The Year's Best Horror Stories 14

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  Oh my children. What a toasting it will be! Bodies pushed up against dead-end streets like twigs caught in a sewer grating, hot mud pack for the terminally wrinkled, asphyxiation for the smoker and non-smoker alike.

  All this and more.

  One I’ll save, Hank, the supermarket butcher’s helper. Of all the high and low of Abbots Gate I’ll keep Hank cool and comfortable while all the rest fry. In the freezer down with the beef sides and plucked chicken you’ll keep until later. So you have an IQ of 70 and you lost your job at the stockyards because you molested the death row cows, I don’t care. We talked. Or rather I talked and you listened. You didn’t talk much. Was it because you were too stupid to jeer? Is that it?

  Least you listened. For your silence you’ll live. Play with all the bodies you want. After I’m through there will be enough for even your appetite.

  We both know what loneliness can do.

  Abbots Gate will feel my need. My cresting rhythmic beat. My deep spasms. My controlled, confident impulse. My ...

  They won’t know who. It will be my secret. But they’ll feel it. Know it like a slap on the face. My mark will free all your cloth covered places, your blushing birth marks, your freckled stretch marks and ingrown toe nails. Left breast too small, mismatched, not at all? Going to fat? Your gums bleeding plaque? One testicle not distended? I’ll see it. No creams or soaps can fool me. Trusses and wrappings and bags over heads will come off. I’ll see you ugly to the bone.

  And he watched. From the edge of the woods he watched the people stroll through MacGreggor Park. And as he watched, and selected, he chewed at the corners on his fingers. His nails were almost gone. What was left was so reduced it was impossible to find an edge to work from. His hand wound throbbed with a new kind of pain. Not at all like the shameful bathroom picking pain but rather an ethereal exalting freeing pain. These carvings called for hope.

  Tom stopped gnawing. His hands tumbled to his side. The moment was here. There was no mistake. No words. His feet led him along the forest edge. Tom walked with a purpose. And he didn’t walk alone.

  In the half dark, Sam Tullage judged the fallen log to be two feet high. It was three. So when he lifted his leg and spotted his flashlight further into the woods and stepped ... he tripped. The ground was as unkind as his fellow searchers’ comments.

  “I think Big Foot got him.” Mike Resnick said from somewhere to the left.

  “Undigestible!” Steve responded. “Sam’s got a bottle. You’ve been holding out on us, haven’t you?” Brushing aside some spindly ash saplings, Steve saw his prostrate friend.

  “You’re lucky you won’t be carrying me out of here. I could have snapped my leg. Give us a hand.”

  Mike walked in on the two just as Sam bent down and reached out with his hand.

  “Oh, My God! A snake.” Steve cried.

  Charged with a vision of his own painful, lingering death, Sam jumped up and bleated, “Kill it!” He then proceeded to tango from one unstable perch to another, finally ending up on the log that had tripped him.

  “Well, he can move when he wants to” Steve said. He cradled his shotgun across his arms and steadied his flashlight on Sam.

  “Go on. Give the snake a good view” Sam yelled. He looked down to where his gun had fallen. The ferns and the tangled dead branches of forest floor seemed all to move like worried fingers over a knotty problem. His discarded flashlight under lit the ferns marking a beacon where the night insects crawled.

  “Come on Sam. There is no snake.” Mike kicked the spot with his Cougars. “Steve’s just wasting our time.”

  “Christ!” Sam scrambled down. “I’m not out here for my health. If I wasn’t a volunteer fireman I’d be home in front of the tube.”

  “Wouldn’t we all.” Steve looked up through the forest canopy searching for a star. It was black. The only light came from their flashlights. The wind blew. Sending the oak and maple leaves twisting and surging. The pines provided a low background hiss. Blending well with the more boisterous deciduous woodwinds. All creaked under the communal strain.

  “Look at it. There’s going to be a storm. Let’s go back.”

  “Can’t. We promised to work to the beach then north up to Battleman Ridge. Then ...”

  “... over to Wayburn farm.” Sam interrupted Mike. “But that’s at least fifteen miles. We’ll be drowned rats by then.” Steve spat.

