“For God’s sake!” cried the crippled girl. “Help us join back together!”
I backed away and ran upstairs to the common room and sat down. Later that night there was a lot of coming and going, and I heard Dr. Alexandre and his assistant shouting in the passages.
When I first came here it was like a picture painted on a sodden, opened-out cardboard box. I remember the train slowing down between garden fences from which dangled bits of rag; and convolvulus spilling like white of egg out of a rusty old car abandoned in a scrapyard. Some of the soldiers said good-bye to us; most of them went silently away up the platform. All I want now is to stay in this room sleeping and reading. The maid says very politely, “Could you go downstairs for a bit, miss, we want to give the place a thorough going over.” They know they will be getting rid of me tomorrow. W.B. will come and fetch me. We are going over to France, where he has heard of a man who has had above-average success with a new chemical.
Last night, listening to the barges full of conscripts being towed up and down the river, the men singing their mournful songs, I thought: “Places are not so easy to escape from.” I will never go back to Agar Grove, but I see the blue bodies everywhere. Spawned in the violence and helplessness of the treatment shed, shadows of myself cast somehow by rays that no-one properly understands, they bob and gesticulate dumbly at the edge of vision. How many times have I said, “I would do anything at all to be cured!”
Now that I have done everything I feel as if I have been complicit in some appalling violation of myself.
CRUISING by Donald Tyson
Donald Tyson was born on January 12, 1954 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he still resides. He developed an appetite for science fiction and fantasy at an early age through the works of such favorite writers as Bradbury, Bloch and Blackwood, and began to write during his university years, winning literary competitions for both prose and poetry. Tyson’s short stories have appeared in publications ranging from Black Belt to Black Cat Mystery, while he has written articles for such diverse magazines as The Woodworker’s Journal and Fate Magazine. In 1982 his original radio drama, “The Hitchhiker,” was presented on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation program, Audio Stage. Its success resulted in the commission of an original television script, “The Far-Off Land,” due to be produced by CBC Television in the near future. Currently Tyson is working on a novel-length fantasy-adventure epic set at the dawn of the Iron Age. With “Cruising” Donald Tyson shows us he can pack a lot of power into just a thousand words.
Tires shrieked on sun-baked asphalt, and the music of a car radio emptied itself across the quiet city intersection. Inside the car Johnny Sheen tapped his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel and looked up at the red light. He was bored. Aching for something to happen. It was a summer Sunday afternoon, and the streets of the city were like lanes through a graveyard.
Sheen was young and tough—what they call street smart. He had never read a book, but he knew what he wanted from life. His hair was razored in a spiky punk look and he wore mirror shades to hide his eyes. Drove a ’78 Camaro with custom flame painted on the sides. Days he worked as a mechanic in a garage to earn enough for the upkeep on the car. Nights and weekends he cruised the streets. Cruising for action was his life.
An old Chevy sedan pulled up beside him in the fast lane. He gunned his engine and looked across with the faint mocking smile that never left his lips. Two teenage girls with long greasy hair and T-shirts sat in the front seat of the Chevy. His eyes measured the car professionally. Dented and covered with dust, it had come a long way. The windows were rolled down against the heat. He noticed a steel ring around the roof column, probably to keep the front door shut, and a line of ugly red decals on the front fender.
The brunette, who sat nearest him, looked over archly at the sound of his engine. Johnny smiled, knowing she could not read his eyes. She leaned over to the blonde driver and whispered into her ear, then glanced back at him. The blonde looked and laughed.
The light went green. He let them win and fell in behind, stalking them with animal patience. This was his game and he always came out on top in the end. They looked like sluts, but he was in no mood to be critical. Sunday afternoon was slow. He followed close and drafted them around a corner, the tires of both cars screaming. The brunette waved her hand at him through the dusty rear window, laughing, as the driver wove her way through the light traffic. Sheen stayed on her bumper, his interest growing. She might be a slut, but she drove like a bitch.
