The Year's Best Horror Stories 14

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  As they faded into uncertain silhouettes against the colored lights of the town, something stirred at the water’s edge. It quivered and trembled like a stranded fish, gulping the briny air. Wide blank eyes blinked, watered, and then watched. The cars and buses stopped and started along the sea front. Some scooters crackled by. Although unseen, it sensed the great presence of the castle ruins perched on the solid mass of rock which dominated the town.

  With waves washing her feet, she rose and wavered as if unsure of her balance. Then the girl, her feet wetly patting the sand, walked up the beach toward the town. The promenade was busy—people sniffing out inviting pubs, clubs, and theaters. The machines still sang their electric songs but the candy floss stalls, sweetshops and children’s amusements had closed for the night. Fish and chip papers scurried across the road, occasionally folding about her ankles. She paused by the red shell of a wartime mine, now meekly collecting pennies for a good cause.

  Baring his teeth, the man with the camera and scrabbling fur ball of a monkey approached her—“Hello, luv. Lovely evening”—and threw the monkey at her. Screaming, it kicked, bouncing back onto the man’s arm. Tiny black fingers clutched at his lapels and tie.

  “Petro! Petro. Go to the nice girl, Petro.” The monkey squeaked. “Have your picture taken with Petro, luv. Now move that hair away, we can’t see yer face. Petro, go to the nice lady.” The monkey clung to him crying. Camera in one hand, he pried the limpet capuchin from him with the other. “It’s OK luv. He wouldn’t ’arm a—bloody hell! The sod bit me.”

  The monkey scrambled up onto his shoulders and the man sucked his bloody finger, hissing threats. When he looked up, the girl had gone. Three giggling girls, pink-flushed with martini, were crossing the road. “Hello, my darlings. Lovely evening.” He threw the monkey at them. It obligingly cuddled into the scented arms of the redhead.

  By shellfish stalls, selling cold bite-size morsels of salted gristle and muscle. Hamburger, hot-dog stalls expelling hot breaths of sausage, onion, and frying smells. More arcades. And as the money bells rang, colored lights flashed in gratitude.

  The night wind was blowing cold. Flying in from the dark distances of the sea; sizzling the surf and driving the tattered paper flotsam before it. Some fastened jackets and coats. But most fell back before the chilling breeze to seek refuge in pubs and cafes.

  A handful, beerfull and numb, defied the cold ruffling wind and pointed out to sea where a ship was sinking. Or, perhaps, it was the street lights on the far side of the bay. Or they pointed at girls as skirts lifted in the goosefleshing updraft of air.

  A wolf whistle. “Want a cig, luv?”

  Another voice. “ ’Ave a drink of me ale.”

  “Dunt. He’s peed in it!”

  One laughed. “He’s shy. He really means, will you go to bed with him?”

  A voice cut across the babble: “Shut up, Mick! Leave t’poor lass alone. It’s all right luv, don’t take any notice. They’re ’alf cut.”

  Outside the pub, she paused. A door opened and someone hurried by, dragging some of the odors and the warmth of the public bar with them. Inside. Black crossbeams segregated the yellow-white walls and ceiling which was hung with polished brass. A beer-colored, cigarette-burn-patterned carpet was beginning to fray. Blue coils of tobacco smoke twisted about the room, occasionally vibrating to the throb of the juke box in the next room. She slipped through the bar, her eyes absorbing the rows of bottles holding amber promises. A tap jetted foaming lager, and the barman’s gold-ringed fingers and fingernails clicked against the glass. She sat at a vacant table. Two dozen voices, like waves, washed over her. Submerging her beneath the bubble and hiss of words:

  “Another pint of mild, Jack?”

  A woman’s voice soared into laughter. “You dirty beggar, Harry! He’ll get ’imself shot.”

  Voices fused and dissolved. “I think it’s a bit of sunburn. It is. We ’ad a good two hours in the park, this afternoon. I wonder if a bit of cream. You know, Nivea’ll bring it out. You should’ve seen our Janet last year, when she got back from France. Her legs were burnt shocking. Just ’ere below her knees, covered with blisters. Like balloons filled with water.”

