The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  What the IHG judges and administrator had failed to take into account was that it is the job of the panel to track down individual titles and then discuss the subjective merits of those books amongst themselves.

  Even more importantly, it is not in the judges’ remit to compare one year’s output of books with that of any earlier years. In this particular case, they should have nominated whichever anthology titles they collectively felt were the best of those published in 2005. If they then decided that none of these titles ultimately deserved the final award, then so be it. But to simply say that not one single book – and the genuine contributions made by the authors, editors and publishers involved – was worth acknowledging not only harmed people’s perception of the genre, but it is also diminished an award that is supposed to be all about recognising “achievement” in the field of horror and dark fantasy.

  At the very least, our protest raised some important issues, and I hope that such a decision will not be taken so lightly again.

  For me, personally, it was a nasty, spiteful and disheartening time that exposed the dark and malicious underbelly of the genre I love and work in. Am I glad I got involved? Sure. Given the harassment that I had to put up with, would I do it again? You betcha!

  The Editor

  May, 2007

  AL SARRANTONIO

  Summer

  AL SARRANTONIO IS THE AUTHOR of more than forty books. He is a winner of the Bram Stoker Award and has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the Locus Award and the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award.

  His novels, spanning the horror, science fiction, fantasy, mystery and Western genres, include Moonbane, Skeletons, House Haunted, The Five Worlds Trilogy, Masters of Mars, West Texas Orangefield and Hallows Eve, the last two part of his Halloween cycle of stories. Hailed as “a master anthologist” by Booklist, he has edited such high-profile volumes as 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense, Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction and Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy.

  The author’s short stories have appeared in magazines such as Heavy Metal, Twilight Zone, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Analog and Amazing, as well as in anthologies such as The Year’s Best Horror Stories, Visions of Fantasy: Tales from the Masters, Great Ghost Stories and The Best of Shadows.

  Upcoming publications include a new horror collection, Halloween and Other Seasons, a limited edition of Moonbane, and a new “Orangefield” novel, Halloweenland, all from Cemetery Dance Publications, as well as a paperback edition of Halloweenland from Leisure Books. He currently lives in New York’s historic Hudson Valley region with his family.

  “Unless I’m mistaken,” reveals Sarrantonio, “ ‘Summer’, an unabashed homage to Ray Bradbury, presents one of the very few ideas that Bradbury never covered in his Weird Tales and Thrilling Wonder Stories days: Namely, what if the glorious season of summer came but never ended?

  “Not to say that he’s never touched on the season: His ‘Rocket Summer’ and ‘All Summer in a Day’ (you may notice my clumsy and roundabout paraphrase of that title in the first line of my story) are wonderful evocations of the warm months.

  “Regardless, I’d like to think there’s a little salt and pepper of the Old Master in my tale. Perhaps if Ray had had that idea before me, it would have looked a little bit like my story.”

  IT WAS A SUMMER DAY that was all of summer. Dry heat rose from the cracks in the sidewalks, brushing the brown grass that grew there as it shimmered by. There was a hush in the stilted air, high and hanging, the sun like a burnt coin frozen in the pale and cloudless sky, the trees still, green leaves dried and baked, panting for a breeze.

  Rotating window fans moved hot air from outside to inside. Newspapers rustled on kitchen tables, their pages waving until the artificial breeze moved on, then settling hot and desultory back into unread place. The breakfast plates sat unstacked, forgotten; lunch plates with uneaten lunch – curling pumpernickel, wilted lettuce, an inkblot of mustard dry as paper – sat nearby. Morning coffee milled in two mugs, still tepid from the afternoon warmth.

  “My Gosh, Mabel, has it ever been this hot before?” George Meadows said from his easy chair; he sat arranged like a man who had eaten a great meal, with his shirt and trousers loosened, but only against the heat.

  His wife Mabel, prostrate on the nearby couch, the faded sunflowers of her house dress clashing and merging in a wilted riot with the worn daisies of the sofa print, tried to say something but failed. Her right hand continued to weakly fan herself with its magazine and she tried again.

  “Hot as it’s . . . ever been,” she managed to get out in a croak, and then closed her eyes and ears, discouraging further comment.