Another red. He swerved right and pulled close beside the Chevy, the music from his radio pacing his pulsebeat. The faces of the girls were flushed with excitement, the driver’s red mouth cruel as she raced her engine. Laughing wildly, her friend reached across through the open window of the Camaro and caressed Sheen’s cheek. He took her finger into his mouth and bit it lightly, then leaned out of the car and met her lips with his in a bruising kiss that was broken abruptly as the blonde raced through the changing light.
Cursing, Sheen opened his four-barrel and went after them. The Chevy was a sleeper with dual pipes and big inches under the beaten metal, but the Camaro pulled even as the girls got held up in traffic. Waiting for an open stretch, he swung in close beside and reached through the window of the Chevy with both cars moving fast. Tauntingly the brunette let him touch her breast, then pulled away across the seat. The blonde cut the Chevy left and Sheen followed, his nerves tingling as his eyes flicked between the road ahead and the wicked faces beside him.
Once again he reached through the window of the other car. Something hard closed on his seeking arm. He looked across and saw a shining steel ring around his wrist, a short chain trailing from it to a similar ring around the roof column. The brunette held a key up by her face and shook it in front of him like a little bell. Leaning forward to watch, the driver smiled and trailed the tip of her tongue wetly over her lips.
It was a second before he understood. Then he felt a tear so naked that his stomach churned and his throat constricted and his skin went cold in the summer heat. He began to stop his car and hesitated, foot over the brake, realizing that he could not. As the Camaro slowed, the steel chain of the handcuffs pulled tight and sent a stab of pain lancing down his left arm. He carefully pressed the gas and matched speed with the Chevy.
The cruel smile left the face of the blonde driver and was replaced by calculation. The other watched him breathlessly. With deliberate skill the blonde swung the Chevy in slow curves from side to side, careful to let the Camaro keep pace. Sheen shouted and begged, forced to use every fraction of his skill to control the distance between the cars. His eyes flicked to the speedometer. Forty-five. The Chevy began to accelerate.
Ahead in the right lane was a slow-moving car that grew rapidly as they overtook it. Desperately Sheen swung into the Chevy, trying to force it wide to the left. Metal shrieked on metal as the doors ground against each other, but the old sedan was like a rock on the road. Pulling away, he tried to climb out his open window, almost lost the Camaro, and fought frantically to regain control. The girl with the key to the handcuffs leaned over and playfully bit one of his fingers.
Sheen never felt it. As the Chevy swerved to pass the slow car, drawing him tight against his door, time jammed like a single frame of film in a projector. He saw the looming rear of the slow car ahead; the excited, soulless faces watching him. For the first time he noticed that the line of decals under the road dust on the fender of the Chevy were tiny red hands broken off at the wrists and dripping blood.
Then time started up again and Johnny Sheen screamed.
THE DEPTHS by Ramsey Campbell
Ramsey Campbell has been in all but one of the eleven volumes of DAW’s Year’s Best Horror Stories to date, this under three different editors, and Series XI marks the third volume in which Campbell has appeared twice. After all this, your present editor has a disturbing sense of deja vu in writing introductions to Campbell’s stories. No doubt Campbell could write a disturbing
horror story about all this.
The circumstances are that Campbell is perhaps the best writer of horror fiction active today, and that Campbell is very active indeed. In his twenty-year career, he has written some 175 short stories—about ten of which saw first publication this past year. Not surprisingly, there have already been four volumes of Campbell’s collected short stories. In the last few years Campbell has concentrated on writing novels, and he has not written any new short fiction since early 1980. I would hope that he finds time for new short stories before his present backlog is exhausted. If not, his five-year-old daughter, Tamsin, may have to carry on the family tradition; she may well have broken the world record for the shortest horror story with her recent remark; “When I’m dead, I’ll be hungry.” Like father, like daughter.
As Miles emerged, a woman and a pink-eyed dog stumped by. She glanced at the house; then, humming tunelessly, she aimed the same contemptuous look at Miles. As if the lead were a remote control, the dog began to growl. They thought Miles was the same as the house.
