The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  “I know,” Keith wheezed. For a man well into his fifties, he was keeping up pretty good, but Tibbs was setting a punishing pace. “Seen it – back at the courthouse.”

  “You seen that? You seen the coal? Then you got a pretty good idea what we brung back here.” He’s got a better idea than that, maybe, I thought to myself, but I didn’t say anything. For one thing, I doubt my aching lungs would have let me – nor yet my growing panic, which I was only just managing to keep in check.

  “Anyhow, it was deader’n Abel slain by Cain – I’ll swear to that, an’ these men here’ll back me up. You never seen a thing so dried out an’ wrinkled – nor so ugly, neither. Jesus Christ, it made me sick to look at it! – but it was my prize, an’ I swore it was goin’ to make me a rich man. Me an’ all my kin . . .” He choked up at that, and we none of us pressed him; we ran on, was all, with the rustling thud of our footfalls through the brush warning the whole forest of our approach, probably.

  The dogs were still straining hard after the scent, when all of a sudden they stopped and gathered round something underfoot, down by a little stand of dwarf sumac. I thought it was a rock at first – I couldn’t see through the bodies of the hounds. It was Tibbs’ cry that made me realize what it might be – that, and the story Keith had told me not half-a-dozen hours previously, rattling round my mind the way it had been ever since.

  Tibbs couldn’t pick it up, that roundish muddy thing the dogs had found. That was left to Horton Keith. He lifted it just a little, enough for one of the other men in the party to gasp and mutter “Jesse”. Tibbs repeated the name a few times to himself, while Keith replaced the thing the way he found it and straightened up off his haunches. Then Tibbs gave it out in a howl that made the dogs back off, cower on their bellies in the leaf-rot as if they’d been whipped. I swear that sound went all the way through me. I hear it still, when I think about that night. It’s bad, and I try not to do it too much, mostly because the next thing I think of is what I heard next – what we all heard, the sound that made us snap up our heads and turn in the direction of our otherworldly quarry.

  You’ll probably remember that Keith had already taken a stab at describing that sound. If you go back and look at what he said, you’ll see he compared it to the last trump, and all I can say is, standing out there in the middle of the forest, looking at each other in the lantern light, we all of us knew exactly what he meant. It turned my guts to water: I damn near screamed myself.

  It was so close; that was the thing. Just by the clarity, the lack of muffling, you could tell it wasn’t far off – five, maybe ten score of paces on through the trees, somewhere just over the next ridge. Tibbs got his senses back soonest of us all, or maybe he was so far gone then that sense had nothing to do with it: he was off and running, aiming to close down those hundred yards or so and get to grips with whatever cut down his brothers and took a trophy to boot. The dogs almost tripped him up; they were cowering in the dirt still, and there was no budging them. He flung down the leash and left them there.

  It was Keith started after him, of course. And once Keith had gone, I couldn’t not go myself. Then the rest of then followed on; all of which meant we were pretty strung out along the track. It may have saved Keith’s life, that arrangement.

  I heard Tibbs up ahead, cursing and panting; then, I heard a strange sort of a whizzing noise. I once stood at a wharf watching a cargo ship being unloaded, and one of the hawsers broke on the winching gear. The noise it made as it lashed through the air; that was what I heard. Whip-crack, quick and abrupt; and then I didn’t hear Tibbs any more.

  What I thought I heard was the sound of rain, pattering on the leaves and branches. I even felt a few drops of it on my face. Then one of the men in the rear caught up and shone his lantern up ahead. It lit first of all on Keith as he staggered back, hand to his mouth. Then, it lit on Tibbs.

  At first it seemed like some sort of conjuror’s trick. He was staggering too, like a stage drunk, only there was something about his head . . . At first your brain refused to believe it. Your eyes saw it, but your brain reported back, no, it’s a man; men aren’t made that way. It’s a trick they do with mirrors; a slather of stage blood to dress it up, that’s all. Then, inevitably, Tibbs lost his balance and fell backwards. Once he was down it became easier to deal with, in one way – easier to look at and trust your own eyes, at any rate. At last, you could look at it and see what there was to be seen. Which was this: Tibbs’ head was gone, clean off at the neck.

