The Best New Horror 7

by Stephen Jones

  He was done crawling. And for damn sure he was done suffering the grief of bastards like these.

  The man with the fork knelt over him, grinning, still giving it the twist. Bobcat-quick, Stack reached up and snatched a fistful of the man’s shirt, surprising him and tumbling him forward across Stack’s own chest, so that the man landed on the grill between half a cow and a generous hunk of lamb.

  The other gun-dog might have pulled his Colt in that short instant, but he had to drop the half-empty whiskey bottle he was holding before he could go for the weapon. Stack was off the grill just that fast. An instant later the big fork was buried in the pistolero’s guts.

  And then Stack had a pistol.

  In the time it would take an exceptionally thirsty man to down a shot of whiskey, Stack had emptied the weapon.

  That left him with a choice of six more just like the first.

  He jammed a couple into his belt, snatched up another, and moved into the night.

  Lead flew hot and heavy.

  When it was over, Stackalee stood alone.

  Midas hid, all alone in the dark.

  He’d seen it all through the bedroom window. Seen his gun-dogs mowed down like they were an army of bovine retards. Blind bovine retards. And then he’d turned to the Chinaman’s daughter, and she’d looked at him with that little bitty bit of a smile on her face, her eyes seeming to say, Now he’ll come for you, and hearing a gal talk through her eyes, and realizing that the words those eyes had spoken were without a doubt the God’s honest truth, well, that had scared Midas worse than anything.

  It was quiet now. Finally. That was good, because it meant things were most likely over. But it could be bad, too, because if things weren’t over he would have to stay hidden awhile longer.

  And that meant Midas had to stay very quiet. That was a hard thing to do, especially since there was something down in his gut that was busy tickling him. He tried to ignore it, but every minute or two he just naturally had to let a little giggle bubble over his lips.

  Like now. He giggled and spit like a babe in arms. Had to bite his lip real hard to cut it off.

  The tickling thing didn’t satisfy easy, though. It scrabbled around in Midas’s belly, rippling over his ribs, but he couldn’t allow himself to give in to it. He closed his eyes and covered his mouth with his hands. He had to stop giggling, because if the gunslinger was still out there . . .

  God. Midas knew that he had to steer clear of that man if he wanted to live. The bastard had more lives that a cat. And the things that man had done, the things he’d lived through. He wasn’t like any man Midas had ever heard about. Not outside of a yellowback novel, anyhow.

  Just wait it out, Midas thought. It’s not so bad, waiting in the darkness. It’s almost peaceful. Not cowardly at all. Just biding your time – which is only the smart thing to do, after all. Waiting. All alone. In the darkness. In –

  The door swung open on squeaky hinges. From above, a sliver of moonlight slashed Midas’ face.

  Quickly, he ducked out of sight.

  Above, floorboards groaned as the stranger positioned himself.

  Midas wanted to move, but he couldn’t.

  The bounty man coughed a couple times. Sniffed once, then settled down to business.

  A hot yellow stream washed Midas Gerlach’s face, but Midas did not squirm or cry out from his hiding place in the virgin shit-shaft. He did not make a move or a sound until he heard the stranger step away, until the outhouse door slammed closed above him and the echoes of the stranger’s horrible boot heels rang in the distance. Then and only then did torrents of laughter spill from Midas Gerlach’s lips.

  Midas hushed up soon enough, suddenly afraid that he’d laughed prematurely. But the stranger didn’t return, so he couldn’t have heard . . .

  Midas nodded vigorously. That had to be the way it was. He was safe now. Still, Midas kept his eyes closed. He listened intently, and it wasn’t long before he heard music coming from the player piano he’d borrowed from that Fiddler whorehouse.

  It stood all alone out there in the night, beneath red lanterns that glowed with promises of happiness and love of the eternal variety, playing to an audience of dead men.

  Midas shivered.

  It’s not so bad down here in the ground, waiting in the darkness. It’s almost peaceful. Not cowardly at all. It’s only the smart thing to do, after all.

  Waiting . . . all alone . . . in the darkness.

