The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  Jeperson snapped his fingers.

  “I think he’s a lot like his great-great. And I know what the ghosts have been trying to tell us. Quick, Fred, get the Rolls. Vanessa, ring Inspector Price at New Scotland Yard, and have him meet us at the Horus Tower immediately. He might want to bring a lot of hearty fellows with him. Some with guns. This is going to make a big noise.”

  Fred didn’t care to set foot inside the Horus Tower. Just thinking about what had been done in the building made him sick to his stomach. He was on the forecourt as the coughing, shrunken, handcuffed George Rameses Bunning was led out by Inspector Euan Price. Jeperson had accompanied the police up to the pyramid on top of the tower, to be there at the arrest.

  Employees gathered at their windows, looking down as the boss was hauled off to pokey. Rumours of what he had intended for them – for two hundred and thirty-eight men and women, from senior editors to junior copy-boys – would already be circulating, though Fred guessed many wouldn’t believe them. Derek Leech’s paper would carry the story, but few people put any credence in those loony crime stories in the Comet.

  “He’ll be dead before he comes to trial,” said Jeperson. “Unless they find a cure.”

  “I hope they do, Richard,” said Fred. “And he spends a good few years buried alive himself, in a concrete cell.”

  “His Board of Directors were wondering why, with the company on the verge of liquidation, Bunning had authorized such extensive remodelling of his corporate HQ. It was done, you know. He could have thrown the switch tomorrow, or next week. Whenever all was lost.”

  Now Fred shivered. Cemeteries didn’t bother him, but places like this – concrete, glass and steel traps for the enslavement and destruction of living human beings – did.

  “What did he tell what’s-his-name, the architect? Drache?”

  “It was supposed to be about security, locking down the Tower against armed insurrection. Rioting investors wanting their dividends, perhaps. The spray nozzles that were to flood the building with nerve gas were a new kind of fire-prevention system.”

  “And Drache believed him?”

  “He believed the money.”

  “Another bastard, then.”

  “Culpable, but not indictable.”

  The Horus Tower was equipped with shutters that would seal every window, door and ventilation duct. When the master switch was thrown, they would all come down and lock tight. Then deadly gas would fill every office space, instantly preserving in death the entire workforce. Had George Rameses Bunning intended to keep publishing magazines in the afterlife? Did he really think his personal tomb would be left inviolate in perpetuity with all the corpses at their desks, a monument to himself for all eternity? Of course, George Oldrid Bunning had got away with it for a century.

  “George Rameses knew?”

  “About George Oldrid’s funerary arrangements? Yes.”

  “Bastard bastard.”

  “Quite.”

  People began to file out of the skyscraper. The workday was over early.

  There was a commotion.

  A policeman was on the concrete, writhing around his kneed groin. Still handcuffed, George Rameses sprinted back towards his tower, shouldering through his employees.

  Jeperson shouted to Price. “Get everyone out, now!”

  Fred’s old boss understood at once. He got a bullhorn and ordered everyone away from the building.

  “He’ll take the stairs,” said Jeperson. “He won’t chance us stopping the lifts. That’ll give everyone time to make it out.”

  Alarm bells sounded. The flood of people leaving the Horus Tower grew to exodus proportions.

  “Should I send someone in to catch him?” asked Price. “It should be easy to snag him on the stairs. He’ll be out of puff by the fifth floor, let alone the thirtieth.”

  Jeperson shook his head.

  “Too much of a risk, Inspector. Just make sure everyone else is out. This should be interesting.”

  “Interesting?” spat Fred.

  “Come on. Don’t you want to see if it works? The big clockwork trap. The plans I saw were ingenious. A real economy of construction. No electricals. Just levers, sand and water. Drache kept to Egyptian technology. Modern materials, though.”

  “And nerve gas?” said Fred.

  “Yes, there is that.”

  “You’d better hope Drache’s shutters are damn good, or half London is going to drop dead.”

  “It won’t come to that.”

  Vanessa crossed the forecourt. She was with the still-bewildered Lillywhite.

  “What’s happening?” she asked.

  “George Rameses is back inside, racing towards his master-switch.”

