The Year's Best Horror Stories 22

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  He spent the next half hour pacing laps around the living room. At one point he picked up one of the empty Heineken bottles and hurled it through the glass top of the coffee table. The sudden realization that he’d just turned a piece of his furniture into about a billion tiny shards of glass helped him get things together.

  He picked up the phone again and called the police. Then he called Christina. The phone rang seventeen times before he heard the other end pick up and drop again.

  It was almost one-thirty by the time the guys from the police department knocked on his door. He let them in—Officers Swanson and Bentley, hello, I’m David Conners—and he spent the next fifteen minutes recounting everything from the bus ride on. They did their cop thing and left, can’t really spare a surveillance unit at this stage but call us immediately if anything else transpires.

  David knew that any attempts at sleep tonight would be a washout. So he made coffee, returned to the sofa pit, and waited for dawn.

  Who in God’s earth was this guy?

  He’s Roy. He wants you to kill him. Haven’t we been listening?

  Why him, then? How about that. Why, out of all the poor dopes in this lunatic city, did this particular lunatic decide to single out him to make miserable?

  David decided, as he sat in the stark glow of the television, sipping his coffee and watching the snow, that next time he saw the guy he’d ask.

  When daylight at last began to seep carefully into the city, David showered again. He put away two last cups of French Roast, called for a cab, and was at Christina’s by eight.

  She was almost packed. Going to her sister’s.

  He nearly had to staple her down, but in the end, which was almost two hours later, he’d managed to convince her—at least enough to nix the trip to sister Susan’s—that no, he was not leading a double life, was not having an affair with a psychotic man named Roy, and you can goddamn well bet I called the police. Looked like an episode of Dragnet in my apartment until two-thirty this morning.

  “My God, David,” she said, after he threw up his hands and collapsed, thoroughly wrung, into the loveseat. A silent minute passed, and when he lifted the heels of his hands away from his eyeballs Christina was sitting down beside him. She put a hand on his cheek. “I am so sorry.”

  He hugged her.

  “Are you okay? Has he ... done anything?”

  “I’m pissed. He hasn’t done anything but break into my home and wear my clothes and send you the other direction at warp factor eight.”

  They broke the clinch, and when she looked up her eyes were wet. “I’m so sorry, David,” she said again, and then she shook her head like she couldn’t figure out what kind of ungodly sprite had gotten into it. “Not trusting you. I’m pathetic. Just pathetic.”

  He told her, after they sat for a few moments, that he didn’t cook breakfast for pathetic people, and after they’d eaten she took him shopping.

  All, it seemed, was right with the world once more.

  They decided he would stay the rest of the weekend at her place. When they returned that evening, loaded with bags and exhausted and happy, she said that this time she would cook, shooed him out, and set about it while he ran back to the apartment for clothes, toothbrush, all the rest. A Frito Lay truck had somehow managed to jackknife in the middle of the intersection at Forty-fifth and Boswell. They got to his building in just under an hour. David would remember this, later.

  When he opened his door and flipped on the lights, Roy was on the couch, waiting.

  It was strange. David didn’t feel surprised.

  He looked him dead on. The guy’s face was expressionless, eyes intent. “What do you want from me?” he said. He slipped his hands into his pockets and leaned against the door, as if to say I’m not budging until you come clean, mister. It struck him how ridiculous it really was. It was his apartment, for God’s sake. He decided to hell with it and arched his eyebrows. “Huh? What is it that you want.”

  Roy folded his arms. “I’ve told you, David. I want you to kill me.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Roy.”

  David just nodded and kicked off the door. “Yeah. Well, Roy, I’m not going to kill you, ’kay? If you want to die, there are plenty of other ways besides walking up to a stranger and saying ‘kill me.’ Hell, buy a gun. Jump off a building. Jump off a building in front of a bus, for all I care. Just get out of here and don’t come back.” He smiled at Roy sweetly. Whaddaya say, hmm?

