The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  “The only thing is,” he says, “she doesn’t sound depressed.”

  “Then she’s probably pretending it’s not even happening. My mom, if you mention that time to her now, she just looks at you like ‘What are you talking about?’ ” Charisse makes a big flourish with her hands, introducing something that isn’t there. “Ladies and gentlemen . . . our role models!” She laughs, and it’s the first time Micah can remember her laughter sounding like he’s not supposed to join in. Like maybe this time she’s worried she might not be able to overcome every bad example set for her. “What does Evan say?”

  “Evan doesn’t say anything.” Micah stares at the liquefying shake in his hand. He’s been downing them since before time began but this one suddenly seems unnatural and nauseating. They can’t call these things milkshakes because no milk ever gets anywhere near them. He’s heard they’re made of aerated chemical foam. “When he’s not in there with her, Evan just smiles and plays his new piano.”

  Like now he’s got everything he wanted, Micah thinks but doesn’t say out loud, because it too would be an admission of failure, since to get it Evan at least had to know what that was.

  It’s the third day and he’s decided that enough’s enough. He’s going to get some answers. Which is only fitting, since he can’t shake the nagging suspicion that he’s given a lot of wrong ones during this past week of test questions.

  Today’s the right day for it, too, since this is one of those rare afternoons when Evan’s car is gone. He’s run down to the jazz club, maybe, to pick up his paycheck while it’s still banking hours.

  Weird, how long a hallway can feel when you’re not that eager to get to the other end. If Charisse had known he was going to do this, she could’ve wished him good luck, told him he could handle it, that he was beautiful.

  He knocks on the closed bedroom door. Lightly, in case she’s sleeping.

  “Lydia?” he calls. “Can I come in for a minute and talk to you?”

  “Micah?” she calls back. Like who else would it be? “No . . . no, I’d really rather you didn’t. Not right now.”

  He listens carefully, trying to hear if there’s a rustle of sheets, or any other movement of a depressed, sluggish body, and decides there isn’t. Just this strange distant quality to her voice, as if it were coming through an extra door or two.

  “Well . . . when, then?”

  “I don’t know, Micah. Whenever I’m feeling better, I guess.”

  She’s starting to sound irritated and defensive, then softens when he tells her all he wants to do is talk the way they used to when it was just the two of them, when they used to need each other to make it through some of those earliest days. That gets her; he’s speaking Lydia’s native language now. She knows exactly the days he means: both of them hating the same man and for a long time too chicken to come right out and admit it.

  “We can talk this way,” she says. “Nothing has to change.”

  “But I can’t even see you.”

  She makes a noise that sounds a little like her most carefree laugh. “You don’t know what I look like by now?”

  Taking great care to do it silently, Micah grips the knob and gives it a slow twist. It turns only millimeters before it stops. Locked. He leans against the door frame, stalling for time while he schemes. Telling her that today was the last day of school for the year – did she know that?

  “You’re kidding.” She sounds legitimately surprised. “It seems like only a week or two ago it was spring break.”

  Yeah, he thinks, losing all track of time is always what happens when you start to lose yourself in the wrong guy. He has to wonder if for Lydia there even exists such a thing as the right one.

  “So you’re on summer vacation now?” she says. “What are you going to do?”

  “I figured I’d just get a crappy job somewhere.”

  “No . . . no, that’s a bad idea. Maybe you should take off and travel . . . did you ever think of that?” she says from faraway, from what sounds like a small cave. “You should have some adventure in your life . . .”

  There’s something about hearing her echo Evan now, in very nearly his exact words, that makes Micah want to be sick. She tells him how wonderful traveling would be for him, how it would broaden his horizons, except all he can hear is what she’s really saying: that he no longer belongs here and maybe never has.

  A thing like that and she can’t even say it to his face?

  He looks at the doorknob. How good a lock can it be, anyway? Locks inside the house are only meant for the people you live with, so you can’t accidentally walk in on them while they’re in the process of deciding to hate you. It’s not like they’re meant to keep out thieves. Once the thieves are inside the house – and some even come in by invitation – it’s too late.

