The Best New Horror 7

by Stephen Jones

  This was all wrong. This wasn’t the day that he’d set out to have. The car in front was a white Fiat and it shifted out of the way when he blasted on his horn. He was desperately trying to think of some way that he could turn it all around and make it come right, but everything was moving too fast. He shot through the space that the Fiat had made, and crossed traffic lights on amber. The police car came through on red a few seconds later, slowing for safety as the cross-traffic braked and gave way, but already he’d doubled his lead. He floored it, he sped. Within the minute he was back on the ring road and the police car was a distant howl. Still behind him and still chasing, but losing ground in the traffic rather than gaining it. Some tangle must have held it back for a few seconds for him to get so far in front. He didn’t know what, and he wasn’t inclined to hang around and look.

  He had to get away from all this. He had to buy some time to think.

  He cracked open the window an inch or so, just enough to be able to listen out for his pursuers and judge how far they were behind him. At first all that he could hear was the roar of the wind, but then the sounds began to separate out. It was as if the siren had an echo, but then he realized; there were at least two of them now, two wolves on his trail, both howling as they picked up the scent.

  And then a third, a different kind of two-tone altogether. One of the blue vans, perhaps, or something bigger. The van they were going to throw him in. Word was going out on the radio, and they were converging in pursuit. The howling of the sirens would then give way to the howling of a mob and once that began he could never, ever hope to be heard above it.

  The road was dropping into an underpass, traffic noise turning to thunder. The articulated lorry ahead of him began to pull out, and he got close up behind and pulled out after.

  Much of the traffic here was made up of trucks and vans, big freight and delivery wagons. They lumbered along and it took one hell of a surge in acceleration to pass them sometimes; you were out there and exposed for what seemed like forever, a real test of the best. Getting in behind a lorry and using it for cover felt almost like a wimp’s way out, but right now he was desperate. He checked his mirror, and saw the blue van. It was some way back, still, but must have joined the chase from somewhere close. Its twin blue lights were like captured stars, and they were reflected over the cars in a sea of metal.

  The underpass was open to one side, daylight coming in through an endless temple of concrete columns. Slowly, achingly, the lorry ahead of him drew past the long flatbed vehicle in the inside lane. He was right up against its tail and hanging on close. The flatbed carried roadbuilding machinery and could probably go no faster; the roar of engines in the enclosed space made his chest vibrate. As the back end of the overtaking lorry moved ahead of the flatbed’s cab, the flatbed driver flashed his lights and the lorry signalled to swing back in.

  The way ahead would be left clear, and he could floor it and go through.

  He’d better. Because the two big lorries were nose-to-tail in the inside lane now, and there would be no space for him to get back in.

  Elementary mistake.

  The articulated’s driver had judged it perfectly. He’d seen the oncoming Volvo truck some way ahead, he’d worked out that he had exactly enough time to make his manoeuvre and get back in, and he’d carried it out with neatness and precision. The trucker’s calculations hadn’t included a Mondeo tagging along behind. Why should they? Controlling one of those big lumbering dinosaurs was enough of a job on its own.

  He’d been left out in the wrong lane, heading the wrong way, racing head-to-head with a vehicle ten times his size. The Volvo truck was blasting its horn, flashing its lights. Warning him to get out of the way.

  But how could he do that? He gripped the wheel harder, willing something to happen.

  He couldn’t drop back, there wasn’t time. He couldn’t return to his lane, there wasn’t a space. If he tried to swing wide, he’d hit the pillars.

  And the truck driver’s options were exactly the same as his own.

  In the two-fifths of a second before disaster struck, he knew exactly what had to be going through the truck driver’s mind. Knew it probably better than the driver did himself.

  When it came down to it, the man’s options were limited. Swerve into the other trucks, and die. Swerve into the concrete pillars, and die. The choice he had to make was really no choice at all.

  Whether he knew it or not, he’d reacted already.

  He’d chosen the car.

