The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22

by Stephen Jones

  “I met a scientist once,” the sergeant said. “He had some guy’s guts stuck to his face, and he was down on his knees in a lab chewing on a dead janitor’s leg. I put a bullet in his head.”

  Laughter went around the circle. I took one last drink and passed the bottle along with it.

  “But, you know what?” the private said. “Who gives a shit, anyway? I mean, really?”

  “Well,” another kid said. “Some people say you can’t fight something you can’t understand. And maybe it’s that way with these things. I mean, we don’t know where they came from. Not really. We don’t even know what they are.”

  “Shit, Mendez. Whatever they are, I’ve cleaned their guts off my boots. That’s all I need to know.”

  “That works today, Q, but I’m talking long term. As in: What about tomorrow, when we go nose-to-nose with their daddy?”

  None of the soldiers said anything for a minute. They were too busy trading uncertain glances.

  Then the sergeant smiled and shook his head. “You want to be a philosopher, Private Mendez, you can take the point. You’ll have lots of time to figure out the answers to any questions you might have while you’re up there, and you can share them with the rest of the class if you don’t get eaten before nightfall.”

  The men laughed, rummaging in their gear for MREs. The private handed over my shotgun, then shook my hand. “Jamal Quinlan,” he said. “I’m from Detroit.”

  “John Dalton. I’m the sheriff around here.”

  It was the first time I’d said my own name in five months.

  It gave me a funny feeling. I wasn’t sure what it felt like.

  Maybe it felt like turning a page.

  The sergeant and his men did some mop-up. Mendez took pictures of the lodge, and the bloody words pasted to the living room wall, and that dead thing on the floor. Another private set up some communication equipment and they bounced everything off a satellite so some lieutenant in DC could look at it. I slipped on a headset and talked to him. He wanted to know if I remembered any strangers coming through town back in May, or anything out of the ordinary they might have had with them. Saying yes would mean more questions, so I said, “No, sir. I don’t.”

  The soldiers moved north that afternoon. When they were gone, I boxed up food from the pantry and some medical supplies. Then I got a gas can out of the boathouse and dumped it in the living room. I sparked a road flare and tossed it through the doorway on my way out.

  The place went up quicker than my house in town. It was older. I carried the box over to the truck, then grabbed that bottle the soldiers had passed around. There were a few swallows left. I carried it down to the dock and looked back just in time to see those birds dart from their nest in the chimney, but I didn’t pay them any mind.

  I took the boat out on the lake, and I finished the whiskey, and after a while I came back.

  Things are getting better now. It’s quieter than ever around here since the soldiers came through, and I’ve got some time to myself. Sometimes I sit and think about the things that might have happened instead of the things that did. Like that very first day, when I spotted that monster in the Chrysler’s trunk out on County Road 14 and blasted it with the shotgun – the gas tank might have exploded and splattered me all over the road. Or that day down in the dark under the high school football stadium – those rat-spiders could have trapped me in their web and spent a couple months sucking me dry. Or with Roy Barnes – if he’d never seen those books in the back seat of that old sedan, and if he’d never read a word about lesser demons, where would he be right now?

  But there’s no sense wondering about things like that, any more than looking for explanations about what happened to Barnes, or me, or anyone else. I might as well ask myself why the thing that crawled out of Barnes looked the way it did or knew what it knew. I could do that and drive myself crazy chasing my own tail, the same way Barnes did with all those maybes and what ifs.

  So I try to look forward. The rules are changing. Soon they’ll be back to the way they used to be. Take that soldier. Private Quinlan. A year from now he’ll be somewhere else, in a place where he won’t do the things he’s doing now. He might even have a hard time believing he ever did them. It won’t be much different with me.

  Maybe I’ll have a new house by then. Maybe I’ll take off work early on Friday and push around a shopping cart, toss steaks and a couple of six-packs into it. Maybe I’ll even do the things I used to do. Wear a badge. Find a new deputy. Sort things out and take care of trouble. People always need someone who can do that.

  To tell the truth, that would be okay with me.

  That would be just fine.

  STEVE RASNIC TEM

  Telling

  STEVE RASNIC TEM’S RECENT stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Black Wings II and the Ellen Datlow anthology Blood & Other Cravings. His new novel, Deadfall Hotel, will be published by Solaris Books in early 2012, while New Pulp Press will be bringing out a collection of his noir short stories, Ugly Behavior, later the same year.

  “As for the following story,” reveals the author, “it began with a dreadful image at the end of a dream. I couldn’t remember the other details of that dream, but I was determined to find out where that image might have come from.”

  BEFORE HE MET MAGGIE, he thought he understood the difference between sense and nonsense. By the end, and he could smell it coming – redolent of fish and sweaty sheets – he could hardly tell the difference between breath and flesh.

  They had visited three, four hundred houses for sale. They had driven down every street in the county, every nameless lane. They had done this in late October, with a layer of ice-capped snow on the ground, the wind low but steady enough to scour the back of your throat until you were made inarticulate.

  Wayne did not complain, but it was painful, creeping along, enduring the stares of suspicious neighbours, as in the shaded lanes the ice cracked and exploded beneath his tyres. It might have been better if he’d had any idea what she was looking for, but she did not share her criteria. Wayne supposed that was what artists were like. But it exhausted the people who loved them.

