The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16

by Stephen Jones

  Men, more murderous animals, secreted their shit, hiding the lees of their innumerable victims . . . fearing vengeance?

  Larken must make an offering to the clothes-ghost. Tomorrow. Must give it . . . something for a heart.

  Precisely at the sun’s first kindling on the eastern hills, Larken, his bike propped by a tree, stood again before the little cinderblock shrine.

  He had pedalled for an hour in the dawn’s light, scouting the country roads for a fit offering. He had hoped for the rare luck to find something he’d happened on before: a road-struck animal whose life had not yet left it. He remembered once running, and coming up eye to eye with a possum that had not yet finished dying. There was still a little bit of him left there in his inky little possum’s eyes. The beast was looking back forgetfully at life, looking into Larken’s eyes forgetful that he was human, seeming to struggle to remember something they had in common long ago . . .

  Had he been given such a find it would have amounted to an omen from the god that his improvised ritual was welcomed. As it was, he found a rare enough thing indeed – a silver fox, whose bush, ruffled by the breeze, had caught his eye. The fox was beautifully intact – back-broken, not mauled – and dead not very many days.

  This was much, he reflected as he eased it into his old khaki knapsack. Enough to be a kind of warrant from the god. Foxes, these sharp-muzzled tricksters, were almost never nailed by monkey Man’s grunting pig machines. Larken had to pedal hard to bring this rarity to the shrine before the sun’s rising, and he made it there just at the instant that the first light struck the grey wall.

  He knew, seeing that, that this rite of his was welcomed, and the god was present to receive his offering.

  He stepped inside, his knapsack cupped before him in both hands. The clothes-ghost seemed to float on the floor, to glow, so full of feral insolence, of fierce and graceful glee its posture was. Under the hat’s slanted bill, the spark of an eye almost glinted. The jauntiness of that up-hooked tail, the sinewy thrust of that clawed foot . . . It knew!

  Larken knelt down slowly on one knee. He felt the ghost’s seething aura of energy, waiting for Larken to find the awakening magic to give it form and force.

  He drew the reeking fox-that-was from the sack. Sun had shrunk its tendons, and there was a stiffness that made the little corpse more wieldy. He gripped the grey pelt at the spine just below the neck, and with his other hand, lifted one flap of the ghost’s shirt. He felt no need for words. He shrouded the fox inside the ghost’s shirt, willing spirit into this inhuman gatekeeper. His hidden hand felt in an alien space, felt the heat and menace of a hostile dimension.

  Just as he withdrew his hand, it was powerfully, searingly bitten.

  Torn to the bone, both the palm and the back of his hand. Blood, its astonishing crimson, welled blazing out of him in the morning light.

  He stood staring at his hand full of blood.

  Was this a message?

  What was the message?

  He became aware that an engine, something big and huffy, was idling not far off. Larken had to stand a moment, struggling to decide if the sound came from that eternal world where his hand had been torn, or from this one his feet were planted on.

  He seized up a sun-bleached fragment of T-shirt from one corner, bound his hand and knotted it with his teeth. The bandage went instantly red as he thrust the hand inside the light windbreaker he wore. His bike outside already declared him. He stepped out into the slanting sun, picked up his bike with his left hand, and stepped through the trees to the road with it. A young man stood by a black Jeep Cherokee, arm draped on the roof.

  Larken smiled easily at him, straddled his bike with his hand still tucked away, stood on one pedal and slowly coasted over to him.

  “The pause that refreshes,” he said to the young man who, looking surprised, said:

  “Mr Larken!”

  Larken, when teaching junior college, had infallibly Mistered and Mized all his students, and after a beat, he said, “Mr Bonds! This is a pleasure! Is this your . . . estate you’re viewing?”

  Pat was remembering Marjorie’s question yesterday. No doubt about it, there was something subtly but deeply not normal about this guy. He steps out of a ruined shed at dawn, steps smiling out of the trees with his hidden hand making what looked like it might be a bloodstain in the armpit of his jacket, then cruises over to Pat, totally suave and smiling. And not only does he remember Pat after what, six years? But he even remembers the little standing jokes between them about Pat’s pragmatism, his fiscal realism, his good-humoured disinterest in big ideas.

