The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  It has been months since I’ve been out here – we use the garage for storage, not for our old Nova – and I’ve forgotten how heavy the salt-saturated wooden door is. It comes up with a creak, slides over my head and rocks unsteadily in its runners. How, I’m thinking, did I first realize that the presence in my room was my first, unborn child? The smell, I guess, like an unripe lemon, fresh and sour all at once. Lizzie’s smell. Or maybe it was the song springing unbidden, over and over, to my lips. “When I awoke dear, I was mistaken.” Those things, and the fact that now, these last times, there seem to be two of them.

  The first thing I see, once my eyes adjust, is my grandfather glaring out of his portrait at me, his hair thread-thin and wild on his head like a spiderweb swinging free, his lips flat, crushed together, his ridiculous lumpy potato of a body under his perpetually half-zipped judges’ robes. And there are his eyes, one blue, one green, which he once told me allowed him to see 3-D, before I knew that everyone could. A children’s rights activist before there was a name for such things, a three-time candidate for a state bench seat and three-time loser, he’d made an enemy of his daughter, my mother, by wanting a son so badly. And he’d made a disciple out of me by saving Lizzie’s life. Turning her father in to the cops, then making sure that he got thrown in jail, then forcing him and his whole family into counseling, getting him work when he got out, checking in on him every single night, no matter what, for six years, until Lizzie was away and free. Until eight months ago, on the day Dr Seger confirmed that we were pregnant for the third time, his portrait hung beside the Pinochio clock on the living room wall. Now it lives here. One more casualty.

  “Your namesake,” I say to the air, my two ghosts. But I can’t take my eyes off my grandfather. Tonight is the end for him, too, I realize. The real end, where the ripples his life created in the world glide silently to stillness. Could you have seen them, I want to ask, with those 3-D eyes that saw so much? Could you have saved them? Could you have thought of another, better way? Because mine is going to hurt. “His name was Nathan, really. But he called us ‘Sam’. Your mother and me, we were both ‘Sam’. That’s why . . .”

  That’s why Lizzie let me win that argument, I realize. Not because she’d let go of the idea that the first one had to have a name, was a specific, living creature, a child of ours. But because she’d rationalized. Sam was to be the name, male or female. So whatever the first child had been, the second would be the other. Would have been. You see, Lizzie, I think to the air, wanting to punch the walls of the garage, scream to the cliffs, break down in tears. You think I don’t know. But I do.

  If we survive this night, and our baby is still with us in the morning, and we get to meet him someday soon, he will not be named Sam. He will not be Nathan, either. My grandfather would have wanted Sam.

  “Goodbye, Grandpa,” I whisper, and force myself toward the back of the garage. There’s no point in drawing this out, surely. Nothing to be gained. But at the door to the meat-freezer, the one the game-hunter who rented our place before us used to store wax-paper packets of venison and elk, I suddenly stop.

  I can feel them. They’re still here. They have not gone back to Lizzie. They are not hunched near her navel, whispering their terrible, soundless whispers. That’s how I imagine it happening, only it doesn’t feel like imagining. And it isn’t all terrible. I swear I heard it happen to the second Sam. The first Sam would wait, watching me, hovering near the new life in Lizzie like a hummingbird near nectar, then darting forward when I was through singing, or in between breaths, and singing a different sort of song, of a whole other world, parallel to ours, free of terrors or at least free of this terror, the one that just plain living breeds in everything alive. Maybe the world that we’re all born dreaming really does exist, but the only way to it is through a trapdoor in the womb. Maybe it’s better where my children are. God, I want it to be better.

  “You’re by the notebooks,” I say, and I almost smile, and my hand slides volitionlessly from the handle of the freezer door, and I stagger toward the boxes stacked up, haphazard, along the back wall. The top one on the nearest stack is open slightly, its cardboard damp and reeking when I peel the flaps all the way back.

