The Year's Best Horror Stories 12

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  When Ian reached to pick up a chicken leg, his father slapped his hand down. “You’ve a knife and fork. Use them.”

  “Oh, really,” Ian’s mother said.

  “Yes?” his father demanded, as if he were speaking to a child at school.

  She stared at him until he looked away, at the food he was brandishing on his fork. They couldn’t argue in front of the waiters, Ian thought, but feeling them argue silently was worse. He set about carving his chicken leg. The knife passed easily through the meat and scraped the bone. “That’s too sharp for him,” his mother said. “Have you another knife?”

  The waiter shook his head and spread his hands. His palms were very smooth and pale. “Just be careful then, Ian,” she said anxiously.

  His father tipped his head back to drain the last trickle of lemonade, and the other waiter came over. Ian hadn’t realized he had slipped away, let alone where. He was carrying an uncorked wine bottle, from which he filled Ian’s father’s cup without being asked. “Well, since you’ve opened it,” Ian’s father said, sounding ready to argue the price.

  The waiter filled Ian’s mother’s cup and came to him. “Not too much for him,” she said.

  “Nor for her either,” his father said, having rolled a sip around his mouth and frowned, then shrugged approval, “since she’s driving.”

  Ian took a mouthful to distract himself. It was distracting enough: it tasted rusty, and too thick. He couldn’t swallow. He turned away from his father and spat the mouthful on the grass, and saw that the waiters were barefoot. “You little savage,” his father said in a low, hateful voice.

  “Leave him alone. He shouldn’t have been given any.”

  To add to Ian’s confusion, both waiters were nodding, agreeing with her. Their feet looked thin as bunches of twigs, and appeared to be gripping the earth; he saw grass and soil squeezing up between the long knuckly toes. He didn’t want to stay near them or near his parents, whose disagreements felt like thunder. “I want a proper picnic,” he complained. “I want to run around like I used to.”

  “Just don’t get lost,” his mother said, a moment before his father said, “Do as you’re told and stay where you are.”

  His mother turned to the waiters. “You don’t mind if he stretches his legs, do you?”

  They smiled and spread their hands. Their mouths looked even wider and paler, and Ian could see no lines on the palms of their hands. “Just you move from this table before you’re told to,” his father said, “and we’ll see how you like the belt when you get home.”

  He could get up, his mother had said so. He gobbled coleslaw, since he couldn’t eat that away from the table, and peered at the fragment of pattern he’d uncovered on the plate. “You won’t lay a finger on him,” his mother had whispered.

  His father took a swallow that made his lips redder and thumped his cup on the table. His bare arm lay beside a knife in the shaft of sunlight, the blade and his wiry hairs gleaming. “You’ve just earned him a few extra with the belt if he doesn’t do as he’s told.”

  “Mummy said I could,” Ian said, and grabbed the chicken leg from his plate as he stood up. His father tried to seize him, but the drink must have made him sleepy, for he lolled over the table, shaking his head. “Come here to me,” he said in a slurred voice as Ian dodged out of reach, having just glimpsed more of the pattern on the plate. It looked like something large trying to escape as it was chopped up. He didn’t want to stay near that, or near his parents, or near the waiters with their silent smiles. Perhaps the waiters didn’t speak English. He took a bite of the chicken leg as he ran toward the children, who had left the distant table and were playing with a striped ball.

  He looked back once. A waiter stood behind each of his parents: waiting to be paid, or to clear the table? They must be impatient for their toes to have been scratching at the earth like that. His father was propping his chin on his hands as Ian’s mother stared at him across the table, which looked oddly ramshackle now, more like a heap of branches.

  Ian ran into the clearing where the children were. “Can I play with you?”

  The girl gave a small cry of surprise. “Where did you come from?” the boy demanded.

  “Just over there.” Ian turned and pointed, and found he couldn’t see his parents. For a moment he wanted to giggle at how he must have surprised the children, then suddenly he felt lost, abandoned, afraid for his mother, and his father, too. He backed away as the children stared at him, then he whirled and ran.

