The Year's Best Horror Stories 15

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  “This wasn’t in a bar in a rough neighborhood or something,” Cassady said, shaking his head. “It was in Palos Heights, for chrissakes. Four blocks from her home.”

  More silence. A car honked outside. The door upstairs slammed distantly.

  “They found her in January. This farmer up near the Wisconsin border let his dog out one morning, and ... this is how the paper put it; ‘After several minutes of digging in the snow, the dog ran proudly back to its master, the head of the missing girl jauntily dangling from his mouth.’ Jauntily dangling. Jesus, can you believe that? The coroner put the time of death at about a week before that. There were pieces of her all over the field.”

  His hands were still pressed tightly against his skull. Cassady made claws out of his fingers and dug them into the creases around his forehead, as if trying to re-open a line of sutures that held back a slow trickle of mistakenly discarded memories. He thought of the blood dripping down Quita McLean’s thigh, black in the glow of the streetlamps. Just like the others. He did not mention that he had asked Vicki out to dinner, and that she had refused, placing him in the class of all the other macho animals. Sarah didn’t need to know that.

  Sarah had begun to speak when Cassady lifted his head. The blood vessels stood out in his cheeks from where his palms had pushed against the skin. Several thin red scratches ran across his forehead. My God, Denny used to have laugh lines, Sarah thought.

  The clock behind Cassady read ten o’clock. Over two hours had passed. A rerun of “M*A*S*H” was on the television.

  “No,” Cassady said with a tone of finality, knowing what Sarah was going to ask. Oh he knew her only too well. Women were all alike, really. “They thought it was her boyfriend, but they couldn’t be sure.”

  He stopped talking then. He was thinking about other, more private things. Sarah reached across the distance between them and took his hand, wiping the blood that was on his nails, soothing him just like she did in that dream thousands of years before. Yes, she knew him well. Too well.

  Cassady knew this, knew that it was only a matter of time before the cops came and asked her questions. He really had only one choice.

  Sarah slowly realized the change that was occurring in Cassady. He looked too calm. Too serene. Instead of wondering why he had brought up all these memories, tragic as they were, she felt chilled.

  Denny’s eyes were different, she thought.

  “Denny, I—”

  “Sarah, wait. Do you remember a few years ago, it was around the time of the Humboldt Park riots, that girl who was raped near the Belmont E1?

  “Remember that guy, he was a clerk in a record store, and he tried to help, and the guy stabbed him to death? ...”

  “Denny, you can’t blame yourself for what happened to that girl at work,” Sarah said. “You weren’t even with her the night it happened, you couldn’t possibly have saved her.”

  She shivered in the semi-darkness of the room.

  “You’re right about the city, though. You can only pray it doesn’t happen to you.

  “Now, c’mere.”

  She pulled him toward her, burying his face into her blonde hair.

  “You know,” Cassady spoke into Sarah’s breasts. “I’m not like the others ... like that old bag Spinoza next door.

  “I’m not afraid of the streets.”

  “Nobody said you were, Denny,” Sarah said, slowly rocking him back and forth in her arms. “C’mon. I’ll make you a drink.”

  She stood up, ruffling Cassady’s hair as if he were a child’s plaything, and walked across the room to the small bar that stood against the wall. There were only two bottles on the shelf: a full bottle of Seagram’s and a half-empty fifth of DuBouchett’s Blackberry Brandy, for when Sarah’s father came by to see how his little girl was doing on her own.

  “I’m ... not sure why you told me these things, Denny,” Sarah repeated. “But, don’t blame yourself. Believe me.”

  “You’re right.” Cassady’s voice was like a metronome. “Life’s too short.”

  He covered his eyes with his hands again. Without stopping, he told Sarah about the October night on the E1 platform, about being a spectator to death. In his head he was singing

  (making love in a rock bed)

  Sarah spilled much of the bottle’s contents on the counter.

  (beneath the subway tracks with you)

  Cassady slowly took his hands from his face. Without stopping, he let the knife drop into Sarah Dunleavy’s back. Much of her blood spilled onto the counter.

  (my brown-eyed girl)

  The next several hours were a nightmarish blur. Conspiracy blended with paranoia, enveloping Cassady the moment he left Sarah’s apartment. His face was no longer familiar; he was wearing the same type of mask that all the other faces were wearing. Every day of their stinking lives. The cops wouldn’t even question his motive; they would nod their heads in agreement and maybe even buy him a beer after he told them the reason he killed the love of his life SarahSarahSarahhhhh

  He grabbed a too-inquisitive squirrel and squeezed its steaming guts onto the dying grass as if the rodent was toothpaste. Squirrel-honey, your gums are bleeding because of gingivitis, you dumbshit. Better use Colgate. Ha! He named the squirrel Binky. R.I.P., Binky old buddy. Hasti Spumanti.