He almost wished that were true; at least it would have been a kind of contact. He strolled through West Derby village and groped in his mind for ideas. Pastels drained from the evening sky. Wood pigeons paraded in a tree-lined close. A mother was crying, “Don’t you dare go out of this garden again.” A woman was brushing her driveway and singing that she was glad she was Bugs Bunny. Beyond a brace of cars, in a living room that displayed a bar complete with beer pumps, a couple listened to Beethoven’s Greatest Hits.
Miles sat drinking beer at a table behind the Crown, at the edge of the bowling green. Apart from the click of bowls the summer evening seemed as blank as his mind. Yet the idea had promised to be exactly what he and his publisher needed: no more days of drinking tea until his head swam, of glaring at the sheet of paper in the typewriter while it glared an unanswerable challenge back at him. He hadn’t realized until now how untrustworthy inspirations were.
Perhaps he ought to have foreseen the problem. The owners had told him that there was nothing wrong with the house—nothing except the aloofness and silent disgust of their neighbors. If they had known what had happened there they would never have bought the house; why should they be treated as though by living there they had taken on the guilt?
Still, that was no more unreasonable than the crime itself. The previous owner had been a bank manager, as relaxed as a man could be in his job; his wife had owned a small boutique. They’d seemed entirely at peace with each other. Nobody who had known them could believe what he had done to her. Everyone Miles approached had refused to discuss it, as though by keeping quiet about it they might prevent it from having taken place at all.
The deserted green was smudged with darkness. “We’re closing now,” the barmaid said, surprised that anyone was still outside. Miles lifted the faint sketch of a tankard and gulped a throatful of beer, grimacing. The more he researched the book, the weaker it seemed to be.
To make things worse, he’d told the television interviewer that it was near completion. At least the program wouldn’t be broadcast for months, by which time he might be well into a book about the locations of murder—but it wasn’t the book he had promised his publisher, and he wasn’t sure that it would have the same appeal.
Long dark houses slumbered beyond an archway between cottages, lit windows hovered in the arch. A signboard reserved a weedy patch of ground for a library. A gray figure was caged by the pillars of the village cross. On the roof of a pub extension, gargoyles began barking, for they were dogs. A cottage claimed to be a sawmill, but the smell seemed to be of manure. Though his brain was taking notes, it wouldn’t stop nagging.
He gazed across Lord Sefton’s estate toward the tower blocks of Cantril Farm. Their windows were broken ranks of small bright perforations in the night. For a moment, as his mind wobbled on the edge of exhaustion, the unstable patterns of light seemed a code which he needed to break to solve his problems. But how could they have anything to do with it? Such a murder in Cantril Farm, in the concrete barracks among which Liverpool communities had been scattered, he might have understood; here in West Derby it didn’t make sense.
As he entered the deserted close, he heard movements beneath eaves. It must be nesting birds, but it was as though the sedate house had secret thoughts. He was grinning as he pushed open his gate, until his hand recoiled. The white gate was stickily red.
It was paint. Someone had written SADIST in an ungainly dripping scrawl. The neighbors could erase that—he wouldn’t be here much longer. He let himself into the house.
For a moment he hesitated, listening to the dark. Nothing fled as he switched on the lights. The hall was just a hall, surmounted by a concertina of stairs; the metal and vinyl of the kitchen gleamed like an Ideal Home display; the corduroy suite sat plump and smug on the dark green pelt of the living room. He felt as though he were lodging in a show house, without even the company of a shelf of his books.
Yet it was here, from the kitchen to the living room, that everything had happened—here that the bank manager had systematically rendered his wife unrecognizable as a human being. Miles stood in the empty room and tried to imagine the scene. Had her mind collapsed, or had she been unable to withdraw from what was being done to her? Had her husband known what he was doing, right up to the moment when he’d dug the carving knife into his throat and run headlong at the wall?
It was no good: here at the scene of the crime, Miles found the whole thing literally unimaginable. For an uneasy moment he suspected that that might have been true of the killer and his victim also. As Miles went upstairs, he was planning the compromise to offer his publisher: Murderers’ Houses? Dark Places of the World? Perhaps it mightn’t be such a bad book after all.