  The boy’s name was Neville; his sister’s was Annette. Their parents were the kindest people he had ever known—but he hadn’t wished for them, he told himself fiercely as he started the car now that his hands were under control; he didn’t know what he had wished at the well. Surely his mother had just been drunk, she and his father must have got lost and gone back to the car on the road through the forest to get help in finding Ian, only for her to lose control almost as soon as she’d started driving. If only the car and its contents hadn’t burned so thoroughly! He might not have felt compelled to wish on the gold that what he thought he’d seen couldn’t have happened, had never happened: the trees separating ahead of him as he ran, then somehow blotting out that last glimpse of his mother scraping at her plate, more and more quickly, staring at the pattern she’d uncovered and rising to her feet, one hand pressed to her lips as she shook his father with the other, shook his shoulder desperately to rouse him, as the thin figures opened their growing mouths and they and the trees closed in.

  ONE FOR THE HORRORS by David J. Schow

  David J. Schow was born on July 13, 1955 in Marburg, West Germany—a German orphan adopted by American parents. He left Europe as a child and grew up all over the United States, before moving to his present home in Los Angeles. This location was no accident, for Schow is a serious student of films—as the reader of “One for the Horrors” will quickly recognize. Most of Schow’s writing has been on films, either as a columnist for various publications or as a contributing editor to film books. Just now Schow is writing a continuing study of the television program, The Outer Limits, for Twilight Zone Magazine. He has also published short fiction in that magazine (some under the pseudonym Oliver Lowenbruck), as well as in Galileo, Ares, and Whispers. He is also author of three books in a “Warner Books paperback violence series” (under a pseudonym), three movie novelizations for Universal (also under a pseudonym)—in addition to being one of the world’s foremost authorities on spatter films. “One for the Horrors” is very much a story for film buffs, who may well go mad searching for J.A. Bijou’s after reading this story.

  He recalled a half-column article that had said Stanley Kubrick postedited A Clockwork Orange by something like two-and-a-half minutes, mostly to deter jaded MPAA types from slapping it with an “X” rating, that probably would have murdered the film in 1971. It might have been consigned to art houses for eternity. Inconceivable.

  Clay Colvin strolled through the theater waiting-room with its yellowing posters of Maitresse and Fellini’s 8½. Wobbly borax tables were laden with graying copies of Film Quarterly and Variety and Take One amid a scatter of the local nouveau-undergrounds—which, Clay thought, weren’t really undergrounds anymore but “alternative press publications.” More respectable; less daring, less innovative. Victims of progress in the same way this theatre differed from the big, hyperthyroid single-play houses with their $4.50 admissions.

  Predictably, the wall was strewn with dog-eared lobby cards, one-sheets, and film schedules citing such theme-oriented programs as Utopian Directors, Oh-Cult and Modern Sex impressionism. The front exit was a high-school-gym reject that had been painted over a dozen times or so, the color finally settling on a fingerprinty fire-engine red that also marred the tiny box window set into the door’s center. Outside, worn stone-and-tile stairs spiraled beneath a pale metal canopy, down to the street and back into the world-proper.

  Clay’s wife of twenty-one years, Marissa, had died on October 17th, 1976, abo
ut seventeen hours before his promotion to Western Division Sales Manager finally came through. It would have been the upward bump that would embellish their life together. Her reassurances that the position would be awarded to him “sometime soon” were devoted and unflagging; her belief in him was never half-hearted, not even when her hospital bills had become astronomical. Clay dined on soups and kept a stiff upper.

  Guilt at her passing was the last thing Clay would allow himself, for Marissa would not have permitted it. What surprised him was the way he settled into a regimen during the next six months: 8-to-5 with overtime on each end, mail stop, and then filling the several hours hitherto devoted to the hospital stop. As substitutes, Clay either took work home, or went to a movie, or a bar, or tried a bit of television or a dollop of reading matter (damned if you can’t make fifty pages a night, old man, he chided himself) prior to slumber in a bed realistically too big for a single person the likes of Clay Francis Colvin, Jr.