  “Good grief.”

  “Never fear, Vanessa. Inspector, it might be an idea to find some managerial bods in the crowd. Read the class register, as it were. Just make sure everyone’s out of the tower.”

  “Good idea, Jeperson.”

  The policeman hurried off.

  Jeperson looked up at the building. The afternoon sun was reflected in black.

  Then the reflection was gone.

  Matt shutters closed like eyelids over every window. Black grilles came down behind the glass walls of the lobby, jaws meshing around floor-holes. The pyramid atop the tower twisted on a stem and lowered, locking into place. It was all done before the noise registered, a great mechanical wheezing and clanking. Torrents of water gushed from drains around the building, squirting up fifty feet in the air from the ornamental fountain.

  “He’s escaped,” said Fred. “A quick, easy death from the gas and it’ll take twenty years to break through all that engineering.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” said Jeperson. “Fifteen at the most. Modern methods, you know.”

  “The ghosts won’t rest,” said Lillywhite. “Not without revenge or restitution.”

  “I think they might,” said Jeperson. “You see, George Rameses is still alive in his tomb. Alone, ill and, after his struggle up all those stairs, severely out of breath. Though I left the bulk of his self-burial mechanism alone, I took the precaution of disabling the nerve gas.”

  “Is that a scream I hear?” said Vanessa.

  “I doubt it,” said Jeperson. “If nothing else, George Rameses has just soundproofed his tomb.”

  JAMES VAN PELT

  The Boy Behind the Gate

  JAMES VAN PELT LIVES IN Western Colorado with his wife and three sons. One of the finalists for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, he teaches high school and college English.

  His fiction has appeared in, among other anthologies and magazines, Dark Terrors 5 and 6, the SFWA anthology New Faces in Science Fiction, Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction, David Hartwell’s The Year’s Best Fantasy, Asimov’s, Analog, Realms of Fantasy, Talebones, The Third Alternative, Weird Tales and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. His first collection of stories, Strangers and Beggars, was published in 2002.

  “The genesis of ‘The Boy Behind the Gate’ occurred long before I became a father,” recalls the author. “During the summers, I often explored the old mills and ghost towns in the mountains west of Denver. Every once in a while there would come a report of a body found at the bottom of a deep shaft, and, of course, kids always turned up missing. It didn’t take much imagination to picture a child locked in the mines. But Mark Twain and Injun Joe went there first.

  “For the longest time the story was entitled ‘Two Dads’, and I still think of the story with that emphasis. Those two poor, tortured dads. Is the one’s love strong enough to overcome evil? Will the other pause just long enough before he strikes to change his mind? As a dad, I hope so.”

  AS YOU ARE NOW,

  So once was I.

  As I am now,

  So you shall be.

  Prepare for death and follow me.

  —from a tombstone in the

  Central City Cemetery

  CENTRAL CITY: TODAY

 
; Pine-tree tops creaked overhead, but the air didn’t move in the granite-strewn gully as Ron hiked up the steep gulch. He consulted his compass, then rechecked the map. Another hundred yards above him should be The Golden Ingot #9, and if the rusted mining equipment he’d been climbing over and around for the last ten minutes were any indication, the map was right. He scanned the ground, his eyes aching from sun and dust. The backpack, heavy with a powerful flashlight, rope and bolt cutters thumped against his kidneys. Was anything out of the ordinary? Was there any sign? A patch of cloth? A child’s shoe? Could Levi have walked this far? Ron imagined the eight-year-old being towed up the mountain, hand in hand with the stranger who’d taken him. Would Levi have been crying, aware in his little-boy way of the danger he was in?

  Ron closed his eyes. He wanted to imagine Levi scared. He hoped he was scared to death because the alternative . . . Maybe he’d been wrapped in a blanket or a plastic sheet slung over the man’s shoulder. They knew who the man was, Jared Sims, but Levi wouldn’t have known. Ron shivered and continued climbing.

