The Best New Horror 7

by Stephen Jones

  Hastily now, not wishing to give her sister more ammunition with which to sneer – but also to shrug off the goose-bumps – she hurried through the opening, holding her breath.

  A peal of laughter exploded around her, echoing in the high, empty space of the apartment. At first Euphrosyne was hidden. Then there was light, golden, crystalline.

  Polyhymnia wobbled forwards, her legs turning to jelly. Her sister was cackling again, and Polyhymnia was dragged forward as though she were a rag doll, and thrust roughly through a low opening in a wood-panelled wall.

  “Can it be . . .?” Polyhymnia blinked at the hard brightness shining through crystal chandeliers. She recognized the decor of the corridor in which they now stood.

  “Yes, sister,” Euphrosyne sneered, as if she had known this was going to happen all along, “the hotel . . .” Carefully closing the door behind her, Polyhymnia watched it blend secretly into the ornate wooden mouldings on the wall.

  “But how? We were miles away.” Her astonishment was complete. “We must have accidentally walked back towards the riva,” she added, attempting to convince herself.

  Euphrosyne seemed less profoundly moved. “All those little roads, twisting, turning . . . we thought we were lost, but here we are!” Again that aggravating, knowing smile fouled Euphrosyne’s lips, her words less a description than a taunt.

  “But how did you discover the secret opening?”

  “Aha! Wouldn’t you like to know!” Euphrosyne cried mysteriously.

  “That place, that horrible house, it must have belonged to the hotel.”

  “Undoubtedly. In any case, Pol, we are no longer going to be late for dinner!”

  During the main course, Polyhymnia dropped her fork. She stooped to retrieve it as Rudolf, now refreshed, was sitting regaling the three women with a history of the hotel, a former palazzo.

  “– the original entrance on the campiello Zingari, which as you know, means the square of the Gypsies – ” His words froze in mid-sentence.

  Polyhymnia had ducked under the voluminous linen and lace of the tablecloth. As she lifted her piece of cutlery from the carpet, she saw her ward’s left hand beyond the grey stocking tops, above the suspender belt, active within the loosened fabric of Euphrosyne’s knickers.

  Clambering awkwardly from beneath the table, Polyhymnia was breathless, and red as a beetroot.

  “Whatever is the matter, dear?” Rudolf’s wife was asking him.

  He looked sharply at Polyhymnia for confirmation whether she had seen something she shouldn’t. Yet any emotion he might be harbouring was unfathomable behind those dark brown eyes. Polyhymnia turned her head away quickly, to face her sister, whose lewd smile mocked. Opening her lips, Euphrosyne licked them wetly.

  “Nothing, my dear. I was merely waiting for Polyhymnia to cease her distraction. Waiter!” Rudolf called, deflecting anything indiscreet Polyhymnia might have had to say. “Another fork for the young lady, if you please.” He snatched the soiled utensil from Polyhymnia’s trembling, white-knuckled hand and handed it to the waiter.

  “You are so clumsy, sister,” Euphrosyne said, sniggering. Then turning to Rudolf, “Please, uncle Rudolf, do go on.”

  “I do so appreciate it when you refer to me as uncle,” he said and his left hand came up at last, waving airily. Polyhymnia gaped. “Matilda and I do so feel as if we really are your aunt and uncle at times.”

  “Very categorically,” Matilda appended, her pasta busy between fork and mouth.

  How dare he! Polyhymnia’s blood was roaring angrily in her veins. She tried to regain her composure. How could she! How filthy – at the dinner table! Her thoughts squirmed with disgust. Her “uncle” continued his discourse as though nothing had happened, as though the dirty white fingers of his left hand had not defiled her sister. Euphrosyne sat ogling him, gleefully impervious to any possibility of Matilda noticing.

  The waiter returned and Polyhymnia began to eat again, to take her mind off what she had seen, but found she could not. The slimy layers of pasta on her plate were pallid worms, writhing uncontrollably around the abalone. Nausea quivered in her stomach.

  “I . . . I think . . .” She spoke too loudly. Other diners stopped their discourse and glanced in her direction. Cutlery chattered against china. Then she was sliding off her seat as if someone were tipping the chair forwards. Rudolf was rising. Her sister was grinning wildly. She herself was sweating, her face as hot as a furnace. The table’s edge slid into view as she slipped inexorably towards the floor.

