The Best New Horror 7

by Stephen Jones

  Still, for nearly every day I do make an attempt to find something good in it. My wife would expect it of me.

  Around the time of that last column, I had been enmeshed in an ongoing debate over sex and violence on TV. As one who earned his living from words, I was made very nervous by the groups of self-appointed guardians of the public trust who were making noisy demands that they knew best for us all, and should be granted an advisory capacity to monitor what went out over the airwaves. They were armed with lots of zeal, and stats selectively compiled from cause-and-effect studies whose validity wasn’t even agreed upon, certainly not conclusively enough to warrant compromising the First Amendment. I spent a lot of ink trying to puncture holes in their self-righteousness and pseudo-science. Today an image, tomorrow a thought, that was my fear; it’s not without precedent.

  I can’t imagine how much these people must have grown to hate me. The columnist always gets the last word; the columnist is the embodiment of smug and godless ruin, the self-congratulatory Nero who fiddles while Rome burns.

  Maybe I was.

  I tried to tell myself that the team who showed up at my home one night wasn’t really trying to harm anyone. That their goal was to frighten. Doesn’t killing somebody undermine credibility, even as an extremist? They said they got the idea from a rerun of Miami Vice. Too much monitoring? Anything to prove a point, I suppose.

  But I’ve given up trying to figure them out. Facts are easier to stick with. They lobbed three gasoline bombs into our home at three different locations. We’d been remodeling, and things were a mess, and the fires spread quickly, joining into one conflagration while the smoke billowed into a dense, caustic cloud.

  A wife and two children, I lost them all, and gained a lot of blisters and baked skin that took months to heal. The people who did this, certainly they shut me up; it’s hard to type with your hands swathed in bandages, and I couldn’t keep my head clear enough to dictate a column to save my life. It wasn’t for lack of trying. I’d get a paragraph in, maybe two on a lucid day, and then I’d think I smelled my children, or heard them crying out to me, in absolute faith that I would never fail them.

  You’ve never known failure until the last thing you’ve taught your children is how fragile and human you really are.

  I didn’t decide to leave the country until after the trials and convictions. I attended faithfully, like church, and before the day of the sentencing I schemed obsessively to smuggle a pistol into the courtroom so it was waiting for me. If the judge didn’t come down hard enough to suit me, I could at least rise like an avenging angel and bring them down in retribution for the three people I had failed most in this world.

  I even had my hand on the grip before I began wondering what the experience had turned me into. I’d actually considered this? I’d thought I could go through with it?

  Something’s wrong, I thought. Something is very wrong and it’s not just me.

  South America. I later thought. It would be another world, someplace to stumble around and lose myself for years while I got my bearings. I could live cheaply down there; with the insurance, and the money I’d earned from syndication, I might not have to work for a very long time. I might be human again by then.

  Ultimately, though, it wasn’t the struggle with my own murderous impulses that drove me south. It was my neighbor from directly across the street.

  The gasoline bombs immediately caught his eye, fires blooming in an upstairs bedroom, the dining room, family room. My neighbor was concerned just enough to make a run for his video camera; not enough to actually try to help. He taped everything, even after I was long gone to the hospital in a scream of sirens . . . right up to the moment when they brought out the bagged bodies of my family from the smoldering husk of the house.

  He sold that damned tape to a tabloid show for more than I’d earned my first six years working for the newspapers.

  I had a hard time dealing with that.

  The next day I learned from Pedro that a shopkeeper had been savaged several blocks from my apartment the same night I’d seen whatever it was from my bedroom window. Not all of the body had been recovered; because of the teeth- and clawmarks, the general assumption was that it never would be.

  Everybody who lived in the area, and many beyond, knew about the victim. He operated a botanica, filled with fragrant herbs and pictures of saints, with incense and candles, standard trappings of the numerous religions to spring from an African commonality. Vodoun, santeria, candomblé, macumba . . . the same basic gods and beliefs, with variations among their rites. Most knew this man for the sham he was, with faith in nothing more than profit. His trade was not with true believers, but mostly with dabbling kids who wanted something more primal than the Catholicism of their parents and didn’t know any better about him, and with tourists who got a cheap thrill out of burning a candle they could have bought for a fraction elsewhere, but felt sure the expensive one was blessed.