  “Yep,” George managed to answer before closing his own eyes. He couldn’t resist, he never could, getting the last word in. He rallied to add, even though Mabel was already perfectly aware: “Man on the radio said it might get hotter still.”

  Three twelve-year-old boys hated Summer.

  They hadn’t always. At one time, Summer had belonged to them. From the first day of school letting out, until the dreaded bell sounded again, they had ruled summer as if they owned it. There had been baseball and bad tennis, and miniature golf and marbles in the hot dust. There had been butterfly hunts with orange black monarchs big as pterodactyls and just as difficult to catch. Trips to the secret pond with jars, and pondwater drops under Lem’s microscope to watch the amoebas within. And their own swimming, from dawn to dusk some days, emerging at the end waterlogged beings, raisin boys, to dry and unwilt in the setting sun. And Monk’s telescope at night, the fat dry cold moon sliding across the eyepiece like a pockmarked balloon; Saturn hanging silent and majestic with its golden split ring. Backyard campouts, the walls of Shep’s pup tent lit from within not with fireflies but with the flashlights of boys with comic books, the smell of Sterno and pancake batter the next morning, the metal taste of warm water in boy scout canteens.

  Summer had been their time – the time away from schoolbooks and parents’ waggling fingers, the time to be boys. And this year it had started the same – the banishment of black-and-white marble notebooks, pencils thrown under beds spearing dust bunnies, school clothes in the backs of closets.

  And out with the baseball glove! Oiled, smelling like new wet leather, sneakers that smelled of dirt, short pants, the dewy morning giving way to a fresh hot feeling and late afternoon thunderstorms scattering the ballplayers with warm wet drops big as knuckles and the temperature dropping and making them shiver. And swimming, and more swimming, and more swimming still, and the cool-warm nights, the sharp cold taste of ice cream, of a bottle of cola drawn from an iced bucket, of a hot dog steaming, hiding under hot sauerkraut. A drive-in movie in Uncle Jed’s pickup truck: two hiding under the tarp until they were in.

  Morning noon and night it was summer.

  Real summer.

  Until:

  Something . . .

  . . . began to change.

  It was Shep who noticed it first: in the dangerous treehouse on a mid-August afternoon. They had finished trading baseball cards, arguing over how many cards (always doubles!) to attach to bicycle spokes to make them clack and were halfway through another argument about who was prettier, Margaret O’Hearn or Angie Bernstein, when Shep’s head went up and he sniffed, just like a hound dog might. His leg, swinging through one of the hut’s many floor holes, pendulumed to a frozen stop.

  “What’s wrong?” Lem asked, and Monk looked up from his new copy of Vault of Horror with a frown.

  “Turn off your brain, Shep,” Monk growled. “It’s summer.”

  “Just because you don’t want to talk about girls or leg hair or B.O.—” Lem began, but he stopped dead at the look on Shep’s face.

  “Something’s different,” Shep said, and he still held that pointer-at-a-bird look.

  Lem tried to laugh, but stopped abruptly, a hiccup of s
eriousness at the look in Shep’s eyes.

  A whisper: “What do you mean: different?”

  Shep spoke without breaking his concentration. “Don’t you feel it?”

  Monk shook his head with finality and went back to his comic, but Lem’s face had taken on a worried look.

  Shep was never wrong about these kinds of things.

  “I . . . don’t feel anything . . .” Lem offered mildly.

  Idly, still scanning his Vault of Horror, Monk kicked out his sneaker and caught Lem on the shin. A scatter of orange infield dust, dislodged from the sculpted sole, trickled down the other boy’s bare leg.

  “You feel that, Lemnick?”

  “Be quiet—” Shep said abruptly, and it was not a request.

  The other two boys were silent – and now Monk sat up, his butt easily finding the structure’s largest hole, which they inevitably called “the crapper.”

  Something like a faint hiss, something like the eerie castanet sound cicadas make, passed by his ears and brushed him on one cheek, but there was not so much as a breeze in the early hot afternoon.

  “What was—?”

  “It’s getting hotter,” Shep said simply.

  “Maybe it’s because of Hell’s Cave,” Monk laughed, but nobody joined him.

