The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16

by Stephen Jones

  Go figure kids today.

  I was panting more furiously than Guy by the time we made it up to street level, but Vibiana hadn’t so much as broken a sweat.

  “I wouldn’t have made you for a fitness freak,” I said to her, letting go of Annie’s cold ankles and collapsing onto a concrete bench along the river wall.

  Vibiana gently lowered Annie’s top half to the ground. She kissed her palm then pressed it to Annie’s forehead as she laid her on the dirty sidewalk.

  “It’s all up here,” she said, touching her fingers to her temple. “Everything’s mental. In the head, don’t you know.”

  “Woof, baby,” Guy agreed.

  I was too tired to do more than nod.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  Vibiana stood up as tall as she could. She started to turn in slow circles again, looking straight up at the moon. I heard her take an enormous breath and saw her hand briefly pass in front of her mouth. Then she exhaled with a leonine roar, and spittle – or something – exploded out from between her lips and geysered up into the air above her. A form took shape overhead, something like the foamy crest of a wave glowing argent. The wave rocked back and forth, tiny Hokusai fractals spilling off it and rising into the sky like sparks off a Jacob’s Ladder. Then it crashed out in the direction of Union Station and faded away.

  Vibiana offered me the hint of a smile and gestured in the direction indicated by the wave. Wearily, I stood up.

  “I know, I know,” I muttered, “heads or feets.”

  In fact, Guy sniffed out a small hand truck abandoned in an alley no more than half a block from the river. It wasn’t easy or elegant, but we managed to balance Annie on the apron of it without dragging any of her on the ground. Vibiana pulled her along behind like a happy little kid tugging a red Radio Flyer.

  Well, a happy little psychopathic kid.

  The streets were deserted – not too surprising given the neighbourhood and the hour – but the silence and stillness that had set in since leaving the river was spookier than the run of the mill menace of the empty city at night. Under normal circumstances (a place as far removed from my life, it too often seems to me, as over the rainbow), I wouldn’t be caught dead walking alone through such a part of town – and as a typically uptight, Westside gringo, I always imagined that dead is precisely how I would end up if caught here. But none of that usual paranoia bothered me. Though I recognized the familiarity of the street signs and the architecture, it felt as if the trip upriver had taken us into some separate Los Angeles. If not for a pink day-glo poster of Angelyne fly-posted over the rusty steel shutters of a carneceria, I might well have believed we had stumbled into a parallel universe.

  There can’t be two universes with Angelyne in them. Surely.

  As we headed up an alley behind Vignes Street, a peculiar odour became noticeable. I suppose it was a genuine L.A. moment in that it took me a few seconds to identify the scent as burning tobacco – who the hell smokes these days? It wasn’t the usual foul stench of cigarettes or cigars, though, but an altogether earthier, sweeter smell. I’ve never been a smoker – other than pachinko, it’s the only serious vice I’ve not succumbed to – but if tobacco had smelled as rich and tasty as this, I’d have come up to the Kool taste long ago and happily punched my ticket on the emphysema express. Guy took a whiff and sneezed explosively. Vibiana sniffed at the air and changed direction to follow her nose and the smell.

  I hurried along behind them.

  We were approaching the fringes of the railroad yards and spurs that mark the turf of Union Station. Wagging his tail, Guy led us through a crudely cut gap in some cyclone fencing and into an overgrown field littered with rusted out freight cars and the detritus of countless fly-tippers. I suspected that the rent in the fence had been made by the illegal dumpers. There were old fridges and stoves and washing machines galore, and a small mountain of cracked computer monitors and CPUs: it appeared that this was where old Dells came to die.

  There was also a rickety storage shed, made of tin with a tarpaper roof that looked as though it had been blown in by a tornado from somewhere in the Mississippi Delta. Light spilled out of the sole empty window and I half expected to hear the twang of a blues guitar or a heartbreak harmonica filling the night.

  The only sound was the breeze blowing through the appliance carcasses and Guy’s rhythmic panting.

  “Never get out of the fucking boat,” I repeated. Guy whimpered.

