The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  Let’s not, he wanted to say, but what came out when he followed her back to the bed was, “Three movies featuring a head-in-a-box. Name them.”

  “God,” she said, “do you have to be so morbid? Se7en.” She lifted the lid.

  “That’s one,” he said, so he wouldn’t shout something stupid and hysterical like Don’t look inside!

  “It’s filled with photographs,” she said. “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.”

  “That’s head-in-a-bag, not head-in-a-box,” he said desperately.

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Picky, aren’t we?” Her voice changed. “That’s weird.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know how she got hold of these. It’s all pictures of me.”

  So. What’s the story with your mom and your Aunt Rose? he’d asked.

  Mom always said she was a witch.

  A witch . . . Like a Wicca-witch? New Agey, blessed be and white magic and all that? Like Teresa? Teresa was their neighbor back in Seattle.

  No, I mean a bad old witch. Yeah, hard to believe, isn’t it? It’s the one subject guaranteed to make my rational mom completely irrational.

  Then she said, Also, something about my dad.

  Your dad . . . Sophie never talked about her father.

  When they were young. I don’t know; they fought over him. He was Rose’s boyfriend and Mom stole him, I think. I don’t remember him at all.

  She said it so cleanly, so matter-of-factly, that he couldn’t believe she wasn’t masking her pain.

  He disappeared before I was three. Who are you when you’re that young? You’re not even through becoming a person yet – you don’t have memories, even, just bright flashes of moments here and there, and what people remember for you, what they’ve told you so many times you start to think it belongs to you. He went away before I could have any part of him to myself.

  “Barton Fink,” she said. She was pulling out handfuls of photos and tossing them on the bed. Sophie as toddler in a birthday hat, Sophie grinning to expose missing teeth for an elementary school photo, Sophie wearing a strapless blue dress and holding hands with a skinny dark-haired boy at a high school dance.

  “Check. That’s two.”

  She grinned, waved snapshots at him in a less than menacing manner. “I’ll show you the life of the mind!”

  “You don’t look a bit like John Goodman.”

  But she wasn’t listening anymore. “What’s this?”

  He had a sinking feeling of inevitability, like the second or third time you watch a movie in which something terrible is going to happen, and even as you know it’s coming, some part of you is hoping against hope that this time the film will magically find its path to a different fate. But this was not a movie, and it was nothing he’d seen before, so there was no reason for this sick feeling to engulf him when Sophie pulled a key out of the box.

  “This is freaking me out,” she said. “Where did she get all these pictures of me? And why’d she keep them?”

  “Maybe your mom sent them to her.” Families did weird stuff like that, mingling devotion and resentment, like his cousin Shelby who wouldn’t speak to her dad but made her son write him a letter once a month.

  “Sent a whole shoebox full of pictures?” she asked. He shrugged. “It looks like a door key,” she went on. “I wonder . . . Kevin, do you have any idea how much that stuff in the other room is worth? What if this is the key to something even more valuable? Imagine if I came out of this with enough money to open my own restaurant?” Her eyes were shining when she looked at him. He wanted to take her hand and insist that they leave immediately, tell her that her mother was right and they should let other people deal with this.

  Instead he said again, “This window ought to look out at the front yard. Why can’t I see the car?”

  “There’s nothing out there.” She was back at the doorway to the living room, tense and impatient. “There must be another room. Maybe she hung a rug over the doorway like she hid all the windows.”

  He lingered, not wanting to go back to the stuffy closed-in part of the house. On a whim he tried one of the windows; it seemed important to have another route of escape besides the front door, and anyway he was noticing a heavy flowery scent hanging about, the kind of sickly sweetness used to disguise the odor of something foul. He took a deep breath, but could find no hint to the source of the rottenness underneath. It was not the same as the spoiled food in the kitchen; this was something earthier and more intense.

  Fresh air would do him good. He tugged at the window, and it did not budge. It appeared to be painted shut.