  Matilda’s mouth opened slowly, several white corpse worms coiling on her tongue. “Smelling salts, smelling salts!” she shouted above what was, to Polyhymnia, a pandemonium of metal and china and brash voices. Then blessed silence.

  Darkness . . .

  . . . And there was a shape in her dream. The oddly terrifying portal in the ruined palazzo . . . the cherub blindly gazing down, its bottom lip pouting, a glaze of damp on the lichen it wore as a mask . . . And beyond, a dark man standing amongst the debris of plaster and cracked ceramics. She was unable to distinguish who he was, but he appeared to be holding a long pole in his hands; his head was concealed by the brim of a flat straw hat.

  A gondolier?

  “What a scene!” Euphrosyne cried, as if privy to Polyhymnia’s dream.

  “Have I been asleep?” she asked. “Oh!” Polyhymnia suddenly remembered what had happened in the dining room. “You!”

  “What?” Euphrosyne responded contemptuously.

  “You and Rudolf! At dinner!”

  “You’re such a child, sister, I can hardly believe we are the same age.” The derision in Euphrosyne’s voice was brutal.

  Polyhymnia blushed with rage; and with jealousy at her sister’s carnality. “Oh, go to sleep!” There was no response to her words and very soon Polyhymnia had returned to slumber, her disturbed thoughts dissipating.

  Later she woke, stifling a hiss of alarm as she thought someone had entered the bedroom. But it was Euphrosyne, out of bed and moving towards the door. She was dressed only in her shift. The door opened and for a moment her features, sly and cunning, were revealed by the light from the corridor.

  As the door closed, Polyhymnia threw herself out of bed, and dressed quickly. She knew where her sister was going. Indeed, the hidden door in the corridor was slightly ajar when she reached the ground floor.

  A nearby table conveniently presented her with a lighted oil lamp, and she took it eagerly, entering the ruins. The spectral glow illuminated the decrepit room, highlighting the doorway she had passed through from the other direction earlier in the day. She hesitated before continuing, remembering the skulking figure from her original exploration. But when she reached the doorway, there was nothing in the room beyond except detritus, soaking in pools of rancid water. Her lamp revealed walls of wet brick and a ceiling, once handsomely painted, but now of cracked and mottled plaster.

  A faint sound, as soft as silk scraping on stone, drew her attention to the porch beyond, the exit to the campiello. The swish of fabric was followed by the slap of water, a wet hand clap repeated slowly.

  Polyhymnia moved carefully forward through the pools. Was the lagoon tide rising, she wondered, flooding the abandoned building? She was afraid the floor might collapse and plunge her into the diseased swamp on which the city had been built. Her lamp wobbled, its sickly rays of light hesitant to linger on the wet surfaces and reveal Polyhymnia’s fearful reflection. When she decided to douse the lamp for fear of her sister realizing she had been followed, Polyhymnia was surprised by another source of illumination.

  Very carefully, she peered into the porch. Standing, softly illuminated by a swaying lamp nearby, was Euphrosyne. Naked, with her back to Polyhymnia, her hair was hanging loose, her head thrown back. In front of her stood a man, his head pressed to her breasts.

  The man’s hands were meticulously massaging her sister’s back and buttocks, and she was whining ecstatically at these attentions. Polyhymnia, envious beyond caring,
walked boldly into the ante-chamber. But the voice with which she was going to shout was suddenly unavailable. The man who was thoroughly familiarizing himself with Euphrosyne’s body was, of course, Rudolf Fortiscue. But he was garbed in black, with a gondolier’s straw hat hanging at the back of his neck from a loop of thread. And although she could not see his face, Polyhymnia had no difficulty in recognizing those darkly haired fingers.

  Rudolf’s face lifted above the curve of Euphrosyne’s left shoulder and Polyhymnia’s breath caught in her throat. His features were concealed by a repulsive mask, on which was painted a crude copy of Rudolf’s moustache. The mask was white, eye holes black circles, somehow soulless. The skin of the mask was mottled with the plague. Rudolf’s pustulant lips opened and met those of Euphrosyne’s, who had turned her head to meet them, undismayed at her guardian’s grim disguise.

  It was only in her revulsion that Polyhymnia averted her eyes from the kissing couple, but as she did so, she saw why the nearby lamp was swinging to and fro. It was hung from the prow of a gondola. Impossibly, the boat sat below the level of what had earlier been solid flooring, as if a former rio had risen to its rightful place.

