“Your boy come told me what happened.”
“He ain’t my boy, Lobo.”
“Everybody knowed that but you, but wasn’t no cause to do what you did. I been up to the house, and I found Tom in the ravine.”
“They’re still dead, I assume.”
“You ought not done it, but she was your wife, and he was messin’ with her, so you got some cause, and a jury might see it that way. That’s something to think about, Deel. It could work out for you.”
“He shot me,” Deel said.
“Well now, that makes it even more different. Why don’t you put down that gun, and you and me go back to town and see how we can work things out?”
“I was dead before he shot me.”
“What?” Lobo said. Lobo had dropped down on one knee. He had the Winchester across that knee and with his other hand he held the bridle of his horse. Deel raised the shotgun and set the stock firmly against the stone, the barrel pointing skyward.
“You’re way out of range up there,” Lobo said. “That shotgun ain’t gonna reach me, but I can reach you, and I can put one in a fly’s asshole from here to the moon.”
Deel stood up. “I can’t reach you, then I reckon I got to get me a wee bit closer.”
Lobo stood up and dropped the horse’s reins. The horse didn’t move. “Now don’t be a damn fool, Deel.”
Deel slung the shotgun’s makeshift strap over his shoulder and started climbing down the back of the stones, where Lobo couldn’t see him. He came down quicker than he had gone up, and he didn’t even feel where the stones had torn his naked knees and feet.
When Deel came around the side of the stone, Lobo had moved only slightly, away from his horse, and he was standing with the Winchester held down by his side. He was watching as Deel advanced, naked and committed. Lobo said, “Ain’t no sense in this, Deel. I ain’t seen you in years, and now I’m gonna get my best look at you down the length of a Winchester. Ain’t no sense in it.”
“There ain’t no sense to nothin’,” Deel said, and walked faster, pulling the strapped shotgun off his shoulder.
Lobo backed up a little, then raised the Winchester to his shoulder, said, “Last warnin’, Deel.”
Deel didn’t stop. He pulled the shotgun stock to his hip and let it rip. The shot went wide and fell across the grass like hail, some twenty feet in front of Lobo. And then Lobo fired.
Deel thought someone had shoved him. It felt that way. That someone had walked up unseen beside him and had shoved him on the shoulder. Next thing he knew he was lying on the ground looking up at the stars. He felt pain, but not like the pain he had felt when he realized what he was.
A moment later the shotgun was pulled from his hand, and then Lobo was kneeling down next to him with the Winchester in one hand and the shotgun in the other.
“I done killed you, Deel.”
“No,” Deel said, spitting up blood. “I ain’t alive to kill.”
“I think I clipped a lung,” Lobo said, as if proud of his marksmanship. “You ought not done what you done. It’s good that boy got away. He ain’t no cause of nothin’.”
“He just ain’t had his turn.”
Deel’s chest was filling up with blood. It was as if someone had put a funnel in his mouth and poured it into him. He tried to say something more, but it wouldn’t come out. There was only a cough and some blood; it splattered warm on his chest. Lobo put the weapons down and picked up Deel’s head and laid it across one of his thighs so he wasn’t choking so much.
“You got any last words, Deel?”
“Look there,” Deel said.
Deel’s eyes had lifted to the heavens, and Lobo looked. What he saw was the night and the moon and the stars. “Look there. You see it?” Deel said. “The stars are fallin’.”
Lobo said, “Ain’t nothin’ fallin’, Deel,” but when he looked back down, Deel was gone.
There are restless spirits in “Hurt Me” and—like many traditional ghost stories—they are fueled by obsession, guilt, malice, anger, and revenge . . . but perhaps not in the way you might expect.
