The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  Executives needed to promote the illusion of a “safe and sane” consumer entertainment experience, and in response had assigned pagers with panic buttons to park employees. This year they were tied into a satellite tracker that could pinpoint trouble spots instantly.

  Oscar reconsidered the park property surrounding him. It was a mile and a quarter in circumference, this bubble of make-believe pretend Hollywood hoo-hah. The rock scarps were spurious, unreal. Much of the strategic vegetation was plastic. Theme areas were boldly delineated and convenient restrooms benchmarked. All visitors had to do while inside was spend money. The whole place was like a compound in a zoo – low maintenance, entirely fabricated, patently fake: an exemplar of the illusion of security.

  The park was split up into mazes, theme tunnels or rooms, stage-bound presentations like the Vampire Magician or the Séance Tent, and tarted up backlot areas such as the Haunted Bayou, the Phantom’s Sewer, and the Stairway to Hell. Some of the rides had been converted to night-time operation; you could strap yourself into the Chunkblower and ride it backward, in the dark. For one week only, Western Street had turned into Satan’s Gulch. Rubberheads, or park extras wearing simple over-the-head masks, hung around mostly to provide guests with monsters to pose against, for snapshots. Ambient monsters in more complex make-ups and gear populated the scare zones. Oscar’s assignment was an area inside the Ghostly Graveyard known as Lycanthrope Trail.

  “Your basic movement grids are on the maps handed out to you,” announced Randy. “Stick to your grid. Jump-and-scares are okay so long as you don’t scare little kids or catch guests too off-guard.”

  It was okay to be scary, thought Oscar . . . as long as nobody actually got scared, experienced fear, or suffered genuine dread. When had horror become so hypocritical?

  Oscar thought that Hallowe’en should really fall on Friday the 13th, but he bowed to tradition, since few were left amid the mercantile consumerism packaged to the buying public as “holidays”. Hallowe’en had never been an official holiday within his lifetime. No red numeral on the calendar; everybody worked. Seasonal employees were usually treated like the worst sort of chattel – temps, forever bludgeoned with reminders that they should be thankful for the gig and could be shitcanned for the slightest infraction.

  His combo brow-and-snout piece was a featherweight appliance of breathable latex, affixed with non-allergenic spirit gum. He paid special attention to the hairlines and blends. Details mattered. He had suited up out of his own pocket in order to duplicate Lon Chaney, Jr’s venerable wolfing garb, not that anybody still paid attention to the classic chestnuts. Most civilians found remembering those old movies preferable to actually watching them, and indeed, most guests could not be expected to have done the basic coursework. They knew Frankenstein, Dracula, the Creature as words, not names; they existed into the new century only as forms of iconographic product placement. They were supposed to be scary, but only on Hallowe’en, then they were mothballed until the next SpookyNight. They no longer scared anybody, not really.

  Gordito, Flaco, Chispa and Tiny came strictly to raise hell. Gordito’s homegirl was a spidery white chick named Ashleigh. The rest were partnered with buoyant hoodrats proudly displaying the speckled foundation make-up and sky-high, needle-thin eyebrows that trademarked them as expatriates from Ramparts, which most Los Angeles-area newswatchers routinely short-formed as Gang Central. Flaco’s girl was Chiqui, bratwurst-encased by skin-tight silk which amplified the size of her butt into a wonderland of possibilities. She still bore the Gothic O.C. tat on her neck from her dalliance with some cholo in Costa Mesa; much internal ragging and discourse was devoted to how the ink could be modified, embellished or obliterated. Her pasted-on acrylic nails were three inches long, and each fingertip bore the image of one of the Homies cartoon characters.

  Only Chispa had kept his beautiful hair. “See, white guys are all jealous of Mexicano hair,” he’d say. “So they promote the image that bald is super-bad, so all the cholos shave their heads. You guys are humiliating your heritage, man.” Gordito and Flaco and Tiny, all shaved and goateed, teased Chispa about cultivating a pachuco pomp and therefore not being worth shit in a fight. Like snaps or the dozens, the ranks went round and round, everybody insulting everybody else to show their love.