  There they are. The plain, perfect-bound school composition notebooks Lizzie bought, as diaries, to chronicle the lives of her first two children in the 270 or so days before we were to know them. “I can’t look in those,” I say aloud, but I can’t help myself. I lift the top one from the box, place it on my lap, sit down. It’s my imagination, surely, that weight on my knees, as though something else has just slid down against me. Like a child, to look at a photo album. Tell me, Daddy, about the world without me in it. Suddenly, I’m embarrassed. I want to explain. That first notebook, the other one, is almost half my writing, not just Lizzie’s. But this one . . . I was away, Sam, on a selling trip, for almost a month. And when I came back . . . I couldn’t. Not right away. I couldn’t even watch your mom doing it. And two weeks later . . .

  “The day you were born,” I murmur, as though it was a lullabye. Goodnight moon. “We went to the redwoods, with the Giraffes.” Whatever it is, that weight on me, shifts a little. Settles. “That isn’t really their name, Sam. Their name is Girard. Giraffe is what you would have called them, though. They would have made you. They’re so tall. So funny. They would have put you on their shoulders to touch EXIT signs and ceiling tiles. They would have dropped you upside down from way up high and made you scream.” Goodnight nobody. That terrifying, stupid, blank page near the end of that book. What’s it doing there, anyway?

  “This was December, freezing cold, but the sun was out. We stopped at a gas station on our way to the woods, and I went to get Bugles, because that’s what Giraffes eat, the ones we know, anyway. Your mom went to the restroom. She was in there a long time. And when she came out, she just looked at me. And I knew.”

  My fingers have pushed the notebook open, pulled the pages apart. They’re damp, too. Half of them are ruined, the words, in multi-colored inks, like pressed flowers on the pages, smeared out of shape, though their meaning remains clear.

  “I waited. I stared at your mother. She stared at me. Joseph – Mr Giraffe – came in to see what was taking so long. Your mom just kept on staring. So I said, ‘Couldn’t find the Bugles.’ Then I grabbed two bags of them, turned away, and paid. And your mom got in the van beside me, and the Giraffes put on their bouncy, happy, Giraffe music, and we kept going.

  “When we got to the woods, we found them practically empty, and there was this smell, even though the trees were dead. It wasn’t like spring. You couldn’t smell pollen, or see buds, just sunlight and bare branches and this mist floating up, catching on the branches and forming shapes like the ghosts of leaves. I tried to hold your mother’s hand, and she let me at first, and then she didn’t. She disappeared into the mist. The Giraffes had to go find her in the end, when it was time to go home. It was almost dark as we got in the van, and none of us were speaking. I was the last one in. And all I could think, as I took my last breath of that air, was, Can you see this? Did you see the trees, my sweet son, daughter or son, on your way out of the world?”

  Helpless now, I drop my head, bury it in the wet air as though there were a child’s hair there, and my mouth is moving, chanting the words in the notebook on my lap. I only read them once, on the night Lizzie wrote them, when she finally rolled over, with no tantrum, no more tears, nothing left, closed the book against her chest, and went to sleep. But I remember them, still. There’s a sketch, first, what looks like an acorn with a dent in the top. Next to it Lizzie has scrawled “You. Little rice-bean.” On the day before it died. Then there’s the list, like a rosary: “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I don’t get to know you. I’m so sorry for wishing this was over, now, for wanting the bleeding to stop. I’m so sorry that I will never have the chance to be your mother. I’m so sorry you will never have the chance to be in our family. I’m so sorry that you are gone.”

  I reci
te the next page, too, without even turning to it. The I-don’t-wants: “a D & C; a phone call from someone who doesn’t know, to ask how I’m feeling; a phone call from someone who does, to ask how I am; to forget this, ever; to forget you.”

  And then, at the bottom of the page: “I love fog. I love seals. I love the ghosts of Sutro Heights. I love my mother, even though. I love Jake. I love having known you. I love having known you. I love having known you.”

  With one long, shuddering breath, as though I’m trying to slip out from under a sleeping cat, I straighten my legs, lay the notebook to sleep in its box, tuck the flaps around it, and stand. It’s time. Not past time, just time. I return to the freezer, flip the heavy white lid.

