The Year's Best Horror Stories 22

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  He didn’t feel like eating much. He finished off a slice of toast laden with baked beans, and wondered whether Fishwick had eaten yet, and what his meal might be. As soon as he’d sluiced plate and fork he made for his armchair with the radio. Before long, however, he’d had enough of the jazz age. Usually the dance music of that era roused his nostalgia for innocence, not least because the music was older than he was, but just now it seemed too good to be true. So did the views on the wall and beyond the window, and the programs on the television—the redemption of a cartoon Scrooge, commercials chortling “Ho ho ho,” an appeal on behalf of people who would be on their own at Christmas, a choir reiterating “Let nothing you display,” the syntax of which he couldn’t grasp. As his mind fumbled with it, his eyelids drooped. He nodded as though agreeing with himself that he had better switch off the television, and then he was asleep.

  Fishwick wakened him. Agony flared through his right leg. As he lurched out of the chair, trying to blink away the blur which coated his eyes, he was afraid the leg would fail him. He collapsed back into the chair, thrusting the leg in front of him, digging his fingers into the calf in an attempt to massage away the cramp. When at last he was able to bend the leg without having to grit his teeth, he set about recalling what had invaded his sleep.

  The nine o’clock news had been ending. It must have been a newsreader who had spoken Fishwick’s name. Foulsham hadn’t been fully awake, after all; no wonder he’d imagined that the voice sounded like the murderer’s. Perhaps it had been the hint of amusement which his imagination had seized upon, though would a newsreader have sounded amused? He switched off the television and waited for the news on the local radio station, twinges in his leg ensuring that he stayed awake.

  He’d forgotten that there was no ten o’clock news. He attempted to phone the radio station, but five minutes of hanging on brought him only a message like an old record on which the needle had stuck, advising him to try later. By eleven he’d hobbled to bed. The newsreader raced through accounts of violence and drunken driving, then rustled her script. “Some news just in,” she said. “Police report that convicted murderer Desmond Fishwick has taken his own life while in custody. Full details in our next bulletin.”

  That would be at midnight. Foulsham tried to stay awake, not least because he didn’t understand how, if the local station had only just received the news, the national network could have broadcast it more than ninety minutes earlier. But when midnight came he was asleep. He wakened in the early hours and heard voices gabbling beside him, insomniacs trying to assert themselves on a phone-in program before the presenter cut them short. Foulsham switched off the radio and imagined the city riddled with cells in which people lay or paced, listening to the babble of their own caged obsessions. At least one of them—Fishwick—had put himself out of his misery. Foulsham massaged his leg until the ache relented sufficiently to let sleep overtake him.

  The morning newscast said that Fishwick had killed himself last night, but little else. The tabloids were less reticent, Foulsham discovered once he’d dressed and hurried to the newsagent’s. MANIAC’S BLOODY SUICIDE. SAVAGE KILLER SAVAGES HIMSELF. HE BIT OFF MORE THAN HE COULD CHEW. Fishwick had gnawed the veins out of his arms and died from loss of blood.

  He must have been insane to do that to himself, Foulsham thought, clutching his heavy collar shut against a vicious wind as he limped downhill. While bathing he’d been tempted to take the day off, but now he didn’t want to be alone with the images which the news had planted in him. Everyone around him on the bus seemed to be reading one or other of the tabloids which displayed Fishwick’s face on the front page like posters for the suicide, and he felt as though all the paper eyes were watching him. Once he was off the bus he stuffed his newspaper into the nearest bin.

  Annette and Jackie met him with smiles which looked encouraging yet guarded, and he knew they’d heard about the death. The shop was already full of customers buying last-minute cards and presents for people they’d almost forgotten, and it was late morning before the staff had time for a talk. Foulsham braced himself for the onslaught of questions and comments, only to find that Jackie and Annette were avoiding the subject of Fishwick, waiting for him to raise it so that they would know how he felt, not suspecting that he didn’t know himself. He tried to lose himself in the business of the shop, to prove to them that they needn’t be so careful of him; he’d never realised how much their teasing and joking meant to him. But they hardly spoke to him until the last customer had departed, and then he sensed that they’d discussed what to say to him. “Don’t you let it matter to you, Mr Foulsham. He didn’t,” Annette said.

