The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  Its glare seemed starkest on the area of rubbly ground where the house with the watchful occupant had been. The illuminated empty stretch reminded me of a stage awaiting a performer. Suppose the last tenant of the house had refused to move? Where would they have gone now that it was demolished? How resentful, even vengeful, might they be? I was heading for the nearest street when I heard the feral snarl of bicycles beyond the houses. Without further thought I made for the woods.

  Arbour Street and Shady Lane were far too dark. If the path took me past the site of the house, at least it kept me closer to the streetlamp. I sidled through the gap in the railings and followed the track as fast as the low-lying darkness let me. More than once shadows that turned out to be tendrils of undergrowth almost tripped me up. Trees and bushes kept shutting off the light before letting it display me again, though could anyone be watching? As it blazed in my eyes it turned my breaths the colour of fear, but I didn’t need to think that. I was shivering only because much of the chill of the night seemed to have found a home in the woods. The waste ground of Copse View was as deserted as ever. If I glanced at it every time the woods showed it I might collide with something in the dark.

  I was concentrating mostly on the path when it brought me alongside the streetlamp. Opposite the ground where the demolished house had been, the glare was so unnaturally pale that it reduced the trees and shrubs and other vegetation to black and white. A stretch of ferns and their shadows beside the path looked more monochrome than alive or real. My shadow ventured past the lamp before I did, and jerked nervously over a discoloured mosaic of dead leaves as I turned my back on the site of the house. Now that the light wasn’t in my eyes I could walk faster, even if details of the woods tried to snag my attention: a circular patch of yellowish lichen on a log, lichen so intricate that it resembled embroidery; the vertical pattern on a tree trunk, lines thin and straight as pinstripes; a tangle of branches that put me in mind of collapsed shelves; a fractured branch protruding like a chair arm from a seat in a hollow tree with blanched ferns growing inside the hollow. None of this managed to halt me. It was a glimpse of a face in the darkness that did.

  As a shiver held me where I was I saw that the face was peering out of the depths of a bush. It was on the side of the path that was further from Copse View, and some yards away from my route. I was trying to nerve myself to sprint past it when I realised why the face wasn’t moving; it was on a piece of litter caught in the bush. I took a step that tried to be casual, and then I faltered again. It wasn’t on a piece of paper as I’d thought. It was the queen’s portrait on a plate.

  At once I felt surrounded by the deserted house or its remains. I swung around to make sure the waste ground was still deserted – that the woods were. Then I stumbled backwards away from the streetlamp and almost sprawled into the undergrowth. No more than half a dozen paces away – perhaps fewer – a figure was leaning on its sticks in the middle of the path.

  It was outlined more than illuminated by the light, but I could see how ragged and piebald the scrawny body was. It was crouching forward, as immobile as ever, but I thought it was waiting for me to make the first move, to give it the excuse to hitch itself after me on its sticks. I imagined it coming for me as fast as a spider. I sucked in a breath I might have used to cry for help if any had been remotely likely. Instead I made myself twist around for the fastest sprint of my life, but my legs shuddered to a halt. The figure was ahead of me now, at barely half the distance.

  The worst of it was the face, for want of a better word. The eyes and mouth were little more than tattered holes, though just too much more, in a surface that I did my utmost not to see in any detail. Nevertheless they widened, and there was no mistaking their triumph. If I turned away I would find the shape closer to me, but moving forward would bring it closer too. I could only shut my eyes and try to stay absolutely still.

  It was too dark inside my eyelids and yet not sufficiently dark. I was terrified to see a silhouette looming on them if I shifted so much as an inch. I didn’t dare even open my mouth, but I imagined speaking – imagined it with all the force I could find inside myself. “Go away. Leave me alone. I didn’t do anything. Get someone else.”

  For just an instant I thought of my uncle, to establish that I didn’t mean him, and then I concentrated on whoever had robbed him. An icy wind passed through the woods, and a tree creaked like an old door. The wind made me feel alone, and I tried to believe I entirely was. At last I risked looking. There was no sign of the figure ahead or, when I forced myself to turn, behind me or anywhere else.