  A birthday and a half later saw more impressive sales rosters and salary hikes for Clay. A bit more hair and vision lost. Unlike Marissa, his checking account had bounced back robustly. His new gold wire-prims were respectably costly. Comparatively frugal since Marissa’s death, he splurged on a Mercedes and fought the cliche of a widower faced with the steep side of late middle age. Although he looked a bit rheumy-eyed in the mirror, he eventually concluded that he had been dealt to fairly.

  It had been an unusually productive Wednesday, and upon spotting a Xerox place during his drive home, Clay pulled over to duplicate some documents he’d forgotten to copy at the office. From his cater-corner viewpoint, the block consisted of the Xerox shop, flanked by a pair of health-food restaurants, a hole-in-the-wall ten-speed store, a pizzeria and a place called Just Another Bijou—it seemed that the business establishments on the periphery of the university district were the only places open after six o’clock. In the Xerox shop, a thumbtacked flyer caught Clay’s eye. He scanned a list of features and discovered the theatre he had seen was referred to as J.A. Bijou’s. The bill for the night highlighted Fredric March in Death Takes A Holiday and Anthony Adverse, the latter Clay knew to feature a neat Korngold score. He knew both films—of course—and the jump from Xerox shop and dull evening to the lobby of J.A. Bijou’s was a short, easy one.

  Clay enjoyed himself. More importantly, he came back to the theatre, and without his vested business suit.

  What there was: Theatre-darkness and old cinema chairs of varied lineage and age, in wobbly rows, and comfortably broken-in. Loose floor boltings. The mustiness of old cushions; not offensive, but rather the enticing odor of a library well-stocked with worthwhile classics. Double-billed tidbits like Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon together, for once, or the semiannual Chaplan and Marx orgies. Clay favored Abbott and Costello; J.A. Bijou’s obliged him. Homage programs to directors, to stars, and on one occasion to a composer (Bernard Herrmann). Also cartoon fests, reissues, incomprehensible foreign bits and the inevitable oddball sex-art flicks, which Clay avoided. But the oldies he loved and the better recent items insured his attendance. It was a crime not to plunk down two bucks—or $1.50 before six P.M.—to escape and enjoy, as Clay had done frequently in the five months between Anthony Adverse and tonight’s offering, Kubrick, who had wound up in an art house, censors or no. Clay enjoyed himself—it was all he required of J.A. Bijou’s. He never expected that anything would be required of him, nor did he expect to be blown away in quite the fashion everyone was during the following week.

  Clay had an affection for Dwight Frye’s bit parts, and Fritz in Frankenstein was one of his best. After Renfield, of course. It was opening night of a week’s worth of Horror Classics, and Clay was in enthusiastic attendance. He, like most of the audience, would cop to a bit of overfamiliarization due to used car screenings on the tube after midnight.

  There were some unadvertised Fleischer Betty Boops and the normal profusion of trailers before the shadow-show commenced. Frankenstein had been the Exorcist of its heyday, evoking nausea and fainting and prompting bold warnings on screen and ominous lobby posters. Many houses in the 1930s offered battle-ready ambulances and cadres of medics with epsoms primed. Then came the obsessed censors, cleavers raised and hair-triggered to hack out nastiness ... quite an uproar.

  Soon after Colin Clive’s historic crescendo of “It’s alive!” filtered into J.A. Bijou’s dusty green curtains, Clay’s eyelids began a reluctant, semaphoric flutter. His late hours and his full workload were tolling expertly, and he soon dozed off during the film, snapping back to wakefulness at intervals. His memory filled in the brief gaps in plot as he roller-coastered from the blackness to the screen and back. It was a vaguely pleasing sensation, like accomplishing several tasks at once. Incredibly, he managed to sleep through the din of the torture scene and the Monster’s leavetaking from the castle. He was wakened by a child’s voice instead of noise and spectacle.

  “Will you play with me?”

  The voice of the girl—little Maria—chimed as she addressed the mute, lumbering Karloff. She handed him a daisy, then a bunch, and demonstrated that they floated on the surface of the pond by which they both sat.