  In most cases a relatively slow drive-by was sufficient: the house would apparently be in the wrong architectural style, or too tall, or too wide. He wasn’t permitted to say anything – he couldn’t even hum while he was driving. And now and then she would insist that they step inside, or walk around, or lie on the floor and gaze at the ceiling. Wayne had been unemployed two years, but he did have his real estate license – for once that made him feel useful.

  Wayne didn’t enjoy any of it. He especially didn’t enjoy lying on those dusty floors, looking into those crusty ceilings, inviting dust into his eyes, dust into his mouth, where it tasted aspirin bitter, like all that was left by the end of the day, like the end of life itself.

  He had no idea why they were doing it, except Maggie said it was something she needed to do before she could choose the right house. And as much as she annoyed and infuriated him, Wayne adored Maggie, and would do anything she asked.

  “This is the one,” she said. “Finally, this is the one. I can feel it.”

  The house was in worse shape than most of the others. Unpainted grey boards pushed through tatters of off-white colour. Inside, the walls were thin as paper. Wayne imagined he could see the colours of the next room bleeding through.

  “If you dropped something you’d hear it in every room of the house.” As if on cue, vague, hesitant sounds travelled from the other end of the house, or farther.

  Maggie hadn’t heard, or ignored them. “But that’s a good thing, isn’t it? Nothing can ever sneak up on you.”

  The fact that something sneaking up was even a consideration appalled him. “It smells funny in here,” he said. “Are you sure you can live in a place that smells funny?”

  “They make paint with chemicals that kill the odour.”

  And that was that. She’d made up her mind. He supposed she didn’t care how
the place smelled. For him it was as if he’d crawled inside a loaf of old, damp bread. The rich stink filled the nose and spilled over into the mouth. He imagined a sponginess in the wood open to rot, mould, mildew.

  Sun glare flashed through the window glass. A suggestion of double-exposed imagery floated across the wall. But when he shifted his head slightly it had gone. Maggie had chosen, and he had to make the best of it. It was her money.

  The day after they closed, Wayne had their bedroom ready. By evening they had the appliances arranged in a rudimentary kitchen. He spent a difficult weekend stocking Maggie’s new studio with paints, canvases, and a myriad other supplies.

  In her studio he watched as she put the finishing touches on a new painting. Maggie never seemed to mind his visits to her workplace – often she invited him. It didn’t seem to matter how unfinished a piece might be.

  But then she always acted as if he wasn’t there. Her focus could be disturbing, the way she stared at the canvas, aggressively applying paint, not even bothering to check her pigments, holding her breath, unable to do anything else until the canvas filled with colour.

  It was one of her house paintings. Almost all of her paintings were of houses, at least as long as he’d known her. Those paintings had proved surprisingly popular in the galleries – they were the reason they could afford to buy this house, and pay for everything else. “They work because the right house will remind us of other houses important in our lives,” she explained. “They resonate. You look at certain houses, and you can just imagine the lives of the people inside, trapped by those walls, or lovingly embraced. Their experience is also our own.”

  When Maggie painted it was always an attack upon the canvas. She thickened the acrylic paint until it was the consistency of brilliantly coloured liquid clay. She shovelled the colour onto the surface, then worked quickly to create vegetation, planks, timbers, brick, doors, windows, roofs, sky. He was always surprised when her fury suddenly turned a chaos of swirling thick colour into something recognisable.

  But what was even more surprising was that something extraordinarily appealing resulted from this process. These were the prettiest, most intensely welcoming houses he’d ever seen.

  “So what do you think?” she asked.

  The painting was like all the others, but he could sense subtle differences. “The lines around the door, the porch roof, that window, it’s like this house, isn’t it?”

  “In better days, yes. Or maybe the way it will be, after we finish fixing it up.”

  “So this place is the model you were looking for?”

  “Maybe I’ve been painting it since the beginning, the spaces, the lines. It’s like I was trying to recall it.”

  “Then you’ve been here before?”

  “No – I’m sure I haven’t.”

  “Maybe with your dad?” It was a risk – her father had always been a sore point.

  “No – I don’t think so. The house he moved into after the divorce may have been similar. I stayed there summers until I graduated from high school, a few years before his death.”

  “It would have helped if I’d known what we were looking for.”

  “I couldn’t have put it into words before now. I’m a picture person, not a word person. I had to see it, be inside it, and then start painting it. That’s the way I’ve always found out things about myself. I’ve never been here, Wayne, but maybe someone like me lived here, or at least nearby. Someone I’m in sympathy with.”

  “So – living with your dad, that was hard?”

  She nodded silently, then the tears began to drop. He started toward her but she held up her hand. “Sorry. I don’t know why I get like this. It was a sad time, but you know how kids are. You can’t think of much outside yourself. I’m not aware of hating that house, but I don’t remember ever actually being in it. I remember saying goodbye to my mom, and starting out on this long bus trip, but I can’t remember ever arriving, living with my dad, or anything about his house. I do remember telling my mother I could never go back, and my mother telling me I had to go back.”