  And sitting inside the craft was Matilda Fortiscue, staring avidly at the two obscene lovers through the round, button eyes of her own awful mask.

  Seconds later Rudolf, the gondolier, was carrying her sister onto the moored craft. Matilda immediately began to punt the gondola away from the landing stage, her husband laying Euphrosyne down and placing his lips upon hers. She groaned as his weight pressed down on her naked body.

  The gondola was drifting away, through the exit onto what before had been the path that led to the campiello. Now it was a small canal, its black water lapping viscously at the walls on either side.

  Polyhymnia ran forward, nearly tipping herself into the water chopping at the approdo. She managed to hold back, saved by the post to which the gondola had been tied.

  “Euph!” she cried out, wishing to forget how much hatred for her sister was still bubbling inside her. The lamp bobbed, cascading giddy rays of light over the boat and its occupants.

  Rudolf lifted himself briefly from his defilement of Euphrosyne, in order to loosen his clothing, and his mask began to contort. Only then did Polyhymnia realize that it was not a mask at all. Both of her guardians had been transformed into blemished, pestilent creatures and she knew instinctively they came from a region of eternal wetness and decay. Underneath Rudolf, Euphrosyne was beginning to cry, squealing rhythmically as he thrust himself upon her. Matilda began to cackle in a way Polyhymnia had never heard before.

  “Mathilde! Mathilde!” the man shouted, breathless, his voice now unexpectedly inflected, his mouth sounding as if it were choked with gelatinous liquid.

  “Rudolfo!” she yelled back. “Rudolfo, let me see the fine red parts!” Coarse giggling followed her shout.

  Polyhymnia staggered, unconsciousness rising to throttle her. In her eyes there were tears. All lustful desires were thrust aside, as was her hatred of Euphrosyne.

  Then Matilda saw her, and she began gobbling like a turkey, steering the gondola back towards the landing stage.

  “Come away! Come away!” Polyhymnia heard Matilda call.

  Tripping, Polyhymnia fell, grazing her knee. Her blood mixed with the sour water into which her hands were pressed. “Who are you?” she screamed, raising her head. The gondola sliced water as turgid as tar, moving faster than she would have thought possible. “Let my sister go!”

  “Do you not recognize us,” Rudolf spoke, abandoning for a moment his rape of Euphrosyne. “We are from below.”

  “No!” At once, however, Polyhymnia recalled the painting in the palazzo. The lust of the carnival, the lurking swarm of plague-ridden humanity. They had been emerging from gondolas, from the canal, from the deeps of the lagoon.

  “Come away with us!” Matilda sang gaily.

  “My sister . . .!”

  “No!” Rudolf said, “she has joined us.”

  In a panic Polyhymnia stood up awkwardly, turned and ran as the gondola scraped on stone. A few steps and the secret doorway was almost within her reach. Her arms stretched out, fumbling for the latch she could not see, but strong hands grasped her shoulders, and drew her back.

  “For a while it was necessary to be your guardians, to live as men.” Rudolf’s voice whispered in her ear, his accents more alien than ever before. She could smell decay and feel wetness seep through her clothes. “But here, beyond, is our true world, beyond the Serene Republic. An ancient and magnificent domain.”

  Polyhymnia could smell her sister’s perfume as she was dragged back through the ruins. She felt herself sway dizzily as she was carried aloft. All her strength fled when she was at last permitted to look at her sister. Euphrosyne had a head and legs and arms and a body. But all there was to see of the surface now was redness. Redness and gouged hollows. Cavities, diseased, suppurating wounds. Euph’s face was sweating blood. Ruined flesh . . . Euphrosyne’s transformed flesh, that had once been identical to her own.

  Yet still her sister squirmed, her thighs arching and shuddering in her unrequited lust, presenting a final gush of blood from between her thighs. She was voiceless in her need, or through a pain beyond conceiving.

  Polyhymnia gasped. Deep inside her, deeper than horror, emotions stirred wantonly. At first she resisted the sensations. Then, realizing that now, at last, she could enter her sister’s secret world, she stood. Without further thought, her moist lips parted and her breathing hastened as she began to disrobe in front of the skeletal Rudolf. She was not about to let her dying twin commandeer all the fun. Indeed, whereas Euphrosyne had been his alone, she saw – as the plague-riddled Matilda tore her clothing from putrefying flesh – that she was to be pleasured by both inhabitants of a clandestine community which had, for a while at least, been hidden from the world above the waves.

