The Year's Best Horror Stories 10

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  “I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself,” I pointed out.

  “Fuck off then if that’s your attitude.”

  And we faced one another across the desk, the litter of unpaid bills and falsified invoices stretching between us like a paper continent neither of us remember how to cross. After that I got used to his silences as I had got used to the smell of his waste bin. Every fortnight when I pushed open the office door I would find him staring out of the window at the pedestrians below. “Christ, how I hate those bastards!” he would say, apropos of nothing; or, pushing out his lower lip petulantly, complain about the headaches that stopped him from sleeping. “I had a sickener last night. A real sickener.” I caught him pasting press-cuttings into a series of scrap books he had kept since he was fourteen—recording with a kind of morose glee the bankruptcies and deaths of the Fifties pop stars who had been his adolescent heroes.

  In his absence (for it was an absence, as I now know from experience, even if he sat there all day) someone broke the shop window and stole most of the more valuable comics; he had allowed the insurance to lapse, and it was never properly reglazed. Inside he put up notices saying, We do not want people reading these magazines if they have no intentions of buying!—but by now his stock was so old that even the businessmen had abandoned the back shelves. (They were the last to go: years afterwards, you felt, they would still be wandering hopefully along Peter Street in their lunch hour, like animals searching for a lost waterhole.) Once or twice I sat behind the desk myself, putting books in bags under the dusty, flickering strip lights. It was a novelty at first—but the cold cavernous silence, the filthy blue carpets, and the innuendos of the debt-collectors soon frightened me off. One Tuesday morning in May I had the bailiffs in, two heavily built men in sheepskin car-coats, who knew Lucas of old.

  They leafed through old issues of Cockade while they waited for him to turn up with his last quarter’s rent. It was, they said, a month overdue. When he arrived he was smiling, puffed, red in the face, the jacket of his safari suit flapping open as if he had been running all over the city since eight o’clock in the morning. “Oh, hello gents,” he said. “If you’d given me a bit more time ... Still, I’ve got just under half of it here, and I’m off for the rest now.” In fact he only had a third, and when he came back again he had nothing at all, so they took his keys, locked the shop up, and over the next few days sold off the remaining stock by auction. It went for an average of ten pence a book, I believe, and certainly didn’t fetch enough for the rent.

  Included among all the bales of Count, Peaches and Chariots of the Gods was Lucas’s collection from the upper room: every one of his Beardsleys, Harry Clarks, first editions of Ishmael Reed.

  He wanted to try and buy some of the stuff back, so I went with him to the auction. It was a dismal affair conducted in a large empty Edwardian room. A lot of his competitors were there, nodding to him nervously as they bought up his assets, hoping he wouldn’t commit suicide in the lavatories and wondering who would ‘go bump’ next He hardly bought anything. Lysistrata had gone at the beginning, stuffed in among a bunch of old science fiction magazines. He seemed stunned that no-one there could tell the difference. “They can’t even bloody pronounce it,” he kept saying. “The bastards!” He drank a lot at lunchtime and began to complain of a headache. He seemed reluctant to be on his own and in the afternoon insisted we go to the cinema, where we watched uncomprehendingly some sort of comedy. The flickering of the screen made his migraine worse, and when we came out he was blinking and shaking his head.

  “What will you do now?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know,” he said irritably. “Go home and watch ‘Crossroads’, I suppose. What else is there?”

  It was the rush hour. As we pushed our way through the pedestrians the traffic was beginning to congeal at the junction of Peter Street and Deansgate, where no-one ever obeys the traffic lights. Lucas turned down toward the shop. He had spotted quite a large crowd of students and children gathered in front of the cracked window. They seemed to be waiting for the door to open. The younger ones kept trying it, rattling the handle then pressing their noses to the plate glass; they peered into the gloomy depths of the place, where they could just make out looming empty shelves and torn posters. The students, meanwhile, leaned against the wall with their hands in their pockets; and it was one of them who got up the courage to approach us, unzipping a plastic holdall.