  Midas lay down on the floor of the new shit shaft and curled himself into a ball. He thought of his grandpa and his grandma, of the night so long ago when Grandma had sliced off Grandpa’s willie and tossed it down the old shit shaft. He thought of that little hunk of meat nestled down there under all that crap, just waiting, year after year, without a single complaint.

  Midas Gerlach fell asleep in the hard earth of Fiddler, California, knowing for sure and for certain that patience, indeed, was a virtue.

  When it was over, music came. Lie could not imagine where it came from, for Father’s terror in fanged boots had entered the goblin’s house shortly after the music began, and most everyone else was dead.

  Lie had been waiting for the dark man to come. Her eyes took him in, head to toe. The blood, the burns, all of him. Still, he looked good, better than before. The spark that she had glimpsed in his razor-edged glance now seemed to have settled into his eyes for good, and he seemed strangely content.

  This pleased her.

  She knew that he could not understand what had happened this night, or how he had survived it. Many questions were locked behind his eyes. It seemed obvious that he thought the answers to his questions were locked behind her unspeaking lips.

  But this was not so. And even if it were so, Lie could no more answer his questions than ask her own. As her father often said, she had the voice of a flower. And a flower could speak not a single word.

  She picked up the carpetbag. He collected fistfuls of gold coins. He dropped them into the toy palace and hoisted it onto his good shoulder. Together, they left the white goblin’s house.

  She knew he would not understand what she had to do. On the porch, she stopped and opened the carpetbag, removing a wad of paper money and a box of lucifers.

  She lit a match and set the wad of bills aflame. She did this for luck – a custom learned in Father’s gambling hall. She did not expect her dark man to understand such things.

  But some things did not require an explanation. The dark man seemed to understand all too well. He turned to a strange wooden box which stood on the front porch. A row of black and white teeth danced on a lone shelf on this box, teeth pressed by invisible fingers. Sprightly music spilled from the box’s heart. Strange magic Lie could not understand.

  The dark man smashed several whiskey bottles over the box, then collected the burning bills from the place Lie had dropped them. He fed the dying flames with a larger wad of money, and with these he set the magic box aflame.

  Lie took off the white dress the goblin had forced upon her, shed too the horrible little booties with their dangling pearls. These she tossed into the fire.

  The dark man draped his scorched duster over her shoulders. She slipped her arms into the big sleeves – one was little more than an ashy flap of material – and buttoned the front. Then she snatched up the carpetbag and started toward the wagon, charred coattails whispering against her ankles.

  The dark man walked at her side, the toy palace filled with gold tucked under one arm. Behind them the flames grew hotter, roaring now, and the sprightly music died away.

  Lie tossed the carpetbag in the back of the wagon.

  Gunfire exploded in the distance.

  Lie shivered, and the dark man laughed. “Don’t worry,” he said, pointing at the moon above. “It’s only that damn coyote fella. His blood must be on the boil tonight.”

  Lie did not laugh, but she smiled.

  There was nothing left to do but take her dark man’s hand.

  And lead him fro
m that place.

  JEFF VANDERMEER

  The Bone-Carver’s Tale

  JEFF VANDERMEER IS the author of more than 140 short stories, which have been published widely in such anthologies and magazines as Dark Terrors, Dark Voices 5, Asimov’s Science Fiction, BBR, The Silver Web, Magic Realism, Dream’s From The Stranger’s Cafe, Weird Tales and Pulphouse. His first novel, Dradin, In Love, was published in 1996 by Buzzcity Press, and a short story collection, The Book of Lost Places, appeared from Dark Regions Press. VanderMeer also co-edits the eclectic Leviathan anthology series (with Luke O’Grady). He won the 1994 Rhysling Award for best short poem (reprinted in Nebula Awards 30) and a 1995–96 Florida Individual Artist Fellowship for excellence in fiction.

  About “The Bone-Carver’s Tale”, he explains: “One day a few years back, in the middle of a goddawful period of my life and my writing – I really thought I might never write a decent word again – I saw a movie about Cambodia called The Killing Fields, and in the middle of this movie there is a scene in which the main character is crossing a bridge between rice fields when he realizes the bridge is made of human bones.