  THOMAS LIGOTTI

  The Bungalow House

  THOMAS LIGOTTI LIVES IN a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, and is the author of three acclaimed volumes of horror stories: Songs of a Dead Dreamer, Grimscribe and Noctuary, as well as a collection of short short fiction entitled The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales. His most recent book is The Nightmare Factory, a compilation of previously collected and new stories.

  Another recent project is a collaboration with British group Current 93 in a recording of a new novella with musical accompaniment. It will be simultaneously published as a compact disc with a limited edition hardcover in Britain.

  “The Bungalow House” was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award and according to the author “has its source in a vivid nightmare.”

  EARLY LAST SEPTEMBER I discovered among the exhibits in a local art gallery a sort of performance piece in the form of an audiotape. This, I later learned, was the first of a series of tape-recorded dream monologues by an unknown artist. The following is a brief and highly typical excerpt from the opening section of this work. I recall that after a few seconds of hissing tape noise, the voice began speaking: “There was far more to deal with in the bungalow house than simply an infestation of vermin,” it said, “although that too had its questionable aspects.” Then the voice went on: “I could see only a few of the bodies where the moonlight shone through the open blinds of the living room windows and fell upon the carpet. Only one of the bodies seemed to be moving, and that very slowly, but there may have been more that were not yet dead. Aside from the chair in which I sat in the darkness there was very little furniture in the room, or elsewhere in the bungalow house for that matter. But a number of lamps were positioned around me, floor lamps and table lamps and even two tiny lamps on the mantel above the fireplace.”

  A brief pause occurred here in the opening section of the tape-recorded dream monologue, as I remember it, after which the voice continued: “The bungalow house was built with a fireplace,’ I said to myself in the darkness, thinking how long it had been since anyone had made use of this fireplace, or anything else in the bungalow. Then my attention returned to the lamps, and I began trying each of them one by one, twisting their little grooved switches in the darkness. The moonlight fell upon the lampshades without shining through them, so I could not see that none of the lamps was equipped with a lightbulb, and each time I turned the switch of a floor lamp or a table lamp or one of the tiny lamps on the mantel, nothing changed in the dark living room of the bungalow house: the moonlight shone through the dusty blinds and revealed the bodies of insects and other vermin on the pale carpet.”

  “The challenges and obstacles facing me in that bungalow house were becoming more and more oppressive,” whispered the voice on the tape. “There was something so desolate about being in that place in the dead of night, even if I did not know precisely what time it was. And to see upon the pale, threadbare carpet those verminous bodies, some of which were still barely alive; then to try each of the lamps and find that none of them was in working order – everything, it seemed, was in opposition to my efforts, everything aligned against my taking care of the problems I faced in the bungalow house. For the first time I noticed that the bodies lying for the most part in total stillness on the moonlit carpet were not like any species of vermin I had ever seen,” the voice on the tape recording said. “Some of them seemed to be deformed, their naturally revolting forms altered in ways I could not discern. I knew t
hat I would require specialized implements for dealing with these creatures, an arsenal of advanced tools of extermination. It was the idea of poisons – the toxic solutions and vapors I would need to use in my assault upon the bungalow hordes – that caused me to become overwhelmed by the complexities of the task before me and the paucity of my resources for dealing with them.”

  At this point, and many others on the tape (as I recall), the voice became nearly inaudible. “The bungalow house,” it said, “was such a bleak environment in which to make a stand: the moonlight through the dusty blinds, the bodies on the carpet, the lamps without any lightbulbs. And the incredible silence. It was not the absence of sounds that I sensed, but the stifling of innumerable sounds and even voices, the muffling of all the noises one might expect to hear in an old bungalow house in the dead of night, as well as countless other sounds and voices. The forces required to accomplish this silence filled me with awe. The infinite terror and dreariness of an infested bungalow house, I whispered to myself. A bungalow universe, I then thought without speaking aloud. Suddenly I was overcome by a feeling of euphoric hopelessness which passed through my body like a powerful drug and held all my thoughts and all my movements in a dreamy, floating suspension. In the moonlight that shone through the blinds of that bungalow house I was now as still and as silent as everything else.”

