The Year's Best Horror Stories 15

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  “That we’re dining together. In fact he suggested it. He didn’t want me to eat alone—and since this is your last night ...”

  “I’ll get a taxi right away,” I told her.

  “Good. I look forward to ... seeing you. I shall be in the bar.”

  I replaced the telephone in its cradle, wondering if she always took an aperitif before the main course ...

  I had smartened myself up. That is to say, I was immaculate. Black bow tie, white evening jacket (courtesy of C & A), black trousers and a lightly-frilled white shirt, the only one I had ever owned. But I might have known that my appearance would never match up to hers. It seemed that everything she did was just perfectly right. I could only hope that that meant literally everything.

  But in her black lace evening gown with its plunging neckline, short wide sleeves and delicate silver embroidery, she was stunning. Sitting with her in the bar, sipping our drinks—for me a large whiskey and for her a tall Cinzano—I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Twice I reached out for her hand and twice she drew back from me.

  “Discreet they may well be,” she said, letting her oval green eyes flicker toward the bar, where guests stood and chatted, and back to me, “but there’s really no need to give them occasion to gossip.”

  “I’m sorry, Adrienne,” I told her, my voice husky and close to trembling, “but—”

  “How is it,” she demurely cut me off, “that a good-looking man like you is—how do you say it?—going short?”

  I sat back, chuckled. “That’s a rather unladylike expression,” I told her.

  “Oh? And what I’ve planned for tonight is ladylike?”

  My voice went huskier still. “Just what is your plan?”

  “While we eat,” she answered, her voice low, “I shall tell you.” At which point a waiter loomed, towel over his arm, inviting us to accompany him to the dining room.

  Adrienne’s portions were tiny, mine huge. She sipped a slender, light white wine, I gulped blocky rich red from a glass the waiter couldn’t seem to leave alone. Mercifully I was hungry—I hadn’t eaten all day—else that meal must surely have bloated me out. And all of it ordered in advance, the very best in quality cuisine.

  “This,” she eventually said, handing me her key, “fits the door of our suite.” We were sitting back, enjoying liqueurs and cigarettes. “The rooms are on the ground floor. Tonight you enter through the door, tomorrow morning you leave via the window. A slow walk down to the seafront will refresh you. How is that for a plan?”

  “Unbelievable!”

  “You don’t believe it?”

  “Not my good fortune, no.”

  “Shall we say that we both have our needs?”

  “I think,” I said, “that I may be falling in love with you. What if I don’t wish to leave in the morning?”

  She shrugged, smiled, said: “Who knows what tomorrow may bring?”

  How could I ever have thought of her simply as another girl? Or even an ordinary young woman? Girl she certainly was, woman, too, but so ... knowing! Beautiful as a princess and knowing as a whore.

  If Mario’s old myths and legends were reality, and if Nichos Karpethes were really Necros, then he’d surely picked the right companion. No man born could ever have resisted Adrienne, of that I was quite certain. These thoughts were in my mind—but dimly, at the back of my mind—as I left her smoking in the dining room and followed her directions to the suite of rooms at the rear of the hotel. In the front of my mind were other thoughts, much more vivid and completely erotic.

  I found the suite, entered, left the door slightly ajar behind me.

  The thing about an Italian room is its size. An entire suite of rooms is vast. As it happened I was only interested in one room, and Adrienne had obligingly left the door to that one open.

  I was sweating. And yet ... I shivered.

  Adrienne had said fifteen minutes, time enough for her to smoke another cigarette and finish her drink. Then she would come to me. By now the entire staff of the hotel probably knew I was in here, but this was Italy.

  V

  I shivered again. Excitement? Probably.

  I threw off my clothes, found my way to the bathroom, took the quickest shower of my life. Drying myself off, I padded back to the bedroom.

  Between the main bedroom and the bathroom a smaller door stood ajar. I froze as I reached it, my senses suddenly alert, my ears seeming to stretch themselves into vast receivers to pick up any slightest sound. For there had been a sound, I was sure of it, from that room ...

