The Year's Best Horror Stories 10

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  “We were trained for things like that, simulations of damn near everything.”

  “Kossum, the odds against success that particular time were overwhelming, but you managed to recover the rendezvous with the command module. Two seconds either way and—” Dr. Alton cut himself off. “But you made it back, and so did O’Shea.”

  “Put it down to the will to live.”

  “That alone doesn’t guarantee performance in a crisis. In a real crunch many people have total paralysis of nerve.”

  Kossum grunted impatiently. He felt embarrassed and irritated.

  “My point is, Kossum, underneath that superb functioning you had the same emotions any panic-stricken tyro would have, the same that poor O’Shea felt and couldn’t control. You’ve kept all that pushed out of sight. This may be what you have to deal with now in your dreams.”

  “I’m not sure,” said Kossum wearily. Dr. Alton began to straighten the books on his desk, a signal that it was time for the session to end. Kossum stood up and moved heavily toward the door. He couldn’t put his doubts into proper words. It certainly wasn’t a reluctance to admit having moments of fear—that wasn’t what was torturing him. It was the intensity of the recurring dreams; each time they left him more shaken. More and more it seemed as if they were devouring his life, becoming more real than the actual world. Even now he felt like a sleepwalker as he forced himself to concentrate on Dr. Alton’s anonymous voice dismissing him and confirming the next visit. As he left, the room seemed shadowy and indistinct, as if the afternoon had clouded over.

  The Friday night crowd jostled noisily at the Fat Cat. At a corner table Kossum sipped his second screwdriver. The murky gloom where he now existed was only deepened by the vodka and Valium. Kossum peered distantly at the figures on the dance floor, feeling no more than a groggy nostalgia; he was hopelessly removed from the good times of these strangers.

  At a nearby table the lead guitarist’s dark-haired girlfriend chatted with another girl. He listened idly, catching a word now and then. The second girl was a tawny blonde, sun-streaked. Pure California, he thought. Her halter top revealed a smooth rosy tan and her smile was slow and rich, her manner relaxed and generous. Through the friendly din of the Fat Cat, Kossum strained to hear their voices. “Sarah,” the brunette called her friend.

  When the guitarist finished his set and led his dark girl out to the dance floor, Kossum strolled over.

  “Sarah, let me buy you a drink.”

  Her eyes were brown and calm, looking up first in mild surprise, then in bubbling amusement “I think I recognize you,” she said with a guilty little laugh.

  Kossum laughed with her and took the empty chair. “I think I recognize you too, Sarah,” he said, and indeed it all seemed very familiar. He had grown accustomed to a stream of willing bodies, the bold ones who pushed themselves into his arms at cocktail parties and kissed him for luck, and the others, the timid knocks at the motel door and the awkward explanations.

  The music pounded into Kossum like an alien heartbeat. Under his ribs he felt the warmth of the liquor rising. Sarah’s face was welcoming, her lazy smile tender and inviting. He felt her golden body tugging at him like the earth’s gravity drawing home an errant satellite.

  The night was gusty and smelled of rain. The rickety outside stairs to Sarah’s garage apartment shivered under their footsteps as they climbed up. Back toward Houston, neon reflections stained the low overcast in pale greens and pinks. The world seemed folded in mysterious colored darkness. Kossum tried to shake off a recurring sense of unreality and flight, but some deeper awareness could not be quieted. Even now I’m running, he thought to himself, trying to hide.

  He stood close to Sarah, his hand on her bare midriff as she fished out her key. The lamp she snapped on inside gave a dim amber glow, and she lit candles in colored wells. Overhead the eaves sloped together and the candlelight flickered on zodiac posters tacked to the slanting walls, on fringed magenta cushions and an India print on Sarah’s tumbled bed.

  Almost as tall as Kossum, she moved easily into his embrace, her body a lithe delight under the thin cottons of her halter and wrap skirt. He tasted her rich winy mouth and breathed the scent of her skin. When she broke away from his kisses, it was only to murmur endearments. “I’ve thought of you so many times and never knew I’d be with you ...” Her voice was breathy with excitement.