  A jumble of cable, thick as his wrist and so rusted that wherever the metal crossed itself it had corroded into one piece, blocked his path. Ron scrambled partly up the gully’s slope around it. Piles of yellow and white mine tailings humped up above him, and soon he topped out to the relative flatness of the claim. The old map he’d photocopied in Central City had shown him where the mine was; it wasn’t marked on the USGS maps. Most of the abandoned mines and shafts had been filled in. Too much chance of some tourist wandering around old mining property, snapping pictures of busted-down mills and what was left of miners’ cabins, and then stepping on some rotten boards covering a shaft a hundred feet deep. So over the last twenty years, the state and park service had been closing the properties. Still, the Gilpin County mining district had been huge and thousands of claims had been made. There were hundreds of openings even now for someone to find if he knew where to look. Perfect, mysterious holes blasted into the mountain, timeless monuments to long-dead miners’ hopes. Perfect places to hide a little boy you didn’t want found. Here, at the Golden Ingot #9, except for the rust, it could be 1880 again. He half expected to surprise a dozen miners waiting for their turn in the bucket and the long ride down the shaft.

  Ron kept his gaze down. Little chance that there’d be a footprint in the yellow gravel, but it didn’t hurt. Maybe Levi would have dropped something for him to find. It seemed years ago, but it was only last winter that Ron had read him The Lord of the Rings. The hobbit, Pippin, had broken from the orcs and dropped a sign that he was still alive, a beautiful beech-tree leaf brooch. Levi had said, in his little man’s voice, “That was very clever of him, Daddy, wasn’t it?” Ron remembered Levi’s head resting on his arm while he read. He could almost feel the weight of his little boy leaning against him until they got to the end of the chapter. “Read some more, Daddy. Read some more,” he’d said sleepily.

  A pile of boards lying almost flat looked hopeful. Ron lifted the end of one. It creaked as it rose slowly, pulling a dozen nails from the rotted plank beside it. Dust slapped into the air after Ron moved it aside and dropped it. The next one showed a shaft’s edge. A minute later, he’d cleared most of the boards. The pile looked like it hadn’t stirred since Grover Cleveland held office, but since he was here, he was going to check.

  The afternoon sun showed only six feet of shaft wall, while the rest was black. Was the bottom only a dozen feet away, or was this one of those deep, deep holes reaching hundreds of yards down?

  As always, as he had scores of times since the police had given up looking ten days before, he crouched at the shaft’s edge, cupped his hands around his mouth and called into the darkness, “Levi! Levi! Are you there, son?”

  Wind stirred sand behind him, blowing a little over the edge where it glittered in the sunlight, then disappeared. Only the breeze’s sibilant hiss answered him.

  CENTRAL CITY: 1879

  Images flitted in Charles’s mind as he stayed motionless in his bed, listening to the boy’s even breathing on the floor beside him. It was the small hours of the morning, when time came unanchored, and memories piled willy-nilly atop one another. Charles could see them all: his wife dying, the Laughlins, the McGaritys, the bloody hands in the mine. The fireplace coals had long since died, and the moon’s thin line outside the window cast almost no light through the muslin drape. He’d light a candle if he dared, but if he did, the boy’s eyes might be open; he might look at him through the flickering light and know that he knew.

  He couldn’t sleep. No, not that. Charles would dream, and in his dreams he’d see the Laughlin children burning up, their red skin baking from within. “Scarlet fever,” the nurse from Idaho Springs had said. “Poor things.”

  Charles had stood at the Laughlins’ door that morning, a basket of bread and clean sheets hanging from one hand, blinking at the darkness in the room. Only the sun behind him provided light. They’d covered the one window, and the cabin smelled close and moist and sweaty-sick. The nurse sat by three-year-old Lisa to his left. Against the back wall lay Evelyn with her mother sitting beside her. The baby’s crib rested in the opposite corner. William Laughlin sat at the rough-hewn table in the room’s middle, resting his forehead in his hand.

  The boy crept around Charles, even though he’d told him to stay with the mule. His arm wrapped around the back of Charles’s leg, and he leaned into the room. Charles put his hand down to push him back, but he didn’t. He didn’t like touching his son, the stranger who lived with him every day. Lisa panted under the blankets, blonde hair plastered to the side of her face. Four-year-old Evelyn turned to the wall, her chest still for a moment before she drew her next wheezing breath. Her mom, a hint of the scarlet flush across her own cheeks visible in the sunlight, pressed a wet cloth to Evelyn’s forehead.