HURT ME
M.L.N. HANOVER
There weren’t many three-bedroom houses that a single woman could afford; 1532 Lachmont Drive was an exception. Built in the 1930s from masonry block, it sat in the middle of a line of houses that had once been very similar to it. Decades of use and modification had added character: basement added in the 1950s, called “finished” only because the floor was concrete rather than dirt; garage tacked on to the north side that pressed its outer wall almost to the property line; artificial pond in the back yard that had held nothing but silt since the 1980s. The air smelled close and musty, the kitchen vent cover banged in the wind, and the Air Force base three miles to the north meant occasional jet noise loud enough to shake the earth. But the floors were hardwood, the windows recently replaced, and the interiors a uniform white that made the most of the hazy autumn light.
The realtor watched the woman—Corrie Morales was her name—nervously. He didn’t like the way she homed in on the house’s subtle defects. Yes, there had been some water damage in the bathroom once. Yes, the plaster in the master bedroom was cracking, just a little. The washer/dryer in the basement seemed to please her, though. And the bathtub was an old iron claw-footed number, the enamel barely chipped, and she smiled as soon as she saw it.
She wasn’t the sort of client he usually aimed for. He was better with new families, either just-marrieds or first-kid types. With them, he could talk about building a life, and how the house had room to grow in. A sewing room for the woman, an office for the man, though God knew these days it seemed to go the other direction often as not. New families would come in, live for a few years, and trade up. Or traffic from the base; military people with enough money to build up equity and flip the house when they got re-assigned rather than lose money by paying rent. He had a different set of patter for those, but he could work with them. New families and military folks. Let the other realtors sell the big mansions in the foothills. Maybe he didn’t make as much on each sale, but there were places in his territory he’d sold three or four times in the last ten years.
This woman, though, was hard to read: in her late thirties and seeing the place by herself; no wedding ring. Her face had been pretty once, not too long ago. Might still be, if she wore her hair a little longer or pulled it back in a ponytail. Maybe she was a lesbian. Not that it mattered to him, as long as her money spent.
“It’s a good, solid house,” he said, nodding as a trick to make her nod along with him.
“It is,” she said. “The price seems low.”
“Motivated seller,” he said with a wink.
“By what?” She opened and closed the kitchen cabinets.
“Excuse me?”
“Motivated by what?” she said.
“Well, you know how it is,” he said, grinning. “Kids grow up, move on. Families change. A place maybe fits in one part of your life, and then you move on.”
She smiled as if he’d said something funny.
“I don’t know how it is, actually,” she said. “The seller moved out because she got tired of the place?”
The realtor shrugged expansively, his mental gears whirring. The question felt like a trap. He wondered how much the woman had heard about the house. He couldn’t afford to get caught in an outright lie.
“Well, they were young,” he said. “Just got hitched, and they had all these ideas and plans. I don’t like selling to newlyweds. Especially young ones. Too young to know what they’re getting into. Better to go rent a few places, move around. Find out what you like, what you don’t like.”
“Bought it and didn’t like it?”
“Didn’t know quite what they were getting into,” he said.
The sudden weariness around the woman’s eyes was like a tell at a poker table. The realtor felt himself relax. Divorced, this one. Maybe more than once. Alone now, and getting older. Maybe she was looking for some
place cheap, or maybe it was just the allure of new beginnings. That he was wrong in almost every detail didn’t keep him from playing that hand.
“My wife was just the same, God rest her,” he said. “When we were kids, she’d hop into any old project like she was killing snakes. Got in over her head. Hell, she probably wouldn’t have said yes to me if she’d thought it through. You get older, you know better. Don’t get in so many messes. They were good kids, just no judgment.”
She walked across the living room. It looked big, empty like this. Add a couch, a couple chairs, a coffee table, and it would get cramped fast. But right now, the woman walked across it like it was a field. Like she was that twenty-year-old girl with her new husband outside getting the baggage or off to work on the base. Like the world hadn’t cut her down a couple times.
He could smell the sale. He could taste it.
“Lot of rentals in the neighborhood,” she said, looking out the front window. He knew from her voice that her heart wasn’t in the dickering. “Hard to build up much of a community when you’re getting new neighbors all the time.”