  The halter was tied in back. With one hand Kossum deftly loosened the knot and drew it away from her body, freeing her breasts. She unsnapped the skirt, letting it slip down, and stood in her light panties.

  “Oh, Sarah, lovely ... lovely ...”

  Her tawny body was warm and tropical, giving back days in the sun. It trembled eagerly at his touch.

  “I thought I wouldn’t come back to you—” he said, his voice strangled and intense. He knew his words were incongruous, but she accepted them without surprise. He had a wild need to tell her everything, how at that moment she was the haven he sought in desperate flight from the menacing dream. Against the soft edges of Sarah’s world of drifting colors, perfume, night wind, another reality hovered in the distance, etched in black and stark white light. He turned away from it, following her glimmering flesh.

  For a long time they lay loosely in each other’s arms in the murmuring shallows of spent delight. Sarah sighed and lightly stroked his chest.

  “Your body is so beautiful ...” Her voice was soft and sleepy. Her wandering hand traced down his thigh and paused curiously, exploring a strange roughness of his skin. “How did you hurt yourself?” she asked. “Look at those scratches.”

  Kossum shivered with eerie disorientation. I don’t want to remember, he thought in panic, but the memory forced itself upon him. Running, the hounds’ exultant baying close behind, dark thickets looming ahead, staggering, falling, thorns ripping at his thighs ...

  It can’t be real, he told himself in desolate wonder. To Sarah he muttered stupidly, “I was in the woods at night, didn’t know where I was—”

  “Little boy lost in the woods,” she said lightly, but her eyes betrayed a deeper concern.

  He looked away. Above, on the slanting eaves, the candles cast shifting splashes of color on the zodiac posters. Kossum’s gaze traced out the hieratic figures, a crab beneath a crescent moon, a girl with a sheaf of wheat, a centaur with a bow.

  “You go in for this astrology stuff?”

  “Sure.”

  “Tell me something about it.”

  “I’m earth ... I think you’re fire.”

  “December third. Sagittarius.”

  “I was right. That’s a fire sign—the Archer. And you’ve aimed very high.”

  Kossum concentrated on her voice and the comforting odor of her skin. She spoke in little rushes of words, a kind of music. “Your aura is so strange. I’m sensitive to things like that. It’s like you’re in some kind of danger or something. Someone is very angry, for something you didn’t even mean to do. Maybe I can cast a horoscope for you, help you in some way—”

  “Baby, I wish you could.”

  It was hard to believe the change in Kossum. Dr. Alton kept his usual guarded composure, but he noted Kossum’s shambling gait as the man entered the office. His glance quickly took in the stubbled face and the bloodshot eyes that flickered with anxiety.

  “What’s going on, Kossum?” he asked with a faint touch of camaraderie.

  “It’s bad. Really bad. I don’t know how much more I can stand.”

  “The dreams?”

  “The dream. It’s every night now. I’m afraid to go to sleep. And the marks, the crazy damned ... after effects.” Kossum’s eyes were almost pleading. There were now marks on his arms.

  Dr. Alton glanced at the folder on his desk. The appearance of hysterical symptoms had definitely changed the nature of the case. Kossum might be close to a real breakdown. Hospitalization? He hesitated. A trace of hero worship made him want Kossum to fight his way back to normal on his own.

  “I don�
��t know what’s real any longer. Everything I used to believe ... Nothing holds.”

  “You don’t have to doubt your reason because of psychosomatic effects. These things happen all the time—the man with the ulcer, the kid whose wart disappears when he rubs an egg against it and buries the egg. Your symptoms are just more dramatic.”

  “But you don’t know how bad it is,” Kossum said. “When I dream now I can hardly wake up or come back from ... from that place. And then its marks are on me. I know the dream isn’t real, but they make it real.”

