The Year's Best Horror Stories 10

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  The leaves skittered across the road as the cold November wind blew out of the western Massachusetts hills. They were a familiar sight to Sandy, but the first time the headlights of the old Volvo caught them, Wayne started to brake the car and stalled the engine. He muttered an obscenity.

  “Why did you do that? You’re going to get us stuck out here,” Sandy grumbled. “I told you we should have stayed the night in Amherst.” Even though they were both tired and it was nearly midnight before they’d left Sandy’s friends’ apartment, Wayne had insisted on making the two-hour trip to her parents’ home in Lowell that night.

  “There were animals running across the road,” Wayne replied as he shifted into neutral and steered the slowing car toward the side of the road. The engine caught, and he shifted back into drive. “Didn’t you see them? They were little dark things, rats I think.” He accelerated and pulled the car back toward the middle of the empty road.

  “They were just leaves, blown by the wind. It’s something you never see in California.”

  “Then I’m glad I missed them. California’s always had everything I wanted.”

  “Except me.”

  “Sometimes I wonder about that.”

  It was an old line of banter that, like many other things, was souring on them both, but Wayne’s twisting of it hurt Sandy. The trip had been her idea—she’d wanted to visit family and friends back East, and hoped that the trip would help bring her and Wayne back together. But nothing had gone right; even the old car she’d brought West with her years ago was dying. “Come on, Wayne. You agreed to come back with me. You said you wanted to see the East, remember?”

  “Yeah, I guess I did. There was nothing better to do. But it’s so damn alien here.”

  Sandy stared out the windshield, trying to find a way to snap Wayne out of his foul mood. The wind was picking up, bringing with it some snowflakes which were settling on the empty road that would take them to Pelham, where they would pick up Route 202 and drive north for miles to Route 2, then to Route 495, and finally into Lowell. She knew the route well from her college years, but she’d never taken it so late at night.

  In the silence, Wayne reached over and turned on the radio. He punched two buttons and got only static, but the third brought Jimi Hendrix’s voice into the car: “... Two riders were approaching, and the wind began to howl ...” The last word echoed down the road with them and the wind, then faded back into static as they went down a hill.

  Sandy shuddered. “Turn it off, Wayne, please.”

  “Why? I like it; I haven’t heard it in ages.”

  “It bothers me. Hendrix has been dead for ten years now. To hear him now is like ... like a ghost singing.”

  Wayne laughed. “Don’t be silly. It’s just electronics, just music. It’s grooves on a record being translated electromechanically into signals that can make a speaker move. There’s nothing supernatural about it.” He stared out into the thickening snow. “The only thing that’s spooky around here is the country.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s strange, that’s all. Ancient and foreboding and now ...” he pointed to the bare trees beside the road, “... barren.”

  “You call this barren after living around Los Angeles?” Sandy thought of the scraggly shrubs that failed to cover the dry soil of the Angeles National Forest, and of the sandy desert east of San Bernardino.

  “No, I mean empty, menacing. You remember that book we read by Lovecraft? He lived in New England, and this is his kind of country. Even the names match. I remember the name of one of his characters—Whateley, Wilbur Whateley. There’s a town named after him. We drove through it, remember?”

  “The town spells it differently—W-h-a-t-e-l-y. Lovecraft had an extra e in it. I checked.”

  Wayne shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. It’s still a horror-story kind of place, a dark and sleepy town that time and the highway passed by.”

  Sandy watched the snowflakes as she tried to sort through her thoughts. “I don’t understand.” She saw a single light on the hillside; outside of their headlights it seemed to be the only light in the world. “Why does it bother you?”

  “It’s empty, it’s ...” he groped for words. “Well, I can’t really find the words, but it’s just not right.”

  “For God’s sake, Wayne, it sounds like you’re taking those old horror stories seriously!”

