The Year's Best Horror Stories 14

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  He didn’t need his face on the news; not at all.

  Cassady thought about that Don McLean song that he and Sarah had listened to in high school. I feel the trembling tingle of a sleepless night ...

  Only the girl in the song had chestnut-colored hair that fell across her pillowcase.

  The field below was in the process of becoming the early stages of a project about which Cassady knew nothing. A lime-green construction shack with Myers and Sons, Winnetka printed in three-dimensional blue on its side stood at the far end of the field. Beyond that was the monolithic overpass of the C & NW Railroad. The railroad tracks ran beneath the L about twenty feet up; the two sets of ties cut the field off effectively and almost completely. He heard the man below him grunt—the sound of a car with a dead battery being turned over.

  Maybe the woman will be lucky and the guy will have a dead battery, Cassady thought, then she wouldn’t end up in a Michigan Avenue abortion clinic telling the doctor: “Yes, it was my boyfriend, and yes, I know I should have come in sooner, but—” “—you were embarrassed, right? Well now, don’t worry, just rest your feet in these stirrups; the hose won’t hurt too much ...”

  The people who worked at the building from nine until six-thirty made picture frames. Moonlight splashed across third-floor windows; he could vaguely make out a small bottle of Jergens hand lotion, a miniature sentry that seemed to stare at him from the window sill. All the windows seemed to stare at him.

  A nearly deserted CTA bus advertising Nobody Does It Better: Channel Two News at 5, 6, & 10 split the night, droning by within ten feet of the two figures in the field. The driver’s eyes mirrored the unblinking darkness of the building’s windows, as they stared straight ahead toward the North Side and better neighborhoods.

  The man—Christ! Cassady had paid hardly any attention to him at all—looked up as the bus hissed on. He had a full and unshaven face, white hairs spotted his beard. Broad shoulders pushed out from a checkered shirt, and his soiled shirttails were dangling out of the open fly of his Wrangler jeans. The man was wearing a pair of red Keds basketball sneakers that made squishing noises as he shifted his weight in the muddy tire tracks on the ground. His teeth were crooked.

  Cassady was captivated by the clarity with which he saw these things. It was as if he were sitting in the sixth-row aisle seat in the Colony theater, secure in the darkness, stuffing popcorn into his mouth as some B-movie starlet is hacked at by some B-movie slasher.

  The woman kicked at the man, who was still looking toward the street. He stumbled backward, howling, more out of surprise than anger. The woman staggered to her feet, jeans still bunched at the knees. The two moved in a drunken pavanne, the man trying to regain his balance, his arms flapping at the air; the woman attempting to turn away, her mouth now resembling a gaping wound.

  Later, Cassady would remember everything that followed as happening with a cruel slowness, as if the field had been invisibly flooded with glycerine. Everything that followed, everything, ripple of muscle, ripping of flesh, blinking of eyes, expanding and contracting of lungs as air was inhaled and scream was expelled, all happened in slow motion, separate frames in a great motion picture. He could almost see himself breathing in slomo.

  The man came forward again, a knife suddenly in his left hand—Cassady thought of a stiletto his father, a retired Monroe Street cop, had shown him once; when he flicked the release button a six-inch blade jumped out uncaringly, capable of slicing flesh and bone alike, press it into somebody’s back snnikt! and their spinal cord is severed like so much butter. He heard the slow whirring of the movie projector again.

  The woman took three steps backward before falling to the ground with a wet thud. A streetlamp near the corner flickered twice and went out. The man’s arm descended in jagged flashes, as if a piece of film was slowing down and speeding up spasmodically, or maybe the scene below had been poorly edited and hastily shipped out for viewing to reap whatever profits could be made. The huge knife ripped twice into the woman’s right breast.

  Blood, a rich purple color in the streetlamp’s haze, flowered across her blouse. A third thrust, this one accompanied by a miserable sucking sound as if the knife had entered the exact same entry hole as the previous stab, and the purplish blood sprayed out in all directions, and had the effect of a water hose being turned on with a thumb over the nozzle. The man was drenched, his pants and shirt had been streaked shiny in places, and the ejaculation of blood drove him into an even greater frenzy.

