The Year's Best Horror Stories 10

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  The van’s front wheels turned to the right and it shot past him. Bastard, he thought, and then, run. Now you can make it. It doesn’t have time to get to the mainland, turn around and come for you again, even with the crippled right leg.

  He heard the van’s brakes squeal behind him. When he looked over his shoulder, he saw it backing up, straight at him.

  He turned to run, but his right leg gave out beneath him, and he fell on the causeway. His body twisted over his crippled leg. He rolled awkwardly to face the van. His cheek was pressed into the asphalt. His vision was blurred from the pain. Was that the Sheriff’s car, coming slowly toward the island, which he thought he could see framed between the undercarriage of the van and the roadbed? RVH 927. Must remember that. The last thing he saw was one of the van’s oversized rear tires bearing directly down on him.

  An hour and a half later, the sun was high enough to make the unfinished pine boards on the abandoned Navy barracks begin to sweat sap. Flies buzzed in the scrub grass. A man was sitting in a straight-backed wooden chair tipped back against the barracks wall, when the black van pulled up. It sparkled in the sunlight, freshly washed and polished. The man who got out of the van was wearing a green T-shirt. Across the front in white numerals was the legend:

  10001

  9:00

  He nodded to the sitting man, who said “Morning, Bobby.”

  Bobby was carrying a crumpled piece of purple fabric in his right hand and the keys to the van in his left. He tossed the keys to the sitting man, and they sparkled in the sunlight as they flew through the air. The sitting man reached up and caught them without moving.

  Bobby went into the barracks. When he came out a few minutes later he was wearing Michaelson’s T-shirt. He began doing stretching exercises for his legs against the barracks wall. When the sitting man saw the purple shirt, he raised his eyebrows.

  “Think you’re ready for a seven, Bobby?” he asked.

  Bobby dropped his left leg and propped his right on the barracks wall, stretching forward to touch his toes. “I’ll buy you a beer back in town,” he said. His voice had the edge of arrogance a young man sometimes uses in talking with an older one, especially an older man in a position of authority.

  The sitting man shook his head. He said nothing until Bobby finished his stretching exercises and looked over toward him. The sitting man punched the start button on his stopwatch with his right thumbnail and said, “The very best of luck to you today, Bobby.”

  “Thanks, Sheriff,” said Bobby.

  He jogged toward the causeway. His shoes kicked up small clouds of dry sand which hung in the air for a few seconds after he had passed.

  The Sheriff sat gazing out at the causeway until his stopwatch read 6:02. He tipped the chair forward until its front legs hit the ground. He got up and stretched, thrusting his arms high into the air, and climbed into the van.

  Its interior was hot from the sun, so he left the driver’s door open.

  When his stopwatch read 6:30, the Sheriff started the van’s engine. It idled quietly.

  At 6:48 he shut the van’s door. He looked out over the causeway. All of them had argued about its exact length back in the beginning until he had borrowed a precision odometer about a year ago and measured it with the patrol car. Exactly 10,001 meters from end to end. After that, they had had the T-shirts printed up.

  He looked for the purple dot that would be Bobby, but it was out of sight.

  At 7:00—not a second late, not a second early—the Sheriff put the black van in gear and drove onto the causeway.

  EGNARO by M. John Harrison

  Born in 1945, not far from Catesby Hall, gathering place of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators, M. John Harrison was educated at Rugby and lived for a time in London before moving to the Holme Valley, where he lives in a cottage on the edge of the Peak District National Park and indulges his suicidal hobby of rock-climbing when not writing. Better known as a science fiction writer, Harrison sold his first story in 1966 and served as literary editor of the controversial New Wave magazine, New Worlds, from 1968-1975—“an unpaid position but one which allowed considerable scope when it came to biting the hand that fed you.” His science fiction books include the novels, The Committed Men and The Centauri Device, and the collection, The Machine in Shaft Ten. Fantasy Fans know Harrison for his excellent Viriconium Sequence: The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, and In Viriconium. Horror fans should know his work, as well.