  “Do what you want.” Sam pulled out his Scout Masters compass. “Over there is the sea.” He motioned. “I can’t depend on mad ducks like you to lead us out of here.” Snapping back branches and letting them swish back uncontrollably he pressed on.

  “You know she’s probably hitched out of this dead-end town.” Sam said as he dodged a branch. “There’s nothing here to keep ’um. I’d run if I were her.”

  “If you had kids you’d know why we’re out here.” Mike said.

  “I’m careful. Not like you guys who get all excited on a Saturday night. Whoooo-boy! Let’s rip some panties.”

  “Are you sure you don’t have any kids?” Sam said.

  “Stella’s a damned liar. Are you going to take the word of some cheap ...”

  “Okay. Calm down. That’s not a stick you’re waving around.” Sam laughed and picked up the pace.

  “We’re fools out here scaring the frogs and toads.” Steve felt reassured on this topic. “I tell ya. That tail hightailed out of here.”

  “Cheer up, Steve. Call this Community PR. There are only two gas stations in town. If word got out that you backed out of your civic duty ...”

  “I’m here! Aren’t I? I’m going to catch a cold just like everyone else. Just because I grump when some horny teen scents an out-of-town pair of jeans ...”

  “Right. It’s your town. You love it, wouldn’t leave it for the world.” Mike said.

  “Right.”

  Mike shook his head and smiled at the ground. “How much further? The air’s getting pretty thick back here.”

  “Close.”

  The forest had changed as they moved. The trees were thicker, shorter, and closely packed. Whereas before the wind raced high up in the branches, here the wind sped along the ground picking up needles and dirt. Now, added to the mix of wind, branch and leaf sounds, came water. The break of surf gathered tempo and power as they walked. A blue, ever so faint, wooly glow clung to the low shrubs. The sea grumbling grind groans drowned out the tree whispers as the three stumbled onto the beach.

  They faced the sea. Flashlight beams skipped out over the water like poorly thrown flat stones drying thirty feet from shore. The Atlantic kicked and bit the beach. The long white lip of surf pouted and unfurled. The water would push up higher before morning.

  “Tomorrow I’m beachcombing. No telling what will wash up.” Steve looked happy for the first time tonight.

  “Squid. Jelly-fish. Tin cans.” Sam said.

  “Viking loot. I’ve seen the old boat moorings carved in solid granite.”

  Sam let out an exaggerated sigh. “That hustler Arty drilled those holes to catch ape dumb tourists. Did you ever wonder why those holes just happened to be beside his marina and nowhere else?”

  “How the hell do I know what Vikings did?” Caught out again Steve turned his collar up.

  “Let’s move” Mike said. “They’ll be sending out a search party for us if we aren’t at Wayburns in an hour.”

  Steve snorted. Sam laughed to himself. Though it was late and the sky overcast, a faint glow attended their walk. Somewhere above, a moon shone giving just enough radiation to contrast the sea from the sky. But the pines were a mountain. Crowding the beach, backing it into the sea, you felt you could only enter the forest on its terms. For a time they walked in silence. The surf lip curled up on the sand, sucking back, and trailing a senile froth. Eyes on stalks threw back the searchlight probes as crabs picked the scum. The ocean worried the men’s nerves. It grumbled like some Titan grinding monstrous marbles in a tired hand. Low and constant, after awhile the listener d
oesn’t realize the sound still pounds. The experience becomes systemic. Indistinguishable from internal gurglings.

  A northwesterly picked up, lifting the sea foam and sprinkling the men.

  Steve pulled his collar tighter. “Damn. It was such a nice day today. Now this.”

  Mike sniffed the air. “Spring. It’s up and down.”

  Mike sniffed again.

  “Fire!” Sam said what Mike thought.

  Up ahead the beach curved out to the sea, stopped at a point, then doubled back on the other side. Cooked cedar-pine resins and charcoal carried from behind the tree line from the other invisible beach.

  Wet sand fought their running boots. Dancing flashlights turned the landscape into a rush of erratic motion. Stumps and stones jumping into view. Dodging back into shadows. Now, almost at the point, they slowed. Lighted trees barred their way. Red-yellow-orange a bonfire painted their way onto the beach. Tom sat cross-legged in front of the driftwood fire, watching the fire crawl up white bleached tree limbs and the embers pile higher. With his back to the men he looked like a Buddhist supplicant drowning in the mysteries of a waterfall.