  The title of the tape-recorded artwork from which I have just quoted was The Bungalow House (Plus Silence). I discovered this and other dream monologues by the same artist at Dalha D. Fine Arts, which was located in the near vicinity of the public library (main branch) where I was employed in the Language and Literature department. Sometimes I spent my lunch breaks at the gallery, even consuming my brown-bag meals on the premises. There were a few chairs and benches on the floor of the gallery, and I knew that the woman who owned the place did not discourage any kind of traffic, however lingering. Her actual livelihood was in fact not derived from the gallery itself. How could it have been? Dalha D. Fine Arts was a hole in the wall. One would think it no trouble at all to keep up the premises where there was so little floor space, just a single room that was by no mean overcrowded with artworks or art-related merchandise. But no attempt at such upkeeping seemed ever to have been made. The display window was so filmy that someone passing by could barely make out the paintings and sculptures behind it (the same ones year after year). From the street outside, this tiny front window presented the most desolate hallucination of bland colors and shapeless forms, especially on late November afternoons. Further inside the gallery, things were in a similar state – from the cruddy linoleum floor, where some cracked tiles revealed the concrete foundation, to the rather high ceiling, which occasionally sent down small chips of plaster. If every artwork and item of art-related merchandise had been cleared out of that building, no one would think that an art gallery had once occupied this space and not some enterprise of a lesser order.

  But as many persons were aware, if only through second-hand sources, the woman who operated Dalha D. Fine Arts did not make her living by dealing in those artworks and related items which only the most desperate or scandalously naïve artist would allow to be put on display in that gallery. By all accounts, including my own brief lunchtime conversations with the woman, she had pursued a variety of careers in her time. She herself had worked as an artist at one point, and some of her works – messy assemblages inside old cigar boxes – were exhibited in a corner of her gallery. But evidently her art gallery business was not self-sustaining, despite minimal overheads, and she made no secret of her true means of income.

  “Who wants to buy such junk?” she once explained to me, gesturing with long fingernails painted emerald green. This same color also seemed to dominate her wardrobe of long, loose garments, often featuring incredible scarves or shawls that dragged along the floor as she moved about the art gallery. She paused and with the pointed toe of one of her emerald green shoes gave a little kick at a wire wastebasket that was filled with the miniature limbs of dolls, all of them individually painted in a variety of colors. “What are people thinking when they make these things? What was I thinking with those stupid cigar boxes? But no more of that, definitely no more of that sort of thing.”

  And she made no secret, beyond a certain reasonable caution, of what sort of thing now engaged her energies as a businesswoman. The telephone was always ringing at her art gallery, always upsetting the otherwise dead calm of the place with its cracked, warbling voice that called out from the back room. She would then quickly disappear behind a curtain that hung in the doorway separating the front and back sections of the art gallery. I might be eating my sandwich or a piece of fruit, and then suddenly, for the fourth or fifth time in a half-hour, the telephone would scream from the back room, eventually summoning this woman behind the curtain. But she never answered the telephone with the name of the art gallery or employed any of the stock phrases of business protocol. Not so much as a “Good afternoon, may I help you?” did I ever hear from the back room as I sat eating my midday meal in the front section of the art gallery. She always answered the telephone in the same way with the same quietly expectant tone in her voice. This is Dalha, she always said.

  Before I had known her very long she even had me using her name in the most familiar way. The mere saying of this name instilled in me a sense of access to what she offered all those telephone-callers, not to mention those individuals who personally visited the art gallery to make or confirm an appointment. Whatever someone was eager to try, whatever step someone was willing to take – Dalha could arrange it. This was the true stock in trade of the art gallery, these arrangements. When I returned to the library after my lunch break, I continued to imagine Dalha back at the art gallery, racing between the front and back sections of the building, making all kinds of arrangements over the telephone, and sometimes in person.