  The old man had a real . . . charisma. A complete self-possession. But sitting here with a bloodstain spreading across his jacket, having just stepped out of a fucking abandoned shed at sunrise . . . his self-possession looked more than a little unreal.

  “I don’t own these grapes themselves. I’m in the development sector of the viticulture industry. We design acquisitions, financing. We’re going to get fifty more acres of zin out of this field.”

  Larken looked across a sea of grapes from fence to fence. “Where are you going to get it?”

  “Here and there along the margins. We’ll get a good ten acres here when we tear out that shed and this border strip.”

  At this Larken just nodded, but he let a beat go by. “Are you leaving any eucalyptus?”

  “Just one line at the roadside. We’ll take those out later this year. They create a shadowing problem for the new acres.” Pat found himself getting a little stiffer as he went on. He still amused Larken on a level he didn’t get. That was okay when he was the guy’s student – a teacher is supposed to run some attitude on you, poke at your perspective. But this man, this whacko old man with his chickenfeed job, found something genuinely funny about the way Pat was, after all, engineering this entire environment here.

  And Larken seemed to sense his thought. “A world-shaper,” he smiled at Pat. “I saw it long ago.”

  “Well, every generation shapes things, right? Every generation makes what they can, builds what they can make use of.”

  “You are absolutely right, Mr Bonds. You can’t take a single step on this old globe without changing it. So when are you clearing this section?”

  “Tomorrow.” And Pat had scored something, he felt it. Where’s your contempt for money and power now, he asked the old man in his mind. There’s something he values here, and just twenty-four hours from now I’m making it disappear.

  Then Larken smiled again. “Time is on the wing, isn’t it? On the wing. Which reminds me, I’ve got to get to work. Good to see you!”

  When Larken had pedalled off, right hand still tucked beneath his arm, Pat entered the weedy margin behind the trees. He wondered how he’d failed to ask Larken how he hurt his hand. He stepped into the cinderblock shed.

  Nothing. Trash and discarded clothing everywhere. Just a useless eyesore. A perfect place to be scraped clean. Developed.

  As he climbed back in his jeep, he thought of Larken’s eyes, grey eyes under shaggy brows. There was an intention behind those eyes, something fixed and unyielding. What might a trashy nook like this one here mean to a war-scarred old guy like that, a bookish man of the kind who brooded about big ideas. Who could tell? The fact remained that, just meeting Larken’s eyes as he’d emerged from that shed, Pat Bonds had felt like a trespasser here.

  Marjorie was northbound on 101. The 3:00 p.m. traffic was clotting and creeping around her, still five miles south of town, where she was already fifteen minutes late for coffee with Pat at Espresso Buono. When she reached him on his cell phone, she could tell that he too was carbound.

  “Where are you Pat?”

  “101. I’m just above Novato.”

  “Christ you’re thirty miles behind me. I’m just north of Rodent Park.”

  “Things ran late at the title company.”

  “It’s kind of romantic, Pat, the two of us just cruising the traffic-stream together, trading sweet nothings.�
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  “Are you actually cruising that close to town?”

  “Actually no, it’s creep and crawl . . .” Should she tell him? On the phone like this? “I was just down in Petaluma. I had to go see the mother of the guy I told you about, Guy Blankenship? He had morphine patches, right? Well he, like, put on half a dozen of them last night. He overdosed. He’s dead. He left a note, or he started a note. It said tell Carl.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Right. Well the police asked me about it. It’s a wrongful death, right? I said I didn’t know who it was. I said I’d look into it and maybe get back to them.”

  “Did you tell Larken?”

  “He didn’t come to work today, and he doesn’t have a phone.”