  “Want to buy some records?” he asked in a slow voice. He offered the open bag for inspection. This seemed to incense Lucas, who blinked and rubbed his forehead wildly.

  “It’s closed down, you stupid bugger!” he shouted. “Can’t you see?”

  The rest of them turned slowly, like cattle interrupted drinking, and stared at him.

  “Closed! Finished! Understand? You won’t be getting any more of that here!”

  He laughed. He swayed.

  “What’s the matter Lucas?” I said. “Come away!”

  He pushed at me.

  “Leave me alone, I’m all right,” he said. In a quieter voice he advised the crowd, “Piss off and find someone else.” They watched him stagger off down Peter Street towards the Midland Hotel, their eyes uncommunicative and inturned. Some of the younger ones laughed or catcalled uncertainly. He was obviously in difficulties. He kept stopping, holding his head, looking round as if he wondered where he was. I went after him. Suddenly he wobbled over to the edge of the pavement, got down on his knees, and began to vomit almost carefully into the gutter. People from the bus queues on the steps of the Free Trade Hall moved hesitantly toward him. He looked lonely and embarrassed, wiping his mouth with his handkerchief, blinking and grinning up into the light that was causing him so much pain. “What can I do, Lucas?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Just piss off.”

  Twenty or thirty people now surrounded us. At the front stood the women from the bus stop, clutching their shopping bags and umbrellas, a ring of greyish anxious faces. Behind them men from the car showrooms and drawing offices struggled quietly for a better view. What was the matter? It was a car accident: it was two men fighting. A woman had fainted. It was a dog. Lucas squirmed about, moaning with pain, squinting up at them as they discussed him, screwing up the flesh round his eyes against the migrainous, coronal light that flared round their heads. Then, quite suddenly, the headache seemed to leave him. He shoved me away and jumped lightly to his feet. He looked more relaxed and healthy than I had ever seen him.

  “What do you know of Egnaro?” he demanded in a loud and scornful voice.

  Surprised and puzzled, the crowd drew back from him. This seemed to amuse him. He laughed, and spat in the gutter.

  “What will you ever know?” he pressed them.

  Some of them shook their heads. He winked horribly at the women, grinned at the men. They backed off further, but he had their attention.

  “You,” he went on, “with your supermarket tunes and your Wimpey houses! You with your insurance policies!”

  He darted forward, ransacked briefly some woman’s shopping while she stared helplessly on, and held up a packet of ‘Daz’. “You,” he accused triumphantly, “with your Blue Whitener!”

  He sneered at them; he imitated their favourite T.V. personalities; his effect on them was astonishing.

  “If you want to know about the Golden Land,” he challenged them, “you must go there!” The schoolchildren worked their way forward through the crush and gazed up at Mm. He regarded them indulgently. “You must suffer as I have,” he told them, “in its swamps! You must itch with its fevers and yellow rashes, tremble on its lee shores, wade through its foetid deltas until your feet rot on your legs!”

  The children cheered.

  Lucas shook his finger in admonition. He put his hands on his hips.

  “I know you!” he cried. “You whisper that word among yourselves when you think I can’t hear! But dare you speak it aloud? Dare you?”

  I hadn’t any idea
what to do for him. In the end I abandoned him there with his puzzled but enchanted audience: a fat latter-day Errol Flynn or Mario Lanza, recruiting for some trumpery, desperate expedition against the Incas among the crumbling jungles of Hollywood’s ‘new’ world. His eyes were flashing, his curly hair was plastered to his forehead, he had gone insane. As I walked off I thought, ‘He’s spent his life exploiting their fantasies to subsidise his own. This is his punishment.’ I was quite wrong.

  “That place is not for you!” I heard him cry, and they groaned. “That place is for dreamers!”

  One word hung in the air above him, heavy with promise yet bubbling and buoyant, a marvellous word sparkling with mystery and force: he had only to open his mouth and it would speak itself. A policeman was approaching the crowd from the direction of St Peter’s Square.