  On the day that I first noticed the new artwork entitled The Bungalow House, Dalha’s telephone was extremely vocal. While she was talking to her clients in the back section of the art gallery, I was practically left alone in the front section. Just for a thrill I went over to the wire wastebasket full of dismembered doll parts and lifted one of the painted arms (emerald green!), hiding it in the inner pocket of my sportcoat. It was then that I spotted the old audiotape recorder on a small plastic table in the corner. Beside the machine was a business card on which the title of the artwork had been hand-printed, along with the following instructions: PRESS PLAY. PLEASE REWIND AFTER LISTENING. DO NOT REMOVE TAPE. I placed the headphones over my ears and pressed the PLAY button. The voice that spoke through the headphones, which were enormous, sounded distant and was somewhat distorted by the hissing of the tape. Nevertheless, I was so intrigued by the opening passages of this dream monologue, which I have already transcribed, that I sat down on the floor next to the small plastic table on which the tape recorder was positioned and listened to the entire tape, exceeding my allotted lunchtime by over half an hour. By the time the tape had ended I was in another world – that is, the world of the infested bungalow house, with all its dreamlike crumminess and foul charms.

  “Don’t forget to rewind the tape,” said Dalha, who was now standing over me, her long grey hair, like steel wool, almost brushing against my face.

  I pressed the REWIND button on the tape recorder and got up from the floor. “Dalha, may I use your lavatory?” I asked. She pointed to the curtain leading to the back section of the art gallery. “Thank you,” I said.

  The effect of listening to the first dream monologue was very intense for reasons I will soon explain. I wanted to be alone for a few moments in order to preserve the state of mind which the voice on the tape had induced in me, much as one might attempt to hold on to the images of a dream just after waking. However, I felt that the lavatory at the library, despite its peculiar virtues which I have appreciated over the years, would somehow undermine the sensations and mental state created by the dream monologue, rather than preserving this experience and even en
hancing it, as I hoped the lavatory in the back section of Dalha’s art gallery would do.

  The very reason why I spent my lunchtimes in the surroundings of Dalha’s art gallery, which were so different from those of the library, was exactly why I now wanted to use the lavatory in the back section of that art gallery and definitely not the lavatory at the library, even if I was already overdue from my lunch break. And, indeed, this lavatory had the same qualities as the rest of the art gallery, as I hoped it would. The fact that it was located in the back section of the art gallery, a region of mysteries to my mind, was significant. Just outside the door of the lavatory stood a small, cluttered desk upon which was the telephone that Dalha used in her true business of making arrangements. The telephone was centered in the weak light of a desk lamp, and I noticed, as I passed into the lavatory, that it was an unwieldy object with a straight – that is, uncoiled – cord connecting the receiver to the telephone housing, with its enormous dial. But although Dalha answered several calls during the time I was in her lavatory, these seemed to be entirely legitimate conversations having to do either with her personal life or with practical matters relating to the art gallery.

  “How long are you going to be in there?” Dalha asked through the door of the lavatory. “I hope you’re not sick, because if you’re sick you’ll have to go somewhere else.”

  I called out that there was nothing wrong (quite the opposite) and a moment later emerged from the lavatory. I was about to ask for details of the art performance tape I had just heard, anxious to know about the artist and what it would cost me to own the work entitled The Bungalow House, as well as any similar works that might exist. But the phone began ringing again. Dalha answered it with her customary greeting as I stood by in the back section of the art gallery, which was a dark, though relatively uncluttered, space that now put me in mind of the living room of the bungalow house that I had heard described on the tape-recorded dream monologue. The conversation in which Dalha was engaged (another non-arrangement call) seemed interminable, and I was becoming nervously aware how long past my lunch break I had stayed at the storefront art gallery.