  Roy did not flinch. He didn’t smile or tic or anything. He just looked at him. “I’m asking you, David. You can do it, no matter what you think. Kill me.”

  What was this? Some deranged philosophy major going around to people? Recognize the Dark Side, stare the Beast in the eye and make friends with it and all that happy horseshit?

  “Get out.”

  “If you want me gone, take the proper steps, David. I’ve told you. You know how to get rid of me.”

  “I,” David said, “am not. For the last time. Going to kill you.” He went for the phone again. At least there was one thing besides death that made the guy leave.

  “You will,” the guy said, just as the door closed. He tossed something onto the carpet before it did, which made a muffled chink as it landed.

  David knew what it was before he even got there. He recognized the miniature tennis shoe.

  Christina’s keyring. He felt his head go numb as he picked it up, saw the sole of the little sneaker smeared red, pieces of sandy hair stuck in it, the message suckerpunching him and leaving him trying to breath.

  Stepped on her, bro. Kill me.

  David remembered calling the police, vaguely remembered mentioning Swanson and Bentley, and he must’ve called a cab because one came to pick him up.

  That was about all from the next several hours, except for the image of flashing red and running people, that the cops had gotten there before his cab and wouldn’t let him see.

  David flew to his brother’s in Akron the next afternoon. The cops had found the cabbie in whose company he’d been when it all went down. There were also strands of hair in his robe and evidence that the lock to his door had been picked, verifying his claim of an intruder. The strands of hair were important in that they a) weren’t his and b) matched the ones beneath Christina’s fingernails.

  After Christina, they took him seriously enough to send him to the airport in a squad car.

  The cop waited with him until he boarded.

  David threw a last look back as he ducked into the boarding tube. Back, far back beyond the cop and the people waiting in the gate lobby, he could see Roy, leaning up against the Arrivals/Departures kiosk with his hands in his pockets, watching him. His stubble was slightly darker now. He was wearing a long coat.

  Then the line swept David along like a leaf in a stream.

  It would be all over the national news broadcasts for most of the next week, riding out its life on the local stations for longer than that.

  But then, when a guy pulls a Mini-14 and three loaded clips out of his coat in the middle of a busy airport, you’re gonna have news.

  In Akron, David caught it all. CBS to CNN to People to Maury Povich.

  Roy burned out two and almost all of the third of his 30 round clips before he fled the airport and screamed off toward the city in a late-model Ford Taurus, hitting downtown just as the sirens kicked in, weaving in and out of traffic, careening through the city with the cops in pursuit. He hit the pedestrians too slow to move, actually made a point of swerving to do the job on at least two occasions (said an unidentified bystander one night on Hard Copy). Window open, he plugged as many at random with an unlicensed Beretta 9mm before the 15 round clip gave out. He’d been too busy driving, it seemed, to pop in another.

  They brought him down at Sixty-fifth and Gable. Nobody got more specific than that in terms of location, but David recognized his own address when he saw it.

  The trail of bodies led almost to the front steps of his buil
ding.

  David overheard, one evening, very late, his brother and his wife speaking in the den, tones hushed, voices strained. About calling somebody, Christ, Caroline, I don’t know but I’m worried about him.

  When the thing became redundant at last, when they stopped coming up with new stuff (it took a bit, the late-night could milk a thing like this for weeks), David catalogued all the VHS tapes (there were seven) and watched them again.

  PORTRAIT OF A PULP WRITER by F. A. McMahan

  Frances A. McMahan prefers to write under the byline, F.A. McMahan. Much to her chagrin, she was variously listed under both bylines with her story in The Ultimate Zombie. We’ll try to get it right this time. Don’t fret, McMahan: A scrambled running folio in the British Edition of Jack the Ripper ran my name as Karl Edward Angels. Never been called that before.