“You see that with anything near the base,” he said, like they were talking about the weather. “People don’t have the money for a down payment. Or some just prefer renting.”
“I can’t rent anymore.”
“No?”
“I smoke,” she said.
“That’s a problem these days. Unless you’ve got your own house, of course.”
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The realtor had to fight himself not to grin. Here we go.
“Wrap it up,” she said. “I’ll take it.”
Mr. And Mrs. Kleinfeld had lived at 1530 Lachmont Drive for eight years, making them the longest-standing residents of the block. To them, the U-Haul that pulled up on Sunday morning was almost unremarkable. They ate their toast and jam, listened to the preacher on the radio, and watched the new neighbor start unloading boxes. She wore a pair of old blue jeans, a dark T-shirt with the logo of a long-canceled television show across the front, and a pale green bandana. When the breakfast was over, Mrs. Kleinfeld turned off the radio and cleaned the plates while Mr. Kleinfeld ambled out to the front yard.
“Morning,” he said as the new woman stepped down from the back of the truck, a box of under-packed drinking glasses jingling in her hand.
“Hi,” she said with a grin.
“Moving day,” Mr. Kleinfeld said.
“It is,” she said.
“You need a hand with any of that?”
“I think I’m good. Thanks, though. If it turns out I do . . . ?”
“Me and the Missus are here all day,” he said. “Come over any time. And welcome to the neighborhood.”
“Thanks.”
He nodded amiably and went back inside. Mrs. Kleinfeld was sitting at the computer, entering the week’s expenses. A trapped housefly was beating itself to death against the window, angry buzzing interrupted by hard taps.
“It’s happening again,” Mrs. Kleifeld said.
“It is.”
It took her the better part of the day to put together the basics. Just assembling the new bed had taken over an hour and left her wrist sore. The refrigerator wouldn’t be delivered until the next day. The back bedroom, now a staging area, was thigh-deep in packed one-thing-and-another. There was no phone service except her cell. The electricity wasn’t in her name yet. But by nightfall, there were clothes in the closet, towels in the bathroom, and her old leather couch in the living room by the television. She needed to take the U-Haul back, but it could wait for morning.
She walked briskly through the house—her house—and closed all the blinds. The slick white plastic was thick enough to kill all the light from the street. The new double-glazed windows cut out the sounds of traffic. It was like the walls had been suddenly, silently, transported someplace else. Like it was a space capsule, a million miles from anything human, cut off from the world.
She turned on the water in the tub. It ran red for a moment, rust in the pipes, and then clear, and then scalding hot. She stripped as the steam rose. Naked in front of the full-length mirror, she watched the scars on her legs and elbows—the tiny circles no bigger than the tip of a lit cigarette; the longer, thinner ones where a blade had marred the skin—blur and fade and vanish. Her reflected body softened, and the glass began to weep. She turned off the water and eased herself into the bath slowly. The heat of it brought the blood to her skin like a slap. She laid her head against the iron tub’s sloping back, fidgeting to find the perfect angle. She had soap, a washcloth, shampoo, the almond-scented conditioner that her boyfriend David liked. She didn’t use any of them. After about ten minutes, she turned, leaning over the edge to reach for the puddle of blue cloth that was her jeans. A pack of cigarettes. A Zippo lighter with its worn Pink Martini logo. The slick and hiss of the flame. The first long drag of smoke curling through the back of her throat. She tossed cigarette pack and lighter onto the floor, and lay back again. The tension in her back and legs and belly started to lose its grip.
Around her, the house made small sounds: the ticking of the walls as they cooled, the hum of her computer’s cooling fan, the soft clinking of the water that lapped her knees and breasts. Smoke rose from her cigarette, lost almost instantly in the steam. The first stirrings of hunger had just touched her belly when the screaming started, jet engines ramping up from nothing to an inhuman shriek between one breath and the next. Something fluttered in her peripheral vision, and she scrambled around, dropping her cigarette in the tub and soaking the floor with water.