  I said you could look at it; not for long, though. Instead I turned to Keith, who was pressed back up against a tree trunk, still with his hand to his mouth. He saw me, and he tried to speak, shaking his head all the while, but he couldn’t find the words.

  Then we both heard it together: a rustling in the branches above our head, the sound of something dropping. We both looked up at about the same time, and that was how I managed to spring back, and so avoid the thing hitting me smack on the crown of my head. It hit the ground good and hard, directly between the two of us: the soft mud underfoot took all the bounce off it, though. It rolled half of the way over, then stopped, so you couldn’t really see its features. There was no mistaking it, though, even in the shaky lantern-light; I’d been looking at the back of Tibbs’ head only a moment ago, hadn’t I?

  A dreadful realization dawned in Keith’s eyes, and he looked back up. Instinctively I followed suit. I guess we saw about the same thing, though Keith had the experience to help him evaluate it. It was like this:

  The branches were close-meshed overhead, with hardly any night sky visible in between. What you could see was tinted a sickly sort of greenish hue: the way those modern city streetlights will turn the night a fuzzy, smoky orange, and block out all the stars. Through the treetops, something was ascending. I’d be a liar if I said I could recognize it; there was just no way to tell, not with all those shaking, rustling branches in the way. All I got was a general impression of size and shape; enough for me to stand in front of that slab of coal in the courthouse basement the next day and say, yeah, it could have been; I guess. Keith was with me, and so far as he was concerned it was a deal more straightforward; but as I say, he had the benefit of prior acquaintance.

  Up it went, up and up, till it broke clear of the canopy, and we had no way of knowing where to look. The sky gave one last unnatural throb of ghoulish green, as if it was turning itself inside out; and it was over. All that was left was the bloody carnage down below: Lamar Tibbs’ body, that we dragged between us back to the farmhouse, and the bodies of his brothers covered up with a tarpaulin. One entire generation of a family, wiped out in the course of a single night.

  What with the weeping and the wailing of the relatives, and the never-ending questions – most of them from that fat fool Kronke, who hadn’t even the guts to get out of his damn automobile – that business up on Peck’s Ridge took us clear through dawn and into the afternoon of the next day to deal with. It stayed with us a good while longer than that, though; in fact, it’s never really gone away. Ask either of my wives, who will surely survive me through having gotten rid of me, as soon as was humanly possible. They’ll tell you how I used to come bolt upright in the middle of a nightmare, hands flailing desperately above my head, screaming at the ghosts of trees and branches, babbling about a sky gone wrong. Ask them how often it happened, and what good company I was in the days and weeks that followed. Yes, you could say it’s stayed with me, my three days’ visit down in Oram County.

  * * *

  I had the pleasure of Keith’s acquaintance for a dozen more years in all, right up until the time he set off for the headwaters of the Amazon with the Collins Clarke archaeological party and never came back. Missing, presumed dead, all fifteen men and their native bearers; nothing was ever found of them, no overflights could even spot their last camp. Keith was well into his sixties by then, but there was never any question that he’d be joining the expedition, once he’d heard the rumours – the ruins up above Iquitos
on the Ucayali, the strange carvings of beasts no one had ever seen before. He’d done his preparation in the library at Miskatonic with Clarke himself, cross-referencing the Indian tales with certain books and illustrations – and with that slab of coal from the Oram County courthouse, one-half of which had made its way into the cabinets of the University’s Restricted Collection. There was no stopping him: he was convinced he was on the right track at last. “But why put yourself in their way again?” I asked him. “With all you know; after all you’ve seen?” He never answered me straight out; there’s only his last telegram, sent from Manaus, which I like to think holds, if not an answer, then a pointer at least, to the man and to the nature of his quest.