  It was a Bad Day at Black Rock, all right. First Sarah and her incessant whining over his looks and that stupid laugh that sounded like a freaking air hose! And the rain was making the deadspace in his right bicep throb as if the muscle was still there. Fucking doctors, eight years ago said it’d be all right. Yea, all the interns at the Osteopathic Hospital were aware of his case, nodding their heads in agreement, saying the muscle would be back in the next six months. Liars! Didn’t they realize muscles are what girls wanted? They were too busy making their six-figure incomes anyway ...

  Cassady bought a pint of Seagram’s, downed it while crossing a public park, and threw the empty bottle with all his might. He clapped in glee when the bottle smashed against the wall of a recreation center, shattering the gang graffiti and lovers’ initials.

  He ran screaming down a deserted midnight street. No one looked out their windows, and, knowing this, Cassady smiled broadly and winked at the clouds above.

  He shared secrets with the drainage ditches.

  Somehow finding his way uptown to Sheridan, Cassady raced madly for the E1 tracks intersecting the street at Loyola. He fell down, chipping a front tooth. Swinging a ragged fist, he mouthed bloody epithets at several singing winos behind the ruins of the Grenada theater.

  He had to get to the train. Pull a train. The train of thought. He had lost his train of thought. Hey, where did we go, days when the rain came? All along the waterfall with you, my brown-eyed girl. On Slate Street that grate street I saw a man he dry humped his wife a Chicano made moan sound Ha! I saw a man he danced with a knife in Chicago oh please come to Boston in the springtime ... the train! It was coming he could make it

  (underneath the subway tracks with you)

  (my brown-eyed girl)

  the train. A giant, throbbing penis that screwed Cassady every time he took its sterile ride for a job interview. Or for a pick up.

  The turnstile of the Loyola station wavered in front of him, a gateway to truth, an upright skeleton of a dead centipede. Glazed with ice, it blazed like neon blue in Cassady’s brain.

  He found the needed energy to run toward it, making the distance easily in seven long strides. But the bars moved clockwise, providing an exit for the commuters inside. It was not intended to be an entrance. The bars did not budge and Cassady was beyond hearing his nose crack. His lips curled in a snarl and his teeth touched the frozen metal.

  He stepped back, lunging forward three more times, each time harder than the previous, stopping only when a triangular swatch of his cheek was ripped from his face. A bone shard, fingernail-thin and red in the night, peeked through Cassady’s right eyelid like a sentry. Scouting a new way to get into the fortress.

/>   He left the turnstile, then. Stumbling toward the closed glass doors. Flecks of his face trailed behind.

  The door was locked. He did not hesitate, and by crashing through it, gouged his already blinded eye. When he hit the ground, something broke deep inside him, making a pulpy sound, perhaps that of crushing grapes for wine.

  His legs made mock parodies of each other as he fell forward along the concrete floor. Muttering incoherent thankyous that it was too late for a teller to be on duty, Cassady crawled up the iced stairs, ten, twenty, thirty leading upward into a mist. Darkness clutched at his one remaining eyelid.

  When he heard the quiet rumble of the approaching train, not realizing that the Loyola terminal was closed for repairs, he finally relaxed.

  He cried as the train went by, a thunderous blur of winos and late-night partyers, none so much as noticing his outstretched, supplicating arms.

  He cried louder, in great sobs spewed from his throat like vomit. Then he saw the man, so much like him, dragging his body away from Cassady as if Cassady himself was some kind of psycho pariah. Or was that messiah?

  The similar man undid the buttons on his shirt in painful slowness. Would anybody care if Cassady did kill himself, like he knew the other man was going to do? He was sure his parents didn’t even know he was living in Chicago. The last time he had written them, years before, he had told them he was working for the government. Would his face be in the paper? Pull a train, pull the cord tighter tighter honey honey sugar sugar yummy yummy. My brown-eyed girl.

  Tying the knot was easier than he had expected, even with the skin peeling off his fingers in the pre-dawn cold.

  The other man, now nothing more than a shadow, climbed on top of the salt box next to the stairwell. He waited for Cassady to decide. So, it was going to be a game of chicken! Cassady would show them all!