  That was four months ago. I did not see Lucas again until yesterday, although for a while I made regular visits to Peter Street, hoping he might be drawn back to the scene of his failure. What I expected of him I don’t know: that he should recover from his breakdown, I suppose, and begin again—he had, after all, paid me in cash. I imagined him in the dirty streets behind Woolworths or the Ardwick Centre, trying to raise finance among the market stalls and pet shops where he had begun his career, two patches of black sweat growing steadily under the arms of his safari suit as his peculiar splay-footed walk carried him from disappointment to disappointment. But the place remained deserted (it was to reopen much later as an extension of Halfords’ already profitable bicycle department); Lucas seemed to vanish into his own fiction; and all I could do was stare at my own reflection in the cracked plate glass.

  At about this time I began to have my own intimations of Egnaro.

  There was nothing original about my seduction; it was dismally similar to Lucas’s own, except that it began with a dream.

  I was standing in a high narrow room with white walls. It was very hot; but in through the room’s single window came the sound of trickling water, and those scents which water draws from dry vegetation. There was a thin thread of music, one figure repeated over and over again on some stringed instrument. I went to the window but the view was blocked by a tree. All I could see through its shiny, fat leaves was a blur of sunlight. Where a ray of light penetrated this curious foliage, it filled the room with a dusty glow the colour of rose petals; from this I deduced that the sun was sinking. Standing in that room, soothed by its proportions although I knew I was in some country so foreign I could not imagine it; hearing that string-figure endlessly repeated; I felt assuaged and yet excited, as if by a premonition of future happiness. I heard someone begin to say,

  “Comfort us now & in the hour of our deaths.”

  When I woke it was with an unbearable pang of nostalgia. Boarding the train at Stockport that morning I heard a woman say distinctly, “The coast, they claim, is a must at this time of year,” and I knew I was lost. Since then I have kept a little notebook. The popular advertisements are full of clues. One shows a tiger running in slow motion across a heartbreaking landscape of sand dunes; another, for banking services, a horse splashing through shallows. I record them all.

  Like Lucas I have ransacked the atlases and encyclopaedias, finding nothing. Unlike him I have visited the great seaports: London, Glasgow, Liverpool. By Southampton Water I sat down and wept; the wind was full of the sound of foreign voices, the scent of foreign fruit; I was dizzy with expectation. But no great fleet is gathering. Nothing can be seen of the great preparations which haunted Lucas and which now haunt me. In the governmental buildings near St James’s Park, they look blankly at you if you mention Egnaro; in the offices of the Geographical Society they can tell you nothing. And yet somewhere they are gutting the records of old expeditions; repairing ancient maps; cross-examining old sailors who—three days battered by ice and gales in 1942 under the Southern Cross, hunted by some lean German raider—saw, or only thought they saw, a smudge of land on a heaving horizon, a ripple of white ice cliffs out from which may flow that current of warm, fresh, mysterious water ...

  I am able to see myself quite clearly on these useless journeys, these errands run on behalf of my own imagination: but I cannot stop: and I understand now why Lucas had such difficulty in describing his condition. It is like inhabiting two worlds at once.

  As I take my first hesitant steps away from the seashore, setting out through the shattered limestone hinterlands into the deep interior of the mystery, I begin to feel a need for reassurance—for an exchange of maps and notes—for some dialogue with those who have made the journey before me. Yesterday, on an impulse, I went back to the Lucky Lotus, that staging-post or coaling-port on the way to Egnaro. I suppose I had known all along that I would find him there when I needed him. He was sitting at his table in the alcove, putting bits of sweet and sour pork into his mouth while he read the paper folded alongside his plate.

  “Oh, hello,” he said. “I was just thinking about you.” And when I had ordered my food he began talking about himself.

  He had been to America, he said, since getting his affairs in order. If he was a bit fatter, that was why. New partners—he didn’t want to be specific at this stage—had paid off most of his old debts, and he was ready to start a new business. America had opened his eyes. “Fast food,” he said. “That’s where the real money is. Hamburgers. Bloody hell, you should see the way they do it over there!” It was like a production line. You took the customers’ money, passed them through the system as quickly as possible, and ejected them at the other end. “They hardly have time to get the muck down them before they’re out on the street again and the next lot are coming in!” It was wonderful, “Fast food, that’s where it is.”

