The Year's Best Horror Stories 22

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  “Last month. I used to bring him here all the time. One day he didn’t come when I called. It got dark, and they closed the park, but he never came back.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry!”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “What was his name?”

  “He didn’t have one. I couldn’t make up my mind, and then it was too late.”

  They walked on between the trees. She kept a close eye on Greta. Somewhere music was playing. The honey-colored cocker spaniel led the German shepherd, the Irish setter and a dalmatian to a redwood table. There the cocker’s owner, a woman with brassy hair and a sagging green halter, poured white wine into plastic cups for several men.

  “I didn’t know,” said Stacey.

  “I missed him at first, but now I figure he’s better off. Someplace where he can run free, all the time.”

  “I’m sorry about your dog,” she said. “That’s so sad. But what I meant was, I didn’t know you were famous.”

  It was hard to believe that she knew the book. The odds against it were staggering, particularly considering the paltry royalties. He decided not to ask what she thought of it. That would be pressing his luck.

  “Who’s famous? I sold a novel. Big deal.”

  “Well, at least you’re a real writer. I envy you.”

  “Why?”

  “You have it made.”

  Sure I do, thought Madding. One decent review in the Village Voice Literary Supplement, and some reader at a production company makes an inquiry, and the next thing I know my agent makes a deal with all the money in the world at the top of the ladder. Only the ladder doesn’t go far enough. And now I’m back to square one, the option money used up, with a screenplay written on spec that’s not worth what it cost me to Xerox it, and I’m six months behind on the next novel. But I’ve got it made. Just ask the IRS.

  The music grew louder as they walked. It seemed to be coming from somewhere overhead. Madding gazed up into the trees, where the late-afternoon rays sparkled through the leaves, gold coins edged in blackness. He thought he heard voices, too, and the clink of glasses. Was there a party? The entire expanse of the park was visible from here, but he could see no evidence of a large group anywhere. The sounds were diffused and unlocalized, as if played back through widely spaced, out-of-phase speakers.

  “Where do you live?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “You said you don’t live here any more.”

  “In Calistoga.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Up north.”

  “Oh.”

  He began to relax. He was glad to be finished with this town.

  “I closed out my lease today,” he told her. “Everything’s packed. As soon as I hit the road, I’m out of here.”

  “Why did you come back to the park?”

  A good question, he thought. He hadn’t planned to stop by. It was a last-minute impulse.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. No, that wasn’t true. He might as well admit it. “It sounds crazy, but I guess I wanted to look for my dog. I thought I’d give it one more chance. It doesn’t feel right, leaving him.”

  “Do you think he’s still here?”

  He felt a tingling in the pit of his stomach. It was not a good feeling. I shouldn’t have come, he thought. Then I wouldn’t have had to face it. It’s dangerous here, too dangerous for there to be much hope.

  “At least I’ll know,” he said.

  He heard a sudden intake of breath and turned to her. There were tears in her eyes, as clear as diamonds.

  “It’s like the end of your book,” she said. “When the little girl is alone, and doesn’t know what’s going to happen next ...”

  My God, he thought, she did read it He felt flattered, but kept his ego in check. She’s not so tough She has a heart, after all, under all the bravado. That’s worth something—it’s worth a lot. I hope she makes it, the Elvis script, whatever she really wants. She deserves it.

  She composed herself and looked around, blinking. “What is that?”

  “What’s what?”

  “Don’t you hear it?” She raised her chin and moved her head from side to side, eyes closed.

  She meant the music, the glasses, the sound of the party that wasn’t there. “I don’t know.”

  Now there was the scraping of steel somewhere behind them, like a rough blade drawn through metal. He stopped and turned around quickly.

  A couple of hundred yards away, at the top of the slope, a man in a uniform opened the gate to the park. Beyond the fence, a second man climbed out of an idling car with a red, white, and blue shield on the door. He had a heavy chain in one hand.

  “Come on,” said Madding. “It’s time to go.”

  “It can’t be.”

  “The security guards are here. They close the park at six.”

  “Already?”

  Madding was surprised, too. He wondered how long they had been walking. He saw the man with the crewcut searching for his Frisbee in the grass, the bull terrier at his side. The group on the bench and the woman in the halter were collecting their things. The bodybuilder marched his two ribboned Pekingese to the slope. The Beverly Hills dentist whistled and stood waiting for his dog to come to him. Madding snapped to, as if waking up. It really was time.

  The sun had dropped behind the hills and the grass under his feet was darkening. The car in the parking lot above continued to idle; the rumbling of the engine reverberated in the natural bowl of the park, as though close enough to bulldoze them out of the way. He heard a rhythm in the throbbing, and realized that it was music, after all.

  They had wandered close to the edge, where the park ended and the gorge began. Over the gorge, the deck of one of the cantilevered houses beat like a drum.

  “Where’s Greta?” she said.

  He saw the stark expression, the tendons outlined through the smooth skin of her throat.

  “Here, girl! Over here ...!”

  She called out, expecting to see her dog. Then she clapped her hands together. The sound bounced back like the echo of a gunshot from the depths of the canyon. The dog did not come.