  A scratching? A rustle? A whisper? I couldn’t say. But a sound, anyway.

  Adrienne would be coming soon. Standing outside that door I slowly recommenced toweling myself dry. My naked feet were still firmly rooted, but my hands automatically worked with the towel. It was nerves, only nerves. There had been no sound, or at worst only the night breeze off the sea, whispering in through an open window.

  I stopped toweling, took another step toward the main bedroom, heard the sound again. A small, choking rasp. A tiny gasping for air.

  Karpethes? What the hell was going on?

  I shivered violently, my suddenly chill flesh shuddering in an uncontrollable spasm. But ... I forced myself to action, returned to the main bedroom, quickly dressed (with the exceptions of my tie and jacket) and crept back to the small room.

  Adrienne must be on her way to me even now. She mustn’t find me poking my nose into things, like a suspicious kid. I must kill off this silly feeling that had my skin crawling. Not that an attack of nerves was unnatural in the circumstances, on the contrary, but I wasn’t about to let it spoil the night. I pushed open the door of the room, entered into darkness, found the lightswitch. Then—

  —I held my breath, flipped the switch.

  The room was only half as big as the others. It contained a small single bed, a bedside table, a wardrobe. Nothing more, or at least nothing immediately apparent to my wildly darting eyes. My heart, which was racing, slowed and began to settle toward a steadier beat. The window was open, external shutters closed—but small night sounds were finding their way in through the louvers. The distant sounds of traffic, the toot of horns—holiday sounds from below.

  I breathed deeply and gratefully, and saw something projecting from beneath the pillow on the bed. A corner of card or of dark leather, like a wallet or—

  —Or a passport!

  A Greek passport, Karpethes’, when I opened it. But how could it be? The man in the photograph was young, no older than me. The man in the photograph was young, no older than me. His birthdate proved it. And there was his name: Nichos Karpethes. Printed in Greek, of course, but still plain enough. His son?

  Puzzling over the passport had served to distract me. My nerves had steadied up. I tossed the passport down, frowned at it where it lay upon the bed, breathed deeply once more ... and froze solid!

  A scratching, a hissing, a dry grunting—from the wardrobe.

  Mice? Or did I in fact smell a rat?

  Even as the short hairs bristled on the back of my neck I knew anger. There were too many unexplained things here. Too much I didn’t understand. And what was it I feared? Old Mario’s myths and legends? No, for in my experience the Italians are notorious for getting things wrong. Oh, yes, notorious ...

  I reached out, turned the wardrobe’s doorknob, yanked the doors open.

  At first I saw nothing of any importance or significance. My eyes didn’t know what they sought. Shoes, patent leather, two pairs, stood side by side below. Tiny suits, no bigger than boys’ sizes, hung above on steel hangers. And—my God, my God—a waistcoat!

  I backed out of that little room on rubber legs, with the silence of the suite shrieking all about me, my eyes bugging, my jaw hanging slack—

  “Peter?”

  She came in through the suite’s main door, came floating toward me, eager, smiling, her green eyes blazing. Then blazing their suspicion, their anger as they saw my condition. “Peter!”

  I
lurched away as her hands reached for me, those hands I had never yet touched, which had never touched me. Then I was into the main bedroom, snatching my tie and jacket from the bed, (don’t ask me why!) and out of the window, yelling some inarticulate, choking thing at her and lashing out frenziedly with my foot as she reached after me. Her eyes were bubbling green hells. “Peter!”

  Her fingers closed on my forearm, bands of steel containing a fierce, hungry heat. And strong as two men she began to lift me back into her lair!

  I put my feet against the wall, kicked, came free and crashed backward into shrubbery. Then up on my feet, gasping for air, running, tumbling, crashing into the night, down madly tilting slopes, through black chasms of mountain pine with the Mediterranean stars winking overhead, and the beckoning, friendly lights of the village seen occasionally below ...

  In the morning, looking up at the way I had descended and remembering the nightmare of my panic-flight, I counted myself lucky to have survived it. The place was precipitous. In the end I had fallen, but only for a short distance. All in utter darkness, and my head striking something hard. But ...