  DEAR FENWICK (it said): FINALLY FOUND SOMEPLACE WORSE THAN SKAGWAY. AND THEY SAY THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS PROGRESS. WE SET OFF TOMORROW ON OUR SNIPE HUNT, NOT A MOMENT TOO SOON FOR ALL CONCERNED. WISH YOU WERE HERE . . . ON THE STRICT UNDERSTANDING THAT WE’RE SOON TO BE SOMEWHERE ELSE. WITH ALL BEST WISHES FROM THE NEW FRONTIER, YOUR FRIEND, HORTON KEITH.

  My friend, Horton Keith.

  STEPHEN KING

  * * *

  The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates

  AFTER TWENTY YEARS I am delighted to finally welcome the world’s most successful, popular and influential horror writer to these pages.

  Born in Portland, Maine, in 1947, Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie, appeared in 1974. Since then he has published a phenomenal string of bestsellers, including Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Stand, Dead Zone, Firestarter, Cujo, Pet Sematary, Christine, It, Misery, The Dark Half, Needful Things, Rose Madder, The Green Mile, Bag of Bones, The Colorado Kid, Cell, Lisey’s Story and Duma Key, to name only a few.

  His short fiction and novellas have been collected in Night Shift, Different Seasons, Skeleton Crew, Four Past Midnight, Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Hearts in Atlantis, Everything’s Eventual, The Secretary of Dreams (illustrated by Glenn Chadbourne), Just After Sunset: Stories and Stephen King Goes to the Movies.

  He has written the non-fiction volumes Danse Macabre, Nightmares in the Sky: Gargoyles and Grotesques (with photographs by f-stop Fitzgerald) and On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. He also contributes the occasional “The Pop of King” column for Entertainment Weekly, and in 2007 he guest-edited a volume of The Best American Short Stories.

  Many of King’s books and stories have been adapted for movies and television, most recently with 1408, The Mist, Dolan’s Cadillac, Everything’s Eventual and a TV remake of Children of the Corn.

  The winner of numerous awards – including both the Horror Writers Association and World Fantasy Convention Lifetime Achievement Awards, and a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation – King lives with his wife, novelist Tabitha King, in a reputedly haunted house in Bangor, Maine.

  The following ghost story is both poignant and disturbing, and would not have been out of place in the old Twilight Zone TV series . . .

  SHE’S FRESH OUT OF THE shower when the phone begins to ring, but although the house is still full of relatives – she can hear them downstairs, it seems they will never go away, it seems she never had so many – no one picks up. Nor does the answering machine, as James programmed it to do after the fifth ring.

  Anne goes to the extension on the bed-table, wrapping a towel around herself, her wet hair thwacking unpleasantly on the back of her neck and bare shoulders. She picks it up, she says hello, and then he says her name. It’s James. They had thirty years together, and one word is all she needs. He says Annie like no one else, always did.

  For a moment she can’t speak or even breathe. He has caught her on the exhale and her lungs feel as flat as sheets of paper. Then, as he says her name again (sounding uncharacteristically hesitant and unsure of himself), the strength slips from her legs. They turn to sand and she sits on the bed, the towel falling off her, her wet bottom dampening the sheet beneath her. If the bed hadn’t been there, she would have gone to the floor.

  Her teeth click together and that starts her breathing again.

  “James? Where are you? What happened?” In her normal voice, this might have come out sounding shrewish – a mother scolding her wayward eleven-year-old who’s come late to the supper-table yet again – but now it emerges in a kind of horrified growl. The murmuring relatives below her are, after all, planning his funeral.

  James chuckles. It is a bewildered sound. “Well, I tell you what,” he says. “I don’t exactly know where I am.”

  Her first confused thought is that he must have missed the plane in London, even though he called her from Heathrow not long before it took off. Then a clearer idea comes: although both the Times and the TV news say there were no survivors, there was at least one. Her husband crawled from the wreckage of the burning plane (and the burning apartment building the plane hit, don’t forget that, twenty-four more dead on the ground and the number apt to rise before the world moved on to the next tragedy) and has been wandering around Brooklyn ever since, in a state of shock.

