The Year's Best Horror Stories 14

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  The fields became more varied: no bigger than a carpet, some, the biggest the size of a small terraced street, narrow and interlocked like a complex but boring jigsaw, they held such things as marrows, purplish cabbage-like plants, dried grass, something like broccoli, currant-like fruit bushes, all stunted, all misshapen.

  Though the sea was still invisible, the wind that carried the moisture as the rain died, was salt, sealike yet not fresh.

  The twisted trees closed about the road, if white stones scattered, bumped, crushed together, stabbing up at feet till Mariella felt as though she walked on glass, could be called road.

  A tiny village rimmed round a widening of the road: low squalid whitewashed buildings. A huge black dog rushed out, barking violently: then a man in stained blue overalllike clothes, with beret and paradoxical modern dark glasses slouched from the door of an even squalider hut than most, decorated with a battered Coca-Cola sign, shouted the dog off: and as the Germans indifferently walked on, while Mariella lingered terrified of the dog till it should obey him and clear her path, he gestured at her, gestures she was sure meant “go back, go back.”

  She wished she could explain to him that she was equally terrified of going back alone, of showing herself up: that everything about this day had become one mass of fear in which staying close to the Germans, despite their so blatantly expressed contempt, their sneering silence, was at least the lesser of possible evils.

  When she walked forward across the barren shapeless square to catch up with the others disappearing between fresh trees further ahead, he shrugged, dived back with the dog into the squalid bar or whatever it was: from the corner of her eye she saw telephone or electric wires plunge to it from emptiness. Here too where no car could come they must have “On the Buses.” It comforted her a little.

  As she ran to catch up she sensed rather than saw other figures gather round the door behind, to watch: their voices seemed to carry a gleeful regret, a “told you so” flavor.

  She wished she was back at the hotel, laid on the beach waiting for Colin. She wished she’d never seen or even dreamed of this horrid hinterland, that she could never even explain to any friend or relative, those who expected only to have to see pictures with famous beauty spots on, or have to listen to how dear English beer was in the hotel. To try to explain how horrible this was back home, would be to push their tolerance, their family tolerance in which every member undertook to allow himself to be bored by the others so he too could have his turn to bore, too far.

  The road, track, more a path to walk on single file now, went on between stone banks and blackberry hedges with the fruit overlarge, overripe, over-touched by flies laying belated eggs.

  The odd artificial looking hill was ahead, then to the right, then behind.

  The path began to climb slowly toward a ridge ahead, thick in trees.

  The little fields continued, more and more of them now overground with thistle, thorn, wild grass and other weeds. Those still cultivated were now mostly grape, and even between the grandmother-bent blue-purple-grape-cluster carrying vines here weeds grew, and the supporting wires were rusted, tangled.

  The rain had stopped: the sky was heavy with vast dark clouds, but that odd hill was lit by a luridly-clear light, and ahead the ridge was silhouetted against a painful brightness that must lie over the Adriatic.

  A small cracked horse-trough-cum-fountain, with blurred inscription.

  It had flooded, or the spring that fed it had, and the path dived here into a muddy spreading pond a few hundred yards wide, filling the last hollow before the way climbed toward the ridge.

  “This way,” Emico that, his first words in miles. Heidi silent, merely sneered back at Mariella as if to say “you won’t make it.” Mariella determined nothing would make her admit defeat before that bitch, that cow.

  Emico led the scramble up a steep bank to the right: a painful hop-skip-jump through—over blackthorn and wire tangle: a scrabble through abandoned rotting cabbages where oddly the ground felt as heavy, cloggy, marshy as English clay in a boggy field.

  Another wire to bend and clamber under, feeling it catch and rip the anorak that was the only new thing bought for this holiday.

  Another grape patch, the most derelict looking yet.

  “If no one wants them, do you think I could take some?” Mariella, hunger, thirst, greed to be noticeable at least, if not noticed. Emico turned, lip twisting, “It is up to you.”

