The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  October said, “Fair enough, young June. Tell that one.”

  June stared at him, like a spooked animal. “I just did,” she said.

  October nodded. “So you did,” he said, before any of the others could say anything. And then he said, “Shall we proceed to my story, then?”

  February sniffed. “Out of order there, big fella. The man in the chair only tells his story when the rest of us are through. Can’t go straight to the main event.”

  May was placing a dozen chestnuts on the grate above the fire, deploying them into patterns with her tongs. “Let him tell his story if he wants to,” she said. “God knows it can’t be worse than the one about the wine. And I have things to be getting back to. Flowers don’t bloom by themselves. All in favour?”

  “You’re taking this to a formal vote?” February said. “I cannot believe this. I cannot believe this is happening.” He mopped his brow with a handful of tissues, which he pulled from his sleeve.

  Seven hands were raised. Four people kept their hands down – February, September, January and July. (“I don’t have anything personal on this,” said July, apologetically. “It’s purely procedural. We shouldn’t be setting precedents.”)

  “It’s settled then,” said October. “Is there anything anyone would like to say before I begin?”

  “Um. Yes. Sometimes,” said June, “sometimes I think somebody’s watching us from the woods and then I look and there isn’t anybody there. But I still think it.”

  April said, “That’s because you’re crazy.”

  “Mm,” said September, to everybody. “That’s our April. She’s sensitive but she’s still the cruellest.”

  “Enough,” said October. He stretched in his chair. He cracked a cobnut with his teeth, pulled out the kernel, and threw the fragments of shell into the fire, where they hissed and spat and popped, and he began.

  There was a boy, October said, who was miserable at home, although they did not beat him. He did not fit well, not his family, his town, nor even his life. He had two older brothers, who were twins, older than he was, and who hurt him or ignored him, and were popular. They played football: some games one twin would score more and be the hero, and some games the other would. Their little brother did not play football. They had a name for their brother. They called him the Runt.

  They had called him the Runt since he was a baby, and at first their mother and father had chided them for it.

  The twins said, “But he is the runt of the litter. Look at him. Look at us.” The boys were six when they said this. Their parents thought it was cute. A name like “the Runt” can be infectious, so pretty soon the only person who called him Donald was his grandmother, when she telephoned him on his birthday, and people who did not know him.

  Now, perhaps because names have power, he was a runt: skinny and small and nervous. He had been born with a runny nose, and it had not stopped running in a decade. At mealtimes, if the twins liked the food they would steal his; if they did not, they would contrive to place their food on his plate and he would find himself in trouble for leaving good food uneaten.

  Their father never missed a football game, and would buy an ice cream afterward for the twin who had scored the most, and a consolation ice cream for the other twin, who hadn’t. Their mother described herself as a newspaperwoman, although she mostly sold advertising space and subscriptions: she had gone back to work full-time once the twins were capable of taking care of themselves.

  The other kids in the boy’s class admired the twins. They had called him Donald for several weeks in first grade, until the word trickled down that his brothers called him the Runt. His teachers rarely called him anything at all, although among themselves they could sometimes be heard to say that it was a pity that the youngest Covay boy didn’t have the pluck or the imagination or the life of his brothers.

  The Runt could not have told you when he first decided to run away, nor when his daydreams crossed the border and became plans. By the time that he admitted to himself that he was leaving he had a large Tupperware container hidden beneath a plastic sheet behind the garage containing three Mars bars, two Milky Ways, a bag of nuts, a small bag of liquorice, a flashlight, several comics, an unopened packet of beef jerky, and thirty-seven dollars, most of it in quarters. He did not like the taste of beef jerky, but he had read that explorers had survived for weeks on nothing else; and it was when he put the packet of beef jerky into the Tupperware box and pressed the lid down with a pop that he knew he was going to have to run away.

  He had read books, newspapers and magazines. He knew that if you ran away you sometimes met bad people who did bad things to you; but he had also read fairy tales, so he knew that there were kind people out there, side by side with the monsters.

  The Runt was a thin ten-year-old, small, with a runny nose and a blank expression. If you were to try and pick him out of a group of boys, you’d be wrong. He’d be the other one. Over at the side. The one your gaze slipped over.

  All through September he put off leaving. It took a really bad Friday, during the course of which both of his brothers sat on him (and the one who sat on his face broke wind, and laughed uproariously) to decide that whatever monsters were waiting out in the world would be bearable, perhaps even preferable.

  Saturday, his brothers were meant to be looking after him, but soon they went into town to see a girl they liked. The Runt went around the back of the garage and took the Tupperware container out from beneath the plastic sheeting. He took it up to his bedroom. He emptied his schoolbag onto his bed, filled it with his candies and comics and quarters and the beef jerky. He filled an empty soda-bottle with water.

  The Runt walked into the town and got on the bus. He rode west, ten dollars-in-quarters-worth of west, to a place he didn’t know, which he thought was a good start, then he got off the bus and walked. There was no sidewalk now, so when cars came past he would edge over into the ditch, to safety.