  Park security and the on-site feel-up was a joke. Gordito’s crowd entered SpookyNight strapped with pins, razors and short, stubby combat blades. Flaco, not wanting to dress down from his customary six-inch stiletto, had concealed it in the crack of his ass, and taken a lot of ragging for it. “What if you cough and it opens, dude?” said Tiny, sniggering. Flaco stoically endured the usual barrage of crap about stinky blades and “cutting” farts; what mattered was, he’d kept his weapon of choice.

  Chispa’s girl, Connie – short for Conceptión – had stripped the micro-blades from safety razors and hot-glued them beneath her scarlet fingernails. Most of the guys had copied Tiny’s trick of dropping their lock-backs into a shoe or boot and walking it through the pat-down, standing on it and trying not to limp. If the scanners tripped, steel toes and soles were blamed and no one ever forced you to take off your shoes. Once in the park, the footwear came off in the bathroom, and the blades were nestled back where they belonged, in a pocket or waistband. Nobody ever searched you when you were exiting the park.

  “Check it out,” Flaco said, cocking a thumb.

  He directed their discreet attention to what Security and the cops could not see: A wall of shadows near the entryway where the dimmed floods of two intersecting theme zones of the park joined. There was an unsightly swath of concrete barricade visible from Flaco’s angle; normally, bogus foliage would have concealed it. A couple of trespassers clambered over the wall from the parking garage. They were visible for all of half a second, but Flaco had spotted the hidden activity with the surety of a concentration camp guard. “Go, dudes,” he muttered. “Gonna be some shit tonight.”

  They had been attending SpookyNight for four years running. It was too much fun to fuck with the monsters that were supposed to frighten you. “Couldn’t scare nobody,” Gordito always said, triumphant over some disposable menace. “Couldn’t scare shit.”

  * * *

  “What’s the record?” said Archie, crouching in the bushes like a Green Beret, his face streaked with black and green camo paint.

  “Guy supposedly snuck into Disneyland and spent the whole night on one of the Jungle Cruise islands,” said Mace. “But the one I heard about the guy who dressed up as a buccaneer and spent nearly forty hours inside Pirates of the Caribbean – that’s gotta be the gold.”

  “What about the kid who lived on Tom Sawyer Island, for, like, days?”

  “Doesn’t count. I think he drowned.”

  “What, in four feet of water?” Archie gave him a curdled expression.

  Nobody ever got the damned stories straight.

  “That’s what I heard. It doesn’t count if you die.”

  “The Pirates dude kept it up for nearly two days?”

  “So they say. You know how many friggin’ security cameras are inside that ride? He foxed them by pretending to be a robot. That redefines cool. I am in awe.”

  “Any proof?”

  “Proof was on the news,” said Mace. “They arrested him when the cameras caught him taking a leak, but he never said how long he was actually inside.” He fiddled with his digital rig and flipped the viewscreen around so he could tape himself. “This is zero hour, 8.00 p.m., and we’ve just penetrated the park.”

  Archie stuck his face into the shot too, for posterity. This was the ultimate in clandestine, behind-the-scenes spy-camming. “Let’s find the women’s prep tent,” he said. “Some of those chicks dressing out as the Bride of Frankenstein are ripped beyond belief. We might get to capture some flesh.”

  “I read ya,” said Mace.

  Their personal monster hunt had begun.

  “Crowd Control expects three to five thousand guests through here tonight,” said R
andy into his bullhorn. “Everybody stay alert and do your job. If it gets hairy, let Security do theirs. Do not intercede.”

  All Oscar could smell was adhesive and latex, his head painted and glued into Wolf Man appliances, his hands already sweating in their fur gloves. All around him, ghouls, zombies and classic monsters were trying to dope out their assigned grids by penlight. Groups of otherworldly horrors grabbed their last chance for hydration at the snack bar.

  Already, his inner voice was chanting: In six hours this will be over.

  Oscar assumed his post and commenced to startle giggling nitwits and the dates of bigger nitwits, getting a photo-flash in the face too damned many times. Even in the land of the supernatural, they acted like the tourists they were. One guy had shoved him, all huffed up because Oscar had actually caught him unawares, but the guy turned his back and strolled away, laughing. No harm, no foul.