  Bastard, she thought ... and hated herself even more for asking. With beating heart, eyes swiveling round for some hidden shotgun-carrying farmer watching just waiting to spring out, she pulled clumsily a couple of huge bunches of the tiny grapes, black from this close up, the weight of their abandoned richness tugging them nearly into the red clamminess of the soil.

  A loud noise made her jump violently.

  Heidi laughed contemptuously. Mariella followed her finger’s arrogant motion. Only an old white horse drinking from the muddy pond.

  They were making their way along the edge of a sunken dry ditch, overgrown by brambles from the hedge that rimmed the road, and a small wood as wild yet artificial looking as something from a school version of “Midsummer’s Eve,” when the rain began again full force. In seconds everything was blotted out. A crow or starling or some such black bird squawked past to dive into the hedge.

  Butterflies fluttered into the tangle.

  “Can we shelter, please? It’s so wet.” Mariella against her will couldn’t help leaving them yet another opening for scorn.

  The cripple nodded. “We would not wish our little guest to drown.”

  Almost human his voice then.

  But by the time Mariella had arranged herself under an overhang of some thick hazelnut-like bush, clear of the heavy drips already beginning at its outer fringes, bag under her to give a dry sitting-space, hoping against hope there were no ants, she realized she had ended up not next to him but to his sister, with Emico beyond her.

  They sat in silence for a while.

  Then the girl pressed Mariella’s shoulder with a sharp oddly jagged nail, almost as painful as the rock she had realized was beneath her leg, hidden in grass, and that by its very intensity of discomfort immunized her against everything, or almost everything at least.

  Mariella looked round.

  This close up the sense of heat, of warm colors, of power to eat life whenever it came in reach of those glittering white teeth, was all but overwhelming.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you want my brother?”

  Mariella couldn’t think what if anything to say, so she said nothing, merely looking attentive. It had got her through school, courtship, marriage, almost unhurt, this technique, perhaps it would save her now.

  “Because if you want him I will ask him for you, he might let you ... it would be good for him, he is under much strain, he needs to relax before what we must do.”

  The rain was a wall in front of them, inches away, making all the rest of the world a wet wilderness. Here, this dry burrow was like something in a dream, all normal connections, family, husband, children, were beyond reach as far as a star. Mariella realized abruptly just how badly she did want the cripple to plunge into her, rip her, wipe out years of being a good girl, a good daughter, good wife, good mother.

  But she wouldn’t, couldn’t, ask for favors. Let him ask himself, not have this horrible sister, this hellcat pimp for him as casually and indifferently as if she was asking fishheads for a cat.

  “He could ask me himself.”

  The girl nodded, as if that was what she expected: a chance to serve a god and of course such a foolish, useless creature set conditions, in effect turned the chance to be of dumb, obedient service down. Typical human scum.

  That at least was what Mariella read in her face.

  And sat hugging her knees in dumb misery, wondering if she’d thrown everything away.

  But he could’ve asked her himself, couldn’t he. And at least asked his sister to go away f
or a bit. Did they really expect her to make love to him here in this horrid ditch like a new grave, all wet earth, and with that creature watching and doubtless taking notes in her black book? They must be inhuman, must be. Only he was so lovely, so powerful, and so sad.

  But the rain stopped seconds after Heidi turned away indifferently from her. The rain stopped, and a shaft of sun briefly lit the clearing before them, throwing the wood’s darkness into greater contrast. And Emico got up, stiffly so that suddenly Mariella as well as fear and anger and longing felt pity.

  And stumped away.

  Not in the whole time had the Germans looked at a map.

  Yet now even that odd-shaped hill was lost from view in the swells of land, and the sea, and as the clouds closed again so too was the sun.

  There were no landmarks, yet without hesitation Emico, after leading them down a bank of earth back onto the familiar path, round the next band led them off it into the woodland.

  Over a curiously short smooth sward like a dance-floor thrown down in the wilderness.