  He turned from the road and looked at her. “So how many horror stories have they written about Los Angeles?” They came up over a hill and saw a handful of lights among the snowflakes and the dark houses of Pelham. “Look, Sandy,” he stated, but was interrupted by John Lennon singing from the radio: “All we are saying, is give peace a chance.”

  Sandy shivered. “Please turn it off.”

  “But it’s good music ... great music. It takes me back to the good years, back when the Movement was alive.”

  “Lennon is dead,” she said, realizing as the words came from her mouth that they would have no more impact than reminding Wayne that the Movement had died, too. He had never been able to cope with that reality, and music had become his way of tuning out the world. At times—often when she was out working—he would sit for hours listening over headphones. “Just listening,” he would say when she came home and asked. He insisted that the only reason he used the headphones was that they sounded better than the speakers, but she suspected that he really was trying to keep his beloved old music to himself. Perhaps he wanted to slip back a decade to when the music was being made, and to when he wasn’t the only one drifting aimlessly through life.

  Wayne shifted into neutral and kept his foot on the gas while braking for the flashing red light at the end of the road. It wasn’t the best treatment for an automatic transmission, but it was the only way they’d found to keep the car from stalling when they slowed it. This time it worked.

  “We don’t have to worry about that again for a while,” Sandy said as they coasted through the left turn and Wayne began accelerating on Route 202. “It’s probably twenty miles before the next stop light.”

  “That far?”

  “There’s not much out this way. We’re going through the watershed of the Quabbin Reservoir—Boston’s water supply. There aren’t any houses for miles.” They were out of the village of Pelham before they realized it. The snow was coming down heavily now, and Wayne eased off the gas. With the snow blowing outside and the speedometer light out, Sandy couldn’t estimate their speed. The trees seemed to meet overhead at places, and it looked as if they were driving through an endless tunnel defined by their headlights.

  Wayne stared out into the snow, trying to see the road. “The snow’s early, isn’t it?”

  “A little. But it does this sometimes.” The sad, flabby voice of Elvis Presley sang meaningless words in the background. Sandy tuned them out automatically.

  “It’s a desolate land, Sandy, and these are desolate times.” Wayne’s voice seemed remote, as if he was speaking from the other end of a tunnel rather than from the other side of the car. “The music helps me hold off the worst of it, lets me try to recapture the magic that’s gone. Sometimes it seems like I’m the only one left who remembers it all, you know, like everybody else had forgotten peace and love and copped out and voted for Ronnie Reagan ...”

  “What do you mean?” Sandy kept her question short, hoping it would keep Wayne from drifting back into the silent brooding that she dreaded the most.

  “Even the music has become a big business. Take Elvis ... or Lennon. What did they say Lennon was worth when that guy shot him—two hundred million? What did he do to deserve all of that? And how many people could he have fed with his money?”

  It was a familiar tirade. Wayne had always been jealous of people who had money because he wished he had some, and Sandy told him so once again. She didn’t expect him to become a businessman, but there were times that she did get tired of supporting him.

  “It’s not the money, dammit, it’s the waste. Lennon
and Yoko rode around in chauffeured Rolls Royces while people starved to death. And look at your friends out there in that little town with all that land. They have a great big lawn, some pasture for a couple of horses, and forty acres of woods. That land could be feeding people like it used to. Now it’s covered by the darkness of the forest because the rich think it’s pretty.”

  The tone of the words scared Sandy. “That soil is awfully rocky, Wayne; you can’t farm it very well.”

  “But people did a hundred years ago. That quaint little house used to be a farmhouse that housed real working people, and those woods used to be a farm that gave them a living. Your friends seemed so proud of that. Why waste land that could be used? Why hand it over to the darkness of the forest?”

  “What’s the matter with the forest? We need trees; they can be lovely ...”

  “They cut out the sun and hide the light. The forest breeds bugs and decay and disease ...”

  “That’s where you had your bad trip, wasn’t it. Out in the woods in Oregon somewhere? You’re not getting a flashback now, are you? Not after all these years?”