  That afternoon it was too hot to swim. It stayed that way the next three days. They abandoned the treehouse, leaving its lopsided openwork collection of mismatched boards and tattooed, badly nailed orange crates, and moved into Monk’s cellar, which was damp but cool.

  It had never been too hot to swim before:

  Never.

  They perused Monk’s comic book collection, which after banishment to the basement was on the verge of mold. Monk had built, from boards too useless even for the treehouse, a lab table in one corner, and they fiddled with the chemistry set, trying to make things that were yellow and then turned red, others that made smoke. They toyed with the rabbit-ear antenna on the ancient television, a huge wooden box with a tiny black and white screen the size of a TV dinner tin – for a while they brought in the monster movie channel, and watched, in a snowy and line-infested picture, the Man from Planet X rampage through the Scottish moors. Monk brought down a bowl of grapes, and they ate some of them, and spit the rest at each other out of their mouths, pressing their cheeks for cannonade.

  But their eyes kept drifting to the cellar windows, and the heat and light outside.

  “Maybe we should go swimming anyway,” Monk said, finally, on the second day.

  They made it halfway to the secret pond, and turned around, dripping and panting.

  Overhead, the sun looked hotter, if not larger.

  They played darts in the cellar, and set up plastic army men and knocked them down with marbles and rubber bands.

  Lem and Shep talked about body odor and shaving their upper lips while Monk scowled.

  And always, for three days, they kept looking to the cellar windows, up high, filled with light, and closed against the summer heat.

  That night they took Monk’s telescope to the secret pond, and Shep’s pup tent, and Lem’s dad’s battery radio.

  The radio played music, and talked about the heat. The air was dry as the inside of an oven. There was a cloudless sky, and a smile of moon tilted at an amused angle, and, after a while, there were stars in the dark but they looked faraway and dim through the hot air. The telescope went unused. They swam for a while, but the water, over the last three days, had taken on the temperature and feel of warm tea. Inside the tent it was as hot as outside, and they shifted uncomfortably as they tried to sleep. When they tried to read comics by flashlight, the flashlights dimmed and then went out.

  In the dark, Lem tried to talk again about Margaret O’Hearn and Amy Bernstein, and about Shep joining the track team when they all started Junior High in the fall, but Monk told them to shut up.

  Later Shep said, out of the blue, “What do you think about Hell’s Cave?”

  “What about it?” Monk sneered. “You think it leads down to Hell?”

  “That’s what they say.”

  Lem was silent, and then he said, “You think that’s why the heat won’t end . . . ?”

  “I wonder,” Shep replied.

  “You really think—?” Lem began.

  “Go to sleep!” Monk demanded.

  In the morning it was even hotter.

  The sun came up over the trees the color of melted butter. Monk set up the griddle over two Sterno cans, but no one was hungry so he didn’t even start breakfast. They spit out the water in their canteens, which tasted like warm aluminum.

  It was getting even hotter.

  “Ninety-nine today,” the radio chirped, “and who knows how hot tomorrow. It only went down to eighty-nine last night, folks. Hope you’ve got those fans on high, or your head in the fridge!”

  He went on to say the weather bureau had no idea why it was so hot.

  “What does that mean?” Shep said. “Isn’t it their job to know?”

  As if in answer the chirpy radio voice said, “Apparently, folks, this heat has little to do with the weather! According to meteorological indications, it should be in the middle eighties, with moderate humidity! Fancy that!”

  “Fancy that!” Monk nearly spat, in mocking imitation.

  The radio voice, again as if in answer, chirped just before a commercial came on: “Hey, folks! Maybe it’ll never be cool again!”

  Shep looked at his friends, and there was a suddenly grim look on his face.

  “Maybe he’s right,” he said.

  It didn’t rain over the next ten days. Thunder heads would gather in the West, dark mushrooming promises of cool and wet, and then break apart as they came overhead, dissipating like pipe smoke into the blue high air. The grasses turned from moist green to brown; postage stamp lawns changed color overnight and died. In town, the few places with air conditioning – Ferber’s Department Store, the Five and Dime with its brand new machine perched over the front door, dripping warm condenser water from its badly installed drain onto entering customers – were packed with customers who didn’t buy anything, only wandered the isles like zombies seeking cool relief. The temperature rose into the low hundreds, dropping into the nineties at night. On the roads, automobiles like ancient reptiles sat deserted at angles against curbs, their hoods up, radiators hissing angrily. Buses, looking like brontosauruses, passengerless, stood unmoving, their front and middle doors accordianed open, yawning lazily at empty white bus stop benches.

