The Year's Best Horror Stories 22

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  He made it in time, congratulated himself, and, as he left his room, received a smile from Marianne, the nurse on duty. Then he got a styrofoam cup of decaffeinated coffee from the large, metal urn and took it back out onto the balcony, thinking about Marianne. He could have easily killed her. She was the type he wanted during what he thought of as his second, more mature period, after the war. He had been 34, older than a lot of the enlistees, but he had worked hard, taken initiative, and had been a sergeant when he left the Army five years later. The legalized killing had been good for him, and though he had not felt the ecstasy as he had with the women, it was, temporarily, enough.

  In 1945 he felt as if his hunger had been satisfied for life, and gave up the road, moved to a small town in Indiana, where, through his Army contacts, he took a job as an assistant manager at a drug store, and, for the next four years, became as bourgeois and respectable as he would ever be. This was the time he had accepted his boss’s invitation to join the organization which now housed him in his old age.

  But in 1949 the aching need had returned, and he left the small town and went back to the Chicago firm, where, despite a ten year hiatus, there were people in sales and in personnel who recalled his previous successes, his great drive, and rehired him. His work of selling started anew, as did the real work of his soul, done with blade and hands and lips and tongue, sometimes in darkness, but most often and most joyously in the light, on the warm, sun-dappled, mossy floors of forests, or upon lush mattresses of bent wheat, or on grass as green as a hundred memories.

  The women were all like Marianne, older, in their forties, with figures that had filled out, and round, rosy faces. Many of them were widowed by the war, and ached for a tall, strong, and handsome man like Richards to sweep them away in his big black car, fill the needs of which they had not been aware, make them more than women, transform them past their sundered flesh, create legends of them. By 1950 it was obvious to all that the Midwest Ripper had returned.

  The notoriety dismayed Richards, as it had in the thirties. He wished for anonymity, and read the stories in the newspapers only to see how much was known, if any detail could draw the search to him. Only once, in 1953, did someone see a black car, either a Pontiac or a Dodge, near the house where a victim lived, but the witness, a child, had not recalled nor even thought to look at the license plate. Richards was relieved, as he never had any wish to be caught. He thought that if that tired cliché of criminology was true, it was true of men other than himself.

  His last killing was in December of 1955, a month before his fiftieth birthday. When he finished, he was tired, and felt only a ghost of the exultation that had previously filled him. Was it, he wondered at the time, because his victims were older too? Because they had lived more of their lives, was there less vitality released by the knife, less life in the blood that flowed? His passion was still there, but cloaked with thick velvet, tired and tiresome, as if he were like other men his age, men married for years, making love to women who had no more surprises to share. Or maybe, he thought, he was just getting older.

  It was possible, wasn’t it? As men entered their fifties and sixties, youthful passions flagged, things that were of burning interest no longer retained their novelty. The lust that made a young man of twenty seek out whores was dead in men of eighty. Such a diminution of fire was not instantaneous. It was not there one day and gone the next. Rather, Richards knew that it subsided slowly, the flames fading to glowing embers, and then to the last sparks that gleamed only when blown upon, and finally to cold and dusty ashes, all heat gone, incapable of flaming again.

  Richards sighed and shook his head, then took a sip of the decaffeinated coffee. What he could taste of it was bitter, and he wished his diabetes allowed him to use sugar. There were packets of Sweet ’n Low, but he did not relish the thought of putting unnecessary chemicals into his body. He had never smoked, and seldom drank alcohol. Indeed, he had not had a taste of whiskey in over thirty years. No, it was never drink that had driven him to what he did. He had carried his own drives within him.

  For years he had looked back, struggling to psychoanalyze himself, but found nothing. His childhood had been happy, he had been loved by both his parents (who had loved each other as well), he had never tortured animals, his early sexual experiences were as normal as the next boy’s. None of the patterns seemed to apply to him. There was no reason.