  Wayne stared through the windshield at the tunnel of snow illuminated by the cold light of the headlamps. “No.” He seemed to be switching his attention back to the road. The wind had died down, and enough of the heavy snow had accumulated to make the surface slippery.

  The distorted voice of a disk jockey cut through the static, a strange voice that Sandy felt sure she’d heard years before. “In Enfield this is WEND, 666 on your AM dial. That’s the number of the beast, folks, you come to it and it comes to you, via the miracle of Mr. Marconi and others long dead. And you’re listening to the voices of the dead tonight ...”

  Sandy leaned forward and punched another button on the radio. There was only static.

  “Turn it back. I want to hear it.”

  “It fits your mood tonight, doesn’t it? Voices of the dead from the dead past.”

  “Come on, dammit. I’m driving; I can pick what I want to listen to. I need it to keep awake—you’re not going to find anything else on the air out here at this hour, are you?”

  “I thought you wanted to talk.”

  “I did, for a while.” He reached over to the radio and pushed the button that brought the music back. Jim Morrison’s voice was singing: “Break ... break ... break on through ... to the other side.” Wayne turned the volume up.

  “What’s the matter?” Sandy asked, but Wayne didn’t seem to hear her. She forced her voice to shout, trying to make herself heard over the music. “Turn it down!” When there was no response, she did. Wayne appeared to frown at her, but it was hard to be sure. With the dashboard lights out, the only light inside the car was the reflection of the headlights from the snow, and the feeble blue glow of the high-beam indicator. While she was looking at him, Wayne switched to low beams.

  “Damn snow freaks me out,” he muttered. “I can’t see much out there, just the snowflakes and the darkness. The trees look like claws reaching into the night. I wish I was back in California.”

  Sandy turned her eyes to the heavy snow. The latticework of flakes drifting to the ground, dancing in front of the windshield, drew her attention. After she strained for a while, she could focus her eyes on the road. The car seemed to be crawling, probably going only about ten miles an hour. “Do you want me to drive? I can see in this ...”

  “No,” Wayne snapped. “You said you were tired, and I told you I’d get you there.”

  “What about stopping?”

  “We’d freeze out here.”

  “Maybe in Orange or Athol. There’s got to be a motel somewhere around there. You’re not going to make it this way, you know.”

  Wayne said nothing as the song drew to its crescendo and closed. He was being drawn into the music as Sandy had seen a hundred times before. He was nodding his head to it; she couldn’t see his face, but she saw his head silhouetted against the snow. Jim Croce began singing “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.”

  Wayne settled down for a moment. “It’s the newest one they’ve played all night.”

  “It’s not that new. Croce died years ago.” Sandy couldn’t remember when Croce’s plane had crashed; it had faded into the haze that she identified as the middle seventies. “All the disco bands picked it up and turned it into mush.”

  Wayne was looking out into the snow, still bobbing his head faintly to the music. “It’s good music, Sandy. Croce was one of the greats. I’d like to hear him now, you know, him and the others. But so many of them are gone—Hendrix and Elvis and Lennon and Morrison and ...”

  “Can you see where you’re going, Wayne?”

  “Of course not, not in this snow.”

  “Then let me drive. You’re too tired, too far spaced out on something. You were smoking grass before we left, weren’t you?”

  “I’m okay,” Wayne replied without taking his eyes from the falling snow. “You couldn’t do any better in this mess. I’ll make it ... I always have.”

  Sandy didn’t see how Wayne could see the road through the snow. They seemed to be alone in a world of whiteness, drifting through the space defined by their headlights. She hadn’t seen another car moving since they’d left Amherst, but she wasn’t surprised by that. The natives knew better than to drive on a country road in a nighttime snowstorm. And even if Route 202 was a U.S. highway, it was still a country road. “I’m scared,” she said.

  “So am I. I see the dark out there, I see the cold. I see things lurking in the trees, waiting for us. I see snow that would trap us here and freeze us to death. I see time, I see emptiness. I’ve never sensed an emptiness like this before. Even when we drove across the desert, it was on an interstate highway full of trucks and cars and at night there were at least other headlights. But this ...”