  Having established that she is indeed F.A. McMahan, when pressed for further details she writes: “I was born July 24, 1962, in Greenville, South Carolina. I live in Greenville now (with my husband, no children) but spent five years in Denver, Colorado, and intend to eventually return to Denver to stay. My fiction has appeared in several magazines since 1991 including Figment, Prisoners of the Night, Strange Days, Midnight Zoo, and the anthologies Chilled to the Bone and The Ultimate Zombie. I have a few novels (two horror, two fantasy, and one science fiction) out to publishing houses and am presently at work on a mainstream novel called The Movement of Hands.”

  Roger Diggs sighed. He had been sitting in front of his TV that doubled as a computer monitor for three hours. Nothing came to him. He had received not one inspiration in the past month. They called it writer’s block. Diggs called it procrastination and laziness, but identifying the problem was little help in solving it.

  He stared at the keyboard and felt a faint longing for his old typewriter. He had gotten the computer, disk drive, and printer used and fairly cheap from a friend. The friend had moved up to an IBM clone and offered his old Commodore system to Diggs. It had turned out to be cheaper than a good electric typewriter, so Diggs had bought it.

  But he had to use his TV as a monitor, and that only served to enhance his slothfulness. Whenever he was at a loss for an idea, he would switch over to TV mode and flip through the channels.

  Later he would realize that he had wasted an hour wondering whether or not Rex would discover that Julie had killed Ted with the carving knife that she had received as a present from her mother who was having an affair with Ted’s twin brother, Bobby. Or if the soaps were boring that day, he would count to twenty in Spanish with an orange puppet whose controlling strings were clearly visible. Or maybe try to come closest to the actual retail value without going over.

  “The milky gray slime oozed through the earthquake fissure and bubbled deliriously, displaying a terrifying indication of sentience.”

  Diggs stared at the line of white words. They contrasted nicely with the blue background color.

  “As it flowed toward a nearby cactus, the pulpy mass glistened in the sunlight and left behind an unctuous spoor. A sunning iguana turned its brown head, watching idly, oblivious to the possible danger, and was snatched by a heretofore unseen tentacle and stuffed into the jelly-thing’s indistinguishable mouth.”

  Diggs leaned his elbow on the computer, resting his chin on his hand. He counted the words, a habit he had when uninspired. His finger made little crackling noises when it touched the TV screen.

  Seventy-five words. He did a bit of mental figuring. Forty times that would be three thousand words. Not too bad. The only problem was that the story so far was pretty much trash.

  He saved his idea to disk just in case he decided later that it was good, then pressed control-delete on the keyboard.

  “Are you sure? Y/N,” flashed on the screen.

  He typed “Y” and his words vanished.

  Diggs stared at the empty blue screen. He would work again tomorrow. Then he turned off the computer and checked his watch to see if it was too late to catch Julie’s trial on channel seven.

  The phone rang. Only twice but enough to wake Diggs up.

  The clock radio’s green display glared that it was only seven-fifteen. Unfortunately, once awake, Diggs found it impossible to go back to sleep. So he climbed out of his nice, warm bed and took a shower that turned cold halfway through. This was definitely not going to be a Saturday to remember.

  He made the coffee too strong. The milk had soured. And the thin sliced white sandwich bread was moldy. He also had a headache.

  The pupilless gray eye of the TV set stared from across the room, beckoning him to another session of aimless key punching.

  He flipped on the system. “ENTER TEXT,” materialized in crisp, white letters.

  Biting his left thumbnail, Diggs sat for a good while wondering why the most frequently used letters were scattered about the keyboard and not on home row. There was a small piece of fuzz between “O” and “P,” and he picked it out, blew it from his fingertips, and watched it drift to the floor.

  “Serth circled the peak of the hill twice, then glided to a landing among the huts of the tribe. His majestic, white wings folded snugly against his back as he strode toward the chief who looked greatly displeased.”

  Diggs had noticed an interesting combination of letters on the keyboard. And “S-E-R-T-H” became a winged man.