  Of course, nobody deserved to die in such a ghastly way, but on the streets, one got the feeling he wouldn’t be missed.

  “Do you think I should report what I saw?” I asked Pedro that same afternoon. He was eating from a bag of pistachio nuts and his lips were comically red, a right jolly old elf.

  “And what was that: an animal you saw for a moment in the dark. This much is known already.” Pedro shrugged. “The policía, what will they do? They will listen, and they will look very bored, and if feeling lively they will scratch their bellies and their balls.” He shrugged again. “Do as you must. But for me, life is too short to spend it watching hairy men scratch themselves.”

  Pedro’s dismissal of the police was as practical as it was fatalistic. They’re no different here than they are throughout much of South America; poorly equipped, underpaid, and notoriously corrupt. Paying the equivalent of $200 American per month, the force hardly draws the cream of the crop. They are the puppets of anyone who puts up enough money.

  And I ended up taking Pedro’s advice.

  It is the way of things down here, and I had learned well in my two years living with them. They accept as natural the oddest things at times, as if a carnivore materializing in the heart of a city of five million, and carrying off pieces of a shopkeeper, is well within the realm of possibilities. They believe in the kinds of magic that come sweeping down on warm winds from the grassy open pampas, or ooze in like fog from the jungles, or bubble up in the thickest of slums. They recognize miracles of both the light and the darkness, because they’ve lived them for so long, keeping spirits and hopes robust even while the occasional dictator has sought to crush protesting throats beneath his boot. It’s not that they’re apathetic to tragedy; they merely reserve their outrage for what truly matters. All else, when said and done, is life in all its richness, simply life.

  It’s only in the youngest and dirtiest of the city’s wealth of life that I see no hope, in whom hope has died, if it has lived at all. The street kids are a breed unto themselves, roaming in packs for survival, and clinging tenaciously to one another for a sense of family.

  The government said the problem is under control, that only fifteen hundred or so actually sleep on the streets. It seems a whitewash to me, that there must be more, but even if that figure is correct, the government can’t deny that tens of thousands more get nothing out of their homes other than a place to sleep when exhausted. The streets may not be their bed, but are still the only way these kids can survive. Children as young as six shine shoes and sell candy, hire themselves out for odd jobs, steal, and prostitute their bodies. They get by, many of them, on fifty cents a day.

  It gets them dead sometimes.

  The street kids – grubby urchins whose dark eyes can be sad one moment, shining innocently the next, and turn vicious a moment later – are not just some exotic species to me that I watch from afar. I know many of them fairly well, give them money and bring them food, listen to them imagine their funerals as if fifteen is an impossibly old age they can never attain.r />
  Many nights I have shared their company as they’ve huddled in tiny cardboard cities erected in alleyways fetid with garbage and plunged deeply into menace by primal shadows beyond their fire. A good night is when they can grill a dog, mouths watering at the sweet smoke. They stand careful watch for off-duty policías, of whom they live in constant fear.

  They kill children here, remember.

  The army no longer is in charge, but death squads haven’t faded into the past – they’ve been co-opted by private enterprise. Swift little beggars and thieves drive away tourists, shopkeepers complain; bad for business. Some of them pool money and pay the most corrupt policías to roam the streets in their off-duty hours, and eradicate the menace. It’s gone on for twenty years, but they used to be discreet about it. No longer. Last year three of them used MAC-10s to gun down eleven kids one bright summer afternoon after a tour bus had been boarded by a gang and its passengers robbed. It was a broad retaliatory strike; the gunmen had no interest in making sure they had the same kids. The bodies were strewn along an entire block of a busy city street that had grown as deserted as a town in an American western movie. I’m sure the rogue policías saw themselves as avenging gunslingers.

