The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror
Page 35
A shock passed through Johnson, quite a violent one.
Afterwards, he was slightly amazed at his own reaction.
For Jason was not dining on a severed hand, not on anything human at all, and yet—Yet the way he ate and what he ate—a fish, evidently raw and very fresh, head and scales and fins and tail and eyes and bones all there, tearing at them with his opened jaws, eating, gnawing, swallowing all, those metal eyes glazed like those of a lion, a dragon—This alone. It was enough.
Not since London had Johnson driven, but his license was current and immaculate. Even his ironic leg, driving, gave him no problems.
He hired the red Skoda in town. It wasn’t bad, easy to handle.
On the afternoon of the almost full moon, having waited on the Nores Road for six and three-quarter hours, he spotted Jason’s blue BMW instantly. Johnson followed it on through forty minutes of country lanes, between winter fields and tall, bare trees, all the way to a small village known as Stacklebridge. Here, at a roundabout, the BMW turned around and drove straight back the way it had come.
Johnson, however, drove on to Newsham and spent an hour admiring the Saxon church, sheep, and rush-hour traffic going north and south. He had not risked the obvious move of also turning and tracking the other car homeward. Near Sandbourne, he was sure, Jason would park his vehicle in concealment off the road, perhaps in a derelict barn. Then walk, maybe even sprint the last distance, to reach his house or the pier before moonrise.
The nature of his studies had often meant Johnson must be patient. He had realized, even before following the blue car, that he could do nothing now, that was, nothing this month; it was already too late. But waiting was always part of watching, wasn’t it? And he had been stupidly inattentive and over-confident only once, and so received the corrective punishment of a knife. He would be careful this time.
4.
He didn’t need to dream about it now. He was forewarned, forearmed.
But the dream still occurred.
He was in the pier ballroom, and it was years ago because the ballroom was almost intact, just some broken windows and holes in the floor and walls, where brickwork and struts and darkness and black water showed. But the chandeliers burned with a cold, sparkling lemon glory overhead. All about were heaps of dancers, lying in their dancing clothes, black and white and rainbow. They were all dead and mutilated, torn, bitten, and rotted almost to unrecognizability.
Jason came up from under the pier, directly through the floor, already eating, with a savage hunger that was more like rage, a long white arm with ringed fingers.
But his eyes weren’t glazed now. They were fixed on Johnson. They knew Johnson. And in ten seconds more Jason would spring, and as he sprang, would become what he truly was, even if only for three nights of every month. The nights he had made sure everyone who knew of him here also thought he spent in Nores.
Johnson reacted prudently. He woke himself up.
He had had dreams about other people, too, which had indicated to him some psychological key to what was troubling them, far beyond anything they had been able to say. Johnson had normally trusted the dreams, reckoning they were his own mechanism of analysis, explaining to him. And he had been very accurate. Then Johnson had dreamed that gentle, tearful Mark Cruikshank from Publicity had come up to him on the carpark roof at Haine and Birch and stuck a long, pointed fingernail through his heart. The dream was so absurd, so out of character, so overdramatic that Johnson dismissed it as indigestion. But a couple of days later Mark stabbed him in the groin, with the kind of knife you could now buy anywhere in the backways of London. For this reason Johnson did not think to discount the dreams of Jason. And for this reason, too, Johnson had known, almost at once, exactly what he was dealing with.
Christmas, personally irrelevant to Johnson for years, was much more important this year. Just as December was, with its crowds of frantic shoppers—not only in the festive, noisy shops, but in their cars racing up to London and back, or to Nores and back.
Moonrise on the first of the three nights (waxing full, full declining to gibbous) was earlier in the day, according to the calendar Johnson had bought. It was due at 5:33 p.m.
Not knowing, therefore, if Jason would set out earlier than he had the previous month in order to beat the rush-hour traffic after four, Johnson parked the hired Skoda in a lay-by just clear of the suburbs, where the Nores Road began.