  “The little one?” Charles said.

  William Laughlin shook his head without moving his hand. “She went during the night.” He coughed. It sounded wet and pathetic.

  “I brung some things,” Charles said. He stepped deeper into the room, and the atmosphere pushed back. Outside the sun shone bright and men filled the valley, moving surely from mine to mill, loading ore wagons or carrying supplies. Blasting echoed off cliff walls above and Clear Creek murmured like watery wind. But here, the air felt dead with fever.

  William draped a hand over the basket’s edge. “You’re a right Christian, Charles.”

  “You going to your shift?” Charles moved back. The heat in the room oppressed, and he didn’t want to breathe so close to the sick girls.

  “I’ll be along.”

  Charles retreated to the porch. The boy leaned over Lisa, his legs bright in the sun pouring through the door, while his upper torso faded in the room’s shadows. He drew a finger across the little girl’s forehead, through her fevered sweat. He stood, facing his father, his finger up as if he’d erased chalk off a blackboard. For a moment he looked at Charles as if surprised to see him still waiting for him, then he put his finger in his mouth.

  When they crossed the footbridge over the creek, Charles said, “Why’d you do that, boy? I told you to stay out.”

  The boy held on to the mule’s bridle, his head not even coming up to the mule’s chin. “They’ll burn, Papa.”

  Charles nearly stumbled, then glanced at the boy. He wore an old flannel shirt too big for him with the sleeves rolled up. Pale, skinny arms. Dark hair cut above his eyebrows. Dark eyes. He was given to long, unblinking looks. A serious mouth, like his mother who’d died bringing him into the world eight years before.

  “I’m glad he’s out of me,” she’d said in the moment before she died screaming.

  “What do you mean, boy?”

  “I put the death in them.” He held up his finger that had touched the girl as if in proof. “Just like the other lambs.”

  “Don’t talk like that.” Charles pulled the bridle from the boy’s hand, his own hand shaking. “You go on home, and I don’t w
ant to see a mess in the cabin when I get back. Sweep the floor.”

  “I can smell the fire,” the boy said before turning toward their cabin.

  Charles thought about his son all day, deep in the mine, as he worked the single jack, bent low in the tunnel only three-quarters of his height, placing the steel bit against the stone, pounding it a bit deeper with each blow, rotating it each time to clear the bit. Pausing just before he drove the hammer home. The angle had to be perfect. The placement, perfect. He had to judge before he struck. Striking without looking could shatter the drill. There was always the pause before the hammer came down to be sure he was doing the right thing. So there could be no mistake. It was a feeling of good or bad in the way the drill stood. Charles considered his judgment with the hammer to be his only genius. He never struck wrongly. Clang! The hammer would fall against the rod. Rock dust crumbled from the hole. Clang! He’d hit it again, his strong right arm driving the blow home. Numbing work to create a hole for the charge. He could raise the hammer all day with that arm; the work had made it larger than the other one, a giant’s arm, but he couldn’t shape the boy with it. He couldn’t even hold him.

  The boy had been bad from the beginning. His wet-nurse took sick and died. After that, no one would help Charles, so he fed the child himself with goat’s milk, certain that the first winter would kill him, having no mother to care for him. But as winter filled the mountains with snow and cutting wind, even as influenza swept through the camp taking many babies, the boy thrived. He was walking by the next summer, and Charles would leave him locked in the cabin when he worked his shift, half expecting to find the toddler dead on his return. But every day the boy met him, a little taller, a little stronger, and never smiling.

  Setting the powder took a half-hour. Each hole had to be filled with the proper amount. Then the fuse cord had to be measured. Charles worked methodically. This deep in the mine, the stale air hurt his lungs and rock-grit coated his eyes and tongue. He checked the candle burning brightly in its shadowgee stuck in the wall. When he set the last charge, he retreated to the bucket lift, covering his nose and mouth with a soaked bandanna to protect against the dust. After the blast, he stood with head bowed, breathing through the wet cloth.