  “Ignoring his leader, Serth walked past him into a nearby hut and began the ritual that would bring rain to the tribe’s thirsty crops. He meticulously ground the herbs he had gathered, making a pulp that he spread on his face and arms. Then he began the ceremonial chant. Sacred syllables flowed from his lips, words that only he could understand. His hands made circular, twisting motions. Sweat dripped into his open, staring eyes and burned with salty fire. Serth was growing old. The ancient rituals were becoming increasingly difficult for him to perform. It was time he chose a successor.”

  Diggs read over his creation. He liked it. It needed work, but he liked it all the same. Counting words again, he found one hundred and fifty. Better than yesterday. Double the amount, in fact, in the same amount of time.

  Leaning back in his chair, he looked into the kitchen. It was nine o’clock, and he was getting sleepy. Saving the fledgling paragraphs onto disk, he got up and wandered into the bedroom. He could take a quick nap and finish the story in the afternoon.

  Diggs drifted off to slumberland with the happy thought that he was finally pushing that pesky writer’s block out of the way.

  He woke with a start.

  A racket was coming from the living room.

  Grabbing a granite bookend off the shelf, he crept around the corner, then stopped dead in his tracks.

  His disk drive hummed softly. Out of the computer, from every crevice and port, came a multitude of creatures.

  Diggs recognized all of them. The gray slime he had created yesterday. An old man, three boys, and an undead rat from last Tuesday. Winged Serth from this morning. Fluid mercury aliens. A miner from an unnamed planet. A three-headed, talking toad ... he had been out of it that day. Various mutant beings, some fragmentary and incomplete, all from the past month of unfinished stories.

  “What a terrific dream,” Diggs muttered.

  This was going to make a great story when he woke up.

  He was delighted as the rabble slowly began to push forward.

  The horde of creatures forced him against the dining room wall.

  Then they lashed out with talons, teeth, clubs, pickaxes, and all manner of nasty-looking weapons.

  The pain was proof that Diggs was not dreaming. But by then it was too late for him to escape.

  His only scream was muffled and gurgling as a milky gray tentacle reached out to crash his larynx.

  Having left no remains of He Who Had Summoned Them, the creatures returned to the computer and, through it, to the swirling macrocosm of all that exists: matter, energy, thought. None of which is ever created or destroyed, but merely transmuted into another form.

  T
hey returned to rest and wait. Wait for another who would send out a call and grant them life through words. Or be consumed by them.

  FISH HARBOR by Paul Pinn

  Paul Pinn is another newcomer to The Year’s Best Horror Stories. When asked to give some account of himself, Pinn responded: “Born London 1955 under a disturbing mass of conjunctions, oppositions, and things. Been writing since knee-high to a grasshopper, but only with deadly serious intent since 1989. From then until now over 60 short story acceptances (about a third so far published) by UK mags such as Dementia 13, Strange Attractor, Orion, Works, Peeping Tom, Fear, etc., plus mags in Canada and Finland. Recently finished two collaborations with D.F. Lewis, and finished (solo) a cross-genre psychological novel which is ‘doing the rounds.’ Currently working on another about a schizophrenic girl on the run through Asia. Living with long-term soulmate Elaine, no kids, plenty of booze. After 20 years recently upgraded intelligence (ho ho) with exam passes in Child Development Psychology and Abnormal Psychology. Working as an administrator in London, but would much rather be writing and once again traveling aimlessly overseas (with Elaine). In the meantime keep sharp listening to Ministry and Mindfunk, Black Sabbath and Motorhead, the Outlaws (Green Grass High Tides—know?) and Freebird by you-know-who.”

  Nice to find a horror writer with such quiet tastes.

  “You sleep to escape.”

  I pulled the sheet up to my navel and would have fallen asleep immediately had Marjory not chosen that precise moment to exercise her penchant for ill-timing.

  “You were bored of my company so you fell asleep on the sofa,” she said as she sat up and glared spitefully at me. “Or perhaps it was just a way of avoiding a night out with me.”

  With her beaklike nose and the icy myopic stare she favored at moments like this, I sometimes thought my wife would have made a good hanging judge. What had upset her, if indeed she was upset and not just nit-picking, was that I had fallen asleep for three hours after dinner.