  “See how mine floats!”

  Together the pair tossed blooms into the water, and for the first time a smile creased the Monster’s face. Having expended all his daisies, he gestures and the girl walks innocently into his embrace. He hefts her by the arms and lofts her high and wide into the water. Her scream is interrupted by sickly bubbling.

  Clay was fully awake now, jolted back in his seat by an image that was the essence of horror—the Monster groping confusedly toward the pond as it rippled heavily with death. There was something odd about the scene as well; the entire audience around Clay, veterans all, shifted uneasily. A more familiar tableau would soon have the girl’s corpse outraging the stock villagers, but for now there was only the Monster and the horrible pond, on which the daisies still floated.

  The scene shifted to Elizabeth in her wedding gown, and the crowd murmured. It had been a premiere, of sorts.

  Clay dreamt, peacefully. He became aware of impending consciousness as per his usual waking-up manner, a rush of images coming faster and faster and why not a pretty girl?

  And up he sat. For the first time, he thought of the drowning scene in Frankenstein. Clay shook his head and rolled out of bed into the real world.

  Next on the roster was King Kong.

  The college kid who vended Clay’s ticket that evening after work was gangly and bearded, his forehead mottled, as though by a pox. Five years ago, Clay would have dismissed him as a hippie; ten years, a queer. Now hippies did not exist and he regarded the gay community with a detached, laissez-faire attitude. He queued before the cramped snackbar to provision himself.

  He had taken a dim view of the uninspired “remake” of the 1933 RKO Studio’s King Kong—in fact, had avoided an opportunity to see it for free. The chance to again relish the original on a big screen was pleasant; in this one, unlike the new version, the only profiteering fame-grubbers were the characters on the screen.

  Clay conjured various other joys of the original while conversing with the lobby-smokers: the glass-painted forests, the delightfully anachronistic dinosaurs of Skull Island. He was told that this was not a “butchered” print, that is, not lacking scenes previously excised by some overzealous moralist in a position of petty authority—shots of Kong jawing a squirming man in tight closeup, picking at Fay Wray’s garments with the simian equivalent of eroticism, and a shot of Kong dropping a woman several stories to her death were all intact.

  This time around, Clay was more palpably disturbed. He clearly recalled reading an article on King Kong concerning scenes that had never made it to the screen in the first place—not outtakes, or restorative footage, or bandaids over some editor’s butchery—and among those were bits that were now streaming out of J.A. Bijou’s projection booth.

  Carl Denham’s film crew was perched precariously atop a log bridge bei
ng shaken by an enraged King Kong. One by one, the marooned explorers plummeted, howling, into a crevasse and were set upon greedily by grotesque, truck-sized spiders. It stopped the show, the film’s original producer had claimed, over forty-five years ago. It was enough justification to excerpt the whole scene; no audience had ever seen it, because it would have stopped the show.

  It certainly does, thought an astonished Clay, as he watched the men crash to the slimy floor of the pit. Those who survived the killing fall confronted the fantastic black horrors; not only giant spiders but shuffling reptiles and chitenous scorpions the size of Bengal tigers. The audience sat, mouths agape.

  New wonders of Skull Island manifested themselves: A triceratops with a brood of young, plodding along via stop-motion animation, and a bulky-horned mammal Clay later looked up in a paleontology text and found out it was an Arsinoittherium. Incredible.

  “Where did you come across this print?” he questioned the bearded kid, with genuine awe. He was not alone. Fans, buffs, and experts had been drilling him since the beginning of the week, and the only answer he or the other staff could offer against the clamor was that they had nothing to do with it. The films came from the normal distribution houses, the secretaries of which were unable to fathom what the J.A. Bijou employees were babbling about, when they phoned long-distance—an expense just recently affordable. Word of mouth drew crowds faster than Free Booze or Meet Jesus signs, and the theatre’s limited capacity was starting to show the strain of good business. No one else had ever seen these films. In all of history.

  And instead of acting then, when he should have, Clay was content to sit, and be submissively amazed by the miracle.