  On we went.

  On either side of the shack’s front door – it was more like a crude slash in the sheet of tin, just wide enough to squeeze through if you were on Atkins – stood intricately carved wooden Indians, one female and one male. The woman – and I know this sounds goofy given that it was just a hunk of wood – had this incredibly provocative come-hither look etched into her dark face. It was in the slight parting of the delicate lips and the askance look of her almond shaped eyes.

  Then I noticed that her throat had been slit and her hands were raised up not in a gesture of welcome but one of supplication.

  The male had nothing come-hither about him. His lips were drawn back in a snarl, his eyes wide and wild, looking every bit like John Wayne’s worst prairie nightmare. One arm was raised above his head and the hand clutched a cruel-looking blade – the same one which had slit his companion’s throat? The other hand was cupped at his side. It held a fistful of big, black cigars. The earthy tobacco scent had its origin inside the shack

  “Do we knock?” I asked.

  “She knows we’s here,” Vibiana said. She bent down and picked up Annie’s body as if cradling a baby. She stood up with hardly an effort – I couldn’t have done it – and gracefully slipped through the narrow entryway, careful not to so much as scrape Annie’s dead skin on the jagged edges of the door. Guy looked up at me then followed her through with a tentative yip. I started to go in, then on a whim stopped and took a cigar from the Indian’s hand.

  It wasn’t exactly a palace inside.

  There was no floor as such, just the dirt of the field that surrounded the shack, with a few bold weeds springing up where they could. A filthy blanket lay across the centre and a cast-iron basin filled with dark liquid stood in the corner. The light was supplied by a flickering lantern suspended from a metal support beam propping the roof up.

  Sitting atop the blanket, legs folded beneath her, was a fabulously pregnant Native American woman of perhaps eighteen or nineteen. She had honey skin which shimmered in the flickering light of the lantern flame and long black hair down to the floor which shone like Catholic school shoes. Because she was so incredibly pregnant – gravid, I think the right word is – her face and extremities so plump with life, her breasts swollen with milk, that I didn’t at first realize that she must have been the model for the carved female figure out in front.

  Her throat was intact, though. And she was smoking one of the black cigars. It was evidently the source of the sweet odour we’d sniffed from so far away.

  “Don’t believe the Surgeon General, huh?” I said, eyeing her massive belly.

  She took a deep puff and blew the smoke straight at me. It hung together in the air, taking on the shape of a butterfly that flew straight at me and burst like a soap bubble on the tip of my nose.

  There is no polite way to say this: the burst of smoke smelled like pussy. Or how pussy might smell if it had been used to smoke a cigar.

  Or so I imagine, not being Bill Clinton.

  “Huh,” I said.

  “Who’s the square?” the woman on the blanket asked. She was speaking to Vibiana, but pointing to me.

  “Medicine Man,” Vibiana said. She was still cradling Annie’s body.

  The Native American woman narrowed her eyes at me and rubbed her tummy with the hand holding the cigar. She studied me like she was wearing X-ray Spex and wanted a peep at the package I kept in my skivvies.

  “Maybe,” she said, after a while.

  “Toypurina,” Vibiana intoned rather formally.
“I beseeches thee.”

  “Again,” the woman said, a little bit sadly.

  Vibiana gently laid Annie’s body down on the blanket in front of Toypurina. She gave Annie a tiny kiss on the forehead. Then she got down on one knee and said:

  “I comes here to Yang-Na, City Beneaths the City, with tribute and entreaty for you, brave Tongva lady. I brings my beloved for you to breathes life into once more. And make her mine as is meant to be.”

  “And what do you bring me, Vibiana of the City Above?”

  Vibiana raised an eyebrow in a what-you-talking-’bout-Willis expression.

  “I brings him,” she said, pointing a thumb my way.

  “Excuse me,” I interrupted. “I don’t mean to piss on anyone’s Manolo Blahniks here,” – actually, Toypurina was barefoot and Vibiana wore a pair of beat-up, bargain store sneakers of the type known as “skips” when I was a kid – “but I ain’t the door prize in whatever game of tag you two crazy ladies are playing. I’ve come this far because . . .”

