The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16

by Stephen Jones

  “I’m going to talk to Carl tomorrow, Guy, about that upsetting kind of talk.”

  “. . . Well . . .”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow, Guy.” She clicked off. There was Pat sitting handsomely ankle-on-knee, on one of the ornate benches surrounding the fountain. He was the picture of understated class. He saluted her with a white-capped Latte, and handed her one of her own as she joined him on the bench.

  “Fifty more acres of Zin,” he told her. “A done deal.”

  He was just Marjorie’s age, a bright, mellow guy, with a clarity of ambition beyond his years, who unlike her had no trouble with his class identity: a Wine Yuppie and proud of it. Bankrolled by his dad, a corporate attorney in San Francisco, Pat’s lack of intellectual pretensions had made him content with the local Junior College for the first two years of his B.A. in Business, and he’d had Carl Larken for an English instructor five or six years ago.

  When Marjorie had first described her co-worker to Pat, and they had discovered this funny little piece of common ground, it had struck her that Pat was covertly amused, that he had instantly perceived her hidden interest in the older man. Herself still unsure what that interest was, she told him now how Larkin had tweaked Guy’s imagination. “On one level it’s kind of a raw thing to do,” she offered in conclusion.

  “Telling some terminal guy how short his life’s gonna be? I guess you could call it that,” Pat smiled. “He’d get on that note in class I remember. Mortality, I guess you’d call it.”

  “I guess you would.” Smiling back at him. “Would you say, Pat, that Larken was, well, insane? Like quietly insane?”

  There it was, the thing that kept bringing Larken up between them. She thought Pat’s eyes confirmed her question, even while he was saying, “I don’t know. Everyone’s had one or two teachers like that, right? They’ve got a crazy routine, but they can be really entertaining too sometimes.”

  She let a beat go by. “Would you say, Pat,” (batting her eyes like the question was occuring to her for the first time) “that Larken is, like, quietly insane?”

  She wrung a laugh out of him with that. “Well, I remember one time in class, one thing he told us. He compared a guy being blown apart by a mine to a guy dying of old age. He said the years hit the old guy just like the frags hit the soldier – the years blew the old guy to a fog too, they just took longer to impact him . . . But hey, the man acts like he’s got a purpose. I see him on the road chuggin’ away. Could an insane guy stay in the kind of shape he’s in?”

  “You still haven’t answered me, but screw it. Let’s eat. How bout sushi?”

  “Sushi rocks.”

  * * *

  The sun was declining when Larken locked the offices’ back door behind him, unlocked his ten-speed, and mounted it.

  He didn’t head straight home. He pedalled for hours through town, ricocheting randomly through the city’s maze, whirring down long ranks of streetlamps, down streets of houses and treed lawns, down streets of neons and flashing signals – trying to wear out the eagerness and fear that struggled inside him.

  At last it was time to aim his flight out toward the darkness surrounding the city. Along four miles of lampless two-lane, the last two miles winding through gentle hills, he sped deep into the crickety country night. The waxing moon, well up, said nearly midnight when he steered into the narrow gravel driveway that branched from the road up into his seven acres of wooded slope.

  He dismounted and shouldered the bike, and carried it up the drive amidst the tree-shadows. He had spread with his own spade this blue-shale gravel. He practised the skill of silently treading it – liked to come soundless into his property. As he climbed the slope, the leafy gloom chirred with buglife, and breathed down on him the dry scents of bay and manzanita and oak and madrone. Something at least coon-sized skittered in dry leaves upslope of him. A pair of owls were trading their tentative syllables.

  He branched from his driveway onto a much narrower deer-trail that crooked its way up, steeply up. Near the crest of his property, on a crescent of levelish ground, a slant-grown oak laid the dome of its branches partly on the grass. Under this crook-ribbed canopy Larken had his sleeping bag. His little aluminium food locker dangled from a branch above his Sierra trail-stove: a number-10 can with its ends cut out and a flap cut in its rim for feeding sticks through. It channelled enough heat from a few handfuls of twigs to boil his oatmeal, and the fire was near invisible at any distance.