  Birds stopped singing in trees; the morning dawned as hot as midday. Dogs panted in their doghouses. There were no mosquitoes, and houseflies hung motionless to window screens. Spiders crawled into shadows and stayed there.

  Cold water came out of taps almost steaming.

  It was getting even hotter.

  Three twelve-year-old boys made one more pilgrimage to the secret pond. They were sick of Monk’s cellar, had done every experiment in the chemistry manual, had recklessly mixed chemicals on their own until one produced in a beaker a roiling cloud of orange choking gas that drove them upstairs. It had become too hot in the cellar anyway, with the windows closed or open. In Monk’s kitchen the refrigerator whirred like an unhappy robot, its doors permanently open to provide a tiny measure of coolness to the kitchen. Milk had spoiled, its odor battling with the sour stench of rotting vegetables. Dishes, unwashed, were piled in the sink. The radio was on, a background insect buzz. Monk’s parents had gone to the five and dime for the air conditioning.

  “And even hotter, with record temperatures reported now not only around the United States but in Europe and Asia as well, in a widening area . . .” the radio said, though the announcer sounded less chirpy, almost tired. “Locally, state authorities are warning anyone prone to heat stroke . . .”

  Monk and Shep and Lem took whatever dry food was left, found Shep’s pup tent, inexpertly rolled and abandoned in a corner, and set out for the pond.

  “. . . forty deaths reported in . . .
” the radio voice reported unhappily as the screen door banged behind them.

  It was like walking through a bakery oven. The heat was not only in the ground and in the air, but all around them. They felt it through their sneakers, on their knees, their eyelids. Their hair felt hot. The air was dry as a firecracker.

  Shep looked up into the sun, and his eyes hurt.

  “I don’t care how hot the water is,” Monk said, “it can’t be worse than this.”

  It was. When they got to the pond and stripped, there was vapor rising from the surface of the water, and fish floated dead, like flat plastic toys.

  “I don’t care,” Monk said, and stepped in, and yelped.

  He looked back at his friends in awe, and showed his retracted foot, which was red.

  “It’s actually hot!” Monk said.

  Lem sat on the ground and put his head in his hands.

  Monk was putting his clothes back on, his hands shaking.

  Shep said with certainty, “Someone stole summer, and we’re going to Hell’s Cave to get it back.”

  “Ungh?” a weak voice said from the kitchen table. George Meadows sat staring at his half empty coffee cup, watching the coffee in it steam. He had poured it an hour and a half ago, and it was still hot.

  He lifted his hand toward it, looked at the sweat stain it left in the shape of a hand on the table and lowered it again.

  “Mabel?” he called in a raspy, whispery voice. The sound of fanning had stopped and when George Meadows made the extreme effort to turn his head he saw that his wife’s house dress looked as if it was melting, with her in it, into the sofa. Her right hand, unmoving, still gripped her magazine and her eyes held a fixed, glazed look. Her chest barely moved up and down.

  “Oh, Lord . . .” he breathed, closing his eyes, getting the last word in though she hadn’t said anything. “Gettin’ hotter still . . .”

  Three twelve-year-old boys stood in front of a cave opening buttressed with rotting timbers. With them was Monk’s rusting Radio Flyer, bursting like a Conestoga wagon with their supplies: the battery radio, two new-batteried flashlights (one of them worked); three boxes of cereal; six comic books, no doubles; a large thermos of hot ice tea; four cans of warm cream soda; a length of clothesline pilfered from Lem’s mother’s backyard; a mousetrap, over which they had bantered incessantly (“What if we meet up with rats?” Lem debated; “Why not a gorilla?” Shep shot back; in the end Shep got tired of the argument and threw it on the pile), a B-B gun, a kitchen knife with a broken handle, a crucifix, a Bible. The last two had been added by Shep, because, he said, “We’re heading down there,” and would listen to no argument.