  Sam stepped forward. “Hey. You there.”

  Tom turned his head. His face caught the flickering rage of the fire, exposing his Dresden bombed nose, jumping into sharp relief his Plain of Jars cheeks and deepening the irregular purple-red gougings of his lunar pock-marked forehead. A small strand of hairs grew from the remnant of a chin. More numerous, the hairs of his patchy moustache helped define where his upper mouth ended and his lower lip started. So many months of fingers prying out blackheads had blurred the line. Possibly because he sat so close to the fire his face glistened with a prodigious amount of sweat.

  As Mike and Steve entered the circle of light they flinched almost on cue. Tom smiled a knowing smile. He’d seen that look many times before. It was an old and dear friend.

  Hesitating just long enough to be rude, Sam said “Has anyone been by?”

  Tom shook his head. The lighting shifted the shadows on his face giving the effect of tiny bugs continually crawling about, warmed by the fire to excess.

  “I thought not.” Sam forced a smile.

  “Not a bad set-up” Steve unwelcomely interjected. “You’ve almost got it right. Great fire, romantic setting, but where’s the beer and girls?”

  “I’m too young to drink.” Tom quickly looked back at the fire. He poked the embers with a shovel deepening the cavity beneath the logs.

  “Come on Steve. Cut it out. Let’s get going” Mike grabbed his arm. “Have a good time. And be sure to put out the fire when you leave.”

  Sam lingered behind. “If a girl, Bonnie Camford is her name, happens to come by, would you tell her to go home. Her parents are worried. Okay? Would you do that for me?”

  “They’ve got nothing to worry about.” Tom didn’t turn around. “She’s in a far better place than here.”

  That’s what Steve keeps telling me, Sam thought as he walked to join the others. “Just remember what I said.”

  Catching up he was in time to hear Steve say, “Brother, does that bring back memories.” He gave a mock shudder. “When he smiled I was afraid I’d get squirted.”

  “You could have laid off of that crack about girls,” Mike snapped.

  “Fun and games. He’ll grow out of it.”

  “Not likely. Those scars are for life.”

  “That’s just too bad,” Steve prickled. “He may look like the dog’s dinner but he doesn’t have to act like one. If he offered me some food, I would have been more sociable.”

  “He didn’t have any food,” Sam said.

  “What’s the matter? You’ve got a cold? He was cooking something, pork or chicken. Probably potatoes and corn on the cob. The smell was everywhere.”

  Sam looked at Mike.

  “I smelled something.”

  “Sure,” Sam looked back at the now distant fire. “You get some tin foil, butter and season the inside, drop the meat in, seal it and bury it in the fire. You’ve got to be careful not to burn it. Turn it once or twice ... Voila! A feast fit for a king.” Steve stopped talking, quite satisfied he’d awakened hunger in Sam.

  Sam flashed his light on the ground he’d just walked. An odd dull look crossed his face. Discounting their own recent tracks and Tom’s the sand held a mystery. “Look at that,” Sam pointed. “Here we walked.” He traced the path with light. “Over there Tom came from the forest ... dragging something ...”

  “I told you. The kid’s a pig-out. Wouldn’t be friendly ...”

  “Hey! Where you going?” Steve yelled at the running Sam.

  Sam took a deep breath. Later after he finished digging, he’d take another.

  Steve was outside watering the lawn that Sunday morning when officer Marincheck pulled by the curb.

  “Steve, about your statement,” he said through the rolled-down window.

  After adjusting the sprinkler and dodging the spray Steve jogged over. “You got Mike’s and Sam’s. Why’d you need me?”

  “Orders. You know how it is. Push this paper. Stamp this. I’ll give you a ride to the station.”

  Steve tapped the car roof. “Okay, Let’s do it. Just let me move the water. I got this damned maple tree with yellow leaves, I woke up this morning and there it was yellow leaves.”

  “If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” the cop agreed.