  Over this, the country screamed its outrage. To appease it, the three killers were arrested, tried, and convicted, are now doing thirty years. I have my doubts they’ll walk out alive. Cops in prison make tempting targets. But they were only sacrificial scapegoats, nothing more. Shopkeepers and death squads alike took a lesson from them; no crowds of witnesses, no bodies strewn along the streets. Bad for public relations.

  For the street kids, though, business went on just the same.

  That, too, was life.

  Three nights later I was awakened by pounding at my door, a pounding of steady desperation. I slipped on khaki pants and went stumbling for the door before the neighbors suffered, complained. I passed a hallway clock that read nearly 3:00 a.m. I opened the door, immediately had to look down.

  I had expected my visitor to be taller.

  “Miguel?” I said. “What the hell is –?”

  It was one of the kids, the lost, one of the sleepers in the asphalt bedroom. Miguel believes he might be eleven years old, a skinny-limbed boy with a beautiful smile and long black hair that tumbles into eyes that know too much. I’d once forcibly taken him to a doctor and paid for the penicillin that cured his gonorrhea.

  “You come with me, okay?” he was saying, tugging urgently at my bare arm. “You have medicines, okay? You come now, find your shoes.”

  I hurried, throwing a few things together while quizzing him and getting frustratingly incomplete answers. He could hardly quit dancing around my apartment, impatient to get me moving into the night. The most I could get out of him was that Rafael was hurt. I didn’t even know a Rafael, but I grabbed bandages, disinfectant, a bottle of antibiotics . . . things I’d scrounged in case the kids needed them. But I was hardly qualified to practice medicine.

  We left my apartment and descended into the streets Miguel leading me along a dark path of alleys and airways, where soon I became aware of everything that might be lying just beyond my limits of vision. I could smell it, sense it, strata of decay and disease. Miguel traveled without hesitation or misstep, as sure-footed and bold as a mountain goat, and he never dropped his hands from my arm. I felt as long as he had hold of me, I would pass with impunity. Probably I’d not have been so lucky two years ago.

  I had been robbed one night within a month of my moving here, by a pair of twelve-year-olds with knives. They’d have used them if I’d resisted, I’m sure, but perhaps it was because, still in mourning, I assigned so little value to my own life that I could see how terrified they were, knives or not. They took me for maybe forty dollars and a watch I still haven’t replaced. As they were backing away, brandishing their knives to discourage any heroism, I knelt and took off a shoe and peeled out another bill.

  “You missed one,” I said. They looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. They took the bill – it was, after all, offered freely – but never was I robbed again. It may only be coincidence . . . but even I am able to believe in a little magic.

  Miguel hurried me along for half an hour, deep into twisting passages and hellish urban bowels, until we arrived at one of those transient settlements of cardboard and packing crates. The moon was a chilly scythe scraping behind the tall silhouette of a tenement building, and as Miguel called out with a soft hooting cry of identification, I sensed a quick sinuous movement just beyond us. It flanked us, whipped over and around as if scampering across a mound of garbage, glided down into thicker darkness –

  And was gone.

  “Down,” Miguel said to me, and for a moment I thought he meant I should drop to hands and knees to enter one of these rude domains. And while I’d have to, it wasn’t what he meant, “Down, to me,” he said. All he wanted was to look me directly in the eye.

  He raised his small hands, cupped my face as tenderly and urgently as a doting mother. An eleven-year-old with responsibilities I could never have imagined dealing with at that age.

  “You help Rafael, right? Right, Monjito?” It was their name for me, Monjito, roughly meaning “Little Monk”. It was their way of teasing me for living alone.

  “I’ll try, Miguel,” I whispered, while from all around us I got the sense of being watched, of life unseen. Small eyes were surely peering from makeshift doorways. “But you haven’t even told me what’s happened to him.”

  “You like Rafael. He’s my friend.” Still pressing his tough little hands to my face, Miguel glanced to either side, then leaned closer in. “You live here long enough now, you see strange things. Okay? Not like your old home. You see another strange thing now, maybe. Monjito? I trust you. You never show us to the policía, right? I trust you.”