  “The image haunted me and combined in my imagination with a story about Hemingway’s disregard of normal humanitarian impulses in the face of a ‘higher’ writerly duty – he saw a matador so badly gored in the thigh that the bright white bone shone through the flesh, and his first reaction was, ‘What a great image’, so he wrote it down rather than help the poor bastard.

  “The next week the basic idea for a story was gnawing on me so insistently I said heck with it and, penniless, unemployed, and in a way completely free, I sat down, and in about five hours had written the rough draft of the story. What I remember about the story most is that it restored to me a sense of the flow of language and with that a relearned love of writing which has not abandoned me to this day. To write about such a foreign-seeming locale came entirely naturally to me as I had absorbed quite a bit of Southeast Asian history and religion in my teens when my mother was getting her Master’s Degree in the subject.”

  ONE NIGHT, SOME months before the monsoons, the bone-carver Sajit Xuan-Ti left his house, made from the whittled ribcage of a whale, and walked down to the black sand beach which had been his, and his alone, for six years. He had awakened from dreams of Angkor Thom, the great religious city to the North, and had seen the visages of its rulers broken along the boundaries of the land of Kampuchea, where the Mekong River flows into the China Sea.

  The weather was hot and dry, and even under the cooling glance of the moon he felt restless. During the day, the sails of junks at sea had seemed to droop. Now his sarong stuck to his skin as he paced the beach, hoping for a flash of bone amid the shells and seaweed. Often, he would find crocodile skulls, or the streamlined spines of dolphins. These he would gather, bring back to his house, and treat with a distillation of ginseng root, camphor oil, and dried copra.

  Increasingly, he spent his days receiving nobles and holy men who admired his carvings. Within a Xuan-Ti carving, it was said, one could find the souls of one’s ancestors; within the eyes of a Xuan-Ti figurine lay the mystery of death. But Sajit ignored such speculation. He saw only the bone, which was smooth to the touch and smelled, in its purest form, like water, like air.

  “Namo kuanshiyihuan Bodhissattiva mahasattva,” he chanted over the hiss of the surf, remembering the scree and clack of the bone as he worked on it, more pleasant than the laughter of women or the clatter of dice against a gambling board. Sometimes, he closed his eyes, his hands knowing the way more readily than his eyes, and he would listen to the tempo, the rhythm, of scree (a narrow, blade edge stroke) and clack (the flat of the blade), to tell if the work went well or poorly.

  He spotted the delicate bones of a scorpion fish splayed out in the sand. It could become a mask, perhaps, with the bones worked into a tangle of feathers.

  As he stooped over the fish, the fluid trill of a serunai rose above the crackle of waves and his fingers trailed in the sand. Never had he heard the instrument played with such precision. The music spoke of the coming of the mountains to the sea: liquid sound with the power of swells and breakers. As a child in his father’s butchershop, he had made a serunai from the bones of a pig, but the sounds he had forced from the long stem, the five holes, had mocked the caw of crows.

  Sajit stood up, the scorpion fish forgotten. For, in the sound of the serunai, he heard the familiar blindness that struck him every so often – a fumbling in the dark for form and content and style. In his fumbling, his hand would become firm, his knife strokes sharp and purposeful. The feeling which welled up inside him at such discovery made him shiver, as if the energy of the Gods had entered into him.

  The music came from the direction of the village of Go Oc Eo, and he turned that way, head held high as if to sniff out a new and unknown scent. The wind no longer felt hot. The smell of bone, salty with the sea and the acidic bite of the liquids he used to preserve bone, rose in his nostrils. The music played on, rising and falling in tempo, drawing him close and then setting him free, before imprisoning him once more.

  The smell of bone brought back the feel of bone, the roughness where it had snapped to a will greater than itself and then the smoothness after he had shined it with an extract of mango and water chestnut, the smoothness which excited his nerves, made his fingers capable of ever grander, more daring designs.

  The serunai drew so many feelings out of him that he wondered, fleetingly, if he was in love. He could not tell. He had never been in love before.

  “Who plays the serunai at night in the village of Go Oc Eo?” he asked Jen Jen the next morning. Jen Jen was his housekeeper, an older woman from Go Oc Eo, who had fine black hair, a small nose, and often leered mischievously. He thought she must be an incarnation of the Naga Queen, and more menacing. Yet without her, he could barely remember to feed or clothe himself, so intent was he on the work. The plates from breakfast – rice and eel curry – would lie scattered on his table until she removed them.

