The Year's Best Horror Stories 12

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  “No!”

  “He’s not bad, Willie. Most of his legs he dug up, or found on people who were already dead.”

  “But—”

  “If we stay, he says he’ll be Father most of the time. I want him to be Father.”

  “But Nellie—”

  “I need that, Willie. Just like he needs to be the people whose legs he puts on.”

  “I want to go home! I don’t want him!”

  Trembling, Willie grabbed his sister round the waist and hugged her.

  On her back, beneath her hiked-up ski parka and blouse, Willie felt clasps and buckles and straps.

  “You!” he cried, pushing her away.

  “Yes,” Nellie said icily. Willie saw now how stiffly she moved.

  “Nellie!” Willie sobbed.

  “I can be anything in this room,” Nellie said, turning stiffly and stabbing her finger at the walls and boxes. “I can be the man who delivers flowers, the woman who gives piano lessons. I can be the mailman one morning, the insurance man who comes to your house the same night. Your teacher. Priest. Dentist.” She loped toward the neon-lit workbench and lifted with a click from its rack a crystal-fine saw.

  “I can be,” Nellie said, rocking rigidly on her legs and tossing her diamond sawblade into the air, catching it nimbly, “a little girl. Or little boy.”

  Willie leaped for the stairs, landing painfully on his knees on the second step from the bottom. Scrambling up them on all fours, he hit the closed door at the top.

  It wouldn’t open.

  Nellie came slowly up after him. There was a smile on her face that the real Nellie had never worn—an ancient smile, nothing even like the meanest smile she had put on when doing the meanest big-sister thing to him.

  When she was two steps from him, Willie kicked out at her legs.

  “Nooo!” she cried out, falling backward.

  Dreamlike, Nellie’s body split in two. The bottom half, two leaden appendages trailing snapped strings and wires at the top, clacked dully down the steps to land dead at the bottom.

  The top half changed into something else. No longer Nellie, no longer anything human—mailman, priest, or dentist—it turned into a screaming white thing, a shriveled form that scooted down the stairs like an albino insect on two deformed hands.

  “Noooooo!” it cooed, moving past the two legs at the bottom of the stair toward the back of the room.

  Willie pushed desperately against the cellar door, and with a sudden jerk it opened. Once again he found himself in a maze. Green and white tiled floors assaulted his feet, trying to make him trip. He made turn after turn and found himself back in front of the cellar door. From below he heard a high keening scream that made his bones rattle. He stumbled on, pushing at the walls, trying to find a way out.

  Abruptly, Willie found himself in the living room. The same hot fire roared in the fireplace, the same overstuffed olive furniture squatted in front of it.

  He ran past, out to the front door. There it was, and next to it the wide window to the outside world. Where snow forts waited, and television, and dinner, and Mother.

  Miraculously, as he looked, the bus chugged to a halt at the stop outside the house, waiting.

  His hand was on the doorknob.

  Pulling it open.

  A foot stepped around him to press the door closed.

  And a voice, the puffing voice of someone who had run very fast very quietly, the voice of someone he might have known, said, “Walk with me, won’t you?”