When he switched off the lights, darkness came upstairs from the hall. He lay in bed and watched the shadows of the curtains furling and unfurling above him. He was touching the gate, which felt like flesh; it split open and his hand plunged in. Though the image was unpleasant it seemed remote, drawing him down into sleep.
The room appeared to have grown much darker when he woke in the grip of utter panic.
He didn’t dare move, not until he knew what was wrong. The shadows were frozen above him, the curtains hung like sheets of lead. His mouth tasted metallic, and made him think of blood. He was sure that he was alone in the dark. The worst of it was that there was something he mustn’t do—but he had no idea what it was.
He’d begun to search his mind desperately when he realized exactly what he ought not to have done. The threat had been waiting in his mind. The thought which welled up was so atrocious that his head began to shudder. He was trying to shake out the thought, to deny that it was his. He grabbed the light cord, to scare it back into the dark.
Was the light failing? The room looked steeped in dimness, a grimy fluid whose sediment clung to his eyes. If anything the light had made him worse, for another thought came welling up like bile, and another. They were worse than the atrocities which the house had seen. He had to get out of the house.
He slammed his suitcase—thank God he’d lived out of it, rather than use the wardrobe—and dragged it onto the landing. He was halfway down, and the thuds of the case on the stairs were making his scalp crawl, when he realized that he’d left a notebook in the living room.
He faltered in the hallway. He mustn’t be fully awake: the carpet felt moist underfoot. His skull felt soft and porous, no protection at all for his mind. He had to have the notebook. Shouldering the door aside, he strode blindly into the room.
The light which dangled spiderlike from the central plaster flower showed him the notebook on a fat armchair. Had the chairs soaked up all that had been done here? If he touched them, what might well up? But there was worse in his head, which was seething. He grabbed the notebook and ran into the hall, gasping for air.
His car sounded harsh as a saw among the sleeping houses. He felt as though the neat hygienic facades had cast him out. At least h
e had to concentrate on his driving, and was deaf to the rest of his mind. The road through Liverpool was as unnaturally bright as a playing Field. When the Mersey Tunnel closed overhead he felt that an insubstantial but suffocating burden had settled on his scalp. At last he emerged, only to plunge into darkness.
Though his sleep was free of nightmares, they were waiting whenever he jerked awake. It was as if he kept struggling out of a dark pit, having repeatedly forgotten what was at the top. Sunlight blazed through the curtains as though they were tissue paper, but couldn’t reach inside his head. Eventually, when he couldn’t bear another such awakening, he stumbled to the bathroom.
When he’d washed and shaved he still felt grimy. It must be the lack of sleep. He sat gazing over his desk. The pebbledashed houses of Neston blazed like the cloudless sky; their outlines were knife-edged. Next door’s drain sounded like someone bubbling the last of a drink through a straw. All this was less vivid than his thoughts—but wasn’t that as it should be?
An hour later he still hadn’t written a word. The nightmares were crowding everything else out of his mind. Even to think required an effort that made his skin feel infested, swarming.
A random insight saved him. Mightn’t it solve both his problems if he wrote the nightmares down? Since he’d had them in the house in West Derby—since he felt they had somehow been produced by the house—couldn’t he discuss them in his book?
He scribbled them out until his tired eyes closed. When he reread what he’d written he grew feverishly ashamed. How could he imagine such things? If anything was obscene, they were. Nothing could have made him write down the idea which he’d left until last. Though he was tempted to tear up the notebook, he stuffed it out of sight at the back of a drawer and hurried out to forget.
He sat on the edge of the promenade and gazed across the Dee marshes. Heat-haze made the Welsh hills look like piles of smoke. Families strolled as though this were still a watering place; children played carefully, inhibited by parents. The children seemed wary of Miles; perhaps they sensed his tension, saw how his fingers were digging into his thighs. He must write the book soon, to prove that he could.
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