  There was some vigorous activity going on in the bushes about twenty yards to the rear, off the beaten track of Lycanthrope Trail. Either humping minors, Oscar knew, or, occasionally, a pair of fornicating show monsters, which was a weird enough possibility to distract his notice from his job. Last year, he’d seen one of the rubberheads, a Frankenstein Monster, with his pants down and his Bride with her legs in the air; now that was a photo op. He decided to take five to check it out, but by the time he fixed a direction, the commotion ceased. All he’d find was a wet Kleenex, or maybe a spent condom hanging on a branch, glistening like a glow-worm.

  It took him an extra heartbeat to identify what he found as a person – a man, lying on his back, his eyes wide and fixed, his throat completely excavated to visible bone. He glistened, all right, mostly due to the ebbing glurts of carotid blood. His hands were frozen into claws and he was the deadest thing Oscar had ever seen.

  Oscar’s first thought was: Maybe this is a really good prop.

  His second thought was: Okay, it’s just more urban violence, this is the 21st Century, don’t panic.

  He fumbled out his pager and instantly dropped it. He groped around for it. Hopeless. When he rose again, he banged into something living and breathing, and rebounded onto one knee. Even in the bad light, he could make out that this was one of his fellow Wolf Men. He started to ask if this was for real when his voice died out in his throat, drying up to desert.

  The creature regarding him had chatoyant eyes and smelled like a wet bloodhound fresh from a wallow in offal. It cocked its head, considering what it saw versus what it could scent – conflicting information. It ran an ebony talon along one side of Oscar’s face and flicked one of his rubber ears. Its breath stank of carrion. Its teeth looked too practical to be a sham. Then it blew out breath in a hot snort of dismissal, released Oscar, and bounded away into the underbrush on backward-jointed canine hind legs.

  If it was a werewolf costume, it was the best Oscar had ever seen.

  Several jello shots later, Gordito fingered the edge of his blade, grinning like a demon and never letting his now-bloodshot eyes stray too far from the park fountain. “If I cut him from behind, right along that fin on his back, dude’ll fall right out of his suit,” he said to Ashleigh, who snickered and popped her gum.

  The attention of the green amphibian monster in the fountain was focused away from them, toward the park. Not a lot of traffic right now, with the Chunkblower at full capacity and showtime for the Vampire Magician just commencing. He splashed about desultorily, awaiting an audience, pondering aquatic scare tactics.

  “I’m gonna go for it,” Gordito said, always anxious to be first. The deal with his homies was that each of them would target a different monster, and each had to score a trophy – a plastic appendage, a slice of monster suit, an artefact of the hunt. A simple bloodstain would suffice, too, but Gordito had his eye on that backfin. Ashleigh did not like the part about the blood.

  “Gordo, don’t hurt the fuckin’ guy, okay? That’s not funny.”

  “Callaté.” It was a command, a warning, and the end of the argument. Inwardly, Gordito was relieved that none of his boys were around to hear his bitch mouthing off. Sometimes, listening to Ashleigh whine was worth it, just so Gordo could be proud of his trophy blonde; other times, well, what was it about white chicks that made them so whiny?

  He edged up behind the fountain like a commando. Nobody was strolling by. If he had to step into the two-foot depth of water, Ashleigh’s instructions were to yank him back so he did not fall.

  When the Creature meandered back to Gordito’s side of the pool, Gordito arm-barred him from behind and made a clean cut straight down the length of the dorsal double-fin. “What-up, fishie!” he growled, making a monster voice. The fin did not peel back easily. Fat droplets of dark purple blood hit the clear water like ink. That was the last thing Gordito saw.

  His victim turned with a bulrush roar, snapping both bones in Gordito’s forearm. The knife dropped into the water. The scaled thing revolved in his limp grasp, slick as motor oil, and razor-keen talons husked Gordito’s face off his skull. When Ashleigh screamed and pulled back on her boyfriend’s free hand, she fell on her rump because the arm was no longer attached.