  I no longer felt safe in the woods. I took a few steps along the path before I fought my way through the bushes to the railings. I’d seen a gap left by a single railing, but was it wide enough for me to squeeze through? Once I’d succeeded, scraping my chest and collecting flakes of rust on my prickly skin, I fled home. I slowed and tried to do the same to my breath at the end of my street, and then I made another dash. My mother’s car was pulling away from the house.

  She halted it beside me, and my father lowered his window. “Where do you think you’ve been, Craig?”

  His grimness and my mother’s made me feel more threatened than I understood. “Helping,” I said.

  “Don’t lie to us,” said my mother. “Don’t start doing that as well.”

  “I’m not. Why are you saying I am? I was helping Uncle Phil. He’s gone slow.”

  They gazed at me, and my father jerked a hand at the back seat. “Get in.”

  “Tom, are you sure you want him – ”

  “Your uncle’s been run over.”

  “He can’t have been. I left him in his flat.” When this earned no response I demanded “How do you know?”

  “They found us in his pocket.” Yet more starkly my father added “Next of kin.”

  I didn’t want to enquire any further. When the isolated streetlamp on Copse View came in sight I couldn’t tell whether I was more afraid of what else I might see or that my parents should see it as well. I saw nothing to dismay me in the woods or the demolished street, however – nothing all the way to Pasture Boulevard. My mother had to park several hundred yards short of my uncle’s flat. The police had put up barriers, beyond which a giant Frugo lorry was skewed across the central strip, uprooting half a dozen trees. In front of and under the cab of the lorry were misshapen pieces of a wheelchair. I tried not to look at the stains on some of them and on the road, but I couldn’t avoid noticing the cereal bars strewn across the pavement. “He forgot to buy me one of those and I didn’t like to ask,” I said. “He must have gone back.”

  My parents seemed to think I was complaining rather than trying to understand. When I attempted to establish that it hadn’t been my fault they acted as if I was making too much of a fuss. Before the funeral the police told them more than one version of the accident. Some witnesses said my uncle had been wheeling his chair so fast that he’d lost control and spun into the road. Some said he’d appeared to be in some kind of panic, others that a gang of cyclists on the pavement had, and he’d swerved out of their way. The cyclists were never identified. As if my parents had achieved one of their aims at last, the streets were free of rogue cyclists for weeks.

  I never knew how much my parents blamed me for my uncle’s death. When I left school I went into caring for people like him. In due course these included my parents. They’re gone now, and while sorting out the contents of our house I found the book with my early teenage stories in it – childish second-hand stuff. I never asked to have it back, and I never wrote stories again. I couldn’t shake off the idea that my imagination had somehow caused my uncle’s death.

  I could easily feel that my imagination has been revived by the exercise book – by the cover embroidered with a cobweb, the paper pinstriped with faded lines, a fern pressed between the yellowed pages and blackened by age. I’m alone with my imagination up here at the top of the stairs leading to the unlit hall. If there’s a face at the edge of my vision, it m
ust belong to a picture on the wall, even if I don’t remember any there. Night fell while I was leafing through the book, and I have to go over there to switch the light on. Of course I will, although the mere thought of moving seems to make the floorboards creak like sticks. I can certainly move, and there’s no reason not to. In a moment – just a moment while I take another breath – I will.

  MICHAEL BISHOP

  * * *

  The Pile

  MICHAEL BISHOP’S ACCLAIMED novels include And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees, Stolen Faces, A Little Knowledge, Transfigurations, Under Heaven’s Bridge (with Ian Watson), No Enemy But Time (Nebula Award winner), Who Made Stevie Crye? from Arkham House, Ancient of Days, Unicorn Mountain (Mythopoeic Award for Best Fantasy Novel), The Secret Ascension (or, Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas), Count Geiger’s Blues and Brittle Innings (Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel).

  His short story collections include two other Arkham volumes, Blooded on Arachne and One Winter in Eden, plus Close Encounters with the Deity, Emphatically Not SF Almost, At the City Limits of Fate, Blue Kansas Sky (Four Novellas), Brighten to Incandescence, and a volume of mainstream pieces, Other Arms Reach Out to Me: Chinaberry Stories, which is still seeking a publisher.