  Wayne’s voice drifted away as the disk jockey returned. “... not the Grateful Dead, this night or ever here on Enfield Radio WEND, just the ungrateful dead ...”

  “Snap out of it, please, Wayne!” Sandy tried to shout, but the car seemed to muffle the words.

  “... Janis Joplin,” were the disk jockey’s words, tumbling out of the speaker. “You remember how she overdosed and they found her and we were all so scared that death had come to our beautiful world ...”

  “Wayne!”

  “I can see the road now, Sandy. Don’t worry, don’t worry. I can steer across the trackless waste between the vampire trees.”

  Sandy closed her eyes, bowed her head, and made the sign of the cross on her breast. It was the first time in years, since her grandmother had dragged her to church a few days after her seventeenth birthday. She tried to recapture the strand of faith that she’d let slip from her hands years before, tried to shut her eyes and ears to the outside and to pray.

  Joplin’s words drifted her into awareness—“Me and Bobby McGee,” a song that had always reminded Sandy of people that once had been precious to her but now were gone. When the familiar voice of the dead woman she had never met came to the words “I let him slip away,” Sandy broke into sobs. She thought of losing Wayne, and before him of losing Michael and Barney and Andy. She thought of her grandmother and her uncle Bill, both alive when she’d left Massachusetts, now both dead. She thought of the 4 A.M. phone call from her mother, begging her to come back home and see her grandmother before she died and how, standing naked in the tiny apartment in the cool California morning, she had begged off, trying to avoid telling her mother or admitting to herself how shaken she was.

  As her tears began to subside, the music drifted back into her awareness. It was Morrison’s voice again, louder than before and badly distorted: “This is the end, my only friend, the end ...”

  She looked at Wayne. He seemed rigid, hypnotized by the snow, but his arms still moved just enough to steer the car around curves. The flakes were coming at them faster—the car seemed to be speeding up. “Wayne, turn it off!” she demanded. He said nothing; Morrison’s ghost voice sang of “a desperate land.”

 
She reached to push a button, but couldn’t make the dial move. When she moved her hand toward the volume control, Wayne’s hand pushed hers away.

  Sandy shivered. “Please, Wayne, please let me turn it off. It’s scaring me, it’s terrifying me, it’s trying to kill me.”

  “I need it on.” His voice was flat, almost calm except for its rigidity. “I can’t see where I’m going without it.” He steered the car around a curve and up a hill.

  Sandy couldn’t make herself believe that he knew what he was doing. In front of the car, she saw only snowflakes; to the side she knew there must be trees. She crossed herself, not recognizing the motion until she’d completed it. She tried to pray, to force the music out of her awareness, to push away Morrison’s dead plea: “Ride the snake, he’s old and his skin is cold ...”

  The song evoked the fears that had haunted Sandy in the lonely, desolate years a decade earlier. It made her remember her last night with Barney, of lying sleeplessly beside him with the song haunting her long after the record had ended and the turntable shut itself off, leaving her alone with the silence and the certainty that she never wanted to see Barney again.

  She prayed, trying to hold herself away from tears and the music. The words reached again for her attention after the long instrumental passage ended. A phrase touched her: “It hurts to set you free, but you’ll never follow me.” She would follow Wayne no more; she’d stay in Massachusetts and have someone send her things back from California.

  “This ...” the refrain repeated in the last line seemed to drag on forever and “... is ...” tried to seize her, although “... the ...” words were deceptively soft. The last of them “... ennnnnd ...” stretched on to the end of the world as she tried to flee from it.

  The force of the impact threw her against the seat and shoulder belts and knocked her unconscious.

  She woke as two men in hunting jackets bundled her into a blanket. One was big and paunchy, an awkward man trying to handle her gently. The other was thinner and looked about twenty years older. “Does it hurt anywhere?” the older man asked when he saw her eyes were open.