  On through trees bent before some wind. At first they were full height, but their tops must be flattened by the prevailing ridge, she realized after a time, so that as they climbed the slope between these twisted trunks, the roof over their heads, the roof of matted branches and leaves, grew nearer and nearer, and the trees among which they climbed, shorter and shorter.

  Till suddenly the roof came down to meet them, an impenetrable tangle of branches, or so it seemed.

  But Emico vanished through it, then Heidi.

  And Mariella, pushing forward, found a tiny opening, a goat’s exit perhaps: just as her hair tangled among some branches behind.

  A knife flashed before her eyes. She was terrified, thinking, “this is it, they’ve brought me here to kill me, sex fiends, that’s what they are, German murderers, it’ll be in the ‘News of the World’.”

  And was trying to gather breath against the yawn-thickening lump in her throat of utter terror, the knife and hand made more frightening because she could not see the body to which it belonged, when it passed by her head and smoothly, neatly, trimmed the end of her hair: she felt a brief tug at the roots, a tiny pain.

  And was free and scrambling out onto the ridge, cursing her foolishness.

  To see Emico and Heidi staring indifferently away from her, looking upward and onward, facing forward. “Thank you.” Ignored, as if help had never been given her to get free. She turned to look back from where they had come, to cover her embarrassment.

  And gasped in wonder.

  The wood lay before her like a floor, as if she could walk away on it, from the yard-high or smaller dwarf oaks at her feet to the farthest giants.

  Beyond, the maze of tiny misshapen fields, the shapes and colors of germs and leucocytes in school biology.

  That odd bunker-shaped hill, dwarfed now to a skull’s hat in a Western.

  And the sea back again, old friend, a gray oily pond stretching far off to the rusty patches of alumina quarry and black specks of freighters. And, far to the right, the roofs of Gradina and even, if she strained her eyes, what she was sure was the hotel. And the pile on pile of coastal mountains, no longer torch paper blue, a bleached gray now beneath the blackened gray of sky, bone displayed on black velvet like jewels she wished Colin would buy her but he never did, not that they could afford, but at least sometime couldn’t he say he wished he could buy her just some small diamond?

  Behind her, the very faintest sound of impatience.

  She turned, but both still had their backs to her: there was no knowing which it was.

  And the impact was like a physical blow of what she saw: gravity seemed to turn and spin dizzily so that the wild scurry of clouds she looked up at was like a chasm into which she wished to fall, a waterfall round the central lure.

  The castle, that some blindness had not let her see, shock of that knife just past perhaps, loomed vast overhead, seeming about to topple on her, seize her throat, so huge it piled above.

  She covered her eyes a second, then looked again. Perspectives steadied.

  In fact it must be a good quarter of a mile away: beyond another dip full of wild rocks and brush and even a few olives and pines, it piled hugely up on top of a savage face of cliffs, on which it in turn added a fantastic complex of towers and pinnacles. Where from far back at the hotel it had looked tiny, tame, more blockhouse than anything else, and appearing to be on quite low hills, she realized now all this was entirely trick of distance and the intervening layers of ridges. This was something huge.

  “Originally built as the Monastery of the Holy Tooth and the Holy Thorn, both believed to have been brought here by the Virgin Mary during her flight from the revenge of Rome ... pilgrims believed that here they would if worthy receive not just their heart’s desire, but Heaven’s purest interpretation of it ... and this belief, which persisted even after the monastery became a fortress of a succession of peoples, was one reason for the ferocity of its defense against the Turks. Jankovic Kula was the hero of the siege, one of the greatest generals of the Croat resistance, pirate more than servant of any king, and his victory here was one of the turning points stopping the Turkish advance, as here was one of the turning points stopping the Turkish advance, as important in its way as the successful defenses of Malta or Vienna.”

  Emico looked at neither of them as he said this, his eye instead fixed on the silhouetted, hard-to-clearly define collar of towers like a thunder-lizard’s ruff she’d once seen in a zoo, chest puffed out and hissing, vast round the huge central tower.