  The author’s novelette “The Quickening” won the Nebula Award in 1980. His short story “Dogs’ Lives” appeared in the 1984 edition of Best American Short Stories edited by Gail Godwin, and his novelettes “The Door Gunner” and “Bears Discover Smut” each won Southeastern Science Fiction Awards for Best Short Fiction.

  Bishop has also edited the anthologies Changes (with Ian Watson), Light Years and Dark (winner of the Locus Award for Best Anthology), three volumes of Nebula Award Stories (#23, #24 and #25), A Cross of Centuries: Twenty-Five Imaginative Tales About the Christ, and Passing for Human (with Steven Utley), which features a wraparound dust-jacket by his son, Jamie, a teacher and a graphic artist who died in the shootings at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007, along with thirty-one other innocent people.

  “I wrote this tale based on the first of ten notes for stories that Jamie left on one of his computers after his murder,” reveals the author. “I have turned these notes into three stories, including ‘Purr’, which recently appeared in Weird Tales, and ‘The Library of Babble’, which is scheduled to appear in Subterranean Online. I will eventually try to get to some of the others, but these three narratives struck me as the most engaging of his suggestions.

  “The Pile’ is named for a conglomeration of trash that residents of Jamie’s townhouse complex in Carrboro, North Carolina, left beside the dumpsters there. Stuff that some residents reclaimed and used again, stuff that got hauled away almost immediately, and stuff that had possibilities for reclamation, if anyone cared enough to effect the necessary changes in it.

  “Jamie observed that some items in The Pile cycled through a number of residents, adding that he thought this phenomenon could make a good horror story if ‘some other element’ were developed to give the tale extra depth and dimension.

  “I tried to find a suitably spooky additional element to provide the complementary oomph that he wanted, and so it pleases me to note here that ‘The Pile’ is one of six finalists for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award in the short story category. This honour would have tickled Jamie silly. No kidding.”

  THE DAY AFTER Roger and Renata Maharis – brother and sister, not a married couple – moved into a Fidelity Plaza townhouse that their father in Savannah had bought as a residence for them while she attended university and he raised money to return to classes, Roger carried some boxes out to the Dumpsters at the far end of the swimming pool and ran smack-dab into The Pile.

  The Pile: that’s how he had to think of it because that’s what it was. It consisted of the discards of the Fidelity Plaza community: the cast-offs and leavings of its residents, stuff too good to feed to the Dumpsters’ maws, jettisoned junk with potential adaptability to other people’s uses: The Pile.

  Roger marvelled at the items there: dilapidated home-made bookshelves, crippled rocking chairs, coffee tables made of converted telephone-line spools, chipped planters, moribund banana trees, elaborate metal floor lamps that (obviously) no longer worked, hideous plastic bric-a-brac, cheaply framed paintings of cats, clipper ships, or long-dead celebrities (not a few on black velvet), fast-food action figures from ancient film flops, scrap lumber, and a lonely plaid lounge chair that had declined from recliner to outright reject. Wow, thought Roger: A treasure-trove for the budget-conscious – a category into which most Fidelity Plaza residents naturally fell.

  After all, Renata was a doctoral candidate in marsh ecology, Roger worked part-time at the college in IT, and their immediate neighbours, Nigel and Lydia Vaughan, who had helped Daddy Maharis find this place, were bluegrass musicians who sold lapidary jewellery – or jewellery makers who often mangled bluegrass – to make ends meet. Other residents were retirees on Social Security, language tutors, rookie cops, or administrative assistants with live-ins who tended bar, stocked shelves, or schlepped out to the corner every morning to wait with the Hispanics, druggies, and dropouts for pickup day jobs. Despite the rundown elegance of its townhouses, then, Fidelity Plaza hardly qualified as upscale, and a murder at the swimming pool three years ago had earned it the mocking sobriquet Fatality Plaza. Ha-ha.