  The thing is, even after I looked in here, the same day I brought my grandfather out and wound up poking around the garage, lifting boxtops, touching old, unused bicycles and cross-country skis, I would never have realized. If she’d done the wrapping in wax paper, laid it in the bottom of the freezer, I would have assumed it was meat, and I would have left it there. But Lizzie is Lizzie, and instead of wax paper, she’d used red and blue construction paper from her classroom, folded the paper into perfect squares with perfect corners, and put a single star on each of them. So I lifted them out, just as I’m doing now.

  They’re so cold, cradled against me. The red package. The blue one. So light. The most astounding thing about the wrapping, really, is that she managed it all. How do you get paper and tape around nothing and get it to hold its shape? From another nearby box, I lift a gold and green blanket. I had it on my bottom bunk when I was a kid. The first time Lizzie lay on my bed – without me in it, she was just lying there – she wrapped herself in this. I spread it on the cold cement floor, and gently lay the packages down.

  In Hebrew, the word for miscarriage translates, literally, as “something dropped”. It’s no more accurate a term than any of the others humans have generated for the whole apparently incomprehensible process of reproduction, right down to “conception”. Is that what we do? Conceive? Do we literally dream our children? Is it possible that miscarriage, finally, is just waking up to the reality of the world a few months too soon?

  Gently, with the tip of my thumbnail, I slit the top of the red package, fold it open. It comes apart like origami, so perfect, arching back against the blanket. I slit the blue package, pull back its flaps. Widening the opening. One last parody of birth.

  How did she do it, I wonder? The first time, we were home, she was in the bathroom. She had me bring Ziplock baggies, ice. For testing, she said. They’ll need it for testing. But they’d taken it for testing. How had she gotten it back? And the second one had happened – finished happening – in a gas-station bathroom somewhere between the Golden Gate Bridge and the Muir Woods. And she’d said nothing, asked for nothing. “Where did she keep you?” I murmur, staring down at the formless, red-grey spatters, the bunched-up tissue that might have been tendon one day, skin one day. Sam, one day. In the red package, there is more, a hump of frozen something with strings of red spiraling out from it, sticking to the paper, like the rays of an imploding sun. In the blue package, there are some red dots, a few strands of filament. Virtually nothing at all.

  The song comes, and the tears with them. You’ll never know. Dear. How much I love you. Please don’t take. Please don’t take. I think of my wife upstairs in our life, sleeping with her arms around her child. The one that won’t be Sam, but just might live.

  The matches slide from my pocket. Pulling one out of the little book is like ripping a blade of grass from the ground. I scrape it to life, and its tiny light warms my hand, floods the room, flickering as it sucks the oxygen out of the damp. Will this work? How do I know? For all I know, I am imagining it all. The miscarriages were bad luck, hormone deficiencies, a virus in the blood, and the grief that got in me was at least as awful as what got in Lizzie, it just lay dormant longer. And now it has made me crazy.

  But if it is better where you are, my Sams. And if you’re here to tell the new one about it, to call him out . . .

  “The other night, dear,” I find myself saying, and then I’m singing it, like a Shabbat blessing, a Hanukkah song, something you offer to the emptiness of a darkened house to keep the dark and the emptiness back one more week, one more day. “As I lay sleeping. I dreamed I held you. In my arms.”

  I lower the match to the red paper, to the blue, and as my children melt, become dream, once more, I swear I hear them sing to me.

  for both of you

  JAY RUSSELL

  Hides

  JAY RUSSELL IS THE AUTHOR of Blood, and three novels in the “Marty Burns” detective series: Celestial Dogs, Burning Bright and Greed & Stuff. His most recent book, Brown Harvest, was a World Fantasy Award nominee for Best Novel and is published in the US and UK by Four Walls Eight Windows. A new Marty Burns chapbook is due in 2004 from Earthling Publications.

  As the author recalls: “When the wonderful Michele Slung asked me to contribute a story to a new anthology, with the vague title of Stranger, she casually mentioned that she wouldn’t mind seeing more period pieces for the book. As I didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to be a part of a Slung project – and not just because she pays so well – it occurred to me that it was a great chance to take on a Western setting, which I’d long wanted to try.