  A match flared in the smoke-soaked air, and wet lips suckled the stem of a pipe. “Did I tell you,” said the man, “about that bloke. He lives in the same town as us? Well, one day, when he was at work, local vet phoned him, yer see, and told him to go see him straight way. And on no account go home first. So, this bloke, wondering what’s up, goes to vet’s and sees he’s got his dog—a bloody great alstation. ‘What yer doing with me dog?’ he asks. Vet tells him a neighbor saw the dog choking in the garden so he took dog to the vet. And vet got some tweezers and pulled out of dog’s throat three fingers—human fingers. They were stuck, choking the dog. So this bloke phones police and tells them to go to his house. Anyway, when they get there, they find back door open. They searched house and found a man in the bedroom wardrobe. It was a burglar. He’d broken in. Not known there was a dog till it went for him. Only way he could get away was to hide in the wardrobe. But bloody dog got ’old of ’is ’and first, and ’ad three of his fingers.”

  A crash—splintering glass—jolted the bar silent. “That’s one way o’ getting art ’o washing up,” observed the man, his dry smile exposing the yellow chips of his teeth.

  “Oh, you and your lip, Freddy. Another quip like that and you’re barred, love,” retorted the barman, as he kicked the pieces into a corner.

  Another voice, lyrical with alcohol, was raised. “A few months ago ... five or six or so, I heard about someone, who lives near us. His wife bought this big piece of steak. Like that. Big as a plate. Anyway, she cuts it in half. Puts one piece in the fridge and ’as t’other for her dinner. Later that day she’s feeling off it. Poorly. So she tells husband to get the steak and cook it for ’is supper. He goes to fridge. Opens it. And the meat. This piece of bloody steak fills plate again. It’s hanging over the side. And when he looked at it. He saw it was just ... just moving, like shivering. They took it to the Council offices, and they found it was cancer. Cancer in the meat. And they found where it’d touched some sausages, it had like infected them and they were bursting out, splitting their skins. Just think of that. That poor woman’d eaten the meat. And it was just a piece of cancer ... living cancer.”

  The night was cold and still when she left the pub. A few people still walked along the promenade. But they hardly strolled; there was purpose and direction in their stride.

  In the distance the saline hiss of the men was subdued. Above, the sky was clearing and the light disc of the moon duplicated itself in darkened shop windows. To her left, stone steps ascended into the darkness. And twelve steps up, sat a lad, his face as white as lard. He squirted something from a yellow tube into a polystyrene cup. Then, cupping his hands around it, as if warming them, he raised the cup and rested it against his top lip. He breathed deeply—drawing great lungfuls of cold air and fumes into his chest, which burnt his nose and throat, filling his lungs with fire. A fire that flooded through his body to numb his arms and legs and his soul. Then he dropped back onto his elbows as the solvent fire dissolved his brain.

  Somebody coughed and spat. “Want a chip, luv?” Two men carrying bouquets of greasy newspaper stood by her side.

  “Yer can do better than that, Shillies. ’Ave a bit of his fish. Best bit of cod in Scabs.” The gleaming white fragment of fish was clutched in his oil-glossed fingers. “She looks foreign to me. Look ... She can’t understand a word yer say.”

  The other tapped his head knowingly. “No, I think she’s a bit ... in the head. Even so, she doesn’t look bad.”

  A soft laugh padded into the night. “God knows. Yer can’t see her face for all that ’air.”

  The other’s voice dropped to a whisper: “Do you look at the mantelpiece when yer poking the fire?” Throwing away the screwed-up newspapers, they each took an arm and led her up a darkly winding side street. Packed with cars, i
t was silent. Black windows of houses, like blind eyes, stared hard against the night.

  “Here’ll do. It’s the back yard of that old chippie. No one’ll see us.” Into the high-walled yard they guided her. Then drew her toward a bed-sized patch of balding grass. “It’s my turn first this time, Shillies.” Shillies relinquished his hold on her and moved out of sight behind a shed of sagging boards.

  The other pulled her close and her long arms wrapped about him like the white rubber tentacles of an octopus. She opened her mouth as he bent toward her. The silver-gray of her tongue moved, and her teeth were a tightly packed row of blue-black mussels set in white flesh. The shells opened. Mother of pearl flowers. Hypnotized. His lips met her water-cold flesh. Salt pricked his tongue. And the rush and hiss of the sea was in his ears. Bitingly cold brine flushed through him, cascading into his lungs. His mouth jerked open and then was as still and as silent as his cold, dead heart.

