The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24 (Mammoth Books)

by Stephen Jones

  No, the true start of it must have been just prior to Christmas when we met at the club to exchange the small gifts that spoke of our esteem for one another, and our pleasure at being privileged to enjoy one another’s company. We were in our late twenties then – old enough to have reached some accommodation with life, young enough to still partake of the many pleasures it afforded. And though there were women in most of our lives, they hovered at the periphery; not yet had that marital drift begun which gradually unravels a rare circle of friendship like ours. In any case, Condon had stopped in for a drink, and seeing us at the bar, he joined us. We welcomed him kindly enough, and he stood among us as presents were unwrapped, nodding in appreciation of the perfect understanding each gift represented: a platinum cigar cutter for Lewis, a bottle of Delemain Extra for Gibson, an exquisite array of silk ties and pocket squares for Banks, the dandy among us.

  After the last gift, Condon excused himself to the restroom. “I say,” Gibson said, “did you smell the man’s breath?” No one else had been standing as close to Condon as Gibson, so there was some good-natured dissension among us. “He’d been drinking,” someone – it must have been Morrison – said, and several of our group nodded: it had been the alcohol, nothing more. Besides who wanted to smell the man’s breath – or indeed anyone’s breath? But Gibson demurred: “It’s positively rancid,” he said, and so, as we shook hands with Condon before departing, several of us leaned in for a private word – best wishes for the season and all that, a moment of eye contact (Condon’s were a pale, pale grey, as nondescript as the rest of the man) and a squeeze of the shoulder.

  Condon looked round once more at the gifts and smiled a closed-mouthed smile. “Well, I’ll see you again, I’m certain. Until then” – another tight little smile – “I wish you the best.” Then he turned, and Harris – the doorman, a tall cadaverously thin Negro who had preceded our tenure at the club – saw him out.

  Another round ensued and those who had stepped close to Condon took up Gibson’s cause. So the man’s breath was sour, someone said, and Lewis, a doctor, noted that halitosis was hardly a novelty among men. What of it? “But it was rancid,” Gibson said again. “Like something spoiled, or rotten.” Really, it was, several others – those who had leaned close to shake his hand – attested. Intolerable actually. Lewis frowned: it’s rarely a matter of serious concern, he said. And then Symes lightened the mood. “Too bad for the woman in his life,” he said, and some question arose about whether anyone had ever seen Condon with a woman, provoking another round of drinks and debate (the consensus was that no one had). And so – after a joke that Condon had lately haunted us – the subject was dropped and we departed the club, gifts in hand, with a merry round of good wishes.

  Condon didn’t come up again, either in our lives or in our minds, for several weeks. The new year was underway and winter besieged the city: snow clogged the sidewalks and merchants scattered salt to melt the ice before their storefronts. Several of us booked passage for warmer climes: Italy, the French Riviera, Spain. Those hardy enough to stay and brave the elements hugged the buildings as we walked to avoid the parabolas of slush flung up by passing automobiles, unleashing spectacular arrays of colour.

  Westfall had been mulling their beauty, he later told us, when he encountered Condon mid-street. Hellos were exchanged, a quick grip of gloved hands; and then they strode off to their separate sidewalks before the onslaught of traffic consumed them. Westfall didn’t notice the faint powdering of grey dust on his glove until later in the afternoon, and even then he had no cause to associate it with Condon – not until that evening at the club, when he seemed to recall that Condon’s shoulders had been lightly dusted with the same material, and that once again there had been a faint unpleasant odour about the man. But Morrison, the attorney among us, said that ex post facto evidence was hardly evidence at all, and that the grey dust on the glove was suspect itself, since it might have come from anywhere – especially since Condon had himself been gloved. Perhaps it sifted down his shirtsleeve, someone suggested, but Morrison merely lifted an eyebrow, and thus the conversation drew to a close.

  Several more sightings followed, the tales duly returned to us at the club. Banks encountered him at a restaurant, pausing at the table where Condon dined alone. Despite the unpleasant odour that seemed to cling to the man, a brief conversation ensued: the usual social niceties, how are you doing, I hope that work goes well, we’ll have to get together some time – though both of them must have known that such promises were hollow, that men not of the same order in life do not mix. Banks introduced his date. Smiles and greetings were exchanged. They shook hands as they departed, and Banks felt the grip of rubber in his palm: the man was wearing latex gloves, such as a surgeon might wear. And now that he thought of it, Condon’s face had looked splotchy and reddened, as by wind; under that, like a palimpsest, a greyish pallor reigned.

  On the whole, he told us that night at the club, it was a most unsettling encounter. Nor would it be the last. Perhaps three months later, Hynes came to the club with a strange story. He had run into Condon at the bookseller we occasionally frequented, an antiquarian known for his personal service and his eclectic collection. Hynes had dropped by to pick up a travel volume; he’d lately begun planning a sojourn abroad, several months in southern Italy and Greece. As he passed, he happened to catch sight of Condon perusing the shelves. Striding over, he was surprised to see that, despite the warmth of the spring day, Condon was clad in a hat and a light overcoat; and shaking hands he found, as Banks had reported, that the other man wore latex gloves. Despite these precautions, a faint hint of decay hung about him. “You’re not ill, are you?” Hynes asked, looking into Condon’s face, which appeared grey, almost spongy in texture. Condon had responded in the negative, Hynes reported, but his voice – his voice was ravaged, a deep gravelly whisper, as though it was all he could do to speak. Unnerved, Hynes made a hasty departure, his travel book forgotten, and as he narrated the tale later at the club, he looked unnerved still.