  The sun was high. He was hungry, so he rummaged in his bag and pulled out a Mars bar. After he ate it he found he was thirsty, and he drank almost half of the water from his soda bottle before he realized that he was going to have to ration it. He had thought that once he got out of the town he would see springs of fresh water everywhere, but there were none to be found. There was a river, though, that ran beneath a wide bridge.

  The Runt stopped halfway across the bridge to stare down at the brown water. He remembered something he had been told in school: that, in the end, all rivers flowed into the sea. He had never been to the seashore. He clambered down the bank and followed the river. There was a muddy path along the side of the river bank, and an occasional beer can or plastic snack packet to show that people had been that way before, but he saw no one as he walked.

  He finished his water.

  He wondered if they were looking for him yet. He imagined police cars and helicopters and dogs, all trying to find him. He would evade them. He would make it to the sea.

  The river ran over some rocks, and it splashed. He saw a blue heron, its wings wide, glide past him, and he saw solitary end-of-season dragonflies, and sometimes small clusters of midges, enjoying the Indian Summer. The blue sky became dusk-grey, and a bat swung down to snatch insects from the air. The Runt wondered where he would sleep that night.

  Soon the path divided, and he took the branch that led away from the river, hoping it would lead to a house, or to a farm with an empty barn. He walked for some time as the dusk deepened, until at the end of the path he found a farmhouse, half tumbled down and unpleasant-looking. The Runt walked around it, becoming increasingly certain as he walked that nothing could make him go inside, and then he climbed over a broken fence to an abandoned pasture and settled down to sleep in the long grass with his schoolbag for his pillow.

  He lay on his back, fully dressed, staring up at the sky. He was not in the slightest bit sleepy.

  “They’ll be missing me by now,” he told himself. “They’ll be worried.”

 
He imagined himself coming home in a few years’ time. The delight on his family’s faces as he walked up the path to home. Their welcome. Their love . . .

  He woke some hours later, with the bright moonlight in his face. He could see the whole world – as bright as day, like in the nursery rhyme, but pale and without colours. Above him the moon was full, or almost, and he imagined a face looking down at him, not unkindly, in the shadows and shapes of the moon’s surface.

  A voice said, “Where do you come from?”

  He sat up, not scared, not yet, and looked around him. Trees. Long grass. “Where are you? I don’t see you?”

  Something he had taken for a shadow moved, beside a tree on the edge of the pasture, and he saw a boy of his own age.

  “I’m running away from home,” said the Runt.

  “Whoa,” said the boy. “That must have taken a whole lot of guts.”

  The Runt grinned with pride. He didn’t know what to say.

  “You want to walk a bit?” said the boy.

  “Sure,” said the Runt. He moved his schoolbag so that it was next to the fence post, so that he could always find it again.

  They walked down the slope, giving a wide berth to the old farmhouse.

  “Does anyone live there?” asked the Runt.

  “Not really,” said the other boy. He had fair, fine hair that was almost white in the moonlight. “Some people tried a long time back, but they didn’t like it, and they left. Then other folk moved in. But nobody lives there now. What’s your name?”

  “Donald,” said the Runt. And then, “But they call me the Runt. What do they call you?”

  The boy hesitated. “Dearly,” he said.

  “That’s a cool name.”

  Dearly said, “I used to have another name, but I can’t read it any more.”

  They squeezed through a huge iron gateway, rusted into position, part open, part closed, and they were in the little meadow at the bottom of the slope.

  “This place is cool,” said the Runt.

  There were dozens of stones of all sizes in the small meadow. Tall stones, bigger than either of the boys, and small ones, just the right size for sitting on. There were some broken stones. The Runt knew what sort of a place this was, but it did not scare him. It was a loved place.

  “Who’s buried here?” he asked.

  “Mostly okay people,” said Dearly. “There used to be a town over there. Past those trees. Then the railroad came and they built a stop in the next town over, and our town sort of dried up and fell in and blew away. There’s bushes and trees now, where the town was. You can hide in the trees and go into the old houses and jump out.”

  The Runt said, “Are they like that farmhouse up there? The houses?” He didn’t want to go in them, if they were.

  “No,” said Dearly. “Nobody goes in them, except for me. And some animals, sometimes. I’m the only kid around here.”

  “I figured,” said The Runt.

  “Maybe we can go down and play in them,” said Dearly.

  “That would be pretty cool,” said the Runt.

  It was a perfect early October night: almost as warm as summer, and the harvest moon dominated the sky. You could see everything.

  “Which one of these is yours?” asked the Runt.

  Dearly straightened up proudly, and took the Runt by the hand. He pulled him over to an overgrown corner of the field. The two boys pushed aside the long grass. The stone was set flat into the ground, and it had dates carved into it from a hundred years before. Much of it was worn away, but beneath the dates it was possible to make out the words

  DEARLY DEPARTED

  WILL NEVER BE FORG

  “Forgotten, I’d wager,” said Dearly.

  “Yeah, that’s what I’d say too,” said the Runt.

  They went out of the gate, down a gully and into what remained of the old town. Trees grew through houses, and buildings had fallen in on themselves, but it wasn’t scary. They played hide-and-seek. They explored. Dearly showed the Runt some pretty cool places, including a one-room cottage that he said was the oldest building in that whole part of the county. It was in pretty good shape, too, considering how old it was.