  Like fellow British writer, Ramsey Campbell, M. John Harrison demonstrates a morbid fascination with urban seediness, drawing upon the numbing ugliness and grimy squalor of industrial slums as background to his fiction. Campbell has described a theme of Harrison’s work as “the occult power of apathy.” “Egnaro” appeared in Winter’s Tales 27, a hardbound anthology published each Christmas by Macmillan. The British have a traditional love for spooky stories at Christmastime, and Winter’s Tales has become a tradition itself after a quarter of a century. This is not to say that “Egnaro” is traditional in any respect.

  Egnaro is a secret known to everyone but yourself.

  It is a distant country, or some city to which you have never been; it is an unknown language. At the same time it is like being cuckolded, or plotted against. It is a part of the universe of events which will never wholly reveal itself to you: a conspiracy the barest outline of which, once visible, will gall you forever.

  It is in conversations not your own (so I learnt from Lucas) that you first hear of Egnaro, and in situations peripheral to your real life. Egnaro reveals itself in minutiae, in that great and very real part of our lives when we are doing nothing important. You wait outside the library in the rain: an advert for a new kind of vacuum pump, photographed against a background of cycads and conifers, catches your eye. “Branch offices everywhere!” Old men sit on the park benches, and as you pass make casual reference to some forgotten campaign in the marshes of a steamy country. You are always in transit when you hear of Egnaro, in transit or in limbo. A book falls open and you read with a sudden inexpressible frisson of nostalgia, “Will I ever return there?” (Outside, rain again, falling into someone else’s garden; a wet black branch touches the window in the wind.) A woman at a dinner party murmurs, “Egnaro, where the long sunlit esplanades lift from a wine-dark sea ...”

  It is this overheard, fragmentary quality which is so destructive. By the time you have turned your head the woman is speaking of tomatoes and hot-house flowers; someone has switched off the news broadcast with its hints of a foreign war; the accountant in the seat opposite you on the train has folded up his Daily Telegraph preparatory to getting off at Stockport. You forget immediately. Egnaro—in the beginning at least—hides itself in the interstices, the empty moments of your life.

  Lucas himself had a similar incidental quality. He was a fattish, intelligent, curly-haired man, between thirty and forty years old and prone to migraine headaches, who had worked his way up from records and goldfish in the Shude Hill Market to a shabby bookshop on one of the grim streets behind Manchester library. I did his accounts once a month in a filthy office he kept above the shop; afterwards he would treat me to a Chinese meal and pay me in cash, for which I was grateful. I sold some of my wife’s books to him when she died. He was quite decent to me on that occasion.

  He conducted the business evasively. Receipts were scribbled on decaying brown paper bags, in a variety of hands. He had three signatures. I never knew how many people he employed. He never paid his bills. He concealed from me almost as much as he was concealing from his suppliers, his partners, and his V.A.T. inspector. To tell the truth I let him hide as much as he pleased: no-one in the grey streets outside cared, and I was glad of the work. I hated the office, with its litter of half-empty plastic cups and plates of congealed food; but I liked the shop. After the rambling, apologetic evasions upstairs it had a sour candour.

  Its window was packed with colourful American comics sellotaped into plastic bags, and its door was always open. Inside
it was the relict of a dozen bankruptcy cases: car rental, cheap shoes, do-it-yourself. Lucas had ripped out the original fitments, leaving raw scars on the wall to remind him, and replaced them with badly carpentered shelves. A tape-player and two loudspeakers pumped the narrow aisles full of a crude music which drew in the students and teenagers who made up his bread and butter clientele. They came in full of a sort of greedy idealism, to buy science fiction and crank-cult material—books about spoon-bending, flying saucers and spiritualism—books by Koestler and Crowley, Cowper-Powys and Colin Wilson—all the paraphernalia of that ‘new’ paradigm which so attracts the young. As a sideline Lucas sold them second hand records, posters, novelties, and—from a basement stinking of broken lavatories and mould—film magazines, biographies of James Dean, and children’s comics.

  They loved it. Every flat surface was strewn with the poor stuff they wanted, and I don’t think that any of them ever realised that Lucas hated them, or that this was his revenge on them.