  He listened, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the new canvas. There was an out-of-place shadow peeking out of the upstairs front window: faded, sepia-coloured, uninvited.

  Maggie worked late into the evening. Early the next morning Wayne left the house so as not to disturb her sleep. It was cold for working outdoors, but he could at least clear some of the dead vegetation out of the back yard.

  He removed a large quantity of dead brush before he could see the ground. And even after he’d got rid of the taller plants he’d get the occasional slap, the random clawing from some unseen branch or stalk, like an untrimmed fingernail tracing the skin. Nothing terribly serious, but enough to well the blood.

  A blurred shadow loomed beyond the last sweep of netted branches. With his sleeve he brushed a gritty paste of chaff and blood from his face. “Maggie? You’re up?” But when his vision cleared no one was there. He exhaled in exasperation. The fogged air hung suspended, as if poised.

  As he removed dead flowers, the stray remains of potatoes, an onion or two, he began finding ash spread under everything, and bits of foundation from an old wall. An impatient weight crouched nearby, waiting for him to look up, which he eventually did, and found nothing. That was when he heard Maggie yelling from inside the house.

  She was on her hands and knees in her studio. He dropped beside her and laid one hand gently on her back. “What happened?”

  She shook her head, ran a finger up and down one of the wide gaps between the floor planks. Extensive sections of the ceiling below were missing, so that he could see most of the living room on the first floor.

  “I don’t know what time I got to bed last night, but when I woke up I was anxious to get back to the painting. Then as I was picking up the brush I smelled something – I don’t know – smoky, but terribly sour as well, like overpowering body odour. I felt threatened, as if the stench might smother me. I looked down, and there was this person standing under me. His clothes were dark, dripping and greasy. And then he shifted, and he was looking at me. Two white, shiny spots staring up at me, but Wayne, no pupils.”

  It took him minutes to check the house and yard. He rushed in to tell her he’d found nothing. She was still sitting on the floor, shaking. “You say you just woke up. It was probably just a shadow, the light confusing you.”

  She shook her head. Then Wayne noticed the new painting. Despite the obscuring strokes of shadow and translucent mist it was still recognisably the same house, but done in a much darker colour palette: greys, burnt umber, deep purple, shades of black and the evening blues. Deepest night. Deepest dream.

  “I probably won’t be able to sell my usual clients this one.”

  “Unwelcoming is the word, I guess.”

  “It terrifies me.”

  “Then stop working on it.”

  “I really don’t think I can paint anything else until I can finish this one.”

  It was powerful. A series of vaguely realised trees led you to the front porch, caked in soot, deteriorating under the assault of some oily disease. A gauze of fog hung from the porch roof. But something more: a blurred presence seemed to be arriving out of the darkness from the back of the porch.

  “I don’t know why we came here.”

  Wayne grabbed her hand. “It’s like you said, houses and people resonate. You’re here because of someone who lived here before. You’re here because of whatever happened to them.”

  Every evening Maggie worked on the new painting into the early morning hours. Wayne had never known her to take so long with an individual work – usually she finished them in a couple of days. But she revisited the same areas of canvas again and again, applying additional thin layers of sombre colour, constantly revising lines and shades as she apparently grew closer to her vision.

  Each morning when Wayne got up he checked the painting: the blurred figure slightly more resolved, its position slightly shifted on the po
rch, as if it were pacing. After a few more nights it had left the porch, and was making its way up the sidewalk.

  Wayne moved forward on repairs to the house and yard, although concerns over Maggie slowed him. He put a ceiling up in the living room, hoping it might comfort her that she no longer had that god’s-eye glimpse into their downstairs. The backyard didn’t look so much like a refuse pile anymore. The uncovered foundation proved to extend to all points in the yard – the building it once supported the size of a full house. He also uncovered bits of an old flagstone walk leading back to the alley that ran behind the long row of neighbouring houses.

  A night came that Maggie collapsed early, and for once he was the late one up, reading, listening.

  At first he thought the breathing he heard might be his own – the book, about secrets and lies and misunderstood identities, had made him tense. But when he put it down and laid his hand on his chest, he realised the rapid panting was more distant – somewhere down the hall and up the stairs. As he made that journey the panting grew louder, and the loudness of it made him think of a dog, the way a dog breathes with his entire body, especially when in pain, heaving and exhaling, unlike people who tend to breathe shallowly from their chests.

  The pale little blonde girl lay with her back to him across two steps near the top of the stairs. Her body heaved like an injured dog’s. Shadows gathered along her spine: hand-shaped bruises, ending in a crown of yellow curls streaked with dark blood.

  Something burned his nostrils – an acrid stench of urine. But he could find no signs of a spreading stain beneath her.

  He wanted to say something, but was afraid. And he dared not touch that tender, panting shape. Suddenly coughing violently, she faded into deep shadow, then lit up again with each new intake of breath. What could he do for her? Spying on her in her old distress was some kind of violation, so he slowly crept backwards down the stairs. At the last moment her head jerked up, staring at the door at the top of the stairs. Her body started to slide toward him as she made ready her escape, but he turned and made his way downstairs and to bed.