  Shillies started when she appeared at his side. Softly, he called his friend’s name. His voice failed. She was turning her face to his. A strange flat immobile face; the face of a ... No. No. It was the face of a girl. Her fingers. No, the wet sucker tentacles of a squid, touched his lips—and pressed. He could not resist as they pushed into his mouth, probing his tongue. His mouth yawned wider and wider as the chill hand, then wrist, slipped into his mouth. And smoothly slid into his throat. No air reached his lungs as the arm, as long as death, continued its tight slide through the core of his body. Eternally, working its way along the winding path of his stomach. He could still feel its cold unceasing passage through his saltwater being as he lay face down in a sea of newspaper balls, chip trays, wooden forks and crushed Coca-Cola cans.

  Where the land meets the sea. The milk surf rolled up the beach toward the town. And waves moved across a crackling band of pebbles to swirl and bubble about her feet. Then, calmly, she stepped forward into the roaring darkness of the nighttime ocean.

  Three-fifths of the world’s surface is covered by water. Should the polar ice caps melt, then the sea level would rise dramatically, flooding many hundreds of square miles of dry land.

  Where the sea meets the shore. The ocean surged up the beach, rushing, tumbling, cascading, falling, rising toward the dry land.

  The tide had turned.

  MOTHER’S DAY by Stephen F. Wilcox

  Stephen F. Wilcox writes: “I was born February 5, 1951, right here in Rochester where, except for two years spent in the army, I’ve lived my entire life. I have a B.A. in journalism and formerly worked as a reporter for one of our local dailies before striking out on my own as a freelance writer. My creative writing efforts are directed toward mystery/suspense stories. I’ve written two mystery novels, as yet unsold, and have several short stories coming up in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. The first will appear in the March issue, the second in April or May. Other pieces are as yet unscheduled.”

  If “Mother’s Day” is a fair example of what Wilcox can do, other editors had better start taking a look at their schedules.

  The two-story frame house on Madigan Street was fast going to seed. The paint on the old wood clapboards—a diluted yellowish gold seemingly exclusive to aged city houses—had blistered and alligatored from myriad seasons of sun and rain and snow. Not that the rest of the street was in any better shape; an empty wine bottle lay in the storm gutter, a gaggle of candy wrappers rode down the sidewalk on a stiff winter breeze, a rusty Oldsmobile sat perched on cinder blocks in a yard three doors down.

  Donald took it all in as he pulled his late-model Chevrolet into the driveway and switched off the ignition. He didn’t enjoy coming back to the old neighborhood. Changes came too quickly, often too violently here, and made him feel much older than his thirty-two years. And there was the memory of Father. It dominated the place like an open wound that refused to heal.

  But Donald came, because he had to come. It was Saturday afternoon, and Saturday afternoons, nearly every one he could remember, belonged to Mother.

  “Lucky Ellen. Smart Ellen,” he muttered as he lifted the bulky toolbox from the trunk of his car. Big sister Ellen had married an airline executive and moved out to Chicago a dozen years before, effectively creating an eight-hundred-mile buffer zone breached only once a year at Christmas.

  The steps groaned as Donald climbed to the front porch and crossed to the door, the toolbox swinging at his side. Briefly he inspected the new storm door he had installed the Saturday before and laughed mirthlessly at the red and black sign mother had since affixed to its upper pane. No Solicitors. He knocked on the inner door using the code, Mother insisted on—shave-and-a-haircut, two bits—and let himself in with his key.

  “It’s me, Mother. Don’t panic,” he called out dryly.

  “Donnie Bear? Is that you? Come see me.”

  Donald set the toolbox in the foyer and walked into the living room, taking care not to upset the china cat that rested in the doorway. The room was a study in kitsch; a worn but still serviceable oriental rug, a Victorian sofa incongruously flanked by two striped platform rockers, a wicker basket brimming with skeins of virulently colored yarns, and everywhere ceramic figurines. Cherubs dancing on the windowsills, the Virgin Mother staring down from atop the television set, rearing horses and towheaded little boys and a heroic bust of JFK on the bookshelf. And the big china cat by the doorway.

