“What was that?” she asked, hearing the idiocy of the question but having to ask anyway.
“Darkness,” said Babbas. “There are places where darkness gets into the world, through pits and caverns and sunless spots. The Order of St John of Patmos is dedicated to finding these places and to keeping in them the light of God, to keeping the darkness at bay. It has been my job on this island for many years, and now it is yours.”
Babbas went past Charlotte and stepped through one of the openings carved into the cavern’s wall. Charlotte, terrified of being left alone near the pit, scurried after him. At the doorway, she stopped, peering through into the shadowed beyond. There was a flare of a match igniting and then the softer glow of a lantern spread around in tones of red and orange, revealing a small room.
The walls were lined with shelves, and the shelves bristled with leather-bound book, their spines black despite the light. The far wall was curtained off and in front of the curtains was a desk. Its scarred surface held an open journal and a pen.
“This is where the records are written,” said Babbas, gesturing first at the open journal and then at the books lining the shelves.“The activities of each day are listed, written in confirmation of their completion.”
Charlotte, interested despite herself, said, “Are these the records for the whole order?”
“No, only this church. The Order has churches in other places and they keep their records as they see fit.”
“How many other churches?”
“I do not know. People are called, and the order receives them. We do not move around. There are many places where darkness can escape into the world, and when the Order discovers them, it takes in light to combat it. That there is still darkness means that we have not found all of the places. Now, we must go. There are things to do.”
Charlotte wanted to refuse, to tell him that she could not leave her life behind, but the sheer size and complexity of the loss she was facing meant that the words would not fit around it. No more saunas, she thought. No more work or going out at lunchtime with my friends. No more nights curled up on the sofa with a bottle of wine watching a movie. No more pizza or restaurants, no more telephone calls. No more life. I can’t, she thought hopelessly, I can’t do it. And yet, as she thought, she heard again that slithering, chitinous noise and remembered the darkness slipping across her foot like the warm kiss of some terrible, moistureless mouth, and she could not turn him down. Instead, she said, “Why can’t you carry on?” A question, she knew, to avoid her own final acceptance.
“I’m dying,” Babbas said. “I have something growing inside me and it is killing me. I cannot carry the oil for the lamps any more. I am slow. I have not yet, but one day I will slip and fall, or forget something, and then? It will escape. I can stay and teach you, but I cannot carry the responsibility any longer. It is why God called you.” He removed the stained white cloth from his head and came towards her, holding it out in front of him reverently. She saw the marks of the old grease that stained it like tree-rings denoting age, and smelled the sickly scent of his decaying, dying flesh.
“We wear this, those of us who carry the burden,” Babbas said. “It is, perhaps, our only symbolic act, the only thing we do that is devoid of true function. This is the mantle of light.”
So saying, Babbas draped the cloth over Charlotte’s hair so that it hung down, brushing her shoulders. It smelled old and sour. Babbas smiled at her and stepped back as the weight of centuries settled on Charlotte’s head.
2008
The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates
Stephen King
THE COVER THEY WANTED to put on the Twentieth Anniversary edition was even more awful than the previous one. I finally had to put my foot down. Again.
Thankfully, my latest editor at Robinson was sympathetic to my concerns and did everything he could to make sure that the final design of the book not only reflected the sophistication of the fiction it contained, but still met the needs of the marketing department. Disappointingly, the American publisher decided to ignore our wishes and went with the original design and lettering, resulting in the first totally different US cover for the series since Volume Three.
Although the previous edition had not been one of the largest ever produced, the publisher was still concerned about the overall length, and I was now contractually obligated not to allow the book to go above a certain word-length.
The Introduction still came in at seventy-seven pages and the Necrology at sixty, and the dedication continued to mark the passing of old friends and colleagues.
At least, after the controversial editorials of the previous two volumes, I contented myself with a look back over the series’ twenty-year history.
I also managed to squeeze in twenty stories from a satisfying mixture of old names and relative newcomers to the genre.
However, there was one name that stood out above all the rest. After two decades, I was finally able to include a story by one of the world’s most successful, popular and influential writers.
Stephen King truly is a household name, and “The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates” is a ghost story written in his inimitable style. He has done more to champion and popularize the horror genre over the past thirty-five years than any other author, and I can think of no better way to end this retrospective volume than with his contribution.
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 other
s?”
“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?”
“Looks like Grand Central Station,” he says. “Only bigger. And emptier. As if it wasn’t really Grand Central at all but only . . . mmm . . . a movie set of Grand Central. Do you know what I’m trying to say?”
“I . . . I think so . . .”
“There certainly aren’t any trains . . . and we can’t hear any in the distance . . . but there are doors going everywhere. Oh, and there’s an escalator, but it’s broken. All dusty, and some of the treads are gone.” He pauses, and when he speaks again he does so in a lower voice, as if afraid of being overheard. “People are leaving. Some climbed the escalator – I saw them – but most are using the doors. I guess I’ll have to leave, too. For one thing, there’s nothing to eat. There’s a candy machine, but that’s broken, too.”
“Are you . . . honey, are you hungry?”