  He unrolled his leather mat and sleeping bag, and lay half-curled around the little stove and its bubbling one-quart pot of porridge studded with nuts and dried fruits. He garnished his meal with blackstrap molasses and ate it with a spoon, eating faster as it cooled.

  Afterwards he lay on top of his bag, looking up at the stars that blazed thick through his oak-leaf dome. These hills were a maze of little valleys – in all directions were pocket vineyards, small ranches, country houses. Here and there, faint in the distance, dogs sometimes barked, taunted perhaps by fox, coyote, coon or bobcat.

  His body lay slumped in fatigue, but his senses ate up the wide-flung night. Homecoming tires hissed down on the two-lane, coming fewer and fewer as the stars blazed more thickly. Four-legged things were afoot in several places on his own acres. The peremptory little tearing sounds of what had to be coon paws were shredding something down in the old overgrown garden where potatoes and tomatoes thinly persisted. A clumsier more faintly heard scrabbling, from just about down at the compost heap . . . that would be possum.

  The thought conjured the clothes-fossil, never far from his mind these eight hours past. It dawned on him only then. He had found it a footless, anchored thing, but he had left it clawed and shod. And those claws, whose awkwardness on asphalt made the possum the commonest species of road-pizza, made him a nimble traveller up in the trees, a nomad of the arboreal highway.

  The Someone Else who joined him in that hut today . . . could he follow Larken now?

  He lay there on the little piece of earth he owned, trying to detect something like a footfall, or a faint, faint click of claw on branch. Joy and terror hammered at his heart. Could he be on the threshold at last, the threshold of the thing he had sought all his life? He had exiled himself from so much, left his precious family behind – Jolly, his wife, sweet Maxie and sweet little Jack, his daughter and son . . .

  He could not bear to think of them, of leaving them behind forever. How many years now? More than three. From that moment of departure, he had stepped into this absolute solitude . . .

  Perhaps a half-mile off, coyote voices began kindling, as if in direct answer to his train of thought. Of course the settling in of the midnight chill – as now – was often the signal for their song. Larken was wary of seeing omens everywhere, the mark of the lunatic. Still . . . It had been coyotes who had conveyed to Larken his first revelation – had shown him the promise for whose sake he had left his dearly beloved ones behind. The animals’ ghostly sound was wholly undoglike. It was a giddy wailing and hooting, a sardonic gibbering – the music of exiled demons begging for readmittance to the underworld.

  Larken had long made a practice of extended moonlit treks through the hills. All this land was owned of course, and so there would be fences even in the deepest hills – fences around the vineyards, around the more sprawling yellow-grass ranches where cattle grazed, around the country estates. He carried a small bolt-cutter for the stubborn few fences he could not otherwise penetrate. When he had to pass near houses, he found it amusing to revive his jungle patrol skills, learned so well in Vietnam, modified for this sparser cover.

  His goal was the entry of the hills themselves, to move through them as their inhabitant, as linked to the earth as any fox, as roofed by the sky. His night vision, given only a strong moon to work with, was excellent, as were his skills for quiet movement, and he had surprised many a deer on his travels, a silver fox, and twice a wildcat, but never, before that night, a coyote.

  It seemed they caught your slighte
st move a mile away, and politely, invariably declined contact. And yet they went everywhere in these hills. They fed from men’s very decks and porches, fearlessly devouring unwary cats and small dogs practically from their owners’ laps. The coyotes filled their world to the brim without once confronting the simian squatters who claimed every foot of it, and roared up and down their roads killing every other natural denizen – even, rarely, the foxes – but never, to Larken’s knowledge, claiming a single coyote as roadkill. Like colliding galaxies, the two nations drifted right through each other – or theirs drifted through ours.

  It had been a windy night, that night where his life had taken its turning. The atmosphere, in flood, was trying to wash the trees right off the hills. The big oaks twisted and shuddered like black flames in the moonlight, and the white grass rippled and bannered.