  I did survive. Survived both Adrienne and my flight from her.

  And waking with the dawn, and gently fingering my bruises and the massive bump on my forehead, I made my staggering way back to my still slumbering hotel, let myself in and locked myself in my room—then sat there trembling and moaning until it was time for the coach.

  Weak? Maybe I was, maybe I am.

  But on my way into Genova, with people round me and the sun hot through the coach’s windows, I could think again. I could roll up my sleeve and examine that claw mark of four slim fingers and a thumb, branded white into my suntanned flesh, where hair would never more grow on skin sere and wrinkled.

  And seeing those marks I could also remember the wardrobe and the waistcoat—and what the waistcoat contained.

  That tiny puppet of a man, alive still but barely, his stick-arms dangling through the waistcoat’s armholes, his baby’s head projecting, its chin supported by the tightly buttoned waistcoat’s breast. And the large bulldog clip over the hanger’s bar, its teeth fastened in the loose, wrinkled skin of his walnut head, holding it up. And his skinny little legs dangling, twig-things twitching there; and his pleading, pleading eyes!

  But eyes are something I mustn’t dwell upon.

  And green is a color I can no longer bear ...

  TATTOOS by Jack Dann

  Born in Johnson City, New York on February 15, 1945, Jack Dann is the author or editor of twenty-one books to date, including the novels Junction, Starhiker, The Man Who Melted, and the forthcoming mainstream novel, Counting Coup. His short stories have appeared in Omni, Playboy, Penthouse, and most of the leading science fiction magazines and anthologies. As an editor, his anthologies include Wandering Stars, More Wandering Stars, Immortal, and (with Gardner Dozois) a series of fantasy anthologies with zippy one-word titles like Unicorns! and Magicats!.

  Jack Dann currently lives in Binghamton, New York—the same town where horror editor/publisher Stuart David Schiff lives, and perhaps this influence is responsible for Dann’s occasional forays into horror fiction. Dann’s latest projects include an anthology of Vietnam stories entitled In the Fields of Fire (edited with Jeanne Van Buren Dann), two more fantasy anthologies (edited with Gardner Dozois), and a historical fantasy novel about Leonardo da Vinci, Da Vinci Airborn.

  We are never like the angels till our passion dies.

  —Decker

  For the past few years we’d been going to a small fair, which wasn’t really much more than a road show, in Trout Creek, a small village near Walton in upstate New York. The fair was always held in late September when the nights were chilly and the leaves had turned red and orange and dandelion yellow.

  We were in the foothills of the Catskills. We drove past the Cannonsville Reservoir, which provides drinking water for New York City. My wife Laura remarked that this was as close to dry as she’d ever seen the reservoir, she had grown up in this part of the country and knew it intimately. My son Ben, who is fourteen, didn’t seem to notice anything. He was listening to hard rock music through the headphones of his portable radio-cassette player.

  Then we were on the fairgrounds, driving through a field of parked cars. Ben had the headphones off and was excited. I felt a surge of freedom and happiness. I wanted to ride the rides and lose myself in the arcades and exhibitions; I wanted crowds and the noise and smells of the midway. I wanted to forget my job and my recent heart attack.

  We met Laura’s family in the church tent. Then Laura and her Mom and sister went to look at saddles, for her sister showed horses, and Dad and Ben and I walked in the other direction.

  As we walked past concession stands and through the arcade of shooting galleries, antique wooden horse race games, slots, and topple-the-milk-bottle games, hawkers shouted and gesticulated at us. We waited for Ben to lose his change at the shooting gallery and the loop-toss where all the spindles floated on water; and we went into the funhouse, which was mostly blind alleys and a few tarnished distorting mirrors. Then we walked by the tents of the freak-show: the Palace of Wonders with the original Lobster Man, Velda the Half-Lady, and “The Most Unusual Case in Medical History: Babies Born Chest to Chest.”

  “Come on,” Dad said, “let’s go inside and see the freaks.”

  “Nah,” I said. “Places like this depress me. I don’t feel right about staring at those people.”