  When he walked back into the living room, Sophie had vanished. A woman stood with her back to him, shoulders rigid, black-haired, wearing Sophie’s sweater. She turned and smiled at him, Sophie’s smile, Sophie’s eyes.

  “Check out this funky wig,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be great for Halloween? What do you think my batty old aunt was doing with something like this?”

  “Take it off,” he pleaded, but he must not have sounded serious at all because she laughed and flounced past him. “Head in a box,” she said. “Are you sure it’s not Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia?”

  “Of course I’m sure, it’s my clue. I made it up,” he said, but he could no longer remember what he’d had in mind for the third head-in-a-box film or why he’d started them on such a gruesome tack in the first place.

  “Torso-in-a-box,” she said. “Boxing Helena, ugh. You’ve got me. I need another clue.” She had her back to him again, and her voice coming from the black-haired figure unnerved him. “Did I ever tell you what my Aunt Rose looked like?” she said. “She was beautiful once. Way more attractive than my mom. Mom got the brains, Rose got the beauty.”

  “How do you know that? That she was beautiful?”

  “You know what?” She laughed. “I hid some pictures of her when I was little, before my mom got hold of all the rest and cut them to pieces. I still have them somewhere, I guess. When I was a kid and I’d get mad at my mom, I’d make up a story that an evil witch had taken her over, my real mom was actually Aunt Rose and that she and my dad were coming to rescue me. Isn’t that stupid?”

  “We should get going,” he said. “There’s nothing else out here, and it’s a long drive back.”

  “That dance she taught me,” Sophie said. “She called it the something reel. The witches’ reel? Oh, I can’t remember. Anyway, I just want to look around a little more. I want to see if we can find out what this key goes to.”

  He wanted to say that if it was truly concealing something so valuable, surely Aunt Rose would not make it so difficult to find and identify. Then again, Aunt Rose was at least a little bit crazy. Someone like Aunt Rose might think I have to hide it, so no one finds it and steals it before she gets here.

  “I know,” Sophie said. He followed her into the hallway, where she was tugging at the wardrobe.

  “Be careful,” he said, “you’ll bring it down on yourself.” He went forward to help her. “Take hold at the bottom here. We don’t want to overbalance it.” He had not noticed, when they first walked in, how much worse the smell was here. This place was sealed up so tightly, could the air go bad, like you heard about in caving collapses, mining disasters?

  Between the two of them they heaved the wardrobe a couple of feet away from the wall. Sophie said, “Kevin, look. Come round on my side.” She’d been right, after all; it had concealed a door, and she could twist the key in the lock and open the door just far enough to allow her to slip inside.

  “Don’t,” he said, while she still stood on his side of the doorway, her hand on the knob.

  She grinned at him. “Let’s make a deal. You tell me the other head-in-a-box movie and I won’t open it.”

  “I can’t remember,” he said. “I guess it was Bring Me the Head. Anyway, it wasn’t even my turn just then.”

  “Not good enough,” she said, and slipped into the darkness.

  Long moments later she s
poke. “I can’t find a light switch. Maybe there’s a string I can pull or something. Do you have your lighter?” She sounded as though she were speaking to him from the bottom of a well.

  “It’s in the car,” he said. “Sophie, come out of there.”

  “Can’t you just run out and get it for me? Come on, Kevin, five minutes and then we’re gone.”

  He hesitated, then threw up his hands. “Fine.” It was easier to get angry with her. He must have imagined the way the front door resisted him when he turned the knob; it was swollen from exposure, maybe, and that made it stick when he tugged at it. Then he was out on the porch again, where the day was still warm and sunny and their car waited just where he’d parked it. Halfway back to it he turned and searched for the bedroom windows he’d looked out from.

  A movement on the roof caught his eye. Something scampered across the peak and out of his sight down the other side. Something blackened and low. Just a squirrel.