  He sounded so like Colin in one way, reeling out his unwanted information: yet somehow with him it was painfully moving, made her want to clutch him like a child and rub him better, kiss him better, as if his knowledge all sprang from an unhealed wound. And the tentacle-like white crippled arm seemed to rise and point at the building’s vastness over there against his will, as a plant turns toward the sun.

  Mariella could not keep silent. “Your heart’s desire,” she stammered it out, nearly drying up under Heidi’s baleful glare turned on her now.

  Emico answered in a tone more natural than anything else she’d yet heard him say, “Your heart’s desire, yes: but your true heart’s desire, what you may not even know you want, not what you think you want, or your reason does ... that is the legend, anyway.” His voice died away to boredom with the last words, and he stumped away among the bushes, aiming toward those colossal foundations soaring above them.

  They followed him as he moved into the growth of bush: the sky seemed full of those vast walls ahead, and for the last few minutes of the walk, like the last few minutes before going into the headmaster’s study at school when she’d been reported for cheating which she had not done but was too shy to deny, and knew beforehand she would be too shy to deny, so that she knew in advance she’d be punished for something she had not done, only because it was a friend of hers who’d really cheated, who was a teacher’s pet, and the teacher, Birdie they called him because his name was Wren, bespectacled and scared looking and, so older girls said, stood so often at the stair-bottom so he could look up skirts, hated Mariella particularly because once when in an R.I. class he’d asked who didn’t believe in God and Mariella not knowing one way or the other had been the only one to put her hand up, just because her father said he was an atheist, being an ex shop-steward sacked for agitating, and she feeling loyal, and ever since Birdie had hated her, jeering her as “The Godless One” in front of all the class, like these last few minutes of movement seemed somehow at one and the same time the terrible end of everything and also a liberation, because somehow she was sure, just from fear of being anything else, she was going to be no matter what the crunch true to herself.

  The gate was an anti-climax.

  The slope had risen imperceptibly: almost down on hands and knees to scramble over butter and egg plants and tiny blue flowers and past dry growths on which butterflies hung like eyes, they looked up only at the last
minute before crashing headlong into it.

  The tower was incredibly smooth, the stones as close-joined as if they were plastic. The mellowing of lichen and creeper seemed irrelevant, like lipstick on an old woman. The gob of gate itself was vast and blackened wood bound by huge iron bonds, hinges and keyholes and chains in profusion like Houdini costume exaggerated for a TV show.

  Emico grasped the vast handle of the door, itself four times a man’s height.

  The door clanged, but did not give.

  Emico seemed human as in temper he bashed and crashed at it.

  Mariella realized that, horrible as these people were, these so alluring, so vile Germans, they were still infinitely better than being here alone. Yet paradoxically she could not help believing, somewhere at the back of her mind, that had she been here alone somehow the door would have magically opened for her: that she would have got in where they could not.

  There was some muttering in German between Emico and Heidi, with glances at the smooth sweep of stonework up to just-visible battered battlements. They must have seen it as hopeless.

  Emico started along the wall’s foot to the right, forcing his way through prickly growth with exaggerated motions of obviously restrained fury. For the first time Mariella pitied him, despite her determination not to be affected by his crippledom.

  He vanished from sight.

  Heidi sneered at Mariella, as if to say “You wait there, useless, you’d only be in the way”, then dived after him into the tangle that grew right to the masonry’s foot.

  Mariella sat down: emptied a stone from her shoe that had hurt for ages but she’d felt too embarrassed to touch. Then climbed behind a growth of spiny dry branches, and let herself piss.

  And finally, just for luck, gave one last bang on the great door that seemed to belong not in the real world but in a fairy tale of dungeons to frighten childhood.

  Echo, echo of resounding noise.

  Silence enough for the dust a lizard stirred to fall with a scrabbling noise among the roots of the brush.

  And then, far off within, a sound of movement. A bell, seeming, and then a clank drag as if of huge metal feet. Terrifying: except that Mariella was so pleased to have succeeded where Emico had failed, she would have welcomed even the King of Hell to prove her point.