“A little. Mostly what I’d like is some water. I’d kill for a cold bottle of Dasani.”
Annie looks guiltily down at her own legs, still beaded with water. She imagines him licking off those beads and is horrified to feel a sexual stirring.
“I’m all right, though,” he adds hastily. “For now, anyway. But there’s no sense staying here. Only . . .”
“What? What, Jimmy?”
“I don’t know which door to use.”
Another beep.
“I wish I knew which one Mrs Corey took. She’s got my damn cards.”
“Are you . . .” She wipes her face with the towel she wore out of the shower; then she was fresh, now she’s all tears and snot. “Are you scared?”
“Scared?” he asks thoughtfully. “No. A little worried, that’s all. Mostly about which door to use.”
Find your way home, she almost says. Find the right door and find your way home. But if he did, would she want to see him? A ghost might be all right, but what if she opened the door on a smoking cinder with red eyes and the remains of jeans (he always travelled in jeans) melted into his legs? And what if Mrs Corey was with him, his baked deck of cards in one twisted hand?
Beep.
“I don’t need to tell you to be careful about the FedEx man anymore,” he says. “If you really want him, he’s all yours.”
She shocks herself by laughing.
“But I did want to say I love you—”
“Oh honey I love you t—”
“—and not to let the McCormack kid do the gutters this fall, he works hard but he’s a risk-taker, last year he almost broke his fucking neck. And don’t go to the bakery anymore on Sundays. Something’s going to happen there, and I know it’s going to be on a Sunday, but I don’t know which Sunday. Time really is funny here.”
The McCormack kid he’s talking about must be the son of the guy who used to be their caretaker in Vermont . . . only they sold that place ten years ago, and the kid must be in his mid-twenties by now. And the bakery? She supposes he’s talking about Zoltan’s, but what on Earth—
Beep.
“Some of the people here were on the ground, I guess. That’s very tough, because they don’t have a clue how they got here. And the pilot keeps screaming. Or maybe it’s the co-pilot. I think he’s going to be here for quite a while. He just wanders around. He’s very confused.”
The beeps are coming closer together now.
“I have to go, Annie. I can’t stay here, and the phone’s going to shit the bed any second now, anyway.” Once more in that I’m-scolding-myself voice (impossible to believe she will never hear it again after today; impossible not to believe), he mutters, “It would have been so simple just to . . . well, never mind. I love you, sweetheart.”
“Wait! Don’t go!”
“I c—”
“I love you, too! Don’t go!”
But he already has. In her ear there is only black silence.
She sits there with the dead phone to her ear for a minute or more, then breaks the connection. The non-connection. When she opens the line again and
gets a perfectly normal dial tone, she touches star-sixty-nine after all. According to the robot who answers her page, the last incoming call was at nine o’clock that morning. She knows who that one was: her sister Nell, calling from New Mexico. Nell called to tell Annie that her plane had been delayed and she wouldn’t be in until tonight. Nell told her to be strong.
All the relatives who live at a distance – James’, Annie’s – flew in. Apparently they feel that James used up all the family’s Destruction Points, at least for the time being.
There is no record of an incoming call at – she glances at the bedside clock and sees it’s now 3.17 p.m. – at about ten past three, on the third afternoon of her widowhood.
Someone raps briefly on the door and her brother calls, “Anne? Annie?”
“Dressing!” she calls back. Her voice sounds like she’s been crying, but unfortunately, no one in this house would find that strange. “Privacy, please!”
“You okay?” he calls through the door. “We thought we heard you talking. And Ellie thought she heard you call out.”
“Fine!” she calls, then wipes her face again with the towel. “Down in a few!”
“Okay. Take your time.” Pause. “We’re here for you.” Then he clumps away.
“Beep,” she whispers, then covers her mouth to hold in laughter that is some emotion even more complicated than grief trying to find the only way out it has. “Beep, beep. Beep, beep, beep.” She lies back on the bed, laughing, and above her cupped hands her eyes are large and awash with tears that overspill down her cheeks and run all the way to her ears. “Beep-fucking-beepity-beep.”
She laughs for quite a while, then dresses and goes downstairs to be with her relatives, who have come to mingle their grief with hers. Only they feel apart from her, because he didn’t call any of them. He called her. For better or worse, he called her.
During the autumn of that year, with the blackened remains of the apartment building the jet crashed into still closed off from the rest of the world by yellow police tape (although the taggers have been inside, one leaving a spray-painted message reading CRISPY CRITTERS LAND HERE), Annie receives the sort of e-blast computer-addicts like to send to a wide circle of acquaintances. This one comes from Gert Fisher, the town librarian in Tilton, Vermont. When Annie and James summered there, Annie used to volunteer at the library, and although the two women never got on especially well, Gert has included Annie in her quarterly updates ever since. They are usually not very interesting, but halfway through the weddings, funerals, and 4-H winners in this one, Annie comes across a bit of news that makes her catch her breath. Jason McCormack, the son of old Hughie McCormack, was killed in an accident on Labor Day. He fell from the roof of a summer cottage while cleaning the gutters and broke his neck.
The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror Page 86