  There was only that first summer day, the pretty girl picking daffodils, the knowledge of what he could do with her, and the will to do it. Sometimes he thought that will was the only difference between him and other men. Everyone had the desire to—how could they not? But something held them back, something that he mercifully did not possess. It was the only way he could comprehend it all.

  Such a warm day it was. A day like this.

  Then someone new entered the plaza, an old woman in a wheelchair, pushed by an overweight man in his fifties. Despite the weather, the woman wore a heavy cloth coat of once-bright red that fell far past her knees, a gray knitted cap that fit her like a second, diseased skin, and a green scarf that hid her nose and mouth. Only her eyes and her hands, which for some inexplicable reason were not swathed in gloves, were visible, and Richards could see that the fingers were crooked claws. Arthritis, no doubt. Then the eyes looked up at him where he stood on the balcony, and he saw recognition gleam in them, recognition that, in another second, was mirrored in his own.

  He had seen this woman before, but could not remember where. A former customer? A neighbor? A victim? No, all his victims were long gone, weren’t they?

  Then he remembered. Except for one. The one who had not quite become a victim. And he knew who the old woman was.

  Her eyes, pink marbles in putty, widened as her wheelchair approached the balcony, and her head continued to tilt back as if to keep him in sight. Just when she was almost directly beneath him, her neck reached the angle where pain began, and the head jerked, the eyes slammed shut as she and the man disappeared into the building.

  Richards stood for a while, thinking. The woman was as old as he was, so perhaps she was senile. Wheelchair-bound, arthritic to the point of agony—what were the odds her mind was any less worn? Finally he smiled, and decided to go downstairs to meet the new arrival.

  She screamed when he rounded the corner. He had expected some sort of reaction if she was indeed who he thought she was, but the scream was the worst possible reassurance that his memory had been correct. It was a mindless scream, a cry of pure emotion, unleavened by logic or the desire for communication. Though Richards had heard many such screams in years past, he was not prepared for the sheer intensity of it, nor for the way it made him feel. For an instant it was like being young again.

  “Mrs. Jenks!” said Marianne, used to dealing with the quirks of the aged. “It’s only our Mr. Richards.”

  “It’s him!” said Mrs. Jenks through a mouthful of loose dentures. “It’s him, he’s the one!” The claws attempted to point, but to no good effect. It looked more, thought Richards, like the gesticulations of the Witch of Endor. The other hand plucked at the loose scarf around her neck as if it was cutting off her breath.

  “Mother had a bad experience some years back,” said the man breathily. The long push in the wheelchair appeared to have tired him. “She was ... almost attacked.”

  “Ah,” Richards said sympathetically, trying to ignore the woman’s babbling.

  “It was after my father died—”

  “It’s him, David ...”

  “She was rather old to be—”

  “I tell you it’s him.”

  “—to be attacked like that. She’s never been able to—”

  “Listen to me, listen, he’s the one who did it!”

  “—put it out of her mind. Now, Mother, it’s all right, this isn’t the man ...”

  “You can’t leave me here, not here with him. He’ll kill me, kill me, do awful things to me.”

  “I believe it,” came a voice from behind
Richards. He turned around and saw Anderson leaning on his walker. “Son of a bitch steals my candy.”

  “Mr. Richards doesn’t steal your candy, Mr. Anderson. You eat all your candy.”

  “Only eat a little,” Anderson said, hobbling into their midst. “He steals the rest.”

  “Now you know that Mr. Richards is diabetic,” Marianne went on patiently. “He can’t eat candy. You eat your candy but you forget you ate it. Now why don’t you go back to your room and put in your teeth?”

  “Son of a bitch steels my teeth.”

  Through this conversation Mrs. Jenks continued to pluck at her son’s sleeve and mutter things about Richards, who kept smiling gently at both her and Anderson, raising his eyebrows every now and then to Marianne and Mrs. Jenks’s son, as if to say, I know, I understand.

  Eventually Marianne led Mrs. Jenks and her son away, and Richards gave a friendly little wave to the old woman as she struggled to turn her head and keep her eyes on him. In another minute the elevator doors closed on them, and Richards and Anderson were alone in the hall.