  He slides the wallet from his pocket and slips out his student I.D. It’s as stout as a credit card, and with another year survived, useless. Except maybe as a break-in tool. He wiggles it between the door and the frame, working it into the latch until it gives with a soft pop, and so much for home security. He can’t think of one thing he learned in school this year that was half this useful.

  Even though it’s not nearly as strong here, the same smell is in the bedroom that he remembers all too well from the garbage can. Except that there’s something about it now that’s cleaner, purer, less diseased and more a fact of biology.

  The last thing he was expecting to find was no Lydia. Not only is she not on the bed, the bed doesn’t even look slept in, doesn’t look like anyone’s so much as reclined on it. It’s made up as neat as a barracks bunk.

  The curtains and blinds are pulled halfway shut, making a pleasant light actually, enough for him to walk in and see how worthless his and Charisse’s theories have been. There’s no junkie paraphernalia. None of the stuff that would accumulate where someone depressed was holing up, whatever that would be – food and magazines and sleeping pills and liquor bottles, he imagines. And for sure there’s no swirling vortex into which someone could just disappear.

  He checks beneath the bed – nothing but luggage and boxes of old pictures.

  The only other alternative is the closet, although that seems way peculiar, since it’s not big enough, deep enough, to be a walk-in. It’s just two sliding doors on rollers in a track, like in a motel, only not as cheap-looking. He pushes one door aside, right to left, and lets in the light.

  When he looks downward, Micah backs away with a start and probably a loud cry, then has to stare for a few moments simply to process the presence of what he’s seeing. How about those eyes – they can really play tricks on you sometimes, can’t they? At first he can’t believe it has the remotest connection with Lydia. It’s a science project. It’s an industrial accident. It’s something one of them has brought home from an anatomy lab, then form-fitted into the corner of the closet.

  He remembers from school that the skin is the body’s largest organ, and yeah, he supposes it would take something like that to have created what he’s seeing – this fleshy hollow, its opening nearly as big around as a barrel. Its inner walls are surprisingly thick, pink as muscles. The edges of the structure cling to the floor and the closet wall like they’ve been fastened with some sort of natural adhesive.

  The worst part about this? Those two wide, familiar eyes staring out at him from the shadows at the very back of the inside of . . . it? Her? They seem to reflect their own unique brand of shame and guilt, like the time a few years ago when she loaned money to a boyfriend who then split town in his new car, no forwarding address.

  He can’t fathom how such a thing can begin to be possible, no more than he can figure out what sustains her. It looks so painful and raw, what she’s been made into; if her cries at night were any indication, it had been. But Lydia had to have wanted this, because it couldn’t have happened all at once. Micah imagines that Evan must’ve used his teeth. And lots of patience, along with architectural skills learned from . . . where? Strange g
rey things clinging to the outside of the house?

  Every impulse is telling him to run, that what he’s seeing is overload and if he stares at it any longer something terrible will happen, over and above his insides feeling as chewed up and reprocessed as Lydia’s body.

  Because what else is this but the ultimate proof of how much it must actually take to keep someone loving you?

  But when he does run, he doesn’t get far, running smack into Evan out in the hallway. Immediately Evan knows what’s up – can’t put anything past Evan – and for a guy who’s always seemed so passive, he can look awfully enraged. Before Micah has even recovered from the collision, Evan’s grabbed him by the shoulders with those oversized hands and hurled him into the wall. He’s bounced all the way to the floor before he hears Lydia’s oddly reverberant voice crying out, “Don’t hurt him, don’t hurt him,” except Micah doesn’t know which of them she’s calling to.

  He lies face-down while feeling Evan’s legs swing over him, hearing the footsteps proceed into the bedroom. There’s a murmur of voices, maybe the sound of someone crying, and the sound of someone getting undressed.