In fact the BMW didn’t appear until three-thirty. Perhaps Jason had been delayed. Or perhaps, as Johnson suspected, a frisson of excitement always ruled the man’s life at this time, adding pleasure to the danger of cutting things fine. For, once the moon was up, visible to Jason and to others; the change must happen. (There were plenty of books, fiction and non, to apprise any researcher of this point.)
On this occasion, Johnson only followed the blue car far enough to get out into the hump-backed country lanes. Then he pulled off the road and parked on a narrow, pebbly shoulder.
He had himself to judge everything to within a hair’s breadth.
To begin the maneuver too soon would be to call attention, and therefore assistance and so dispersal. Indeed, the local radio station would doubtless report it, and so might warn Jason off. There were other places after all that Jason, or what Jason became, could seek refuge in.
Probably Jason always turned round at the Stacklebridge roundabout, however. It was the easiest spot to do so.
Johnson kept his eye on his watch. He had made the trip twice more in the interim, and it took consistently roughly eighty minutes to the village and back. But already there was a steady increase in cars buzzing, and frequently too quickly, along the sea-bound lane.
At ten to four the sun went. The sky stayed a fiery lavender for another thirteen minutes.
At four twenty-five Johnson, using a brief gap in traffic, started the Skoda and drove it back fast onto and across the narrow road, simultaneously slamming into reverse. A horrible crunching. The car juddered to a permanent halt.
He had judged it on his last trip: stalled and slanted sidelong across the lane, the Skoda blocked the thoroughfare entirely for anything—save a supermodel on a bicycle.
Johnson got out of the car and locked the doors. He made no attempt to warn the next car whose headlamps he could see blooming. It came bounding over the crest of the lane, registered it had about twenty yards to brake, almost managed it, and tapped into the Skoda with a bump and screech. Belted in, the driver didn’t come to much harm. But he had buckled a headlight, and the Skoda’s bodywork would need some repairs, aside from its gearbox. The driver scrambled out and began to swear at Johnson, who was most apologetic, describing how his vehicle had gone out of control. They exchanged details. Johnson’s were the real ones; he saw no need to disguise them.
As they communicated, three more cars flowed over the crest and, not going quite so fast, pulled to a halt without mishap. Meanwhile two other cars coming from the direction of Sandbourne were also forced to stop.
Soon there was quite a crowd.
The police must be called, and the AA, plus partners and others waiting. Lights from headlamps and digital gadgets flickered and blazed. Mobiles were out all along the verges, chattering and chiming and playing silly tunes under the darkling winter trees.
All the while, the back-up of trapped cars on either side was growing.
Covered by this group event, Johnson absented himself carefully, slipping off along the tree-walled hem of the fields, making his way back up the static vehicular line towards Stacklebridge.
People asked him if he knew what had happened, how long help would be in coming. He said some idiot had crashed his gears. He said the police were on their way.
It was full dark, five-fifteen, eighteen minutes to moonrise, when he noted Jason’s BMW. It was boxed in on all sides, and people were out of their cars here, too, shouting, making calls, angry, frustrated, and only Jason still there, poised over the wheel, staring out blankly like something caught in a cage. He
didn’t look angry. He wasn’t making a call. Standing back in darkness under the leafless boughs, Johnson observed Jason and timed the moon on his luminous watch.
In fact, the disk didn’t come up over the slope to the left until the dial showed 5:41. By then the changes were well advanced.
Afterward, Johnson guessed no one else had noticed much what happened inside the BMW. It was the Age of Solipsism. You cared only for yourself and what was yours. The agony of another, unless presented on celluloid, was missed.
But Johnson saw.
He saw the flurry and then the frenzy, planes of half light and deep darkness fighting with each other like two vultures over a corpse. And he heard the screams.
And when the creature—and by then this was all one could call it—burst out, straight out the side of the BMW, none of them could ignore that they might have to deal with it.