  “Jimmy, are you all right? Are you . . . are you burned?” The truth of what that would mean occurs after the question, thumping down with the heavy weight of a dropped book on a bare foot, and she begins to cry. “Are you in the hospital?”

  “Hush,” he says, and at his old kindness – and at that old word, just one small piece of their marriage’s furniture – she begins to cry harder. “Honey, hush.”

  “But I don’t understand!”

  “I’m all right,” he says. “Most of us are.”

  “Most—? There are others?”

  “Not the pilot,” he says. “He’s not so good. Or maybe it’s the copilot. He keeps screaming, ‘We’re going down, there’s no power, oh my God.’ Also ‘This isn’t my fault, don’t let them blame it on me.’ He says that, too.”

  She’s cold all over. “Who is this really? Why are you being so horrible? I just lost my husband, you asshole!”

  “Honey—”

  “Don’t call me that!” There’s a clear strand of mucus hanging from one of her nostrils. She wipes it away with the back of her hand and then flings it into the wherever, a thing she hasn’t done since she was a child. “Listen, mister – I’m going to star-sixty-nine this call and the police will come and slam your ass . . . your ignorant, unfeeling ass . . .”

  But she can go no further. It’s his voice. There’s no denying it. The way the call rang right through – no pick-up downstairs, no answering machine – suggests this call was just for her. And . . . honey, hush. Like in the old Carl Perkins song.

  He has remained quiet, as if letting her work these things through for herself. But before she can speak again, there’s a beep on the line.

  “James? Jimmy? Are you still there?”

  “Yeah, but I can’t talk long. I was trying to call you when we went down, and I guess that’s the only reason I was able to get through at all. Lots of others have been trying, we’re lousy with cell phones, but no luck.” That beep again. “Only now my phone’s almost out of juice.”

  “Jimmy, did you know?” This idea has been the hardest and most terrible part for her – that he might have known, if only for an endless minute or two. Others might picture burned bodies or dismembered heads with grinning teeth; even light-fingered first responders filching wedding rings and diamond ear-clips, but what has robbed Annie Driscoll’s sleep is the image of Jimmy looking out his window as the streets and cars and the brown apartment buildings of Brooklyn swell closer. The useless masks flopping down like the corpses of small yellow animals. The overhead bins popping open, carry-ons starting to fly, someone’s Norelco razor rolling up the tilted aisle.

  “Did you know you were going down?”

  “Not really,” he says. “Everything seemed all right until the very end – maybe the last thirty seconds. Although it’s hard to keep track of time in situations like that, I always think.”

  Situations like that. And even more telling: I always think. As
if he has been aboard half a dozen crashing 767s instead of just the one.

  “In any case,” he goes on, “I was just calling to say we’d be early, so be sure to get the FedEx man out of bed before I got there.”

  Her absurd attraction for the FedEx man has been a joke between them for years. She begins to cry again. His cell utters another of those beeps, as if scolding her for it.

  “I think I died just a second or two before it rang the first time. I think that’s why I was able to get through to you. But this thing’s gonna give up the ghost pretty soon.”

  He chuckles as if this is funny. She supposes that in a way it is. She may see the humour in it herself, eventually. Give me ten years or so, she thinks.

  Then, in that just-talking-to-myself voice she knows so well: “Why didn’t I put the tiresome motherfucker on charge last night? Just forgot, that’s all. Just forgot.”

  “James . . . honey . . . the plane crashed two days ago.”

  A pause. Mercifully with no beep to fill it. Then: “Really? Mrs Corey said time was funny here. Some of us agreed, some of us disagreed. I was a disagreer, but looks like she was right.”

  “Hearts?” Annie asks. She feels now as if she is floating outside and slightly above her plump damp middle-aged body, but she hasn’t forgotten Jimmy’s old habits. On a long flight he was always looking for a game. Cribbage or canasta would do, but hearts was his true love.

  “Hearts,” he agrees. The phone beeps, as if seconding that.

  “Jimmy . . .” She hesitates long enough to ask herself if this is information she really wants, then plunges with that question still unanswered. “Where are you, exactly?”