  “Don’t you dare let it spoil your evening,” Jackie told him.

  She was referring to the staff’s annual dinner. While he hadn’t quite forgotten about it, he seemed to have gained an impression that it hadn’t much to do with him. He locked the shop and headed for home to get changed. After twenty minutes of waiting in a bus queue whose disgruntled mutters felt like flies bumbling mindlessly around him he walked home, the climb aggravating his limp.

  He put on his dress shirt and bow tie and slipped his dark suit out of the bag in which it had been hanging since its January visit to the cleaners. As soon as he was dressed he went out again, away from the sounds of Mrs. Hutton’s three-legged trudge and of the dogs, which hadn’t stopped barking since he had entered the house. Nor did he care for the way Mrs. Hutton had opened her door and peered at him with a suspiciousness which hadn’t entirely vanished when she saw him.

  He was at the restaurant half an hour before the rest of the party. He sat at the bar, sipping a Scotch and then another, thinking of people who must do so every night in preference to sitting alone at home, though might some of them be trying to avoid doing something worse? He was glad when his party arrived, Annette and her husband, Jackie and her new boyfriend, even though Annette’s greeting as he stood up disconcerted him. “Are you all right, Mr. Foulsham?” she said, and he felt unpleasantly wary until he realised that she must be referring to his limp.

  By the time the turkey arrived at the table, the party had opened a third bottle of wine and the conversation had floated loose. “What was he like, Mr. Foulsham,” Jackie’s boyfriend said, “the feller you put away?”

  Annette coughed delicately. “Mr. Foulsham may not want to talk about it.”

  “It’s all right, Annette. Perhaps I should. He was—” Foulsham said, and trailed off, wishing that he’d taken advantage of the refuge she was offering. “Maybe he was just someone whose mind gave way.”

  “I hope you’ve no regrets,” Annette’s husband said. “You should be proud.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of stopping the killing. He won’t kill anyone else.”

  Foulsham couldn’t argue with that, and yet he felt uneasy, especially when Jackie’s boyfriend continued to interrogate him. If Fishwick didn’t matter, as Annette had insisted when Foulsham was closing the shop, why was everyone so interested in hearing about him? He felt as though they were resurrecting the murderer, in Foulsham’s mind if nowhere else. He tried to describe Fishwick, and related as much of his own experience of the trial as he judged they could stomach. All that he left unsaid seemed to gather in his mind, especially the thought of Fishwick extracting the veins from his arms.

  Annette and her husband gave him a lift home. He meant to invite them up for coffee and brandy, but the poodles started yapping the moment he climbed out of the car. “Me again, Mrs. Hutton,” he slurred as he hauled himself along the banister. He switched on the light in his main room and gazed at the landscapes on the wall, but his mind couldn’t grasp them. He brushed his teeth and drank as much water as he could take, then he huddled under the blankets, willing the poodles to shut up.

  He didn’t sleep for long. He kept wakening with a stale rusty taste in his mouth. He’d drunk too much, that was why he felt so hot and sticky and closed in. When he eased himself out of bed and tiptoed to the bathroom, t
he dogs began to bark. He rinsed out his mouth but was unable to determine if the water which he spat into the sink was discolored. He crept out of the bathroom with a glass of water in each hand and crawled shivering into bed, trying not to grind his teeth as pictures which he would have given a good deal not to see rushed at him out of the dark.

  In the morning he felt as though he hadn’t slept at all. He lay in the creeping sunlight, too exhausted either to sleep or to get up, until he heard the year’s sole Sunday delivery sprawl on the doormat. He washed and dressed gingerly, cursing the poodles, whose yapping felt like knives emerging from his skull, and stumbled down to the hall.