  “Prei Chen plays the serunai,” Jen Jen replied as she wove a tiger orange sarong upon her shuttle. “The Four Fishers for Gossip tell me she is the most accomplished master since Tow Som. She has played at the Khmer court in Angkor Thom.”

  “Hmmm,” Sajit said. “I believe I shall use the water buffalo jaw to depict Hanuman – this flaw, here, resembles his body. I need only accentuate the lines.”

  It did not matter to him that he had no living model to work from. When he had lived in the Khmer court, he had rarely glanced at a woman or lain with the prostitutes of the Avenue of a Thousand Pleasures, and yet from the haunch of a snow leopard, he had created a sensuous scene depicting a courtesan, her lover, and the kinsman to whom she had been pledged.

  Jen Jen slapped her thigh, her hand leaving an imprint of white against the smooth brown of her skin. “You work much too hard, Sajit Xuan-Ti! You work so hard you see monkey gods in a water buffalo’s jaw! If your parents were alive today, Sajit, they would see that you are still a child to live in such bliss.”

  “Hmmm,” said Sajit. “Why is she in Go Oc Eo?”

  Jen Jen took up her shuttle. “Why do you wish to know?” She snorted. “Perhaps she has come for you?”

  Bones, hardened and bleached to an unbearable white hue, awaited his knife two days later, on a morning when the sky was layered like rice paper and the wind sputtered and spun against the surf.

  In the Khmer court, at the University of Yasoharapura, Sajit had studied the anatomy and physiology of mammals, fish, and birds – and under his ministrations, some bones had already taken on new life: ape skulls became flasks for plum wine, for the apes of the northern Sukhothai Jungle often competed with An tribesmen for plums; thigh bones from the striped tapir became matching oars carved with scenes from the Sanskrit epic The Ramayana.

  He was etching the eyes of the Goddess Kali into a fruit bat’s wing bone when music washed over him like a summer gale, treacherous, but possessed of a freshness
and vitality that overwhelmed the musk of dead fish, the bitterness of sea salt. It cried out above the wind which stung the palm trees on the shore, shook the sand, scattered the fiddler crabs.

  A serunai, played by a master.

  He did not move. He did not blink. Surely Prei Chen had not come here?

  Jen Jen ran through the open door and crouched in front of him, spilling words onto the floor like dried rice, scattered almost to senselessness: “Prei Chen begs to speak with Sajit Xuan-Ti, master carver. She has seen your work. She has seen your work in the courts of the Khmer rulers – and the Thai. She wishes to visit the illustrious man behind such art.”

  He did not move. He did not blink.

  “Well, come on! Get up! Get out there!” Jen Jen tugged his arm until he rose from his seat. She straightened his sarong, and, chuckling, shoved him out the door.

  A woman waited for him in the antechamber, her legs crossed beneath her on the prayer rug. She cradled a serunai in her arms.

  When she saw Sajit, she bowed; a smile creased her face as she looked up at him.

  “I am honored,” she said, “to be in the presence of such a man.”

  He bowed. “And I in the presence of such a woman.”

  But the woman, he saw, with his bone-carver’s eye, was merely pretty. Her legs resembled the stocky legs of a water buffalo, muscled but not graceful. A mole marred her right cheek and her sarong was clumsily tied. Her smile framed a mouth much too wide to be seductive. The kohl around her eyes was too dark a shade.

  Nevertheless, his pulse quickened, and his own movement to sit, the way he crossed his legs, seemed awkward, ugly. Jen Jen had disappeared.

  “What has brought you here?” he asked, ignoring the tension in his body when Prei Chen caressed her serunai.

  Her stare split him open. “I came to see you. I have admired your work in many courts.”

  He thought he heard the rattling of bones in his workshop, but it was only his heart. She had anointed herself with the scent of frangipani, a sweet smell which announced her suitability for marriage. Arabic and Sanskrit words were woven into her sarong, all of which spoke of union and commitment.