  Her screaming attracted no notice in the park as the water turned vaguely pink and Gordito’s corpse splashed face-down. She was borne into the air, light as a broomstick, and body-slammed into the bushes behind the fountain. All she could see was blurry movement and shifting light; the world turning upside down, and there was no time left to draw breath to make any more commotion.

  The Gill-Man had always been attracted to the fair ones, the ones in angelic white. Like many of the others long-past, this one did not survive the mating.

  “Did you see that?! Did you get it?!” Mace was beside himself with excitement.

  “I got it,” said Archie, staring at his video camera as if it had suddenly sprung a secret hatch containing hidden treasure.

  “Ho, man!” Mace was getting wiggly. They were guerilla’ed in at the treeline with a clear view of the park fountain, about thirty yards from where Gordito and Ashleigh had just died. Archie’s digital kit featured an excellent zoom, even using night-vision.

  “Shut up, shut up!” There was more activity at the fountain, and both Archie and Mace hunkered down to see what came next.

  They videotaped a fellow named Rory Caulder who had taken an unscheduled break to repair his Gill-Man suit, since the chemicals used to keep the fountain water clear had a tendency not only to waterlog the rubber, but to dissolve it at inopportune times. God only knew what it was doing to his skin. It was comic to watch, even on instant replay: The green monster shuffles flat-footedly to his post, puts one leg into the water, looks down, and does a monster double-take worthy of Wile E. Coyote. He springs out of the water and falls on his ass, ripping his reptilian suit as he claws for his emergency pager.

  “Got it,” said Archie. “Classic.”

  Oscar was doing his best to skin around the edges of the park, with the nearest exit as his objective. He still could not get his breathing to settle down. He would never be able to erase the image of the eviscerated cadaver from his mind, especially when his imagination impudently filled in gory details obscured by the bad light. His nose seemed clogged with the stench of freed organs cooling in the night, back there, somewhere behind him.

  “What the hell is this – a Wolf Man?” said Connie.

  Libia, Tiny’s girl, unlimbered her straight razor with a stainless-steel glint in her eyes. “Let’s take him.” They had been kicking it under a large eucalyptus tree – a real one – working their way through a spliff the size of a Dodger Dog and discussing how they could one-up their guys in the scavenger hunt for monster parts.

  “Wait!” said Oscar, skidding to a stop. “Wait a minute!” His hairy paws were stretched out, open-palmed, in entreaty as the two girls angled toward him, jackals stalking a werewolf. “You’ve got to get out of the park, now! You’re in danger! There’s—”

  Libia and Connie glanced at each other with scrunched-up ex
pressions of impatience. “Fuck you,” they both said at the same time, like homicidal twins.

  Connie slashed obliquely with her bladed fingernails while Libia thrust and danced and Oscar found his life full-up, trying to track both of them. He felt molten pain in his bicep as he was incised – first blood. Apropos of Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar’s brain reeled as he fell. He was still trying to warn people who were intent on harming him. He was bleeding now, yet the words coming from his mouth were still trying to save them.

  Scrambling to rise, savaging his wounded arm, only Oscar saw the clot of ghouls and zombies that had congregated to watch.

  One of the walking dead grabbed Libia by the hair and gnawed a big wet mouthful out of her naked shoulder. Libia went nuclear and windmilled with the razor. The zombie did not mind, and within seconds Libia was being eaten in all directions. Conceptión simply vanished into a huddle of lurching, famished walkers, folding inward like cardboard. Oscar saw her hand last of all, flashy fingernails tearing impotently at the night air.

  “I could kick Frankenstein’s ass,” said Tiny. “Come on.”

  “What about the girls?” Chispa was looking around for Connie.

  “What a pussywhip,” said Flaco. “They’ll find us. Let’s do it.”

  “Big son of a bitch,” said Chispa, meaning their prey.

  The Frankenstein Monster was seated in a niche in the Rhine Village, which had been redecorated as the Stairway to Hell. Whoever was under the monster make-up had been cast for size, and with the big clunky Franken-boots he was still two feet taller than Tiny, who, typically, was north of six-two and past three hundred on the scale. The guy was laying down on the job, not stalking and scaring. He looked like he had a headache or something.

  “Take the bolts on his neck,” suggested Flaco.