  “In all honesty, I can’t recall how I came to choose the real-world protagonist around whom the story revolves. Despite his centrality to horror fiction I’m not particularly devoted to his work, though the chronology of the tale does accord with the facts of his biography. Michele’s only requirement for the anthology was that a chance meeting with a stranger should somehow figure into the story.

  “I suppose that set me to thinking about all the possible meanings of ‘stranger’ and who and what a stranger is. That train of thought is very much reflected in the title, which refers to at least three different things in the context of the story and the real-life lead character.”

  “YOU AIN’T FROM HERE.”

  Stevenson did his best to smile. The smell wafting off the man was atrocious, like something that should have been buried weeks before. Stevenson hadn’t noticed it so much while the man slept through the first several hours of the journey, but now that he was up and moving, waving his arms about, the smell was impossible to avoid. The others in the stage didn’t seem to mind, but Stevenson couldn’t stop coughing; had to will himself not to retch with every fresh rack of his aching lungs. He spat a wad of phlegm out into his dirty handkerchief. The blond man who smelled like a dead thing hawked up a brown lugie of his own and spat it out the window, largely missing.

  “Lunger?” the man asked.

  Stevenson nodded, started coughing again and lost all control. He turned, leaned over the sleeping, red-haired woman to his right and vomited out the window. Bloody wads of mucus came up along with the too-big breakfast of hotcakes, bacon and coffee he’d forced down in the dining car of the train. The train that was supposed to take him all the way to Sacramento, but which had been forced to discharge its passengers at Carson City where the track had flooded out. Stevenson had been reluctant to board the uncomfortable stagecoach, but hadn’t seen any choice. Not if he wanted to get to Fanny.

  And seeing her again was the only thing in the world that truly mattered. His desire had driven him across an ocean and this massive, mad continent.

  Stevenson held his head outside as the stage rattled along the choppy dirt trail. The dry air did his lungs some good – just not enough. And nothing could change the smell of the man sitting across from him. Stevenson would never have gotten on board if he’d known, but the blond man had jumped on just as the stage pulled out of Carson City. So there was nothing to do but ride it out. Reluctantly, gulping a last tubercular lungful of fresh air, Stevenson withdrew back into the coach. He started to apologize to the young woman he’d leaned across, but saw that she hadn’t so much as stirred. The acid taste of bile coated his tongue and palate, bu
t Stevenson found that it cut into his sense of smell, and he accepted the small mercy. The blond man watched him with an unpleasant smile plastered across his unshaved face. The other passengers – a stiff-backed, elderly man in a black suit and stovepipe hat, and his horse-faced, pursed-lipped wife, also in black – simply looked bored.

  “Nasty,” the blond man said.

  “Aye,” Stevenson agreed.

  “You what?”

  “Sorry?” Stevenson was confused.

  “You said ‘I,’ but you didn’t say what. Then you said “sorry,” but you didn’t say what you’s apologizing for.”

  “Aye,” Stevenson repeated, catching on. “I meant to say yes. Aye means yes, ye see. Ken?”

  “Not in these parts it don’t. And my name ain’t Ken. It’s Jackworth.” He looked at the elderly man. “You Ken?”

  The old man offered the slightest, unfriendliest possible shake of his head. His wife screwed her face up into an even uglier expression.

  “No Kens here,” the blond man said.

  “My mistake,” Stevenson said. He sighed.

  “You talk funny, mister.” Jackworth hawked another wad of phlegm toward the window. Given his own condition it didn’t bother Stevenson – not like the smell – though Stevenson had now seen enough of the American west to realize that there was nothing likely wrong with the man’s lungs; it was the egg-sized wad of tobacco stuffed in his cheek that was to blame.

  “So where’s you from, then?”

  The smell was starting to get to Stevenson again. He put his hand up to his mouth and nose to stem the effects. It didn’t help much.

  “Edinburgh,” he said, and coughed.

  “Enburr?” the man puzzled.

  Stevenson lowered his hand, tried not to roll his r’s so much. “Ed-in-burgh.”