Something moved in the mirror. Something that wasn’t her. The condensation made it impossible to see him clearly. He might have had pale hair or he might have been bald. He might have jeans or dark slacks. The shirt was white where it wasn’t red. The movement of balled fists was clearer than the hands themselves, and somewhere deep in the airplane’s roar, there were words. Angry ones. Corrie yelped, her feet slipping under her as she tried to jump clear.
The noise began to fade as suddenly as it had come. The rumbling echoes batting at the walls more and more weakly. The mirror was empty again, except for her. She took a towel, wrapping herself quickly. Her blood felt bright and quick, her heart fluttering like a bird, her breath fast and panic-shallow. Her mouth tasted like metal.
“Hello?” she said. “Is someone in here?”
The floor creaked under her weight. She stood still, waiting for an answering footstep. The water pooled around her feet, and she began to shiver. The house had grown viciously cold.
“Is anyone here?” she said again, her voice small and shaking.
Nothing answered her but the smell of her spent cigarette.
“All right, then,” she said, hugging her arms tight around herself. “Okay.”
“Mom. Listen to me. Everything’s fine. We’re not breaking up,” she said, willing her voice to be more certain than she was.
“Well, you move out like this,” her mother said, voice pressed small and tinny by the cell connection. “And that house? I think it’s perfectly reasonable of me to be concerned.”
Corrie lay back on the couch, pressing the tips of her fingers to her eyes. Sleeplessness left her skin waxy and pale, her movements slow. She had taken the day off work, thinking she would finish unpacking, but the boxes were still where they had been the day before. Afternoon sun spilled in through the windows, making the small living room glow. The refrigerator had arrived an hour before and hummed to itself from the kitchen, still empty.
“It’s just something I need to do,” Corrie said.
“Is he beating you?”
“Who? David? My David?”
“People have habits,” her mother said. She raised her voice when she lectured. “They imprint. I did the same thing when I was young. All my husbands were alcoholics, just like my father was. I like David very much. He’s always been very pleasant. But you have a type.”
“I haven’t dated anyone seriou
sly since Nash. I don’t have a type.”
“What about that Hebrew boy? Nathaniel?”
“I saw him a total of eight times. He got drunk, broke a window, and I never talked to him again.”
“Don’t turn into a lawyer with me. You know exactly what I mean. There’s a kind of man that excites you, and so of course you might find yourself involved with that kind of man. If David’s another one like Nash, I think I have a right to—”
Corrie sat up, pressing her hand at the empty air as if her mother could see the gesture for stop. The distant music of an ice-cream truck came from a different world, the jaunty electronic tune insincere and ominous.
“Mother. I don’t feel comfortable talking about the kind of man that does or doesn’t excite me, all right? David is absolutely unlike Nash in every possible way. He wouldn’t hurt me if I asked him to.”
“Did you?” her mother snapped.
“Did I what?”
“Did you ask him to hurt you?”
The pause hung in the air, equal parts storm and silence.
“Okay, we’re finished,” Corrie said. “I love you, Mom, and I really appreciate that you’re concerned, but I am not talking about—”
“You are!” her mother shouted. “You are talking about everything with me! I have spent too much time and money making sure that you are all right to pretend that there are boundaries. Maybe for other people, but not for us, mija. Never for us.”
Corrie groaned. The quiet on the end of her cell phone managed to be hurt and accusing.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I understand that you’re scared about this. And really, I understand why you’re scared. But you have to trust that I know what I’m doing. I’m not twenty anymore.”
“Did you or did you not ask David to hurt you?”
“My sex life with David has been very respectful and loving,” Corrie said through gritted teeth. “He is always a perfect gentleman. The few times that we’ve talked—just talked—about anything even a little kinky, he’s been very uncomfortable with including even simulated violence in our relationship. Okay? Now can we please drop—”
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Page 29