  “Your emotions are real, Kossum. Have you ever heard of the stigmata, the bleeding wounds of the crucifixion that appear on the bodies of mystics? We don’t know how the body does these things, but they’ve been documented many times.”

  “I want you to try something different, Kossum,” said Dr. Alton, after a pause. “A very simple procedure, based on autosuggestion, has worked in many cases of obsessive dreams. It’s a way to extend the control of the waking mind into the dream world. Each night before you go to bed, practice the relaxation exercises I’ve shown you. After you unwind a little, tell yourself very strongly, Whatever it is in the dream, pursuing me, I will stand and face it.”

  For the first time in the session, Kossum’s haunted eyes showed a spark of interest. “It would be a relief—whatever happens—to know the end of it.”

  “Try it then. There’s a chance the autosuggestion will give you a breakthrough.”

  He ran. For miles and miles, in the full moon’s light and shadow, through the same ragged terrain. Branches whipped his face. The rocky slopes crumbled and slipped underfoot. His muscles knotted with agony, and the chill air seared his heaving lungs like fire. The triumphant din of the dogs was close behind. He fled with the desperation of the hunted animal. He had no name, no history. He was no longer Kossum.

  Yet even in headlong flight, some part of his being steeled itself for defiance. Rage filled him, the courage of the cornered. In sudden fierceness he wheeled and faced the yelping pack. They stopped, then surged around him, circling and leaping. The brilliant moonlight glittered on their furious eyes and slavering jaws. Behind them pale, shadowy figures hastened forward. He knew they would not help him. She had sent them—the ones who welcomed no heroes, who harried him through endless dreams. For an instant he glimpsed her again. Dazzled by her radiant body, he raised his eyes to her face. Implacable. You have no pity, he thought in despair.

  From the circling pack, a snarling hound sprang, clamping its teeth on his shoulder. He flung it aside, but another was upon him in an instant, then another. They bore him down. As he went to his knees, he felt a slash at his throat and heard youthful voices urging on the dogs. “Theron! Lelaps! Pamphagus!”

  In their archaic accents there was no malice. They shouted with the joy of the hunt, their quarry finally brought to earth.

  MIND by Les Freeman

  “Mind” is only Les Freeman’s second published short story, although he is no stranger to print. Born in May of 1939 and currently living in London, Freeman is a career journalist of some twenty years experience, contributing to such papers as the Daily Express, the Birmingham Post, and The Northern Echo. Freeman is also a poet, a Fellow of the International Poetry Society, and the editor of Water. In addition, he is a playwright, having written more than a dozen plays, some of which have been staged, others which have run into problems, as Freeman explains: “In addition to having a play banned by the theatre that awarded it first prize in a competition, the most recent thing to happen to me play-wise is that after having a full length play accepted for production in London it was promptly banned by the theatre management (this play dealt with the IRA and management thought they could end up with a bomb in their offices or auditorium if the IRA did not like the theme of the play!).”

  The Yorkshire town of Whitby is the setting for “Mind.” Horror fans will recall that Dracula once paid a visit to this seaside town. “Mind,” however, is not a story about gothic vampires.

  For the majority of the year there was something special about Whitby, as far as Derek Benzies was concerned. It wasn’t simply that the little fishing town looked majestic and steeped in history; it was the fact that it felt majestic and it was steeped in history.

  On sharp icy days in December, when there was the threat of rain or snow, Derek would climb the one hundred and ninety-nine steps that led from the older part of the town up the steep cliff to the parish church and the ruins of Whitby Abbey. Once there, he could revisit the site of the old religious community, wander in the mystery of lost history, throw the old copper coin—with a prayer to God or the devil—down the bottomless well that stood a few yards from the nave, before retreating to the shade of the still-used parish church to stare out to sea in the hope of spotting a storm arriving, or to watch snow clouds or snow storms battle their way across the bay and then shower the seafront with foam.