  The wind that night made him feel his chronic longing. The wind, trying to stampede the trees, was roaring for a grand, universal departure to another solar system, a better deal, and the grass struggled to join the rootless giant of the air. All that lives strives to fly, to master time. All tribes of beings strain to rise in insurrection, all knowing their time is short, all, when the wind blows, wanting to climb aboard.

  He climbed in the wind’s teeth, up to the last ridgeline before the plain, where the city glowed. He rounded a hill-shoulder towards a vantage point he liked when, completing the curve, he stopped just short of walking into three coyotes who were oppositely bound. All four of them froze, and stood staring at each other.

  The gibbous moon, declining at Larken’s back, put a glint in the six canine eyes. He looked at each in turn, and settled on the eyes, not of the largest, but of the one who stood foremost, a lean bitch with a jaw that was slightly crooked.

  He was moved by their beauty, not at all uncomfortable. At first he thought they were shocked, embarrassed even at this direct discovery. Animal etiquette would call for a slow side step, a careful withdrawal that avoided any signal of a wish to flee, but the bitch, head low, stood planted, fixedly regarding him. Though the wind was contrary, she dabbed her nose towards him. The two males flanking her then did the same, were probably her big-grown pups, still in training for all their size.

  The fixity of their stare became fascinating to him. He dabbed his own face at them, snuffed their air, in case this was a necessary greeting. Snuffed, and a whiff of something ice-cold came to him.

  It was a scent of . . . terror. Awe. The coyotes reeked of it . . . it was raising their hackles, was causing them to crouch and tense . . .

  He watched enraptured, until it dawned on him, finally came to him. He turned – the turning seemed to take forever – turned to look behind him.

  Hovering above the wind-whipped grass, revealed against the distant fields of city lights behind it, something towered in the air, a transparent something that twisted the light-field into a snarled weave, as if the lights were a coloured net just barely containing the fight of a huge translucent catch.

  Even as he struggled to make out its giant form . . . it was no more. The moonlight dissolved it. The city lights gleamed undisturbed.

  The wild dogs stirred now, shaking off their holy awe. They gazed at Larken a moment, perhaps with interest. Then they turned, wet muzzles glinting in the moonlight, and melted into the grass.

  Larken stood there. All his life – long before ’Nam, which had just clarified it – all his life he had longed to find this doorway, this path that could lead him off the treadmill of time and death.

  His legs buckled under, he dropped like lead and sat in the deep grass, staring at the lightfield where that Someone had stood. He found himself slowed to a synchrony with the earth-clock itself, and sat there unmoving as the starfield inched across the sky. He then knew that when he returned to his wife and children, it would be to take his leave of them forever.

  He knew he had been mocked in this revelation. Here he’d been tramping through the night, the earnest searcher, while the power and glory he was dogging followed him unperceived.

  How long had this Someone mocked him? Back through the decades, had every cloud of crows that burst in flight before him been, in reality, exploding in mirth at oncoming Larken with his giant follower, the derisive god behind him unperceived?

  Well, it was the gods’ prerogative to mock. Larken had been shown at last. He had accrued fifty years of spiritual hunger, poverty and nonentity and finally, it seemed, had amassed his down payment on eternity.

  Oh the price! It was an unending agony to pay, to be denied forever dear Jolly, sweet, sweet Maxie and Jack. But it was a father’s place to die before his children, to show them, with his calm as he steps out into the great Dark, that they have nothing to fear, that their own path will be bearable. How could he abide with them while they aged year by year, and he aged no further? Far easier for them to know no more of him beyond tonight, than to learn that he was not of their world, and was to live beyond even his own memory of their existence.

  So when that morning’s sun rose, Carl Larken had turned forever onto his present path, and lived in solitude.

  He smiled a barbed smile now that tore his heart, and he felt the scald of bitter tears. He’d put down everything he had that very day – turned aside from his life. And the careless god, having beckoned him, had left him hanging, utterly alone, these three years since.

  But what are years to a god? What are a man’s tears? And now the god, or perhaps the god’s messenger, had touched him between the eyes, and run a finger down his spine. Said Yes. I am here.