  Anderson squinting and hunched over like a malignant troll, eyed him. “You’re gonna kill her, aren’tcha?”

  “Bob,” Richards said, “you’re a very nice man, and so am I, and I don’t take your candy, and I would never, never harm Mrs. Jenks. Happy now? Then why don’t you do what Marianne suggested and go put your teeth in.”

  “Why don’t you go and shit yourself,” Anderson said, and, with that bon mot, turned in a series of jerky moves that undercut his approximation of the satisfied air of a man who knows another’s weakness.

  Slowly Richards’s smile splintered, and he walked down the hall and up the stairs just in time to see Mrs. Jenks being wheeled by her overweight, wheezing son into the room directly across from his own. Of course. Mrs. Hodgkins had died in the infirmary last week, so there was the vacancy. Mrs. Jenks would be Mrs. Wilson’s new roommate, tired, deaf Mrs. Wilson, who would not be able to hear Mrs. Jenks’s crazed accusations, paranoid fantasies. Fantasies, at least, to the other people in the homes.

  Richards stepped onto the balcony again. It was still empty. What was wrong with his fellow dodderers? Why was everyone not out here on such a day?

  Such a day.

  And then, with his newly found causality, Richards saw the connection, realized the purpose behind the day. It was too much of a coincidence that the glory of this day should come at the same time as the return of Mrs. Jenks into his life. Only a fool would say that there was no correlation between the two events. The day, the scream, both took Richards back—the warmth of the day to the glories of long ago, and the scream to the efforts of not too long ago, back only to 1973, when he had tried once more, once for old time’s sake, an aging man’s attempt to reclaim the ecstatic pangs of his prime.

  He had been 67 then, and retired, and for some weeks had felt the provocation of desire, but hesitated, unsure of his ability to perform. So he had decided to sublimate the desire through nostalgia, and that summer undertook an excursion to the sites of his previous triumphs, driving through the Midwest, stopping at places that looked familiar, that progress had not changed. It had been remarkable how much he remembered, how a curve in the road through a field, or a stone railroad bridge overgrown with laurel, could roll back the years. He got out of the car often, and walked into groves of trees, remembering, often standing over what graves were still there, undiscovered after so many years. Then he would kneel by them and touch the earth, knowing what souvenirs of joy lay beneath. Once or twice, recalling a particularly moving experience on some lovely afternoon when all had been perfection, he cried.

  And it was while he was crying, twenty yards off a hiking path in Indiana, that Mrs. Jenks came along. She was walking firmly then, on the path and alone, a canvas knapsack on her back, a canteen slung over her shoulder, a healthy, retired woman, he thought, seeking exercise and communion with the outdoors. The day had been so perfect, his memories so overpowering, that it was with no thought at all that he burst onto the path, ready to live his aging fantasies, remembered realities, again. His face was still moist with tears, and he looked to make certain the woman was alone, and said, “Help me, please, my wife is back in there—” And the woman paused in surprise, dropped her guard at his plea long enough for him to lash out and strike her in the side of the head with a clenched fist.

  She went down, moaning, and he thrust his hands under her arms, dragged her into the brush, tore at her clothes, and, too late, realized that he did not have a knife. Frenzied, he ripped open her knapsack, but found only snacks and a paperback book.

  There was no knife. It was wrong. The palette of flesh lay before him, but what he had to do could not be done without a knife. Without a knife there was no joy, no beauty, and he suddenly realized that there now lay within him not the slightest sense of pleasure, only of frenzy. He felt only the strain of an aging body, his heart racing, his chest rising and falling as though someone was hugging him tightly.

  He shut his eyes, put his hands on his pounding, tripping heart, and prayed to a god in whom he did not yet believe for the panic to pass. When he opened his eyes the woman was looking at him, her expression dazed, her hands beginning to flop like fish at her sides. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, then staggered to his feet and ran through the brush, onto the trail, and down it to his car, into which he fell, pains in his side like hot needles.