  In the crispness of April he would wander through the shadows of the main street—only three or four yards wide—admire the stones that made up the old, stately, houses of Bagdale; take special note of the daffodils that held on to life in the old gardens that bordered the town centre; explore the eccentric museum and art gallery with the dull rays of the sun helping to illuminate exhibits; and then enjoy a fish lunch at the Angel hotel safe in the knowledge that, despite cod wars and fishing limits, that particular meat of the sea was good and fresh.

  On the hot, claustrophobic days of August when Whitby changed itself from a town that traded with the sea into a town that took money from day trippers and holiday-makers, Derek rushed through the day with the speed of a young man frightened of growing old. He called on his clients—the few stores in the town prepared to sell expensive French silk clothing—and rushed out again to the more lucrative towns of Harrogate and Scarborough. There may be more money in those two towns, he told himself every August but in Whitby, when it was not overflowing with trippers, there was much more character.

  He had been visiting Whitby and the rest of north Yorkshire for almost ten years, since he had gained an exclusive agency and had been determined to make it a success. And he had. There had been no question of him being replaced as long as his order book looked healthy, and, as the number of French silk dresses that turned up for official functions in the area testified, the health of that order book seemed assured.

  Derek enjoyed his job. It meant that he saw some of the most beautiful countryside in England as he motored through the vast, almost unspoilt North Yorks Moors National Park, getting simple enjoyment from reading place names as varied and as unusual as Seave Green, Spauntan Moor, Rosedale Abbey, Goathland and Ugglebarnaby. But as much as he liked the sights and the sounds of the open countryside, his trips to Whitby, when they were out of season, were the highlights of his year. York and Harrogate, Middlesbrough and Scarborough may provide more orders; Whitby supplied more enjoyment.

  It was December. So his Whitby visit was going to be something to enjoy. There was one major drawback—he had to get there and back by train. His car was out of action and the garage held out little hope of it being roadworthy within a week. But Whitby was a small town; and one of its main attractions was that it was best seen on foot. So a train journey was not going to spoil the trip.

  The train from Middlesbrough to Whitby was a pay-train; a green-backed diesel that snaked its way through the national parkland calling at thirteen or fourteen village stops before arriving at the sea more than an hour after starting its journey. His car could have done it in less time but, he told himself, by train it was more relaxing.

  He arrived at Whitby in mid-morning; called on four shops and took four major orders; lunched on prawns and braised plaice and prepared to spend a couple of hours wandering and watching before catching the train home. It was cold and it was grey. There was a heavy sky that indicated to the knowing that snow wasn’t far away. He tucked his scarf tighter inside the neck of his leather overcoat, and with briefcase wedged between his waist and h
is arm, sunk his hands deep into his pockets.

  He glanced with little interest at the dusty antiques that stared out at him from windows of shops that were closed to customers until the summer; paid little attention to the other odd shops that offered products of Whitby’s traditional jet industry. Instead he hurried along the twisting streets before climbing the one hundred and ninety-nine steps that led to the abbey. At the top of the cliff he stopped for breath. The silhouette of the abbey ruins greeted him; black and big and brooding. He paid his entrance fee at the gate and strode into the abbey grounds as the first flake of snow fell and melted on the old stonework. It was cold. Very cold.

  He stared up at the imposing, but empty, windows that had once-risen in coloured splendour at the back of the altar, and he marvelled at the natural window pane of snowflakes that filled the empty spaces. It was as though someone had flicked flakes between glass in double-glazed windows and held the snow there forever, moving in motion with the wind and the season. As Derek stared at the snow he saw that it was falling, actually falling and reaching the ground, only outside the walls of the abbey. There was no roof to protect the building and although he could look up and see the snow above him none reached the grass that made up the floor of the abbey. And while the grass outside the building was old and wiry and a dull dark green, the grass within the walls of the building was fresh and bright like grass in meadows at summertime. He shook his head to make sure he was still thinking straight, decided it was all due to the fact that the abbey’s walls sheltered the interior of the old building, and marched out to the edge of the cliff to look at the sea.