  He lined up the new cards on his mantelpiece, where there was just enough room for them. Last year he’d had to stick cards onto a length of parcel tape and hang them from the cornice. This year cards from businesses outnumbered those from friends, unless tomorrow restored the balance. He was signing cards in response to some of the Sunday delivery when he heard Mrs. Hutton and the poodles leave the house.

  He limped to the window and looked down on her. The two leashes were bunched in her left hand, her right was clenched on her stick. She was leaning backward as the dogs ran her downhill, and he had never seen her look so crippled. He turned away, unsure why he found the spectacle disturbing. Perhaps he should catch up on his sleep while the dogs weren’t there to trouble it, except that if he slept now he might be guaranteeing himself another restless night. The prospect of being alone in the early hours and unable to sleep made him so nervous that he grabbed the phone before he had thought who he could ask to visit.

  Nobody had time for him today. Of the people ranked on the mantelpiece, two weren’t at home, two were fluttery with festive preparations, one was about to drive several hundred miles to collect his parents, one was almost incoherent with a hangover. All of them invited Foulsham to visit them over Christmas, most of them sounding sincere, but that wouldn’t take care of Sunday. He put on his overcoat and gloves and hurried downhill by a route designed to avoid Mrs. Hutton, and bought his Sunday paper on the way to a pub lunch.

  The Bloody Mary wasn’t quite the remedy he was hoping for. The sight of the liquid discomforted him, and so did the scraping of the ice cubes against his teeth. Nor was he altogether happy with his lunch; the leg of chicken put him in mind of the process of severing it from the body. When he’d eaten as much as he could hold down, he fled.

  The papery sky was smudged with darker clouds, images too nearly erased to be distinguishable. Its light seemed to permeate the city, reducing its fabric to little more than cardboard. He felt more present than anything around him, a sensation which he didn’t relish. He closed his eyes until he thought of someone to visit, a couple who’d lived in the house next to his and whose Christmas card invited him to drop in whenever he was passing their new address.

  A double-decker bus on which he was the only passenger carried him across town and deposited him at the edge of the new suburb. The streets of squat houses which looked squashed by their tall roofs were deserted, presumably cleared by the Christmas television shows he glimpsed through windows, and his isolation made him feel watched. He limped into the suburb, glancing at the street names.

  He hadn’t realized the suburb was so extensive. At the end of almost an hour of limping and occasionally resting, he still hadn’t found the address. The couple weren’t on the phone, or he would have tried to contact them. He might have abandoned the quest if he hadn’t felt convinced that he was about to come face-to-face with the name which, he had to admit, had slipped his mind. He hobbled across an intersection and then across its twin, where a glance to the left halted him. Was that the street he was looking for? Certainly the name seemed familiar. He strolled along the pavement, trying to conceal his limp, and stopped outside a house.

  Though he recognized the number, it hadn’t been on the card. His gaze crawled up the side of the house and came to rest on the window set into the roof. At once he knew that he’d heard the address read aloud in the courtroom. It was where Fishwick had lived.

  As Foulsham gazed fascinated at the small high window he imagined Fishwick gloating over the sketches he’d brought home, knowing that the widow from whom he rented the bed-sitter was downstairs and unaware of his secret. He came to himself with a shudder, and stumbled away, almost falling. He was so anxious to put the city between himself and Fishwick’s room that he couldn’t bear to wait for one of the infrequent Sunday buses. By the time he reached home, he was gritting his teeth so as not to scream at the ache in his leg. “Shut up,” he snarled at the alarmed poodles, “or I’ll—” and stumbled upstairs.

  The lamps of the city were springing alight. Usually he enjoyed the spectacle, but now he felt compelled to look for Fishwick’s window among the distant roofs. Though he couldn’t locate it, he was certain that the windows were mutually visible. How often might Fishwick have gazed across the city toward him? Foulsham searched for tasks to distract himself—cleaned the oven, dusted the furniture and the tops of the picture frames, polished all his shoes, lined up the tins on the kitchen shelves in alphabetical order. When he could no longer ignore the barking which his every movement provoked, he went downstairs and rapped on Mrs. Hutton’s door.