  Then, only then, did the woman scream. It was the sound of something trapped—a child camping with his parents wanders into a foxtrap, which snaps around his tiny leg, crushing tiny bone. The rabbit staring into the muzzle of the shotgun. The mother who answers the phone angrily at two in the morning, starting to say “Can’t you at least call if—” and being interrupted by the police captain.

  Her arms wrapped frantically around her chest, clamping her life back in.

  As her scream skittered down the empty street into the gutters and alleys, the man punched her below the right eye, and Cassady heard her nose break. It was muffled, like the sound of a pretzel being bit in half inside your mouth. Her skin began to swell, darkening her mascara, which had already began to run, minutes before. Not from tears, but from the man’s spit.

  He pulled her hair and her head snapped brutally forward, and then he casually let it drop back with a dull crack. All of this was of course happening in slow motion, the moonlight washed through the woman’s blond hair as her head fell back, and Cassady thought of a line from a Richard Lovelace poem: Shake your head and scatter day ... What an absurd—

  The woman screamed again.

  The sound slapped Cassady’s awareness with the intensity of his radio alarm, going off to WBBM Hot Hits each morning. After the initial onslaught of the Go-Go’s or Toni Basil singing about Mickey, whatever dream-thoughts still slumbered in his head disappeared when he dipped his contacts in icy tap water before putting them in, and he was left staring at reality: reflected in the bathroom mirror, a shabby two-room flat, and more clearly, a twenty-four-year-old man who looked older than he really was.

  Cassady looked into the mirror in front of him and saw the knife high in the air. This is really happening, he thought. I can still save her! And he moved backward, quickly and quietly, past the Creepshow billboard that some half-assed Rembrandt had retouched in marker so that the cockroach coming out of E. G. Marshall’s mouth was instead a giant black penis, past the small blue sign that gave the hours of arrival and departure for the Douglas trains, and he was finally at the phone and the man wasn’t coming after him and the phone felt cold in his hand and there were initials carved into the wood of the bench next to him that said Juice L’s LaVon and Latin Kings Rule and he dialed 911 and

  All of this happened in little over three seconds in Cassady’s mind. He was rooted where he stood like a corpse in its grave. He badly wanted to urinate.

  The man dropped the knife straight into the woman’s mouth.

  It fell o god it fell ever so slowly. Straight down, like the swan dive of an Olympic swimmer. It fell, and Cassady saw the veins sticking out in the man’s wrist, he held the knife so tightly. Knuckles white. Like her eyes. White and huge, the one that had been beaten purple looked as if it had been painted into its socket.

  And the knife fell, and there were images of that 60 Minutes show on slomo filming and that shot of the drop of milk falling with the camera recording every 1/1000 of a second—the drop so gracefully falling into the dish and the splattering milk formed a tiny crown and one tiny globe stood balanced in dead center with a thin tongue of white reaching to pull it back down.

  Cassady would remember later dreaming of the sound that the knife made when it ripped through the woman’s tongue. It was like the sound the dentists air hose makes when it is in your mouth and you have to swallow. Violet blood flew out of the mutilated mess that had been her mouth a moment before. The smell of blood filled the air and worked its
way into Cassady’s mouth. He tasted copper, and his own bile, deep in his throat.

  The woman hitched out a cough. Another, convulsively. The man sliced her throat from ear to ear. He was smiling. The wind caught the sharp odor of pickles and onions from the Wendy’s several blocks down. Black pools welled up in the sockets of the woman’s still staring O god why couldn’t he have just raped me and masturbated in my face instead of KILLING me eyes. One hand clawed lifeless etchings into the mud. The man replaced the knife through his belt loop into an invisible holster, its blade grinning wickedly, and he walked away. He simply walked away. Twenty minutes had passed, according to the flashing neon Seiko sign down the block.

  The train pulled in several minutes after the red basketball sneakers had shrunk to a pinpoint and then to nothing in the darkness. Cassady walked disjointedly down the aisle of the last car, his ankle-length trenchcoat slapping against the seats. He was surprised that it was crowded, filled with simpering suburbanites intent on following the Governor’s orders. Because of the rail strike, leave work a little early or stay a while longer, so we can all spread the rush hour out more, and hopefully, etc. Hopefully you’ll get re-elected, right? Asshole.