  The other man, now just a mist, painstakingly tied one shirt sleeve around his tired neck.

  And on a blustery night in early November, long after the Night Owl train was lost in the distance of the skyline, Dennis Cassady watched with numb fascination as a crazy man hung himself with the remains of his blood spattered shirt. He was afraid to make a move.

  THE FOGGY, FOGGY DEW by Joel Lane

  Joel Lane is one of the youngest writers to appear in The Year’s Best Horror Stories, and it’s nice to see that there’s no danger the breed is dying out. Lane was born in Exeter in 1963, grew up in Birmingham, and is presently at Cambridge, where he obtained a B.A. in History and Philosophy of Science and has now started research in the same subject. He has published poetry in Argo, Oxford Poetry, and elsewhere, and his stories have appeared in Dark Horizons and Dark Dreams. He has also written a critical essay on Ramsey Campbell for Foundation.

  “The Foggy, Foggy Dew” was published as a small press booklet (accompanied by a short poem) and suggests that Joel Lane will shortly be as popular with the Birmingham tourist industry as Ramsey Campbell must be with Liverpool’s—assuming such exists.

  The gray van which stopped in front of the office carried no legend to correspond to the words O’BRIEN INDUSTRIAL SERVICES printed in gray on the locked office door. As the eight people who had been waiting on the pavement gathered by the van, a short man in a cheap blue suit emerged from its front. He ticked their names on a list. “Right, can you get in the back?” They climbed awkwardly onto the wooden benches that flanked the body of the van, on opposite sides of a heap of canvas-covered boxes. The benches were dusty; someone coughed. The drizzle made a subdued insect-sound on the low roof. The van shuddered into activity; its interior was paler than the exterior, a discolored white, and enough light connected the windscreen with the blurred pane in the back door for the passengers to see one another. Outside, the rain filled in the remaining pale spaces on the pavement.

  The young man seated opposite Daniel shrugged his raincoat up above his head and pulled it forward, reversing the sleeves, until he was free of its shadow. The gloom diminished his face, sharpening its familiarity. But even when, a few minutes later, the other offered Daniel a cigarette and he saw the long, tapering fingers, he could not convince himself of the recognition. Too much of the past was at stake for him not to hesitate. But as the journey continued, Daniel suspected that the other was watching him in a similar manner. Ahead, the windscreen blinked repeatedly at the gauze of rain.

  The van stopped in a car park somewhere to the north of Birmingham. It released them halfway up a slope; uphill a line of factory buildings were being repaired or demolished, and in the creases of the valley a slick road twisted like a ribbon of metal. There were no houses in sight; a new industrial estate was taking shape on the ground of an older one. Large open patches displayed only flattened mounds of brick and steel, flecked with clumps of purple-flowering weed; only rain and the eye lent them perpendicular structures. Where the road dissolved in mist, three black chimneys were stubbed out against the sky. One was broken in half, presenting a scalpel’s profile. Inside the factory it was dry, which made the air seem colder. A corridor opened onto rooms housing nothing but unfinished monsters of scaffolding. Radios competed with machinery. The vast concrete-floored warehouse in which the eight workers found themselves was contrastingly still and quiet. Tiers of metal shelves, beginning some eight feet off the ground, formed dust-skinned ranks that were confusingly repetitive in the half-light. Daniel remembered how the public library had seemed to him as a child; being empty made these shelves even harder to distinguish.

  Throughout the morning they swept the dust on the floor into ridges like Braille, then into mounds. It was so light and dry that the brooms raised little gray clouds whose outlines settled on the concrete. Apart from an occasional cough or sneeze, the only sound was the insectile rustle of the brooms. When they swept fine wet sand back over the same ground, the concrete began to reflect a thin light. The mounds were shoveled into wheelbarrows. The faint antiseptic smell of the cleaning sand drifted ambiguously over the original metallic odor. Someone in a white overall pushed a trolley along the dim aisle.

  Daniel held a huge plastic mug of oversweetened tea between his grimy hands. He scrutinized the vague figure seated beside him by the wall. Had he seen it hunched over a desk? The figure shook with a violent sneeze; spilled tea played a bar on the floor. The man turned around. “Have you got a light?” he asked, then stared. “Hello, Danny.”

  “Peter—I thought I recognized you.” Suddenly he could recall clearly the image that had suggested itself: the boy of fourteen, face calm, eyes unreachable as he leaned over the piano keys. Six years ago Peter’s father had died, and Peter and his mother had moved away to another district; they had lost touch after that. “What a coincidence. How are you?”

