The Best New Horror 7

by Stephen Jones

  He wasn’t the person he needed to be in order to write it. Much as Stu tried to cooperate, the words had to be Troy’s and Troy’s alone.

  After a troubled night in a motel room, he reached his exact destination: the stadium bleachers at Colorado State University, Fort Collins. He was among the throng gathered for the graduation of the class of ’83. Patiently he waited as the university president announced the names, until he called that of Marti Hutchison, highest honors, Dean’s List.

  Stu had had to emerge this week. This was an event the man would certainly have attended had he not been killed in the Tet Offensive. Marti Hutchison had been a toddler when Stu enlisted, an action he had taken partly in order to support his young family. That day at the recruitment office the war had been only a spark no one believed would flare into an inferno. He had never expected to be removed so far from his child; that was not his concept of the right way to do things. A man needed to Be There, as he had said when he learned he had knocked up his high school girl friend and heard her suggest giving the baby up for adoption.

  He was Being Here today. Troy kept his binoculars pointed at the freckled face until she reached the base of the podium and vanished into the sea of caps and gowns. The eyepieces were wet with tears as he lowered the glasses, and it felt like somebody was pushing at his rib cage from the inside. The sensation recalled an occasion when he had sat in a bunker all night, so scared of the incoming ordnance that his heart tried to leap out and hide under the floor slats with the snakes. Or was that something Stu had experienced?

  It wasn’t fear he was feeling now, though. It was pride. He let the emotion cascade through him, yielding fully, allowing his buddy to savour every particle of the joy.

  A memory came to Troy hard and potent, one of those that he and Stu shared directly: Stu was sitting next to him in the shade of a troop carrier, speaking fondly of his wife, who was due to rendezvous with him in the Philippines during a long R&R the sergeant had coming up.

  “Gonna try for a boy.” He grinned. “On purpose, this time.”

  Troy shut his eyes tight, reliving the moment when the claymore wasted his buddy, ten days before that R&R came due. No boy. Perhaps Troy and Lydia’s child could make up for that, though that was not something he could control. At least he had this much. He caught a glimpse of Marti over the heads of several female classmates – she was almost as tall as her father had been. Again came the heat to his eyes and the tightness to his throat.

  “Do you feel it, Stu?” His murmurs were drowned by the din of the names continuing to boom from the loudspeakers, though to his right a grandmother in a hat and veil glanced at his moving lips with puzzlement. “It’s for you, buddy. You gotta be in here, feeling this.”

  Stu felt it, indulged in it, and as a sharp throb hit Troy on the left half of his chest, the dead man slipped back into limbo.

  A peace came over Troy, a faith that he was done what he was supposed to. Because of him, seven men had their own taste of immortality.

  Lydia would tan his hide for him if he went on more trips soon. But there was so much more to do. He still had never been to the California/Oregon border, where Doug Siddens was from, nor to Artie Farina’s old digs in Brooklyn, nor to . . .

  Surely there was some way to balance it all?

  1989

  “Do you ever really feel anything for us?” Lydia asked.

  The abrupt comment made Troy jump. He had been gazing at the clouds out of the windows of their rental suburban tract home, lost to the moment. He always seemed to be lost to the moment.

  Outside, his daughter Kirsten, resplendent in ruffled skirts and pigtails for her final day of kindergarten, swung vigorously to and fro, fingers laced tightly around the chains, calling to him to watch her Go-So-High as he had promised to do when she headed for the back yard. Had that been thirty seconds ago, or several minutes?

  “What do you mean?” He cleared his throat. “Of course I do.”

  “Do you?” Lydia hid her expression by stepping to the stove to remove the boiling tea kettle from the burner. “That’s good.” She said it deadpan, which was worse than overt sarcasm, because it implied a measure of faith still at risk upon the chopping block.

  “What makes you ask such a question?” He wanted to let the subject drop, but somewhere he found the courage to listen to the answer.

  “You let yourself trickle out in a million directions,” Lydia said, reaching into a cabinet for the box of Mountain Thunder. She put two bags in her mug and poured the water. “But it’s not because you don’t know what discipline is. You make trips, you subscribe to all sorts of small newspapers, you make scrapbooks. You even hired a private detective that time – all to find out more about some guys in your past. If that isn’t ambition, I don’t know what is. But you don’t apply yourself to what you’ve got right here.”

  Lydia’s jaw trembled. “It’s like you’re not even you, half the time. You’re a bunch of different people, and none of them are grown up. When you’re in one of those moods, it’s like Kirsten and I don’t count. Are we just background to you?”

  “I love you both,” he said. “I’m just . . . not good at remembering to say so.”

  Lydia turned away, sipped her tea, and spat the liquid into the sink because it was far too hot. Testily, she waved toward the back yard. “Go push your child. You only have half an hour before you’re supposed to go to that job interview.”

  “Oh. The appointment,” he said. “Almost forgot.”

  “I know.”

  1991

  As Operation Desert Storm progressed and US ground troops stood poised on the border of Kuwait, Troy grew painfully aware of the frowns of the senior citizens at the park where he walked on afternoons when the temp agency failed to find work for him. Those conservative old men were undoubtedly wondering why someone as young as he wasn’t over there kicking Saddam Hussein’s ass, showing the world that America hadn’t forgotten how to win a war. There was no way to explain the truth to them.

