaves? Because, he thought, if the voice came from me, if it was all just my own craziness, then how could the aluminum foil work? So the voice had to come from someone or something outside. Ordinary people can’t do that, but perhaps it was a top-secret government project. Or aliens. Tony had seen a few stories in the newstand rags about this kind of thing, and he had always laughed them in the past. But this was now. He knew a lot more, from bitter experience. Anything was possible.

  What about Doctor Ladybank? The Doc. Was he in on it? Why did Tony feel drawn to see the man today? For help. But the Doc hadn’t helped him at all last time. Just gave him some bullshit about watching out for—bright lights and colors. Jesus, maybe I was hypnotized, Tony thought. Maybe that’s what this is about. If that’s it, I’ll kill him. Right there in his office.