  Why the hell had I come this far? It wasn’t an easy thing to explain.

  Toypurina roared with laughter. She sounded exactly like Roseanne Barr.

  “Well brought, Vibiana. I accept your tribute. I will honor your entreaty.”

  “I thanks ye,” Vibiana said and bowed down low. She winked at me.

  “Listen,” I started to say.

  But Toypurina held up her hand to silence me. With no small effort, she waddled her way to her knees and then got to her feet. She gingerly stepped over Annie’s body and stood in front of me. She took another big hit off her cigar, leaned forward and pressed her lips to mine. She blew the pungent smoke into my mouth until it filled my lungs.

  I fell backwards into a mine shaft.

  The darkness was so solid, I thought I might bang my head on it. After a while the sense of free-fall eased, but was replaced by a feeling of sideways motion. Direction, really, ceased to have any meaning. I just knew I was travelling someplace very far and hard to reach and there wouldn’t be any rest stops along the way.

  Than I felt a hand holding onto mine. Ribbons of coloured light forced cracks in the darkness. I stood atop a rocky bluff looking out on a blood red sea. Toypurina was beside me, no longer pregnant. Even in this strange place, in these baffling circumstances, her beauty was a thing to behold. She held onto my left hand with her right. She held another hand in her left: it belonged to a boy of three or four, naked and playing with himself in the unselfconscious way that children can and do.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “You already know,” Toypurina said.

  And I did. This was . . . The Other Side. I’d been here once before, though it had looked nothing like where we now stood. Different coasts, same undiscovered country.

  “We shouldn’t be here,” I said. I knew we couldn’t stay for long.

  “No,” Toypurina agreed.

  “We’re here for Annie.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who’s the kid?” I asked. But I already knew. The boy had lost interest in his penis and was now picking his nose, but certain beauty is genetic. He most definitely had his mother’s eyes. He flicked a particularly slick booger off his thumb and into the sea. Then he pointed toward the surf.

  A dark ball bobbed up an down on the pink foam of the wave crests. It was a head. It was attached to a body. It rose up and down with the waves, but betrayed no independent movement. Silver fish or perhaps rays leapt up out of the red surf all around the body. They crackled and flashed like tiny bolts of lightning when they re-entered the water.

  “There isn’t much time,” Toypurina said. “They will devour her.”

  “What do we do?” I asked.

  Toypurina smiled. She gestured at the roiling sea below as if to say “last one in is a rotten egg.”

  I hesitated; I don’t mind rotten eggs. I glanced down at the distant surf, the circling fish which, I saw, had long sharp teeth. A big wave crashed through, tossing the body up and flipping it over. It was enough for me to be able to recognize Annie’s face. I knew what I was supposed to do, but couldn’t quite bring myself to take the plunge. I glanced back at Toypurina who studied me expectantly. I looked for her son, who was no longer standing beside her.

  He was behind me.

  He pushed.

  I fell.

  The little bastard.

  X

  The tide tasted coppery like blood, but was as thin as Hawaiian Punch. The waves roared big and rough occasionally dunking me under, but the water was unexpectedly warm – like a bath. It was intense, but not entirely unpleasant – like the hot tub at any George Clooney party.

  Then the silver fish started biting.

  At first, the nips just felt like paper cuts. But the little buggers were persistent and some of them didn’t just bite, they hung on. At first I could kick them off, but as more and more of them latched on to me, it became a struggle to shake them off and stay afloat in the rough red surf. And at the same time I was trying to grab hold of Annie in order to try and drag her to shore, though she seemed just as dead here as she had in the shopping cart on the L.A. River. Every time I’d manage to fasten an arm around her, another group of silver fish would come at me. Quite a few had latched on to her, too, and having affixed themselves to her, chewed deeply into her flesh. I caught a mouthful of pink foam – it felt like cotton in my mouth but tasted like meringue – and lost hold of her once more. I slipped under the water (or whatever it was) and felt another half dozen of the biting fish close their mouths on my arms and legs.