  He kept the pornography at the rear of the shop. On slack afternoons he would stand behind the cash desk, sealing the new stock into plastic wrappers so that the customers couldn’t maul it. This activity seemed to relax him. His plump fingers had performed the task so often that they worked unsupervised, deftly folding the wrapper, pulling the Sellotape off the reel, smoothing it down, while Lucas’s thoughts went elsewhere and his face took on a collapsed, distant expression; so that he looked, with his curly hair and smooth skin, like a corrupt but puzzled cherub. Occasionally he would leaf through a copy of Rustler or Big Breasted Women in Real Life Poses before he sealed it up, or stare with sudden stony contempt at the businessmen browsing the back shelves.

  Once or twice a month the police would come unannounced and remove his entire stock in black polythene dustbin bags. No-one expected this to have any effect. He had the shelves full again the next day. They treated him with a jocular familiarity—and in the face of their warrants and destruction orders he was resentful but polite. He made no distinction between pornography and science fiction, often wondering out loud why they confiscated the one and not the other.

  “It all seems the same to me,” he maintained. “Comfort and dreams. It all rots your brain.” Then, reflectively: “Give them what they want and take the money.”

  Though he believed his analogy, his cynicism wasn’t as simple as it seemed. The art student, with his baggy trousers and his magenta-dyed hair, coming in for the latest Carlos Castaneda or John Cowper-Powys; the shopgirl who asked in a distracted whine, “Got anything about Elvis Presley? Any books? Badges?”; the accounts executive in the three piece suit who snapped back his cuff to consult his digital watch before folding the new issue of Young Girls in Full Colour or Omni into his plastic attache case: I soon saw that Lucas’s contempt for them stemmed from his fellow-feeling.

  In unguarded moments he showed me some of his own collection: florid volumes illustrated in the Twenties and Thirties by Harry Clark; Beardsley prints and Burne-Jones reproductions. He had newspapers from the Fifties and Sixties, announcing the deaths of politicians and pop stars; he had original recordings by Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry. If he knew exactly what the teenagers wanted to buy, it was because he was privy to their dreams; it was because he had haunted the back streets of London and Manchester and Liverpool only a few years before, searching for a biography of Mervyn Peake, a forgotten novel, a bootleg record. And if he hated them it was because he had lost their simplicity, their ability to be comforted, the ease with which they consummated their desires.

  He was trapped between the fantasy on the shelves, which no longer satisfied him, and the meaningless sheaves of invoices floating in pools of cold coffee on the desk upstairs. Therein lay his susceptibility to Egnaro. Where my own lay I am not half so sure.

  “We all love a mysterious country,” said Lucas.

  We were sitting in his office, looking through his collection, warming our hands over the one-bar fire which drew a sour, failed smell from the piles of ancient magazines and overflowing waste bins. The accounts for February were finished. His takings were down, he claimed, his overheads up. All that month a wind from Siberia had been depressing the city-centre, scouring Deansgate from the cathedral eastward, and forcing its way into the shops. Downstairs the tape-player was broken. Students drifted listlessly past in ones or twos, or clustered round the window with their collars tinned up, arguing over the value of the cheap stuff inside.

  “For instance,” Lucas explained, leaning over my shoulder to turn a page; “This tribe has lived for centuries under a volcano on an island somewhere off the south west coast of Africa. The exact latitude is unknown. Their elders worship the volcano as a god, they’re said to have inhuman powers.” He turned several pages at once, his pudgy fingers nimble. “It’s the draughtsmanship I love. There! You can see every head under the water, even the straws they’re breathing through. Look at that stipple. You won’t find drawing like that in the rubbish downstairs.”

  He sighed.

  “I used to spend hours with this stuff as a kid. See the spider monkeys, trapped in the burning village? They act as the eyes of the witch doctor: he never sees anything for the rest of his life but flames!”