  Micah debates it for a few moments, but it’s no debate of intellect, more like warring instincts, and finally one side wins and he squirms forward along the floor and gets as far as his shoulders through the bedroom doorway. Just enough to see what’s going on over at the closet, where Evan is pulling the last of himself into the cell that they’ve made of her.

  And could it really only have been minutes ago that he was thinking about Lydia after so many wrong men, doubting if for her there could be such a thing as the right one?

  Listening to them, to the sounds they make together, he knows he shouldn’t have been so quick to judge.

  Now, at least, this time, the fit is perfect.

  GLEN HIRSHBERG

  The Two Sams

  GLEN HIRSHBERG LIVES IN LOS ANGELES with his wife, son and daughter. The following tale is the title story from the author’s new collection, The Two Sams, recently published in the US by Carroll & Graf. His first novel, The Snowman’s Children, appeared from the same publisher to critical acclaim in 2002 and earned Hirshberg his second International Horror Guild Award nomination.

  His ghost stories and novelettes have appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Trampoline and Dark Terrors 6, and two have been nominated for the World Fantasy Award.

  He is currently completing his second novel and working on a new set of ghost stories.

  “This remains the story I’m least happy to have been inspired to create,” reveals the author about the “The Two Sams”. “And it may be the only thing I ever produce that I do not dedicate to my two weird and wonderful children . . .”

  WHAT WAKES ME ISN’T A SOUND. At first, I have no idea what it is, an earthquake, maybe, a vibration in the ground, a 2:00 a.m. truck shuddering along the switchback road that snakes up from the beach, past the ruins of the Baths, past the Cliff House and the automatons and coin-machines chattering in the Musee Mechanique and our apartment building until it reaches the flatter stretch of the Great Highway, which will return it to the saner neighbourhoods of San Francisco. I lie still, holding my breath without knowing why. With the moon gone, the watery light rippling over the chipping bas-relief curlicues on our wall and the scuffed, tilted hardwood floor makes the room seem insubstantial, a projected reflection from the camera obscura perched on the cliffs a quarter-mile away.

  Then I feel it again, and I realize it’s in the bed, not the ground. Right beside me. Instantly, I’m smiling. I can’t help it. You’re playing on your own, aren’t you? That’s what I’m thinking. Our first game. He sticks up a tiny fist, a twitching foot, a butt cheek, pressing against the soft roof and walls of his world, and I lay my palm against him, and he shoots off across the womb, curls in a far corner, waits. Sticks out a foot again.

  The game terrified me at first. I kept thinking about signs in aquariums warning against tapping on glass, giving fish heart attacks. But he kept playing. And tonight, the thrum of his life is like magic fingers in the mattress, shooting straight up my spine into my shoulders, settling me, squeezing the terror out. Shifting the sheets softly, wanting Lizzie to sleep, I lean closer, and know, all at once, that this isn’t what woke me.

  For a split second, I’m frozen. I want to whip my arms around my head, ward them off like mosquitoes or bees, but I can’t hear anything, not this time. There’s just that creeping damp, the heaviness in the air, like a fog bank forming. Abruptly, I dive forward, drop my head against the hot, round dome of Lizzie’s stomach. Maybe I’m wrong, I think. I could be wrong. I press my ear against her skin, hold my breath, and for one horrible moment, I hear nothing at all, a sea of silent, amniotic fluid. I’m thinking about that couple, the Super Jews from our Bradley class who started coming when they were already seven months along. They came five straight weeks, and the woman would reach out, sometimes, tug her husband’s prayer-curls, and we all smiled, imagining their daughter doing that, and then they weren’t there anymore. The woman woke up one day and felt strange, empty, she walked around for hours that way and finally just got in her car and drove to the hospital and had her child, knowing it was dead.

  But under my ear, something is moving now. I can hear it inside my wife. Faint, unconcerned, unmistakable. Beat. Beat.