  I gripped his wrists, thin as broomsticks. “I’d never turn you in. Never worry about that.”

  He released my face and dropped to all fours, scurrying into the mouth of one of the hovels they’d tacked together in a half hour’s time, if that. I followed, struck by the sudden reek of sweat and blood inside the six-foot crawlspace. Miguel pushed aside a scrap of burlap coffee bag used for a curtain and we crowded into a miserable little chamber that couldn’t even be stood up in, whose only decor was pictures I’d taken of the kids, over time. It was lit by half a dozen candles of various colors, and I tried not to think what would happen if one of them tipped against a wall, unnoticed.

  “Rafael,” he said, pointing.

  He was a curly-haired boy near Miguel’s age, maybe a year or two older. It’s so hard to tell sometimes. Rafael lay barechested and trembling along one rough-hewn wall, a pallet of rags for his mattress. He was covered to the waist by a thin blanket; the bloodstains atop the grime looked fresh.

  Rafael opened his eyes, looked at me without emotion, with neither fear nor relief. I was simply there. He did not shut them until Miguel squatted closer and stroked the boy’s shoulder.

  I quit praying three years ago, but for this I resurrected the act. I slowly drew down the blanket, a few inches at a time, until I saw that his naked hip bore the swollen red pucker of a bullet wound. It was obvious that Rafael had shat himself, but not here; it was only a few smears.

  Although he would have to be kept warm, I couldn’t leave that filthy blanket on him; maybe Miguel could run back to my place for a clean one. I tugged the worn cloth off him to toss it aside –

  And I stared at what lay beneath the rest. Beyond acceptance, beyond rejection. What I saw? It simply was.

  The boy’s feet and lower legs were not human, but some kind of canine or lupine form, bristling with dark fur and matted with his blood. As Rafael twitched, a claw extending crookedly from between a pair of toe-pads scratched incessantly at the wood. They bent strangely, these haunches, the underlying bone structure consistent with animal origins; the feral hide and muscle melded gradually into his skinny boyish thighs.

  “He looks some more normal tha
n he did when I leave for you,” said Miguel. “Soon, he looks like same Rafael again, no different. You help him, okay?”

  “He’s been shot,” I murmured. “He needs a doctor, he needs to go to a clinic.”

  “No doctor, no clinic. They don’t fix him so good, maybe, they see him like this.” Miguel was very firm. “The bullet, out already. Don’t worry, Monjito. I did a good job.” He pointed at a bloody lump of misshapen lead and twiddled his thin fingers like pincers. He’d dug it out with his fingers.

  I worked, trying not to think what I was working on, because it wasn’t the time for questions. All I could try was to keep uppermost in my mind that there was a young boy who’d been shot, and whatever else he may have been didn’t matter. I irrigated and cleaned out the wound, and while swelling had cut off most of the bleeding, I still had to attempt a crude job of stitching closed the hole. I packed it over with a thick bandage, fed him a dose of antibiotics, then resigned myself to the fact that it was the most I knew how to do.

  After which I leaned trembling against the hovel’s frail wooden wall. Rafael had dropped into fitful slumber, while Miguel sat on his haunches and, in the warm glow of the candles, watched us with a strangely affectionate pride.

  “You did a good job, I knew you would,” he said, smiling, and he must have seen all the questions in my eyes. It was one of the most horrible moments of my life, the way he regarded me with not just understanding . . . it was with pity.

  Miguel squirmed slowly across the cramped room, lifted aside the clean blanket he’d come back with while I doctored. Rafael’s strange legs looked even more like a normal boy’s than they had earlier, mended by some creeping transformation. Miguel traced a slow finger through the thinning patches of fur.

  “Happens now, to some of us,” he said dreamily, with neither sadness nor joy. “Few months, must be, maybe, that’s all. Was a long time before we could do it any time we want. I can do it now for you, but I think you don’t so much want to see me . . . so, no, right?”