  And so, no doubt about it, everybody piles on to the 7:03, just like housewives throughout North Lawndale say to their husbands, “Honey, it’s 8:00, let’s get Junior’s cords now and avoid the crowd.” And without a fucking doubt, Cassady spends the last hour of work wishing he were anywhere but Jeans ’N Things.

  He nearly tripped over a toad of a man sitting virtually on top of the doors. Thin, a scarecrow in a three-piece suit. Sunken shoulders, bony knees and ankles touching (as if he was a turkey trussed up for somebody’s, probably his boss’, Thanksgiving dinner), eyebrows perched atop black plastic Sears Optical frames and neck muscles protruding from an ill-fitting collar twitched together in a mad fugue. A Cicero-Berwyn businessman working late. He smelled of Brut 33 cologne.

  In the last seat, next to the conductor’s booth, a pregnant black woman gazed out at the rooftops passing just below eye level. A small boy with huge brown eyes and a Walter Payton t-shirt sat tugging at her faded blue sweatshirt, vying with the dirt on the tenements for his mother’s attention. Their clothes said off-the-rack Zayre’s, and their faces had 18th Street written into every sad wrinkle, and in the dirt under their fingernails, too.

  Cassady was able to get a seat in the back of the car. He slid down next to a man in work boots reading (most likely with some degree of difficulty, he thought) the new Robert Ludlum novel. Across from him sat two elderly women, one with a purple babushka wrapped around her head, both their faces buried deep in The National Enquirer. The headlines screamed to enquiring minds everywhere: Liberace Bombshell!, and in smaller print beneath: Boyfriend Tells All! Cassady remembered reading a headline from one of those tabloids once—his mother used to call them her “supermarket magazines,” just like she used to call those idiotic soap operas her “afternoon stories”—and it said that Jerry Lewis was a UFO clone.

  “My, my, that Prince Andrew going out with that Koo actress, and he just had to know that she appeared nekkid in those movies,” Purple-Babushka said. The cloth was wrapped so tightly about her head that her eyebrows were pulled back on her forehead like Mr. Spock’s. “His poor mother, the Queen!” her friend lamented, her withered hand touching her cheek in actual concern. She was wearing whore-red nail polish, cracked in places. “What is this world coming to?”

  Look around you and see, lady, Cassady thought. See if anybody cares that some woman was cut to pieces tonight and you all passed her right on by and

  I saw it happen!

  none of you even bothered to look out of the window. Too caught up in your own damn lives and your own damn problems. Somebody could have seen the—her—body.

  Hell, nobody was even looking at him.

  Down the aisle, somewhere, a kid had his Sony Walkman turned too loud, and John Cougar was singing about Jack and Diane sucking down chilidogs outside a Tastee-Freez. Go for it, Jacky-boy.

  Cassady shut his eyes.

  “... say, hey, Diane, let’s go off behind a shady tree ...”

  How about an L overpass, Jacky-boy, that’ll do the trick. Cassady could almost hear the sound of his own thoughts. He had an urge to laugh, loud and without reason. A madman’s laugh.

  And what could he have done about it anyway? His ears rang.

  “...oh yeah, life goes on ...”

  You talking to me, Jacky-boy? Cassady’s mind was a black hole, and, except for the song, every single sensory feeling, the cold metal he rested his hands on, the smell of a pipe three seats up, even the old ladies’ talk, was sucked into his brain and pulled into swirling blackness at thought-speed. It was like when you’re walking down the street, maybe thinking about the girl you’re seeing, and you don’t even realize that you’re walking or that your legs are moving up and down at each curb; you turn down the right street without even looking at the sign and you only know that she throws her head back when she laughs and when she wears her red headband it drives you crazy ...

  Outside, away from his mind, shadowed buildings passed by at breakneck speeds. The floor of the car vibrated with the tempo of the rails underneath. Except for the armchair-espionage spy next to him and the two mental cases across the aisle, everybody sat with vacant stares, their heads bobbing in rhythm with the motions of the car like empty beer cans floating in the water off Oak Street beach, their eyes staring noncommittally at their reflections, washed black by the night beyond the rhomboid-shaped windows.