  “ ‘Get out Tom’s old records . . .’ ” I sing, so softly, into Lizzie’s skin. It isn’t the song I used to use. Before, I mean. It’s a new song. We do everything new, now. “ ‘And he’ll come dance around.’ ” It occurs to me that this song might not be the best choice, either. There are lines in it that could come back to haunt me, just the way the others have, the ones I never want to hear again, never even used to notice when I sang that song. They come creeping into my ears now, as though they’re playing very quietly in a neighbour’s room. “ ‘I dreamed I held you. In my arms. When I awoke, dear. I was mistaken. And so I hung my head and I cried.’ ” But then, I’ve found, that’s the first great lesson of pregnancy: it all comes back to haunt you.

  I haven’t thought of this song, though, since the last time, I realize. Maybe they bring it with them.

  Amidst the riot of thoughts in my head, a new one spins to the surface. Was it there the very first time? Did I feel the damp then? Hear the song? Because if I did, and I’m wrong . . .

  I can’t remember. I remember Lizzie screaming. The bathtub, and Lizzie screaming.

  Sliding slowly back, I ease away toward my edge of the bed, then sit up, holding my breath. Lizzie doesn’t stir, just lies there like the gutshot creature that she is, arms wrapped tight and low around her stomach, as though she could hold this one in, hold herself in, just a few days more. Her chin is tucked tight to her chest, dark hair wild on the pillow, bloated legs clamped around the giant blue pillow between them. Tip her upright, I think, and she’d look like a little girl on a hoppity horse. Then her kindergarten students would laugh at her again, clap and laugh when they saw her, the way they used to. Before.

  For the thousandth time in the past few weeks, I have to squash an urge to lift her black-framed, square glasses from around her ears. She has insisted on sleeping with them since March, since the day the life inside her became – in the words of Dr Seger, the woman Lizzie believes will save us – “viable”, and the ridge in her nose is red and deep, now, and her eyes, always strangely small, seem to have slipped back in their sockets, as though cringing away from the unaccustomed closeness of the world, its un-blurred edges. “The second I’m awake,” Lizzie tells me, savagely, the way she says everything these days, “I want to see.”

  “Sleep,” I mouth, and it comes out a prayer.

  Gingerly, I put my bare feet on the cold ground and stand. Always, it takes just a moment to adjust to the room. Because of the tilt of the floor – caused by the earthquake in ’89 – and the play of light over the walls and the sound of the surf and, sometim
es, the seals out on Seal Rock and the litter of wood scraps and sawdust and half-built toys and menorahs and disemboweled clocks on every tabletop, walking through our apartment at night is like floating through a shipwreck.

  Where are you? I think to the room, the shadows, turning in multiple directions as though my thoughts were a lighthouse beam. If they are, I need to switch them off. The last thing I want to provide, at this moment, for them, is a lure. Sweat breaks out on my back, my legs, as though I’ve been wrung. I don’t want to breathe, don’t want this infected air in my lungs, but I force myself. I’m ready. I have prepared, this time. I’ll do what I must, if it’s not too late, and I get the chance.

  “Where are you?” I whisper aloud, and something happens in the hall, in the doorway. Not movement. Not anything I can explain. But I start over there, fast. It’s much better if they’re out there. “I’m coming,” I say, and I’m out of the bedroom, pulling the door closed behind me as if that will help, and when I reach the living room, I consider snapping on the light, but don’t.

  On the wall over the square, dark couch – we bought it dark, we were anticipating stains – the Pinocchio clock, first one I ever built, at age fourteen, makes its steady, hollow tock. It’s all nose, that clock, which seems like such a bad idea, in retrospect. What was I saying, and to whom? The hour is a lie. The room is a lie. Time is a lie. “Gepetto”, Lizzie used to call me before we were married, then after we were married, for a while, back when I used to show up outside her classroom door to watch her weaving between desks, balancing hamsters and construction paper and graham crackers and half-pint milk cartons in her arms while kindergartners nipped between and around her legs like ducklings.

  Gepetto. Who tried so hard to make a living boy.