  A little silence passed between them. Marjorie was picturing Carl Larken out for a run along some two-lane. She pictured the city ahead of her and thought of it semi-abstractly as an environment, as the habitat of Larken. That gaunt greybeard, implacable as Jeremiah. Picturing him like this, it seemed incredible to her that she had not seen his madness sooner. He was no longer a creature of civilization. He was like an animal that infiltrated the city by day, and returned to the hills by night. The man was almost auraed with otherness.

  “Hey Marjo? Tell the police. It’s no harm to Larken. They’ll hard-time him a little is all, and maybe he needs a little accountability check here.”

  Marjorie laughed, thinking of the vivid Mrs Blankenship, whose ramshackle house she had just left – the woman a bleached, cigarette-throated, leather-vested speedfreak. “No harm? If they told his mother, and she found someone smart enough to help her with it, she’d sue the Humanity Incorporated’s socks off.”

  “You know, I ran into him this morning . . .”

  Larken lost himself in an endless patrol, bee-lining across the hills. He carried his little bolt-cutter for the stubbornest fences. He crossed pasture and vineyard and tree-choked stream course. Carefully void of intention, he chose his course as randomly as he could.

  In these hills he had at last been shown, invited. Now, as Time closed in on him, these hills must show him his next step. He gripped this faith and patrolled them, hour after hour.

  The sun had begun to wester. When he was startled out of his walking reverie, he was amazed to realize just how oblivious he’d been. Aware of nothing but these acres of rolling pasture dropping away before him, when close behind him, a voice said, “I see you have a bolt-cutter there. Is that what you used to cut through my fence?”

  When he turned, here was a frail old woman walking towards him from a Jeep – the old fashioned military-looking kind – parked a short way down the fire-break path his feet had been treading so automatically.

  The lady wore khaki work clothes, and a grey canvas hat with a little circular brim. She was so frail; hair as wispy as web escaped the hat. She was frail and there was something else about her – a scent he could almost pick up. “You’ve done it before too, haven’t you?” she urged, her voice very level, though age made it waver slightly. “You like to follow a bee-line across people’s property.”

  Larken smiled gently. “You’ve determined to call the devil by his name, right to his face, hesitation be damned,” he said with admiration. “From now on you’re not going to waste time with caution.”

  “I never have. You talk about caution. Am I in danger here from you?”

  He had been honestly absorbed in her. She would be an omen, of course! Part of the answer he was after. But when she asked him this question, it stunned him for a moment, the alienness of the notion that he should lift his hand against her frailty. And in that moment he identified that faint scent she had. Chemotherapy.

  “You are correct, Ma’am,” he was saying, “I do make bee-lines. I damage as little fence as possible, but sometimes I need to follow the route I’m feeling. You are in absolutely no danger from me. I’m afraid I might have a pretty uncouth appearance, but I’m a good person. I did two tours in Vietnam, a lot of them in-country, and I guess it’s left me a little reclusive.”

  The slopes of dried grass below them were growing golder in the slanting sun. That rich light flooded her face with such detail! Blue veins across her forehead, the fine-china translucence of her wrinkled eyelid, her hair’s sparseness betrayed by the looseness of her hat . . . She watched him as he spoke, not so much listening to his words as following her own train of thought about him. “You tell me I’ve decided not to waste time on caution. You seem to be telling me that I’m obviously someone with not much time left. Suppose that’s true. Why should that make me care any less about vandalism to my property?”

  “When I ventured that description of your state of mind, Ma’am, I meant to express my admiration. I don’t dispute the wrongness of damaging your fence. My trespass was totally impersonal, and I did no harm to your property—”

  “Except to its boundary!”

  “Except to its fence. May I guess, Ma’am? Are you that little beef ranch, a hundred acres or so, triple-strand barbed wire?” Her icy look was as good as a nod. “I will of course pay you whatever damages you see fit.”

  Again she seemed – rather than listening – to be struggling to digest him. “I’ve seen you on the roads, you know, over the years – running, cycling. I’ve seen you running out of your driveway. You call yourself a recluse, and I’ve had exactly that thought about you as I drove past, that you were a kind of hermit. Completely in your own world.”