  Inside, Cassady saw the woman’s face, the man’s face, with its twisted grin, grotesquely out of proportion, as if an egg-beater had been stuck in the middle of their faces, funhouse faces like the ones at the beginning of Night Gallery, leering ...

  “... long after the thrill of livin’ is gone ...”

  Go to hell, Jacky-boy.

  The train made a hissing sound as it slowly pulled into the Central Park station, jolting Cassady’s awareness as abruptly as a cop’s nightstick jabs the wino on the park bench out of his drunken slumber. Cassady found that he had been staring at the “Life in These United States” signs lining the car, furnished as a public service by The Reader’s Digest for your reading enjoyment.

  He was one of a handful of people who were either poor enough or stupid enough to get off the train, the quality of the neighborhood being what it was, sprawled beneath him in two-dimensional decay, gang slogans in carnival colors sprayed on every shuttered and burnt-out building. He stood alone, hands gripping the railing, the wood rough on his fingers, and let the wind that carried the copper smell of blood into his nose twenty blocks east blow gently through his hair.

  He looked down at his hands. They were strong, able hands, nails neatly trimmed. He began to examine a small scab on his right hand, just below the knuckles, a product of a careless slip of the razor while shaving. Methodically, like an old man whittling wood, he scratched at it until a tiny sliver flaked off. He stared at the ugly red skin beneath. Stretching the skin tautly with his other hand, he watched a small bubble of blood rise to the surface. The blood was thick; Cassady felt the sharp sting of nausea begin a slow pulse in his nose. Black patches grabbed at the corners of his eyes. His stomach heaved, and he was running down the steps two at a time, dumbly thinking that every time his feet hit the stairs and then the concrete, his socks were sliding further down his calves. He felt his throat getting all gummy, and he knew it wouldn’t be long before he threw up, like the time he downed a pint of Yukon Jack on Vic Raciuna’s dare and gave Vic’s car a new set of seat covers. That had been outside of Lorenzo’s a Greek lounge on Halsted Street, where the owners called everybody “my friend” and the whole place smelled like gyros, and Cassady wished to fuck that he was there right now.

  He fumbled for his front door key, his bladder doing a fast boogaloo. Blood poked through his scab again. The light in the foyer reflected off of it, made it look like spittle in a baby�
�s mouth. He retched all over himself.

  It rained the next day. Cassady threw up several times in the morning; the taste of bile stayed in his mouth. He could taste it when he belched. He stared vacantly out of his window at life progressing down Ogden Avenue. Faces in doorways were kept dry by yesterday’s racing forms, waiting for the rain to stop so their daily crap games could begin. A hunkered-down old man, the rain seeming to beat him into the ground, waited patiently for the bus, his eyes gently watching two young boys who did not know what rheumatoid arthritis was splash playfully in the puddles. The sky did not have a horizon: it was a bowl of smokestack-gray that was smacked down on top of everything, and as the afternoon progressed into early evening, the rain quickened, ripping its way through the trees, tearing autumn’s last remains and smashing it to the ground in lifeless piles.

  Through all of this, Cassady sat and watched as the rain beat against his window and eroded lines into his reflected face. Behind him, on the Quasar television set that he had bought hot last summer on Maxwell Street, Eddie Haskell was calling The Beaver a little runt.

  He was holding the cockroach in his hand. Had been for quite some time. He held it firmly between his thumb and forefinger; its legs hung limp. Cassady raised it to eye level; the roach met his stare with little disdain. He had found it creeping through the shadows of his kitchen. Remind you of someone you know? a dark voice asked. NO! Cassady’s mind overrode the dark voice and his eyes squeezed shut.

  When he opened them, a million years after the knife’s grin became too much to bear, he saw that he had ripped off one of the roach’s legs. The roach’s attitude had not changed.

  The tiny leg resting on his right finger resembled a woman’s false eyelash. Cassady had never really seen a false eyelash; he just assumed that one would look like this.

  He tossed the roach behind him, hardly heard it hit the floor. Let it bleed to death.