  He snatched the lighter up from where he’d left it in the well between seats and sprinted back to the house. He called her name as he burst through the front door, and her voice came back to him, muffled.

  “Oh, shit, Sophie, why’d you shut the door?” He slumped against the wardrobe, rattled the knob. “It’s locked. Did you lock it?”

  She sounded close – she must have been just on the other side of the door, but she might have been whispering against his ear. “There’s nothing in here.”

  “Well, stay where you are. Don’t go moving around in there when you can’t see.” But she was doing just that; he could hear her, thumping about. “Are you dancing in there?” The something reel. The witches’ reel.

  He’d once read somewhere that the best way to go about breaking down a door was to direct a blow near the lock.

  “What are you doing?” Sophie said, as his foot smashed against it. His second kick splintered the wood; it was old and cheap and not made to keep anyone out. More than anything, he did not want to walk into that inky blackness. But he got the lighter out and struck at it once, twice, with the ball of his thumb. Third time’s the charm.

  As he stepped over the threshold, he was surprised at how much of the room it illuminated when he held it high over his head. He felt his shoulders sag, tension draining out of them as he asked himself what he’d been expecting to find in there; Sophie’s father’s head in a box, perhaps? She was right, it was a small, bare, perfectly square room, perhaps ten feet by ten.

  Then he noticed the walls. He stepped forward, one, two paces. “Get up,” he said. Sophie sat cross-legged in the middle of the room. The flame nipped at his thumb and he let the light go out.

  He hoped that she had not seen what he had: every inch of wall space covered in thick black cursive writing or tattered pages torn from books, punctuated with photographs of Sophie. He thought that some of them had been hung upside down, perhaps defaced. He didn’t want to look again to confirm it.

  Sophie was silent. Then, “There’s something painted on the floor here.” She sounded different in the dark. They had been together for years; how could any nuance be unknown to him? He took a few more steps in. He felt swallowed by the blackness. “Bring the light over here.”

  His thumb was raw as he spun it against the wheel of the lighter. “Sophie,” he said, and the little flame spewed; the room flickered once more in shades of grey. He squatted, and held the lighter down low and close between them. “Sophie, will you please take off that wig?”

  She giggled, and that sounded wrong too. “If it’s such a big deal to you,” she said, and snatched it off, tossed it in a corner. He wished she hadn’t done that, and almost asked her to pick it up. He hated the idea of it lying there like some furry dead thing, and he let the light go out once more.

  “Your mother’s going to get worried if we don’t head back soon,” he said.

  “I wonder what’s in the wardrobe?” she said.

  “Your father’s head?”

  Silence again. Then, “That’s not funny. Anyway, wouldn’t be much left of it, would there?”

  “I’m sorry. I was kidding. It was stupid.” He could feel his shirt damp and stuck to his back, sweat trickling down his sides from his armpits. He became aware that his mouth hung open and he was breathing like he’d been running, heavy and ragged. “Night Must Fall.”

  “What?”

  “Night Must Fall. That’s the other movie with a head in it. I just remembered.”

  “Oh. I never heard of it.”

  “Albert Finney with an axe and a yen for decapitation.”

  “Oh,” she said again. “That was kind of a cheat, then, if you knew I couldn’t possibly get it.” The boards creaked beneath her feet as she made her way over to him. He resisted the urge to recoil, but jumped anyway when she touched him. Her hand was icy through the cloth of his shirt, her fingernails sharp and hard. “It’s so dark in here. Like there never was any light.” Her breath was on his cheek, warm and moist and stale-smelling. “You know?” she said, and then she pressed against him and fixed her mouth on his. Her tongue invaded, prying his lips apart.

  He stumbled back away from her. “We have to go.”

  She coughed, a phlegmy sound like she was a longtime smoker. “You’re right,” she said. “There’s nothing here anyway.”