  In the car Steve welcomed the shade. Today was going to be a scorcher. “I didn’t have much to do last night. Sam’s the hero. If heroes find bodies.”

  “He saved us a lot of man hours. We’re grateful.”

  “I am too. No telling what that nut would do next. You should have seen him scream when old Sammy tore into that fire. Spitting and cursing about virgins, Gods, sacrifices and volcanoes. I’ll sleep better knowing that creep’s behind bars.”

  “Ain’t it the truth.” They stopped at a red light. “She must have been horrible to see.”

  “She was.” Steve tapped the side window. “But she sure smelled good. Something like pork.”

  “Will you look at that,” Steve directed. All along the roadside the trees were tinged yellow. “It’s spreading. Must be some damned blight.”

  The light turned green and they drove off. They could still ride the roads. The rising heat had yet to buckle them.

  RAPID TRANSIT by Wayne Allen Sallee

  This is a rare piece of prose fiction from Wayne Allen Sallee, who is primarily a poet—and I think you’ll agree that having had 136 poems accepted for publication in the past two years does qualify one as a poet to be reckoned with. Born September 9, 1959 in Chicago, Sallee explains that “Rapid Transit” was written for his final paper at the University of Illinois, where he received a B.A. in English Literature. Just now he works as a credit analyst in Chicago.

  Sallee’s poems have appeared in Cat’s Eye, Fire, Blue Light Review, Comet Hailey, Calliopes Corner, Impetus, and many other publications. He has also written reviews for Castle Rock, two screenplays, a 61-page poem entitled “Desmond’s Inferno,” and is at work on a novel, Paingrin: The Biography of Randall Andrew Sink. And he has written a follow-up to “Rapid Transit” entitled “Take the A Train.”

  Waiting for the Douglas L on the final day of Indian summer, Dennis Cassady saw the woman slowly and relentlessly knifed to death in the field below the platform. He had been standing, unaware, for several minutes, thinking about whether or not he should take the weekend off and boogie up to Milwaukee to catch the third game of the Series (since, let’s not kid ourselves, if he lived to be friggin’ ninety, the Cubs would still be looking at first place like a fourteen-year-old pimply-necked kid with one hand buried deep in his pants, drooling over the Playmate of the Month), and not until he looked down the tracks for the train did he notice her. She had not made a sound. He was standing behind a billboard that advertised a brand of cigarettes. The legend below the ad read: True. You found it. He realized with a sudden twinge of morbid fascination, whi
ch went sliding down his back like an ice cube on a hot day, that he had a perfect view.

  The woman’s jeans—he was sure that she had to be in her mid-twenties—her jeans were pulled down to her knees, and blood was running in fine rivulets down one thigh. The Western Avenue sodium vapor lamps cast a violet haze on the field, the kind of haze that you see at dusk in the summer if rain is on the way, and it made the blood appear livid and oily.

  Her breasts were large, but he could not tell if she was attractive: her face was twisted in fear, eyes widened, nostrils flared, blond hair matted with dirt. All of this surrounded a black pit of a mouth from which no sound came. Cassady’s eyes drifted back to her spread legs and perfect thighs, they really were perfect, except for that ugly stream of blood that largely resembled a doctor’s E1 Marko outline of some old bag’s varicose vein.

  The twinge he had initially experienced became stronger; he felt as if his entire body was starting to fall asleep. It ran across him in waves, like that time he had gotten hypnotized at Dilligaf’s. The “mesmerist extraordinaire” (he called himself that; the guy was really just a two-bit showoff in a bouffant toupee) had said to Cassady: “You are getting sleepy. You feel a tingling in your fingers, a tingling in your toes ...” and shit like that. He sounded like a queer, and Cassady ended up hypnotized into “becoming” Neil Diamond, kissing old women and running the microphone cord up and down his crotch.

  But he wasn’t falling asleep. He felt both excitement and curiosity at what was happening below him; how things were going to turn out. He felt the same as people must feel, who slow down their cars at the scene of an auto wreck, or who mill about the aftermath of a grocery store robbery, to see how many times the fifty-year-old Polish immigrant had been shot after his till had been emptied, and to maybe get their faces on the five o’clock news.