  Just as there was no way to tell Lydia, not after all this time.

  The day the Scud missile went cruising into a Jerusalem apartment building, Lydia emerged from the bathroom holding an empty tube of hair darkener, the brand Reagan had used during his administration. “Do you want me to get the larger size when I go to the store?”

  “What do you mean? You’re the only one who uses that stuff,” he replied.

  She blinked. “Me? I’m not the one going grey.”

  Troy swallowed his answer. No use confronting her. Four years younger than he, she was having a hard enough time dealing with her entry into middle age. She smeared on wrinkle cream every morning. She examined her body in the mirror each night after she undressed, bought new bras with greater support features, wore a one-piece bathing suit instead of a bikini so that the stretch marks below her navel would not show.

  “Hey,” he said consolingly, “it’s all right, you know. It doesn’t matter to me how you look.”

  Slowly she held up the tube to his face, her expression a fluctuating mix of anger and pity. “Troy, Troy, Troy – this isn’t even my hair colour. When are you going to stop playing these games?”

  She had said it once too often. “It’s not a game, Lydia.” He choked back, not daring to say more. He regretted saying that much, but he couldn’t let something so important be denigrated that way.

  She tossed the empty tube across the room toward the general vicinity of the waste basket. “Troy, you’re forty-four years old. No matter how well you maintain your looks, let’s face it – you’re getting old. I don’t like it any better than you do, but there it is. I’ve put up with a lot of weird shit from you in thirteen years, but this little fantasy of yours has gone far enough. I think it’s time you saw a therapist.”

  Troy just looked at her in stony silence. The unicorn reared and snorted, though if it heralded the arrival of one of the guys, the latter held back, letting Troy keep command.

  “No?” Lyd
ia asked. “All right then, try this: You move out. I’ve done what I can. You get help, you make some changes, then maybe you can come back.” She whirled and stalked out of the room the way she had come.

  Troy hung his head. He did not go to the bathroom door, did not try to get her to change her mind, though he knew that was what she was hoping for. She would give him a dozen more chances, if only he would promise to change. But how could he do that? The facts were the facts.

  He dragged himself into the bedroom and began to pack a suitcase – just a few things, so that he could get out of the house. He would arrange to come back for other possessions when Lydia would not be home.

  He did not want to leave. This was yet another casualty in his life, and he was tired of making up for a choice he had made when he was nineteen. When would he be through paying the price?

  1995

  July the fifteenth arrived in a blaze of heat and humidity that recalled the jungle. It was Saturday, one of the special days. He pulled up to the curb outside what had once been his home and honked the horn. Kirsten, a lean and spry eleven-year-old, bounded out to his car with a grin on her face.

  She still idolized him. He gazed at her wistfully as she buckled her seat belt: flat-chested, a bit under five feet tall, not yet one of those adolescents who had no time for parents. She would remain his girl child for another year or so.

  Troy thought of all those times he had failed to be a good father. He used to fall asleep trying to read her books at bedtime. He would forget to pick her up after school. She always forgave him.

  “Mom says I need to be back by ten,” she reported.

  “Good,” Troy replied, drawing heavy, damp air into his lungs, letting the dose of oxygen lift his spirits. The deadline was later than ever; it was, in fact, Kirsten’s weekend bedtime. “Is your mother feeling generous, or what?”

  “I made a bet with her.” Kirsten giggled. “She said you’d be late. I said you’d show up on time. She promised that if you did, I could stay out until ten.”

  He chuckled. Kirsten had, as usual, asked him to be on time when they had spoken over the phone on Friday, but he had to admit, most times he managed to be late no matter what.

  They went to the lake for swimming and boating, then returned to town to pig out on pizza and Diet Coke.

  “Mom always gets vegetables on pizza,” Kirsten said with a scowl. She beamed as he ordered pepperoni, sausage, and Canadian bacon. One of the few good things about being a divorced father was that he didn’t have to bother with the hard stuff like enforcing rules, helping with homework, taking her to the dentist. He got to be the pal.

  They finished their evening at the bowling lanes, where Kirsten managed not to gutter a single ball, beating him two times out of three. She danced a little jig as she landed a strike in the final frame.

  He hugged her, noting with regret that it was 9.30pm. “Come on, Shortstuff. Let’s get you home.”

  “I had a great time with you, Daddy.”

  Yes, Troy thought. It had been a good day. He felt like a real father. A competent, mature person, seeing to his offspring’s needs. He had hope there would be more days like it. Leroy and Doug and the others emerged less and less as the years went on. What was the point of living in his body when they couldn’t truly follow their paths? Troy actually found himself looking forward to the next decade or two, to seeing what sort of adult Kirsten would evolve into.

  Chatting with his girl, he drove along the familiar streets toward Lydia’s house, through intersections and around curves that were second nature to him. Three blocks from their destination, he stopped at a signal, waited for the green light, and when it came, pressed on the gas pedal to make a left hand turn.