  Annie was being devoured now by swarms of the silver nasties and I was finding it harder just to swat the creatures away. I started to gag on the thick foam as I got swept under once more. None of the fish was much bigger than my thumb, but they were ferocious and the sheer volume of them overwhelmed me. I could feel them not just biting into me, but grabbing hold and working together to keep me under. I used one foot to scrape ten of them off the other leg, but a dozen more soon took their place. Tendrils of black began to invade the red which filled my eyes and I felt desperation take hold of me as sure as the fish and knew I couldn’t struggle against them for much longer. I managed one final lunge up through the red water and gulped a quick mouthful of air before being pulled down again. Just before I went back under, I thought I heard a splash, but then the fish were on me and I didn’t have time to think about it.

  A dark shape – a much bigger fish – swished past me. It moved fast and unsettled the silver nibblers. It flitted past again, dislodging a good half of them from my upper body. It was enough to allow me back to the surface for some much-needed oxygen. Gasping as I broke through the water, I kicked another bunch of the fish free from my feet and legs. The black shape shot up through the water next to me.

  It was the kid. The willy-wagger and nose picker. Toypurina’s boy. He flashed me a demonesque smile and plunged back under the water.

  The silver fish went flying.

  The kid was half-shark as he tore through the silver shoal. As he snaked among them, he opened his little boy mouth and snapped at the tiny fish, biting in half as many as he could reach. He had huge teeth. Some of the fish he spat out, most of them he simply devoured. The silver fish began to scatter – clearly, the kid scared the piss out of them.

  Me, too.

  But hey: never let it be said that Marty Burns looks a gift piranha in the mouth.

  While the silver fish were flailing about in terror of the little boy with the big gnashers, I fought my way through the waves and back to where Annie bobbed. I swatted a few silver stragglers off of her and began to pull her toward the shore. The silver fish were regrouping now and Toypurina’s kid was starting to look a little tired. Still swallowing tufts of the thick foam I redoubled my efforts until I could feel solid ground under my feet. I stumbled and went under, getting a lung full of the disgusting red liquid, but I held onto Annie. On my knees I managed to drag us both to the water’s edge and up onto the
sand.

  Except it wasn’t sand. Or rocks, or mud or any of what you might expect along a normal seashore.

  The beach was made of breakfast cereal. Thousands upon millions of individual rice pops, corn flakes, puffed wheat, Fruit Loops, Trix . . . the last thing I remembered as I passed out on the crunchy shore, Annie beside me, was the distant sound of Roseanne’s laughter ringing in my ears and the unnaturally sweet taste of Cap’n Crunch in my mouth.

  With Crunchberries.

  I opened my eyes and looked up at Guy’s tongue. It was happily lolling out of his mouth. He gave me a big lick on the chin and then bounded back to the corner of the shack.

  I sat up.

  Toypurina was again perched cross-legged – I’m not a politically correct kind of guy, but under the circumstances I don’t think I can bring myself to refer to how she sat as Indian-style – on her blanket. Still pregnant as a mama elephant. Still puffing away on her sweet-smelling stogie. She smiled at me and I felt like I’d just won American Idol. I nodded back and she flicked her eyes toward the other corner of the shack. I followed her gaze.

  Vibiana was hunched in the corner, back against the wall. She was cradling Annie in her arms and stroking her hair. I looked back at Toypurina, but her attention was fixed on the pair. I had just got up on my haunches, feeling all pins and needles in my legs, when Annie’s eyes opened wide. Then her mouth.

  She screamed.

  She screamed so loud, I went over backward on my ass. So loud, and so painful was the cry that escaped her, that I clamped my hands over my ears.

  Still she screamed.

  Guy whined and bounded out of the door. Toypurina rubbed at the planet of her belly and took a series of quick puffs on her cigar, blowing the smoke toward the corner.

  Vibiana held tighter onto Annie. She wrapped her arms around her head and pressed the girl tightly into her bosom.