  Larken crushed out his coals, washed out his oatmeal pan from the jug of water in his food locker – locked everything up and rehung it from the branch. Then he carried his mat and sleeping bag out from under the oak to a level spot, and lay down, still clothed, on top of the bag, lay scanning the thick strew of stars.

  And heard, or almost heard, that faint, clawed tread – the clothes-ghost he had conjured, coming now, drawing nearer, coming to offer Larken what he had lived for. Coming to tell him the price.

  He realized it didn’t matter whether he actually heard this or not. Because now, after fifty-five years, he was about to step up to his threshold, and confront the god. This had now been granted. He knew it in his spine.

  Strangely, the most immediate effect on him was not jubilation, but a renewed agony at the price he had paid for this victory. Dear Christ, his precious Jolly! His precious Maxie, and little Jack! Eternal exile from them! How had he mustered the strength, the resolution?

  They were his only riches, a fortune he had stumbled blindly into, undeservingly. His and Jolly’s first years together, after he had come back, drugged and raging, from the war, had been dissolute years. They drank and drugged and fucked and fought. On the wings of substances, as they took wobbly flight together, he had tried to show her his most private faith – his mad hope that time could be broken like shackles, and a soul, a fiercely desiring sould, could burn forever.

  But then priceless, accidental Maxie befell them, and Jolly became wholly Mother overnight. Larken himself took three more years, sullenly sucking booze and powders, before turning to at last, and taking on his fatherhood. By then, equally accidental Jack had arrived, and the rusty doors of Larken’s heart were forced all the way open.

  In that deep, tricky torrent of parental love and nurturing, the next fourteen years fled away. The immortal fire persisted in Larken’s inmost self, but he could not share it with his children. He found it a faith too perilous to speak – a magic he would lose if he tried to bestow it. His children’s minds grew strong and agile, but he could not find the words. Before he knew it, Maxie was in middle school, Jack just graduating elementary. Behold, they had friends, passionate interests, lives laid out before them in the world! They had already left him when at last the god vouchsafed to beckon him. Only that made it possible for him to renounce them.

  He wiped his tears and listened to the night. The price he had paid was past counting, but his purchase w
as vast. He had bought nothing less than this whole world, night and day, north and south, now and forever. Was he insane, to feel this reckless certainty? Wasn’t this blasphemy? Hubris? Wouldn’t it cost him his prize?

  He could not think so. This bitter joy refused to leave him. He listened to the night, deep night now, where living things moved quietly about their mortal business. Upslope of him, deer moved very carefully, small-footed through the scarcely rustling oak leaves. Far down on the two-lane he heard the faint, awkward scritch of a skunk (awkward as possums, skunks) beginning to cross the asphalt.

  Whoops. Far down the two-lane, the beefy growl of a grunt-mobile. Enter Man on the stage of night, roaring high, wide and handsome in a muscle-truck – a tinny sprinkle of radio music above the roar. Closing fast, with a coming-home-from-the-bar aura. It must be just after two . . .

  Larken listened to the tires as it roared near, roared past – and yes, there it came, that whump-crunch-thumpa-thumpa as the skunk was taken for a high-speed dribble down the court beneath the 60-milean-hour underframe of the truck.

  He lay listening. All the dyings! Everywhere, all the time. The coyotes announced themselves, very far off now, but with the gibbering intensity of a group kill. Webbed wings made a tiny, soft commotion – a bat, zig-zagging bugs from the air. All the mulch, all the broken, gutted things settling down to decay . . . He felt a shift in his bowels.

  He rose and got his little entrenching tool, and a small canteen of water – set out slantwise up the hill, and upwind of his camp.

  High on the slope, he crouched on a crescent of deep soil, and a fine, round shit came loose from him. Filling his cupped hand from the canteen, he washed and rinsed himself, and washed his hands. He buried his accomplishments, thinking how coyotes and foxes left their skat right on the trail. When those animals retraced their steps at later times, they nosed the skats and knew themselves, sniffed the ghosts of previous meals. Each time they nosed the fading map of former days, the ever-fainter proofs of their own being, dwindling to rumours. Was this their sense of Time?