  NORMAN PARTRIDGE

  The Bars on

  Satan’s Jailhouse

  NORMAN PARTRIDGE WON the Bram Stoker Award for his first short story collection, Mr Fox and Other Feral Tales, while Stephen King called the author’s first novel, Slippin’ into Darkness, “a five-star book . . . easily the most auspicious genre debut of the year.” He has followed those volumes with a second novel, Saquaro Riptide; a graphic novel with artist Marc Erickson, Gorilla Gunslinger: The Good, the Bad . . . and the Gorilla; and co-edited the anthology It Came from the Drive-In (with Martin H. Greenberg).

  “I’ve always enjoyed stories that mix genres,” says Partridge, “especially weird westerns. From B-movies like Billy the Kid vs. Dracula to novels such as Joe R. Lansdale’s Dead in the West and Richard Sale’s The White Buffalo, I’ve loved ’em all.

  “This is the landscape I wanted to visit in ‘The Bars on Satan’s Jailhouse’, a tale of six-gun horror that surprised me by metamorphosing into something of a love story, with what one reviewer called ‘crazed podiatric cannibalism’ thrown in. A sequel of sorts, ‘Dead Man’s Hand’, appears in Bad Intentions, a short story collection published by Subterranean Press in 1996.”

  For Woody Strode and Robert Ryan this black sombrero . . .

  ____

  Don’t marry your daughter to a Gold Mountain Boy.

  He will not be in bed one full year out of ten

  Spiders spin webs on top of her bed

  while dust covers fully one side.

  – Anonymous

  BY THE GHOST of the fifth moon, five coyotes raced toward a wagon. Huge paws ripped divots in barren soil, sleek pelts shone in the amber glow of the coming morning, feral hearts pumped the blood of the beast while hungry eyes studied an Asian woman who held an iron fan and a black driver who steadied the horses.

  The black man felt hunger in the pit of his own empty stomach as he watched the beasts advance. But he made no move after tugging the reins, for he had seen something else.

  Another coyote, waiting on a low ridge to the north.

  A coyote that held a ri
fle.

  The pack continued its charge. Still, the black man didn’t move. Neither did his young companion, who by now had noticed the predators. Gunshots broke the silence, like nothing more than a sharp series of barks. The lead coyote crashed to the ground midleap, tumbled squealing against a pole planted at the side of the dirt road not ten feet from the wagon, and did not get up.

  The horses screamed, and the driver jerked the reins and quieted them. Another bark from the rifle and a second beast was literally slapped muzzle to roadbed as if by the hand of God. With that the remaining coyotes veered away from the wagon, away from the coyote with the rifle, darting toward the south.

  But not fast enough. A final bullet found the slowest predator – nipping tailbone and shaving asshole, separating the beast from its tail – and the anguished howl that rattled across the wounded predator’s teeth was enough to goose the sun over the mountains that lay to the east. At least, that was how it seemed to the black man who held the reins. Cause, and effect.

  But having no great love of philosophy or rumination, the man’s attention turned to the coyote with the rifle. The creature loped across the rutted road, collected the amputated tail, and advanced on the wagon, rifle held over its head in the universal signal of peace.

  The creature’s muzzle did not move as it said, “They’ll spread the word, y’know. They’ll run back to their hellhole and howl and whimper, and they’ll tell every damn pup ’bout how one of their own shot hell out of ’em and kept ’em from their dinner.”

  Her back stiff, her brown eyes unblinking, the woman in the wagon slapped closed her fan, transforming it into an iron cudgel to which she held tight. Likewise, her companion held tight to the reins. He did not reach for the pistol secreted beneath his worn duster. His hands did not become fists.

  He smiled.

  The coyote chuckled, scratching its chin. Then it pushed its entire muzzle up and back, revealing a face the color of oatmeal and blue eyes that squinted against the dull morning light. Unmasked, the coyoteman trained an ear toward the south, even though the driver and the woman heard nothing. “Hear ’em howl?” the coyoteman asked. “They’re talkin’ about me. Tellin’ stories. I’m their devil. I’m their hell.”