  I watched him eat his rice pudding and custard, smacking his lips appreciatively, nodding and winking at the waitresses. I noticed that he had replaced his old leather briefcase with a brand new plastic one. He used the word ‘secret’ constantly. “The secret’s in the condiments,” he would say: “Give them onion relish and they’ll eat anything.” And: “In and out fast, that’s the secret.” He had a second liqueur; he seemed quite willing to stay and talk. He asked me if I would like to get in on the ground floor of fast food with him, and I said I would. He didn’t turn the conversation to old times, and I suspected he would have resisted me if I had. I sat listening to his new dreams, watching the hands of the clock.

  “Well,” he said eventually. “Time to push off I suppose.”

  I still had not brought myself to ask. I knew now how he had felt every time he took out The Castles of the Kings and offered it to some puzzled travelling salesman. I watched the waitresses surround him—twittering “Costa’ costa’ costa’,” like little drab birds—as he got up to go, and my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. He paid the bill with a credit card. We walked along Deansgate and down Peter Street towards the cab rank outside the Midland Hotel. As we passed the shop, with its mended window and brand new ‘Halfords’ sign, I managed to say:

  “By the way. All that ‘Egnaro’ stuff—”

  For a moment he looked puzzled. Then he laughed. “Oh, you don’t have to worry about that,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “I’ve finished with all that. I can’t think why I made so much fuss. It’s nothing at all when you know, is it?”

  I knew then that if I reached out I would touch some transparent membrane which had grown up between us to protect the secret. I nodded hopelessly. “That’s fine,” I said. “Good.” I arranged to meet him again soon. I arranged to meet his backers. I walked away, and later caught my train. I shan’t see him again. Old maps are useless.

  I confess to you now as Lucas confessed to me under the coats in the Lucky Lotus last February—out of fear, out of puzzlement, out of loneliness.

  Wherever I am I think about it: whatever I do is tainted by it: but if you were to ask me what Egnaro is I could give you no answer. In my most despairing moments I believe that the human race exists solely to give it expression. No-one, I su
spect, can have any clear understanding of it. All events are its signature: none are. It does not exist: yet it is quite real. The secret is meaningless before you know it: and, judging by what has happened to Lucas, worthless when you do. If Egnaro is the substrate of mystery which underlies all daily life, then the reciprocal of this is also true, and it is the exact dead point of ordinariness which lies beneath every mystery.

  On 202 by Jeff Hecht

  When “On 202” appeared in The Twilight Zone Magazine, editor T.E.D. Klein stated that Jeff Hecht “pulls the extraordinary feat of mentioning Jimi Hendrix and H.P. Lovecraft in the same story.” Cosmic, my dear Klein.

  Jeff Hecht was born May 30, 1947 in Milford, Connecticut and immediately was hauled off on a nomadic existence across the northeast, attending fourteen schools in twelve years before heading west to Caltech in 1965. There he received a B.S. in electronic engineering, then returned to the east for two years of grad school in higher education at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. During this period, Hecht writes: “I lived in the back of a barn in Haydenville, Massachusetts, a little town marked by a gas station, a post office, and a flashing yellow light and ‘Thickly Settled’ sign on the highway. I discovered the emptiness of Route 202 while on the way from Haydenville to substitute teach in a somewhat larger western Massachusetts town.”

  Hecht now resides in a suburb of Boston, where for seven years he was managing editor of Laser Focus, a trade magazine about lasers. Since July, 1981 he has been a full-time freelance writer. He is co-author of Laser: Super Tool for the ’80s, a popular level book about lasers published this spring, as well as numerous technical articles. Hecht has also published fiction in the New Dimensions anthologies and in Datamation, a computer industry trade magazine. None of which explains how Hendrix and Lovecraft can be found together “On 202.”