  Roger half-coveted the plaid lounger, even though he and Renata had no place to put it. But if he could think of a place (maybe tossing out an old chair to make room), he should grab it now – before a downpour turned its cushions into waterlogged gunnysacks.

  Whereupon a thirty-something woman and a really young teenager showed up at the Dumpsters to interrupt his musings.

  “You interested in that thing?” the woman asked.

  “Excuse me,” said Roger, startled.

  “I mean, if you are, well, you can tote it off, because you got here first, but if you aren’t, I’d like to haul it to our place for Brad.” She jerked her thumb toward the boy and introduced herself as Edie Hartsock.

  Brad looked through Roger as if Roger’s black-and-white Springsteen T-shirt bestowed on him total invisibility.

  Roger smiled in spite of a sudden uneasiness. “It’s yours. Haul away.”

  “Could you give us a hand? I’m a woman and he’s just a kid, you know?”

  So, after handing the boy the fattest cushion and warning Mrs Hartsock to watch her feet, Roger wrestled the Laz-E-Boy all the way from the Dumpsters to the Hartsocks’ townhouse, dragging and rocking it like a lone stevedore struggling with a crated nuclear warhead. He even manhandled it up the steps and into their front hall, finishing there in a streaming sweat.

  “Great!” Mrs Hartsock said. “You’ll have to come sit in it some time. When you do, I’ll give you an Orange Crush.”

  The Pile provided the ever-coming-and-going folks of Fidelity Plaza with a resource – Roger’s apt term – for losing what they no longer wanted or needed, and for acquiring what they hoped they could put to life-brightening use. It changed more often than the residents. Items appeared and disappeared every day, some rapidly and some with such vegetable slowness that it seemed they would take root beside the Dumpsters and grow up next to them like scrub trees or Velcro-suckered vines.

  Roger and Renata settled in. They added to The Pile a burned-out portable TV set, a used wicker picnic hamper, and the plastic dishes, now scratched, that had come with it. Each of these items, Roger noted with satisfaction, vanished overnight. Somebody had found them worth taking, and that was good. Roger visited The Pile every other day or so, more out of curiosity than need, but usually hung back several yards to avoid seeming overeager to loot its ever-mutating mother lode.

  After he returned one evening with a working steam iron – an iron that looked almost new – Renata started visiting The Pile herself. Occasionally she went with Roger to help him appraise its inventory, and together they salvaged a rustic coffee table that Renata assigned to the back porch as a “garden table”. Later, friends for whom
Roger grilled burgers and vegetable kebabs on this makeshift patio told them that the table had first belonged to Graig and Irene Lyons, and then to Kathi Stole in Building F, and then to a sickly man in the nether corners of the complex, and finally to Roger and Renata. Renata, bless her, had refinished the table herself.

  “The old guy’s son put it on The Pile the day after he passed,” Nigel said. “Don’t worry, though. I don’t think he croaked from anything catching.”

  Lydia sipped her virgin Bloody Mary. “But we’re not saying it isn’t haunted.”

  She could have, though: that table was about as haunted as a kumquat.

  The iron proved more problematic. Using it, Renata burned iron-shaped prints in a new blouse, an old tablecloth, and a pair of Roger’s favourite chinos. Once, for no reason either of them could discern, it leapt off the shelf on which Renata had left it and gouged a hole in a linoleum countertop.

  “Haunted,” Roger told her, joking.

  “Defective,” she countered. “That’s why it wound up on The Pile.”

  “I’ll put it back out there.”

  “You will not. A decent soul would dump it where nobody else could get it.”

  “Okay: I’ll dump it where nobody else can get it.”

  “Yes you most certainly will,” Renata said. “Today.”

  And because Big Brother did as Little Sis said, that was the end of that.

  The Pile remained an attraction, though, and neither Roger nor Renata could resist going out there periodically to see what had manifested on, or departed from, it.

  Roger, although good at his job, found his IT work only intermittently satisfying (“We’re all trapped in the tar pit of technology,” he once told his unamused boss); and so The Pile became for him not only a resource for items with which to furnish or decorate their place, but also a source of stuff that he could repair, remake, or put to good aesthetic use in imaginative artefacts of his own creation.