  She seemed reluctant to face him. Eventually he heard her shooing the poodles into her kitchen before she came to peer out at him. “Been having a good time, have we?” she demanded.

  “It’s the season,” he said without an inkling of why he should need to justify himself. “Am I bothering your pets somehow?”

  “Maybe they don’t recognize your walk since you did whatever you did to yourself.”

  “It happened while I was asleep.” He’d meant to engage her in conversation so that she would feel bound to invite him in—he was hoping that would give the dogs a chance to grow used to him again—but he couldn’t pursue his intentions when she was so openly hostile, apparently because she felt entitled to the only limp in the building. “Happy Christmas to you and yours,” he flung at her, and hobbled back to his floor.

  He wrote out his Christmas card list in case he had overlooked anyone, only to discover that he couldn’t recall some of the names to which he had already addressed cards. When he began doodling, slashing at the page so as to sketch stick figures whose agonized contortions felt like a revenge he was taking, he turned the sheet over and tried to read a book. The yapping distracted him, as did the sound of Mrs. Hutton’s limp; he was sure she was exaggerating it to lay claim to the gait or to mock him. He switched on the radio and searched the wavebands, coming to rest at a choir which was wishing the listener a merry Christmas. He turned up the volume to blot out the noise from below, until Mrs. Hutton thumped on her ceiling and the yapping of the poodles began to lurch repetitively at him as they leaped, trying to reach the enemy she was identifying with her stick.

  Even his bed was no refuge. He felt as though the window on the far side of the city were an eye spying on him out of the dark, reminding him of all that he was trying not to think of before he risked sleep. During the night he found himself surrounded by capering figures which seemed determined to show him how much life was left in them—how vigorously, if unconventionally, they could dance. He managed to struggle awake at last, and lay afraid to move until the rusty taste like a memory of blood had faded from his mouth.

  He couldn’t go on like this. In the morning he was so tired that he felt as if he were washing someone else’s face and hands. He thought he could feel his nerves swarming. He bared his teeth at the yapping of the dogs and tried to recapture a thought he’d glimpsed while lying absolutely still, afraid to move, in the hours before dawn. What had almost occurred to him about Fishwick’s death?

  The yapping receded as he limped downhill. On the bus a woman eyed him as if she suspected him of feigning the limp in a vain attempt to persuade her to give up her seat. The city streets seemed full of people who were staring at him, though he failed to catch them in the act. When Jackie and Annette conv
erged on the shop as he arrived, he prayed they wouldn’t mention his limp. They gazed at his face instead, making him feel they were trying to ignore his leg. “We can cope, Mr. Foulsham,” Annette said, “if you want to start your Christmas early.”

  “You deserve it,” Jackie added.

  What were they trying to do to him? They’d reminded him how often he might be on his own during the next few days, a prospect which filled him with dread. How could he ease his mind in the time left to him? “You’ll have to put up with another day of me,” he told them as he unlocked the door.

  Their concern for him made him feel as if his every move were being observed. Even the Christmas Eve crowds failed to occupy his mind, especially once Annette took advantage of a lull in the day’s business to approach him. “We thought we’d give you your present now in case you want to change your mind about going home.”

  “That’s thoughtful of you. Thank you both,” he said and retreated into the office, wondering if they were doing their best to get rid of him because something about him was playing on their nerves. He used the phone to order them a bouquet each, a present which he gave them every Christmas but which this year he’d almost forgotten, and then he picked at the parcel until he was able to see what it was.

  It was a book of detective stories. He couldn’t imagine what had led them to conclude that it was an appropriate present, but it did seem to have a message for him. He gazed at the exposed spine and realized what any detective would have established days ago. Hearing Fishwick’s name in the night had been the start of his troubles, yet he hadn’t ascertained the time of Fishwick’s death.

  He phoned the radio station and was put through to the newsroom. A reporter gave him all the information which the police had released. Foulsham thanked her dully and called the local newspaper, hoping they might contradict her somehow, but of course they confirmed what she’d told him. Fishwick had died just before nine-thirty on the night when his name had wakened Foulsham, and the media hadn’t been informed until almost an hour later.