Jason had become his true self. He—it—was about seven feet tall and solidly built, but as fluid in movement as an eel. The head and face, chest and back and arms were heavily hairy, covered in a sort of pelt through which two pale, fishlike eyes and a row of icy teeth glared and flamed. The genital area was also sheathed in fur, but under that the legs were scaled like those of a giant snake or fish. When the huge clawed hands rose up, they, too, had scales, very pallid in the blaze of headlights. It snarled, and it stank, rank, stale, fishy. This anomalous thing, with the face of a dog and the eyes of a cod, sprang directly against the crowd.
Johnson, cool, calculating, lonely Johnson (to whom every human was a type of study animal), had deemed casualties inevitable, and certainly there were a few. But then, as he, student of humanity, had predicted, they turned.
Subsequent news broadcasts spared no one who heard, saw, or read them the account of how a mob of already outraged people had ripped the monstrous beast apart. Questioned later they had been nauseous, shivering, crying, but at the hour, Johnson himself had seen what they did, and how they stood there after, looking down at the mess smeared and trampled on the roadway. Jason of course, given half a chance, would have and had done the same to them. And contrary to the myth, he did not alter back in death to human form, to lie there, defenseless and accusing. No, he, it, had retained the metamorphosis, to puzzle everyone for months, perhaps years, to come. Naturally, too, it hadn’t needed a silver bullet, either. Silver bullets were the product of legends where the only strong metal, church candlesticks, was melted down to make suitable ammunition. If Johnson had had any doubt, Jason’s own silvery eyes would have removed it.
That night, when the howling tumult and the flying sprays of blood had ceased, Johnson had stood there under the trees. He had felt quite collected. Self-aware, he was thinking of Mark Cruikshank, who had stabbed him, and that finally he, Johnson, for once in his bleak and manacled life, had got his own back on this bloody and insane world of aliens—werewolves, human beings.
There are tragedies we never get over, but we are, as a character in “Crawlspace” relates, supposed to grow enough scar tissue over the wounds to continue to function. But does every injury heal? And when truth is also pain, should it be told?
CRAWLSPACE
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES
Quint calls me up on a Saturday afternoon and tells me to watch this.
I stand in my kitchen and study the stove I put in last Christmas, all my tools on the counter, and all the ones I’d borrowed from Quint. It’s still crooked.
“What channel?” I say.
This is different, though.
Twenty minutes later, Sherry at home with my promise to be back before ten, I’ve eased down to Quint’s, a broken six-pack on the seat beside me, the sole of my boot skimming the loose asphalt gravel between his house and mine.
He’s waiting for me on the porch, smoking like he’s twelve years old again and we only have five minutes before his aunt comes home.
“What?” I say, arcing a beer across the yard to him in a spiral so perfect it should be in a commercial.
He takes it, doesn’t crack it open. That more than anything tells me something’s up.
“Is it Tanya?” I say, looking behind me for some reason.
Tanya’s Quint’s wife. Sunday nights she’s usually on-shift at the hospital.
“Inside,” Quint says, and holds the screen door open, ushers me in.
I shrug, duck into the cat smell of his house and run my finger under my nose.
Quint places his hand on my shoulder like a priest and guides me past his television through the dead part of the kitchen to the hall, then down the hall. The only room this deep into his house is Gabe’s. He’s six months old, maybe. Born just before Christmas. The twin that lived, big tragedy, all that. One that’s supposed to be already over, that Quint’s supposed have dealt with. Not so much gotten out of his system—Sherry says things like that never get out of your system—but at least grown enough scar tissue over it to function.
Until now, too, I’d assumed that was the case. That Quint was functioning.
But now. Being led back to Gabe’s room.
None of the pictures I have in my head are good. Better than half of them involve me lying to the police. Or, worse, to Tanya. So, when Quint palms Gabe’s door open, spilling a wedge of light across his stained crib, Gabe just sleeping there, his thumb cocked in his mouth, I relax a bit.
“Say his name,” Quint says.
“What?”
“Try to wake him up. Just not very hard.”