  “That’s how they make their money,” Dad said. “Keeps ’em off social services.”

  I wasn’t going to get into that with him.

  “Well, then Bennie and me’ll go in,” Dad said. “If that’s all right with you.”

  It wasn’t, but I wasn’t going to argue, so I reached into my pocket to give Ben some money, but Dad just shook his head and paid the woman sitting in a chair outside the tent. She gave him two tickets. “I’ll meet you back here in about ten minutes,” I said, glad to get away by myself.

  I walked through the crowds, enjoying the rattle and shake of the concessionaires, all trying to grab a buck, the filthy, but brightly painted oil canvas, the sweet smell of cotton candy, the peppery smell of potatoes frying, and the coarse shouting of the kids. I bought some french fries, which were all the more delicious because I wasn’t allowed to have them. Two young girls smiled and giggled as they passed me. Goddamn if this wasn’t like being sixteen again.

  Then something caught my eye.

  I saw a group that looked completely out of place. Bikers, punkers, and well-dressed, yuppy-looking types were standing around a tattoo parlor talking. The longhaired bikers flaunted their tattoos by wearing cut-off jean jackets to expose their arms and chest; the women who rode with them had taken off their jackets and had delicate tattoo wristlets and red and orange butterflies and flowers worked into their arms or between their breasts. In contrast, most of the yuppies, whom I assumed to be from the city, wore long-sleeved shirts or tailored jackets, including the women, who looked like they had just walked out of a New England clothes catalogue. There was also a stout woman who looked to be in her seventies. She had gray hair pulled back into a tight bun and she wore a dark pleated dress. I couldn’t help but think that she should be home in some Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, sitting with friends in front of her apartment building, instead of standing here in the dust before a tattoo parlor.

  I was transfixed. What had brought all these people here to the boonies? Who the hell knew, maybe they were all from here. But I couldn’t believe that for a minute. And I wondered if they were all tattooed.

  I walked over to them to hear snatches of conversation and to investigate the tattoo parlor, which wasn’t a tent, as were most of the other concessions, but a small, modern mobile home with the words TAROT TATTOO STUDIO—ORIGINAL DESIGNS, EXPERT COVER-UPS painted across the side in large letters with red serifs through the stems. Then the door opened, and a heavy-set man with a bald head and a full black beard walked out. Ever
yone, including the yuppies, were admiring him. His entire head was tattooed in Japanese design of a flaming dragon; the dragon’s head was high on his forehead, and a stream of flame reached down to the bridge of his nose. The dragon was beautifully executed. How the hell could someone disfigure his face like that? I wondered.

  Behind the dragon man was a man of about five feet-six wearing a clean, but bloodied, white tee-shirt. He had brown curly hair, which was long overdue to be cut, a rather large nose, and a full mouth. He looked familiar, very familiar, yet I couldn’t place him. This man was emaciated, as if he had given up nourishment for some cultish religious reason. Even his long, well-formed hands looked skeletal, the veins standing out like blue tattoos.

  Then I remembered. He looked like Nathan Rivlin, an artist I had not seen in several years. A dear friend I had lost touch with. This man looked like Nathan, but he looked all wrong. I remembered Nathan as filled-out and full of life, an orthodox Jew who wouldn’t answer the phone on Shabbes—from Friday night until sundown on Saturday, a man who loved to stay up all night and talk and drink beer and smoke strong cigars. His wife’s name was Ruth, and she was a highly-paid medical textbook illustrator. They had both lived in Israel for some time, and came from Chicago. But the man standing before me was ethereal-looking, as if he were made out of ectoplasm instead of flesh and blood. God forbid he should be Nathan Rivlin.

  Yet I couldn’t keep myself from shouting, “Nate? Nate, is it you?”

  He looked around, and when he saw me, a pained grin passed across his face. I stepped toward him through the crowd. Several other people were trying to gain Nathan’s attention. A woman told me to wait my turn, and a few nasty stares and comments were directed at me. I ignored them. “What the hell is all this?” I asked Nathan after we embraced.