  As he drove away, he consoled himself with the fact that the woman had been coming out of the woods, so she had not seen the car. And she could not have known him, for he was hundreds of miles away from his home, and he had never seen her before. No, they would not find him. She would have to hold her clothes together and write this off as a nightmare from which she walked away.

  It had been a lesson. He was too old, he had told himself. Too old, too tired, too foolish. Richards had never again felt the hot urge, never until today, this spring day in the heart of winter, this perfect day, which he now knew had been made for him, all for him.

  He realized that he had made a mistake with the woman he now knew as Mrs Jenks. He had let her walk away, but he should have killed her. He should have used a rock, or a branch, or choked her. But he had panicked. His age, his own death, had scared him too much, and now she had returned, returned so that things could be made right, so that an old man could know joy once again. This time, he told himself, he would be ready.

  Richards was fairly certain that he would be caught, but it didn’t really matter anymore. Perhaps the experience of imprisonment, trial, and appeals would bring some needed novelty to his last few years. Certainly, he thought, prison could be little worse than sharing a room with Anderson. Besides, he probably wouldn’t go to prison, not with his physical problems. A state home, perhaps. Or maybe, just maybe, he could get away with it.

  For the first time in years, Richards actually felt excited, as though there really was something worth living for. He felt a pressure in the crotch of his trousers and thought he might have to go inside again, then realized that it was not the demands of his bladder that caused the tightness, but other demands that he had not known for a long time, and he laughed at the discovery. Then he started to think about what he would do, and how he would do it.

  When he went back to his room, he heard a low keening sound from the door of what was now Mrs. Jenks and Mrs. Wilson’s room, and guessed that Mrs. Jenks had been given a sedative to calm her. He hoped that she would receive another before bedtime. It would make things easier.

  Several hours later, he was relieved to see that Mrs. Jenks was not in the dining hall for supper, which lent credence to his sedation theory. As Richards munched his soft and easily chewable meat loaf, he examined the butter knife that lay across the rim of his plate, and dismissed it. The blade was not at all sharp, and had only a blunt point. A steak knife would have been perfect, but they never had steak. It was too difficult for most of the guests to chew. No, it would have to be Anderson’s fudge knife.
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  The candy of which Anderson prattled, and unjustly accused Richards of stealing, was chocolate and peanut butter fudge that his daughter brought him. It came in trays of aluminum foil, and was firm enough that it needed to be cut with a sharp knife. Often Richards watched as Anderson sliced out a piece, put it in his mouth, and waited until it was soft before beginning to chew, open-mouthed, streams of brown snaking down the creases in his chin like thin worms. The knife was metal, horn-handled, and the blade was serrated and ended in a nasty point on which Anderson had cut his fingers more than once, cursing and licking the wound with the same inattentive lack of gusto with which he ate the fudge. While Anderson locked the candy in his closet when he had finished gumming it, he never put away the knife, which the nurse on duty cleaned whenever she saw it, and returned to his dresser top. It was always out, ever accessible.

  The adhesive tape was easy to come by as well. It was not locked up, as were the drugs, and he simply entered a supply closet when the hall was empty, and put a full roll in his pocket. It was the white fabric kind, very strong.

  Richards waited until midnight. He had no fear of falling asleep, for his excitement was too great for that. He got up, went into the bathroom, and evacuated his bowels, sitting and waiting until something happened. He could not risk having an accident, not tonight.

  Then he removed his pajamas and put on his bathrobe so that he was naked beneath it. In one pocket he put the roll of tape and a wash cloth, in the other Anderson’s knife. He thought that even if he cleaned the knife and put it back afterwards, the police might be able to identify it. But then he recalled reading that they could tell less from cutting wounds than from stab wounds, and he had never stabbed, always cut. Stabbing was so brutal, and so final. It could end things too early.

  Standing at the door of his room, he was, for a moment, afraid. His heart lurched like a rabid animal inside his chest, and he took deep breaths, made himself relax, stood there until he could raise his hand and not see it tremble. Then he opened the door a crack and looked out.