  Headlights blazed in through the righthand windows of the car, appearing as if out of nowhere. An engine whined, the noise changing pitch as the driver of the vehicle attempted to make it through a light that had already changed to red. Kirsten screamed. As fast as humanly possible, Troy shifted his foot from accelerator to brake. He had barely pressed down when metal slammed into metal.

  Troy’s car, hit broadside on the passenger side, careened across the asphalt, tires squealing, the other car clinging to it as if welded. Finally the motion stopped. Troy, hands frozen on the steering wheel, body still pressed against his door, looked sharply to his right and wished he hadn’t.

  Onlookers had to pull him away from his seat to keep him from uselessly trying to stanch Kirsten’s bleeding. Numb, he finally let them drag him to the sidewalk. Nearby lay the dazed, yet intact, driver of the other car. The reek of alcohol rose from him like fumes from a refinery.

  Troy had a bruise on his left shoulder and had sprained a wrist. That was all.

  The way Troy saw it a day later, Kirsten had been a natural target. What better life essence to steal than that of the very young? The unicorn had probably had it in for her from the moment she was born.

  He should never have called the tattooist a gook. The man had cursed him. For so many years, he had seen the unicorn at least partly as a blessing, when in fact the tattoo must have instigated all those deaths around him.

  Causality. Everything happens for a reason.

  The warnings had been there yesterday, but he had been blind to them. First there had been his uncharacteristic promptness. Then, Kirsten’s smile in the bowling alley had reminded him all too much of Artie Farina grinning over a joke right at the moment the bullet struck him. Troy should never have kept his baby out late, should have taken her home in the daylight, before the drunk was on the road.

  It was his fault. If not for the curse, reality would have taken a different path. The drunk would have come from the opposite direction, would have smashed into the driver’s side of the car. Troy would have died, and his daughter would have lived.

  It had been his fault in Vietnam as well. If he had taken the death assigned to him then, maybe all of his buddies would have lived.

  He would not accept the devil’s reward this time. He would not continue on, wandering through the decades, living glimpses of Kirsten’s life, the one she would never live directly.

  Blood seeped from the edges of the bandage on his chest. He pressed the gauze down, added another strip of tape from his shoulder to his rib cage. Pain radiated in pulses all the way down to his toes, but he paid it no more heed than he had when the stitcher’s needle gun had impregnated him with ink back at GI Bob’s.

  He had been afraid, when he picked up the knife, that his skin could not be cut, that the invulnerability would apply. But it was done now, and the tears of relief dribbled down the sides of his face. Soon he would pick up the phone – to call Lydia, or contact the hospital directly. The docs could patch him up whatever way they wanted, recommend plastic surgery or let the scars form. All that mattered was that the tattoo was gone.

  He had done the right thing, he told himself, wincing. He knew he could have scheduled laser surgery, could have gone to one of those parlors advertising tattoo removal. But it needed to happen before anything came along to change his mind. Now that he had found the courage, even one minute’s delay would have been too much.

  And it was working. He leaned toward his bathroom mirror, his reflection sharpening as he came within range of his nearsighted vision. There – little crow’s feet radiated from the corners of his eyes. Grey roots showed like tiny maggots at the base of his hair. His joints ached, and his midriff complained of all the years held unnaturally taut and firm. He was back in the timeline, looking as if he had never left it. Tomorrow’s dawn would mark the first time in twenty-eight years that he would wake up as Troy Chesley and no one else.

  His breath caught. Over the bandage, he faintly detected a glow. It coalesced into a horselike shape with a spike protruding from its head. It hung there, letting him get a good look, then it sank into his body. As it did so, his spine straightened, his hair thickened, and an unholy vibrancy coursed through his bloodstream.

  His newfound sense of victory drained
away. The ordeal had not ended. Some part of him was still willing to do anything to have a suit of impenetrable armor. The marks upon him had long since gone beyond skin deep.

  A tattoo was for ever.

  “No,” he whispered. His hand flailed across the counter top until his fingers closed on the knife. “I won’t let this go on.” If cutting off the unicorn was not enough to destroy its power, there was another way, and he would take it. He raised the knife to his throat . . .

  The weapon clattered to the floor. Troy stared at his image in the mirror. It had changed again. Though it was his same – youthful – face, his aspect now radiated an impression of intimidating, heroic size, as if he were looking at himself from the perspective of someone smaller and dependent.

  “My God,” he moaned.

  The glow over his wound had done more than restore his immortality; it had brought an entity to the forefront. Troy reached toward the floor, willing his knees to bend, but they would not. The person possessing him would not allow a knife to point at the flesh of the man she had adored her whole brief life.

  Leroy and Doug and Arturo and the others might have permitted him to consign them to oblivion. But this new one did not understand. She was frightened of death. Whatever shred of existence remained to her, she wanted to keep.

  How could he deny her?

  Troy stumbled into the second bedroom, lay down, and tucked up his knees. Overhead hung posters of cartoon characters. The coverlet was pink and trimmed with ruffles. He pulled Brown Bear off the pillow and hugged him close, beginning to cry as only an eleven-year-old, afraid of darkness and abandonment, could do.

  PATRICK THOMPSON