  In the parking lot, the second security guard let a Doberman out of the car. It was a sleek, black streak next to him as he carried the heavy chain to his partner, who was waiting for the park to empty before padlocking the gate.

  Madding took her arm. Her skin was covered with gooseflesh. She drew away.

  “I can’t go,” she said. “I have to find Greta.”

  He scanned the grassy slopes with her, avoiding the gorge until there was nowhere left to look. It was blacker than he remembered. Misshapen bushes and stunted shrubs filled the canyon below, extending all the way down to the formal boundaries of the city. He remembered standing here only a few weeks ago, in exactly the same position. He had told himself then that his dog could not have gone over the edge, but now he saw that there was nowhere else to go.

  The breeze became a wind in the canyon and the black liquid eye of a swimming pool winked at him from far down the hillside. Above, the sound of the music stopped abruptly.

  “You don’t think she went down there, do you?” said Stacey. There was a catch in her voice. “The mountain lions ...”

  “They only come out at night.”

  “But it is night!”

  They heard a high, broken keening.

  “Listen!” she said. “That’s Greta!”

  “No, it’s not. Dogs don’t make that sound. It’s—” He stopped himself.

  “What?”

  “Coyotes.”

  He regretted saying it.

  Now, without the music, the shuffling of footsteps on the boards was clear and unmistakable. He glanced up. Shadows appeared over the edge of the deck as a line of heads gathered to look down. Ice cubes rattled and someone laughed. Then someone else made a shushing sound and the silhouetted heads bobbed silently, listening and watching.

  Can they see us? he wondered.

 
Madding felt the presence of the Doberman behind him, at the top of the slope. How long would it take to close the distance, once the guards set it loose to clear the park? Surely they would call out a warning first. He waited for the voice, as the sounds ticked by on his watch.

  “I have to go get her,” she said, starting for the gorge.

  “No ...”

  “I can’t just leave her.”

  “It’s not safe,” he said.

  “But she’s down there, I know it! Greta!”

  There was a giggling from the deck.

  They can hear us, too, he thought. Every sound, every word magnified, like a Greek amphitheater. Or a Roman one.

  Rover, Spot, Towser? No, Cubby. That’s what I was going to call you, if there had been time. I always liked the name. Cubby.

  He made a decision.

  “Stay here,” he said, pushing her aside.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going over.”

  “You don’t have to. It’s my dog ...”

  “Mine, too.”

  Maybe they’re both down there, he thought.

  “I’ll go with you,” she said.

  “No.”

  He stood there, thinking. It all comes down to this. There’s no way to avoid it. There never was.

  “But you don’t know what’s there ...!”

  “Go,” he said to her, without turning around. “Get out of here while you can. There’s still time.”

  Go home, he thought, wherever that is. You have a life ahead of you. It’s not too late, if you go right now, without looking back.

  “Wait ...!”

  He disappeared over the edge.

  A moment later there was a new sound, something more than the breaking of branches and the thrashing. It was powerful and deep, followed immediately by a high, mournful yipping. Then there was only silence, and the night.

  From above the gorge, a series of quick, hard claps fell like rain.

  It was the people on the deck.

  They were applauding.

  PERFECT DAYS by Chet Williamson

  Some years back at a World Fantasy Convention in Chicago, Chet Williamson and I were on a panel together. He described a particularly nasty story he was working on, I said I’d like to see it when published, the story was published, and here it is. Worth the wait.

  When asked to say something nice, Williamson responded: “I was born in Lancaster, PA in 1948, have a background in theater and advertising before I got into real writing, have published in a bunch of magazines, including Playboy, The New Yorker, Esquire (the Japanese edition, but it sounds good), F&SF, and others, as well as lotsa anthologies. Six novels, only one of which is currently in print (Reign), but with two coming up this year, Second Chance from CD Publications, and Mordeheim from TSR. Also due out any day is a four-issue Aliens mini-series from Dark Horse called Music of the Spears.” Williamson presently resides in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania with his wife Laurie and teenaged son Colin.

  It was the sheer perfection of the day that made Franklin Richards think about killing again. What there had been so far of winter was cold, harsh and biting. The first snowfall had come in early November, and the freezing temperatures had kept most of the four inches on the ground, though the roads and driveways and parking areas of the homes had long been bare. But this day was different. This day was glorious.

  Richards had been a resident of the homes for six years now. It was the twin curse of mind and bowels that had decided him. His bowels had become more and more reluctant to obey his orders, and his mind had become less and less anxious to give them. He would awaken in the night soiled and not caring, lying in his bed until the discomfort and the smell finally drove him to his feet and into the bathroom to clean himself. He made the decision, no one else, as he had no children to make a pretense of caring for him. His decisions were his own, as always. He had never needed anyone to make them, indeed had never needed anyone at all, except for the times when he had killed. The women were the only others he had needed.