  “I can see pretty good by moonlight,” said the Runt. “Even inside. I didn’t know that it was so easy.”

  “Yeah,” said Dearly. “And after a while you get good at seeing even when there ain’t any moonlight.”

  The Runt was envious.

  “I got to go to the bathroom,” said the Runt. “Is there somewhere around here?”

  Dearly thought for a moment. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t do that stuff any more. There are a few outhouses still standing, but they may not be safe. Best just to do it in the woods.”

  “Like a bear,” said the Runt.

  He went out the back, into the woods that pushed up against the wall of the cottage, and went behind a tree. He’d never done that before, in the open air. He felt like a wild animal. When he was done he wiped himself off with fallen leaves. Then he went back out the front. Dearly was sitting in a pool of moonlight, waiting for him.

  “How did you die?” asked the Runt.

  “I got sick,” said Dearly. “My maw cried and carried on something fierce. Then I died.”

  “If I stayed here with you,” said the Runt, “would I have to be dead too?”

  “Maybe,” said Dearly. “Well, yeah. I guess.”

  “What’s it like? Being dead?”

  “I don’t mind it,” admitted Dearly. “Worst thing is not having anyone to play with.”

  “But there must be lots of people up in that meadow,” said the Runt. “Don’t they ever play with you?”

  “Nope,” said Dearly. “Mostly, they sleep. And even when they walk, they can’t be bothered to just go and see stuff and do things. They can’t be bothered with me. You see that tree?”

  It was a beech tree, its smooth grey bark cracked with age. It sat in what must once have been the town square, ninety years before.

  “Yeah,” said the Runt.

  “You want to climb it?”

  “It looks kind of high.”

  “It is. Real high. But it’s easy to climb. I’ll show you.”

  It was easy to climb. There were handholds in the bark, and the boys went up the big beech tree like a couple of monkeys, or pirates, or warriors. From the top of the tree one could see the whole world. The sky was starting to lighten, just a hair, in the east.

  Everything waited. The night was ending. The world was holding its breath, preparing to begin again.

  “This was the best day I ever had,” said the Runt.

  “Me too,” said Dearly. “What you going to do now?”

  “I don’t know,” said the Runt.

  He imagined himself going on across the world, all the way to the sea. He imagined himself growing up and growing older, bringing himself up by his bootstraps. Somewhere in there he would become fabulously wealthy. And then he would go back to the house with the twins in it, and he would drive up to their door in his wonderful car, or perhaps he would turn up at a football game (in his imagination the twins had neither aged not grown) and look down at them, in a kindly way. He would buy them all – the twins, his parents – a meal at the finest restaurant in the city, and they would tell him how badly they had misunderstood him and mistreated him. They apologized and wept, and through it all he said nothing. He let their apologies wash over him. And then he would give each of them a gift, and afterwards he would leave their lives once more, this time for good.

  It was a fine dream.

  In reality, he knew, he would keep walking, and be found tomorrow, or the day after that, and go home and be yelled at and everything would be the same as it ever was, and day after day, hour after hour until the end of time he’d still be the Runt, only they’d be mad at him for having dared to walk away.

  “I have to go to bed soon,” said Dearly. He started to climb down the big beech tree.

  Climbing down
the tree was harder, the Runt found. You couldn’t see where you were putting your feet, and had to feel around for somewhere to put them. Several times he slipped and slid, but Dearly went down ahead of him, and would say things like, “Just a little to the right, now,” and they both made it down just fine.

  The sky continued to lighten, and the moon was fading, and it was harder to see. They clambered back through the gully. Sometimes the Runt wasn’t sure that Dearly was there at all, but when he got to the top, he saw the boy waiting for him.

  They didn’t say much as they walked up to the meadow filled with stones. The Runt put his arm over Dearly’s shoulder, and they walked in step up the hill.

  “Well,” said Dearly. “Thanks for coming over.”

  “I had a good time,” said the Runt.

  “Yeah,” said Dearly. “Me too.”

  Down in the woods somewhere a bird began to sing.

  “If I wanted to stay—?” said the Runt, all in a burst. Then he stopped. I might never get another chance to change it, thought the Runt. He’d never get to the sea. They’d never let him.

  Dearly didn’t say anything, not for a long time. The world was grey. More birds joined the first.

  “I can’t do it,” said Dearly, eventually. “But they might.”

  “Who?”

  “The ones in there.” The fair boy pointed up the slope to the tumbledown farmhouse with the jagged broken windows, silhouetted against the dawn. The grey light had not changed it.

  The Runt shivered. “There’s people in there?” he said. “I thought you said it was empty.”

  “It ain’t empty,” said Dearly. “I said nobody lives there. Different things.” He looked up at the sky. “I got to go now,” he added. He squeezed the Runt’s hand. And then he just wasn’t there any longer.

  The Runt stood in the little graveyard all on his own, listening to the birdsong on the morning air. Then he made his way up the hill. It was harder by himself.

  He picked up his schoolbag from the place where he had left it. He ate his last Milky Way and stared at the tumbledown building. The empty windows of the farmhouse were like eyes, watching him.