  Peter’s reply disintegrated into a violent fit of sneezing. He put his hand to his face; it came away discolored with blood. “Oh, Jesus.” He fumbled into his pockets. “Have you got a handkerchief? Thanks.” He leaned back, pressing Daniel’s handkerchief into his face. “Sorry about this ... just this ... dust,” he said nasally.

  That afternoon Daniel and Peter used a mobile scaffolding frame to clean the lower tier of shelves in each row, taking it in turns to push the frame along. From time to time they whipped the bars with their dusters, creating sudden negative-image flowers in the air. As each gray keyboard of metal followed the last, Daniel felt more distant from his own mechanical actions. He could not imagine stopping, though his hands flinched from contact with the uncomfortable metal surfaces. Hours later the two climbed down, wearing makeup of dust-bound sweat. They washed in a mobile toilet on the building site; as Daniel turned to the door, Peter was still scrubbing at his hands and staring angrily into a freckled mirror. “Need hot water, for God’s sake,” he muttered. When he returned to the warehouse several minutes later, his face and hands were marked with red scratches. The anonymous van, which returned to the car park at four o’clock, seemed exactly the same color as the shelves. Vacillating between sleep and waking, Daniel hung the pale faces opp
osite him in a series of steel frames. Outside, nightfall was beginning to paint in the gaps between buildings.

  “I think we might do it this time. There’d be enough dust in the atmosphere to shut out the sunlight for weeks; the world would just freeze over.” The Anvils’ gloomy interior suddenly framed a snapshot of trees shattering like icicles onto a dead soil, weighted down by tides of mist. “Be useless to stay underground. There won’t be a blade of grass left on the surface. Won’t even be air to breathe.” Daniel stared at the taut face across the table. His glass was chilly in his hands, dulled over with vapor. He shut his eyes, and the picture intensified: snow crusted like mold over an endless plain, littered with bodies that glowed faintly in the dark. Abstract faces crumbled; they consisted of gray ashes, like papier-mâché masks. The men sitting by the wall had similar faces, patient and knowing. They looked up from their pints of Guinness as Peter continued: “They say people fear the unknown, but if something is feared it becomes unknown. It’s like a shadow, it destroys the ability to see what causes it. Eventually it pervades and disconnects everything. By the time the end comes you can’t tell it apart from the past. Imagine, though, casting a horoscope and finding that absolutely nothing is going to happen.”

  Daniel felt a gap widening between the words and their meaning. Was he drunk? Perhaps he could not hear all of what Peter was saying. The song on the jukebox seemed to go on forever without changing, dropping phrases like litter onto a neutral background: Tell me how does it feel, when your heart grows cold? “What about survival?” he tried. “You used to say man would survive if he wanted to.”

  “Well, perhaps. I don’t know what survives. Is it humanity that wants to survive, or is it just flesh that doesn’t want to turn into dirt?” He finished his pint. “Christ, look at the time. My mother’ll be worried.”

  Daniel stood up; confusion filled his head like catarrh. Only outside, where it was already dark, could he see clearly. The clocks had been set back a few days ago. “Come along, she’ll be glad to see you.” The Anvil’s door divided the jukebox and a barrage of noise. “They’re widening the road,” Peter explained. Wires that drooped plastic flags guided them through a maze of trenches and pits. A series of terraced houses were in the process of being demolished; the glimpses of pale wallpaper, strips of green vinyl over splintered boards, a red metal staircase, were inexplicably embarrassing. Another house supported a growth of scaffolding, some of whose squares were filled in by tarpaulins. The next street was a row of little shops, mostly boarded up. The boards were patched with several layers of posters, some advertising events months past. Corrugated iron distorted a gigantic face. In one of the side-streets, so narrow that cars could not pass by one another, two old women in housecoats stood talking, bent nearly horizontal. They did not move as the two men passed between them. In a gap between the houses a narrow canal gleamed through spiked railings. At the next house Peter stepped over a low wall, crossed a paved front yard and knocked loudly at the door; then he unlocked it and led Daniel inside. A wardrobe occupied the space between the inner door and the naked stairs, to the right of which a narrow hallway was painted orange by the lampshade. A chilly Picasso family—man, woman, and child—stared toward the floor. From the front room there came a repeated sound of high-pitched clicking. “Hello,” Peter called. The sound halted.