  It had been easy to enter the homes. It was the national retirement community of a fraternal organization he had joined in the forties, after the war, when he had attained a small amount of respectability. He had gone to meetings from 1947 through 1949, but when the urge came again and he was forced to leave the town for weeks at a time to satisfy it, his attendance diminished, and finally lapsed, although he always continued to pay his national dues. Writing the check once a year gave him a feeling of belonging.

  It also gave him a place to go when he was old and incontinent. He had merely signed over all his property and financial holdings (which were minimal), and moved into the “mid-care” building of the homes. He had been 78 then, and was 84 today, on this perfect day.

  Richards stood on the balcony and looked down over the plaza, a half acre of cement pathways lined with old trees. Anderson was there, alone, hobbling along with his walker, snarling curses with his twisted mouth as he negotiated the aluminum frame around a patch of ice that had not yet fully melted. Richards glanced at one of the thermometers set here and there about the balcony railing, as if the residents could have no more fascinating pastime than to check the air temperature. Sixty-five. It was positively balmy on December 21st, a thing unheard of in their latitude.

  Though Richards had never been a religious man, his required attendance at chapel (and, he thought, his inexorable approach to his own death) had brought out a spiritual side to him he had not known was there, and he had begun, as a result, to look for reasons in slight things, purposes and patterns in what he had before considered to be only a random cosmos. So now he wondered why the weather should have been so kind, what the gentle season augured.

  Was it, he fancied, a boon to one of the residents who would die today or tonight? A final gift of grace before passing into the cold of the grave? Such an unexpected pleasure could not be mere happenstance. And then such thoughts passed, as he remembered other golden days, sunshine flooding down, making cold flesh warm, red blood gleam like rubies, metal blades flash blindingly when he licked them clean.

  The memories had lost the power to stir him the way they used to. But still he thought of those times the way other old men thought of living flesh, of women hot and alive with passion, and the memories hardened their minds without touching their bodies, and they rejoiced in the memories while they grieved for the years that had stolen away their own lust, left them with only water spouts, and sometimes not even that.

  The same grief overtook Richards now, as he thought of those bright days, as the mild, moist air bathed his aching joints. He remembered a summer day in 1931, the very first time he had killed a woman. He had been bumming his way across Illinois, and had just gotten off an eastbound freight to see if he could earn a bite to eat by doing some chores when he saw her. She had been near his own age (a fetish with him—as he had grown older, so had his victims), and very pretty, though dressed poorly. She was picking daffodils by the side of the track, and he had said hello to her, and they had talked, and she told him that she often came down to the track to pick flowers, and he thought she spoke as if she were simple-minded.

  And then the thought had come to him for the first time, the thought that would come again scores of times before age slowed him and dulled the savagery, blunted the need, the thought that he was alone with her here, that no one had seen him get off the freight, and no one would see him get on another one that would carry him away. And his mind told him that where the girl’s life was concerned he was God, and, as he felt the God he had read of in the Old Testament was wont to do, he killed. The hunger of which he had felt only small pangs became insatiable, and he killed her, doing other things before and after, things of which he had not known he was capable, but which, in retrospect, did not trouble him. He did decide, however, that a pocketknife was not very effective for that kind of work, and resolved to use a larger blade in the future. And when he had cleaned himself, hidden the body, and leap
t into the open boxcar door of another freight, he knew that he had found his life’s purpose.

  A garbled curse broke his reverie, and he looked down and saw Anderson, his roommate, smashing his walker up and down as if he were killing ants. Richards saw that the rubber tip of the back left leg had become wedged between the root of a tree and the edge of the sidewalk.

  “Do you need help?” Richards called down in his gentle tenor. “Do you want me to call a nurse?”

  “Go to hell, goddammit,” Anderson replied, as Richards had known he would, and battered the hapless walker all the harder until he finally extricated the leg. He swore often, but always, Richards thought, with the air of a man who felt uncomfortable with the words he used. Anderson had been a small town used car dealer for fifty years, and, beside belonging to their mutual organization, was also a member of the Rotary, the Lions’ Club, and the Odd Fellows, and had been active in his church, none of which smiled on blasphemy. Anderson, Richards theorized, had always been a closet blasphemer, and now age permitted him liberties.

  Richards, on the other hand, had taken liberties ever since 1931, when the so-called Midwest Ripper had begun his nine year killing spree that had claimed eighteen female victims (eighteen who were found, at any rate), During this time Richards worked for a Chicago firm selling cookware door to door from the safety of an anonymous company car. His territory stretched from southern Michigan to northern Kentucky, and from the Mississippi River to central Ohio. It was a large area, filled with possibilities, and not once in nine years did anyone in Chicago mention that Richards’ territory was the same as the Ripper’s. Richards, however, took the precaution of never killing a woman in Michigan. Only many years later, when he read of geographical patterns in serial killings, did he realize that his evasive maneuvers were far ahead of their time, as were the killings themselves. He took pride in that.

  On the balcony, he paused, felt a stirring in his abdomen, told himself to go in and relieve the pressure before he had an accident. If he had an accident, then he would have to be cleaned up, and that would take too much time away from this lovely, perfect day, from the warm sun, the balmy air.