  He had been preoccupied all day, sometimes depressed and edgy, at others full of the odd nostalgic eagerness which with him stood in for gaiety. He couldn’t settle to anything. Now he was showing me an illustrated omnibus of some American writer popular in the Nineteen Twenties, Edgar Rice Burroughs or Abraham Merrit, which had cost him, he said, over a hundred pounds. It had been privately printed a decade ago and was very hard to come by. I could make little of it, and was surprised to find he kept it with his treasured editions of Under the Hill and Salome. The pictures seemed badly drawn and drab, unwittingly comic in their portrayal of albino gorillas and wide-eyed, frightened women; the tales themselves fragmentary, motiveless and unreal.

  “I’ve never seen much of it,” I admitted.

  Personally, I told him, I had adored Kipling at that age. (Even now, if I close my eyes, I can still picture ‘the cat who walked alone’, his tail stuck up in the air like a brush and that poor little mouse speared on the end of his sword.) When he didn’t respond I closed the book with exaggerated care.

  “It’s very nice,” I said, “but not my sort of thing. Are you hungry yet?”

  But he was staring down into the cold black street.

  “It’s almost as if he’d been there, don’t you think?” he said. “Watching the way the ash drifts down endlessly over the pumice terraces.”

  He was talking to himself, but he couldn’t do it alone. He was trying to woo me, even though we had so little in common he didn’t know what to say. His obsession had him by the throat, and the Rice Burroughs volume had only been an introduction, a way of preparing me. Later I would begin to recognise these moods, and learn how to respond to them. Now I merely watched while he shook his head absently, abandoned the window, and, breathing heavily through his mouth, made a pretence of fumbling through the heaps of stuff under the desk. The book he came up with fell open, from long usage, at a page about halfway through. I see now that this is what he had wanted to show me all along. He looked at it for a minute, his lips moving slightly as he scanned the text, then nodded to himself and thrust it into my hands.

  “I always wondered what this meant,” he said, with a peculiar deprecatory shrug. “You might be interested in it: what he really meant by it.”

  It was an American paperback, one of those with the edges of the pages dyed a dull red and the paper that smells faintly of excrement. There were newer editions of it in the shop downstairs, in fact it was quite popular. Its author claimed to link certain astronomical events with the activities of various secret societies and Gnostic sects, although what he hoped to prove by this was unclear. It was called The Castles of the Kings, or something similar. The bookstalls have been full of this sort of thing for the last ten years; but Lucas’s copy had been bought in the mid
Fifties when it was not so common, and its pages were tobacco brown with age. While I was reading it he fussed round the office, shuffling through the invoices, trying to tidy the desk, warming his hands at the fire: but I could feel him watching me intently.

  “We know what we see,” the passage began, “or think we do ...” And it went on:

  ... but is it possible that the real pattern of life is not in the least apparent, but rather lurks beneath the surface of things, half-hidden and only apparent in certain rare lights, and then only to the prepared eye? A secret country, a place behind the places we know, which seems to have but little connection to the obvious schemes of the universe?

  In certain lights and at certain seasons the inhabitants of any city can see enormous faces hanging in the air, or words of fire. Also, one house in an otherwise dark street will be seen to be lit up at night for a week, even though no-one lives there. From it will come sounds of revelry, although no-one is observed to enter or leave it. Suddenly all is quiet and dark again, as if nothing had happened! But ordinary people will remember.

  Scientists give us many explanations to choose from. Are we really to believe that reality is built from tiny motes whirling invisibly about one another?

  There was more of this; an account of an eclipse witnessed in China during the fourteenth century; and then the following curious paragraph:

  In India newly married couples wade in the estuarine mud catching fish in a new garment. “What do you see?” their friends call from the bank. “Sons and cattle!” is the answer. Are we to doubt that India exists? In the Dark Ages they had never heard of America! When the Jew of Tunis exhibited a fish’s tail on a cushion, did anyone doubt that it was a fish?

  “I don’t quite see what he’s getting at,” I said.

  “Ah,” said Lucas. He thought for a moment. He had expected my reaction, I could see, but was disappointed all the same. “You saw the hole in his argument though?” He took the book gently from my hands and returned it to its heap. “You saw through that?”