  “But aren’t you completely in yours?”

  “Are you hinting again? That you know I’m dying?”

  “I’m just trying for an understanding. I’m dying too.”

  “Not as fast as I am.” Almost wry here, her fragile, skull-stretched face. He could sense her mood exactly. She was partly lured by an unlooked-for understander of her plight, but equally was stung by his understanding. In the pinch, she reverted to legalities. “I called the sheriff on my cell phone as soon as I found the damage, and I told them I suspected you. I felt a little bad about that, not being positive, but then I took the jeep out, and found you practically red-handed.”

  Understanding flooded Larken. This woman was not an omen to him, she was more than that. She was in herself a gift, a token of passage. He understood now the garish Sign that had been given him, in return for his morning’s offering: his right hand full of blood.

  “I’m sure, of course,” she was saying, “that the officers, after writing up a report, will let us settle it between ourselves.”

  All this golden light! It was beginning to shade over to a voluptuous red-gold. Hills rolled away on all sides, and the two of them stood bathed in this ocean of light, and at the same time, they were utterly unwitnessed by another human being. Perfectly alone together in all this big emptiness, with the royal sun alone looking on. Larken, before setting out on his day’s quest, had made and properly tied a bandage for his right hand, though the red stain had seeped through even this one. Perhaps because she sensed his own sudden awareness of it, she took note of his wound for the first time. “How did you hurt your hand?”

  He smiled apologetically. “I was bitten.”

  “Bitten by what?”

  “I was bitten by a god. A god who is about to break out from these hills. Is about to hatch from them. He has promised me . . . immortality.”

  He had her full, bemused attention. He pulled the bandage off his hand. Out of the deep tear in his flesh, black-scabbed though it was, the naked tendons peeked.

  The setting sun gilded the trenched meat, and it glowed like a sacrament.

  Deep night. The county road far below him had at last gone quiet and empty.

  The darkness, even after these long hours of it, still felt like a balm to Larken, as if the bright work of blood-spilling that he had done today had scorched his retinas, and made sunlight agony to them.

  He lay far upslope under one of his oak trees, his own hillside rock-solid under his back. He lay perfectly still, wholly relaxed, so that the vast crickety sound of t
he night felt like a deep lake he sank in, deeper with each heartbeat into the creaking, trilling music of the earth’s nocturne.

  And then, woven into that vast music, it began to be faintly, sinisterly audible.

  So far off at first, so sketchy: a jostle of leaves . . . a friction against bark. An approach. Something moving through the leafy canopy, something small and very far, picking its way from branch to branch. It meandered, finding its path through contiguous trees, but it was seeking him.

  To Larken’s ears this faint advance might as well have been thunder, for there was nothing else in the world but it. Because the earth was opening beneath him. This visitation he had bought with human blood would leave him changed forever, would actually begin his removal from this world, and his advance toward eternity. He lay there, waiting as he had waited all his conscious life, to step off of the earth, and into the universe.

  It wasn’t as small as it had sounded, now that it was working its way up the slopes of Larken’s property. He began to hear a muscular agility, which had helped to mute its approach but, nearing, betrayed a solid mass laddering its way through the branches and boughs.

  Just a short way down the slope from where he lay, his visitant came to a stop. In the short silence that followed, Larken felt an alien intent grow focussed on him.

  Sssssssst

  It was a summons, and its echo changed the air as it drifted up among the oaks and madrones. The night mist grew more spacious, its very molecules drawing apart, as if mimicking the separations of the stars themselves.

  He got to his feet, and doing so took forever, his legs, hands, arms slow travellers across the interstellar emptiness that had entered each cubic foot of the night air. He threaded downslope through bushes-manzanita, scrub oak, bay, scotch broom – that were abstract silhouettes, like archetypes, but whose odours, rich and distinct, filled him with a terrible nostalgia for that mortal world that he was now abandoning.