  “I’m in here, Donnie Bear. I haven’t been feeling very well the last few days.”

  He opened the sliding door leading to what had always been the dining room but now served as Mother’s bedroom. It was better this way, she insisted, what with her bad hip and the trouble she has climbing stairs and the high cost of heating the whole house these days. The summer before, at Mother’s urging, Donald had rehung the door at the top of the stairs and shut down the heating vents to the second floor. The man who bought the heavy oak dining table and hutch had helped him move Mother’s bedroom furnishings downstairs.

  “Is it the arthritis again, Mother?” Donald asked with all the sincerity he could muster.

  She was sitting up in the bed, a checked afghan spread across her lap. “I suppose so. Whatever, it pains me something awful. Just getting old, I guess.”

  “Nonsense. You’ll never get old.” But she already has, Donald thought, taking in the crow’s feet and denture lines and the scrawny slackness in the skin of her neck and arms.

  “Your father would have been sixty-seven last week,” she said softly but emphatically.

  Donald pretended not to hear. “Angela sends her love.”

  “I’m sure,” Mother sniffed. “Did she send along a temperance lecture, too?”

  “She’s not like that, really. It’s just that, well, with her own family and the problems they’ve had with alcohol, she doesn’t like to see—”

  “Oh, and now I’m an alkie, I suppose? Because I have a little brandy in my tea? She doesn’t care that it helps ease my pain a little. Makes me feel like a criminal when I visit you.”

  Donald sighed. “It’s because she cares about your health that she doesn’t like to see you ... overdoing it.”

  “Well, I don’t want to argue about it,” Mother said, changing moods. “How’s Little Bill? Does he send his grandma a big kiss?”

  “Billy is fine,” Donald nodded. He resented it when Mother called his three-year-old son Little Bill. It had been Angela’s idea to name the boy William, after Donald’s father, and Donald had agreed. But mother’s pointed referrals to “Little Bill” were too much.

  Big Bill Heidler, everyone had called his father. A man’s man. An outdoorsman of consummate skill and enthusiasm, he bought Donald his first fishing rod when he was only Billy’s age and presented him with a .22 rifle of his own on his tenth birthday. Every kid on the block envied Donald that day. Big Bill Heidler. “My boy just may be the best shot in the state someday, you wait and see,” Big Bill bragged proudly to his hunting buddies the day Donald shot his first rabbit. But that was long ago, before the accident.
/>   “You planning to finish the house today?” Mother asked.

  “Yes. I brought my tools. Actually, I did most of the work last week. All I have left to do is the front door and the living room windows.”

  “That’s good. These fuel bills I’ve been getting are horrible and we’re not even into the worst part of the winter yet.” Mother coughed, a dry, affected hacking to emphasize her next remark. “I’ve been keeping the thermostat way down, like you told me, Donnie, but I don’t know. Seems like I’m always cold these days.”

  “Well, you’ll be able to turn up the heat a little once I’m through weatherizing the rest of the place.”

  “I’d better be. It’s not fit to live in, hardly, like this.”

  “You made the decision to stay here, Mother. We offered to take you in at our place. We could have sold this old house and used the money to build you your own studio apartment off the back of our house.”

  “Hmmmph. Take me in, all right, like you take in somebody’s dirty laundry.” She shook her head. “Angela doesn’t really want me there anyway.”

  “That’s not true,” Donald said. In fact, it was Angela who first suggested the idea to Donald. But Mother didn’t know that and wouldn’t have believed it had he told her. Angela had married her boy and taken him away from his home, his duties, and Mother would never forget that.

  “What would I do way out there?” she asked rhetorically. “The bus line doesn’t even go out that far. How would I get to the downtown stores? I’d never see my friends.”

  “It’s only fifteen miles by freeway, Mother,” Donald said, exasperation beginning to seep through the calm of his voice. “I’ve told you before, Angela would take you shopping at the mall near our subdivision. And I could drive you into the city when you wanted to visit with your lady friends.” But not every blessed Saturday afternoon, Donald thought.