  He was relieved when she pushed past him and continued down the hall. The wig had left her hair matted and stuck to the crown of her head. When she opened the front door and he saw how the light had changed he realized how much later it was than he’d thought. She commented that it seemed to be growing dark so early these days, it was hard to believe that it wasn’t yet fall.

  “Sophie, those cuts look terrible,” he said, noticing her legs. They’d gone dry and puckered-looking, like tiny gaping mouths. But she was already crawling in on the passenger side, and didn’t seem to hear him.

  The engine failed to turn over the first time, then again and again, and sweat was dripping into his eyes. Sophie sat placid beside him, unmoved by the useless revving of the motor.

  “What’s the number for Triple A?” he said. “Where’s your phone?”

  “It’s dead. I forgot to recharge it last night.” She went on, “It’s not such a bad place, really. I bet we could do something with it.”

  “I forgot my lighter,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said, already willing to forget that for a split second he’d thought of sending her back inside on the pretense of fetching something, then driving away – no, running away, a mile or more back up to the highway where he’d flag down a car. It wasn’t Sophie that stopped him—rather, the certainty that he might run as far as he could and would never find the highway, because it would no longer be there.

  “Poor thing,” she said, “you must be tired. You probably shouldn’t drive anyway. There’s a bed inside, you know, if you need to rest.”

  He steadied his foot on the accelerator and gunned the engine. He would feel better if only he would look at her, and she’d laugh, propose some calm and sensible plan for getting them out of this predicament. Someone will stop for us up on the highway, she’d say in a moment, out here in the country people still help you like that. But he could not do it. He found that a sort of numbness had taken him, rather than grief or any sense of loss, and he kept turning the key and pressing the gas long after it produced only a series of dry dead clicks, and still he could not bring himself to look into her eyes.

  JAY LAKE

  The American Dead

  JAY LAKE LIVES IN PORTLAND, Oregon with his books and two inept cats, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects.

  His current novels are Trial of Flowers from Night Shade Books and Mainspring from Tor Books, with sequels to both volumes due in 2008. His short fiction appears in numerous markets world-wide, most recently The Mammoth Book of Monsters and Logorrhea.

  He is the winner of the 2004 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and a multiple nominee for t
he Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.

  “There are little markers that tells us things about the world,” Lake explains, “so-called telling details. The airliner in the river in this story tells us the world has ended, because in our world we don’t leave downed airliners where they fell. The policeman’s notebook tells its own story. But the story that lasts the longest is the story of our dead.

  “Someday the American dead will be the stuff of history. This is a story of one way that might have happened, and what it means to the people who remain standing puzzled in the ruins.”

  AMERICANS ARE ALL RICH, even their dead. Pobrecito knows this because he spends the hottest parts of the days in the old Cementerio Americano down by the river. The water is fat and lazy while the pipes in the colonia drip only rust brown as the eyes Santa Marguerite. Their graves are of the finest marble, carved with photographs in some manner he does not understand, or wrought with sculpted angels that put the churches up the hill to shame. Some of the American dead even have little houses, tight boxes with broken doors that must have once contained great riches.

  He sits within a drooping tree which fights with life and watches the flies make dark, wiggling rafts out on the water. There are dogs which live in the broken-backed jet out in the middle of the current, eyes glowing from behind the dozens of little shattered oval windows. At night the dogs swim across the slow current and run the river banks, hunting in the colonia and up toward the city walls.

  They are why he never sleeps in the Cementerio. That some of the dogs walk on two legs only makes them worse.

  When he was very young, Pobrecito found a case of magazines, old ones with bright color pictures of men and women without their clothes. Whoever had made the magazines had an astonishing imagination, because in Pobrecito’s experience most people who fucked seemed to do it either with booze or after a lot of screaming and fighting and being held down. There weren’t very many ways he’d ever seen it gone after. The people in these pictures were smiling, mostly, and arranged themselves more carefully than priests arranging a corpse. And they lived in the most astonishing places.