“Quint, man—”
“My responsibility.”
I turn to Gabe, his lips moving, back rising with breath, and shrug, fill my mouth with beer, do what I know’s an annoying-as-hell little gargle.
Gabe shifts position but doesn’t wake.
“What?” I say. “You gave him some Benadryl?”
My voice makes Gabe roll over, his head screwing around on his pudgy neck, his shoulder blades drawing together.
Quint crosses the room, places a hand on Gabe’s side until his breathing’s even again. Before he leaves he angles the baby monitor a little bit closer to the crib.
We walk back to the kitchen.
“Sherry put you up to this?” I ask.
Quint laughs without any sound, tells me to wait.
Again I look over my shoulder, for Tanya maybe, coming home early in her nurse whites, or for Sherry, waiting for me see how cute Gabe was. How we need one.
It’s just us, though.
I push off the counter with my butt, follow where Quint leads.
It’s to the garage, the old recliner Tanya told him he couldn’t keep in the house even one day longer. Even one minute. It’s in the corner by his toolcart, surrounded by the ashes of ten thousand cigarettes.
“Real nest you got here,” I say, drawing my lips back from my teeth, not in appreciation.
Quint doesn’t say anything, just settles down into it.
On the makeshift table beside his recliner is the listening end of the baby monitor. Gabe’s breathing comes through it like he’s right here with us.
I settle back against the Chevelle Quint still hasn’t fixed up.
“Just watch,” he says again, and takes a paperback from the stack by his chair. It’s a horror novel, like all of them. I can tell by the full moon on the front, the red lettering on the spine. And because I’ve known Quint for nearly eighteen years now.
He settles back into what must be reading position #1, starts reading.
I lean forward, look side to side again, this time for candid cameras, then come back to him.
“Quint, dude—”
He never looks up from the book, just holds his finger up for quiet.
I shake my head—this is what I had to talk my way out of the house for, what I’m going to be paying for for the rest of the week—dig through the bottom drawer of Quint’s toolcart for the magazines he’s always kept there. They’re legal, I’m pretty sure, but still, you wouldn’t want the cops stumbling onto them.
For maybe four min
utes I lean against the Chevelle, study the girls in the classifieds ads after I’ve studied all the girls in the main part of the magazine, and Quint just sits there, hunched over his damn book.
Finally I hiss a laugh through my front teeth, roll the magazine into a tube to hammer down through my fist, and am already pushing off the Chevelle to make for the door and whatever I can scrounge from his fridge when the monitor’s lights pulse red, from left to right. Like a tachometer, I think, Gabe really winding up.
“Shhh,” Quint says, still reading the book, his eyes narrow from the effort.
Gabe’s voice comes through the monitor. A moan, I’d call it.
“Listen,” I say, “this has been exciting and all, and it’s not that I’m not thankful, but—”
Gabe interrupts, screaming, all the monitor’s lights flashing red now.
Quint stands, his bottom lip between his teeth. He’s nodding, as if waiting for me to agree that it was worth coming over here.
I just stand there.
“Like clockwork,” he says, then passes his little horror novel over to me, his index finger holding his place. Without even meaning to, I put my finger there too, and then he’s gone, to Gabe.
The monitor’s close enough to the crib that I hear the springs in the miniature mattress when Quint picks him up, hear what he’s saying, that’s it’s all right, buddy. That it’s not real, it’s not real. Daddy just had to show his friend.
I study the red lights on the monitor, then the book in my hands. Read where Gabe must have been.
It’s scene where a guy’s sleeping in a bed with his wife, and this guy, he’s watching his doorway like it’s the most important thing in the world. But still, he’s not watching close enough. He blinks once, twice, and then on the third blink—ten, twelve minutes of sleep—he wakes to a dead little kid tugging on the covers, then trying to crawl in. Then crawling in anyway.
Quint says it again to Gabe: “It’s not real, buddy. It’s just nothing, man. Nothing at all . . . ”