  And so the mystery of Condon deepened. He became for the first time a subject of conjecture that fascinated us all. Lewis speculated about a diagnosis, but in the end could produce nothing concrete, to his palpable discomfort. The rest of us began to debate where the thing had begun – in the department store or outside the bakery or that night not long before Christmas, when he had interrupted us as we exchanged our small gifts. Or perhaps it had begun earlier still, when none of us had been around to perceive it. In the end – though Westfall and Symes held out – we agreed that the first time it became perceptible was that night in the club, though it might have been going on for weeks and months before that, as the condition incubated, when few of us had seen Condon and none of us had noticed anything awry.

  It might have rested there but for the final encounter, when Morrison ran into Condon at a coffee shop. He waited in line behind a man dressed unseasonably in overcoat and hat, a man he took for one who lived on the street, both because of his attire and his smell, a heavy, oppressive odour that Morrison – wrongly as we would discover – associated with the stench of a long-unwashed body. He backed away a step, and when the man turned, his order in hand, Morrison saw that his face had been wrapped tightly in a white scarf, prickled here and there by bright red pinpoints that could have only been blood. Nothing could have surprised him more, Morrison later reported, than such an apparition speaking his name. Yet speak his name the creature did, and when Morrison gasped, “Who are you?”, it was Condon’s name that was returned. “You – you don’t look well,” Morrison said, and in a hollow rasp of a voice, Condon said, “I am as well as can be expected.” That was the end of the conversation. Morrison, to his shame, he admitted, wished the man improved health, turned on his heel and departed.

  And now we sat in the club – where we had not seen Condon for months, since that night just before Christmas – pondering these mysteries. Someone suggested that we should let the matter go altogether; someone
else that we should seek Condon out, assure ourselves that he was indeed well, and if he was not, to offer what aid there might be in our power to provide. This view won out in the end – though in truth it was curiosity that drove us. Harris was prevailed upon for Condon’s address, and we departed upon the minute.

  Condon’s neighbourhood was in the first stage of the city’s eternal cycle of decay, collapse, and gentrification. Apartment windows were barred, others broken, dooryards in disarray. Abandoned buildings thronged the street, their façades cracked and sagging. Grey-faced Negroes congregated on stoops. Condon’s family had fallen further than we had thought – as had Condon himself. His building, four stories of eroding brick, stood next to an overgrown lot behind a chain-link fence. The concrete steps were crumbling. Though the men clustered there drew away from us in deference, a sense of shared apprehension possessed us. The lobby was shabby. Condon’s name appeared over a long-corroded buzzer. The door to the stairs hung open. We climbed them in silence. When we knocked on his apartment door, it swung open at our touch.

  Condon was in the bedroom, supine upon the bed beneath a single sheet. The stench of rot was overpowering. It was all several of us could do to master the impulse to throw up. Condon’s hair had come out in patches; his face was grey and eaten away by decay. His nose had collapsed altogether, leaving only a pair of identical slits. Through the flesh of his jaw, one could see teeth that hung loose in his jaw. “My God,” Lewis said, stripping away the sheet, and we saw then that his body had begun to deliquesce. Through vents in his abdominal cavity, we saw the pulse of organs – and these too had gone grey – that only Lewis could identify. “My God,” he said again. “What has happened to you?”

  For a long time, Condon did not reply. An oppressive silence clogged the room. Just as several us concluded that he was beyond speech, he opened his mouth. Skin gave way along the jaw, as soil might subside into a rift opened by an earthquake. His voice, when it came, was a ravaged whisper, barely perceptible.

  “I have awaited your coming,” he rasped.

  And it is to that moment that we date our membership in a new and more hideous fraternity.

  JOE R. LANSDALE

  The Hunt: Before, and the Aftermath

  JOE R. LANSDALE is the author of more than thirty novels, numerous short stories, articles and comic and film scripts. He has won numerous awards, among them The Edgar, nine Bram Stoker Awards, The Lifetime Achievement in Horror, Grandmaster of Horror, and many others. He is a member of The Texas Literary Hall of Fame and is Writer in Residence at Stephen F. Austin State University. His novella, “Bubba Ho-Tep”, was made into the popular cult film of the same name directed by Don Coscarelli and starring Bruce Campbell.

  As the author admits: “Oddly, though I’m worn out with zombie stories, I’ve written a few, and each time I’ve tried to approach it from a different angle.

  “I decided to stop thinking so much about the zombies and think about a world where people are not only learning to live with their presence, but in fact the focus of the story is on the living people. I don’t care much for the idea of zombies becoming human again, but I wanted to see if the humans could stay human. Thing is, humans can be good or bad, or they can have the most common of problems, no matter what kind of world they live in.

  “This was my attempt to write a story that might have been written by someone writing during a time of zombie infestation, but a time when the world had put itself back together and zombies were a truism of everyday life, same as disease.”

  WE RODE THE famous Fast Train out west, all the way from New York City.

  Went out there with men and women packed in all the cars along with all our baggage and the guns, and they were good guns, too. All of us had good guns. That was a perquisite. We had paid for the hunt and our guides made sure we had the best of everything, and that included the guns. They wanted us to have good weapons, not only because we were about to hunt and were paying heavily for the privilege, but because they thought if we had excellent weapons and ammunition, it less likely that something might blow up in someone’s face, killing them. There were insurance policies, of course. But there’s always trouble and always challenges from the insurance, especially on these types of hunting expeditions. Part of the reason the hunting was so expensive was because the insurance the hunting company paid was very high.

  I brought along my wife, Livia, and we left the kids with their grandparents – my parents. It was a good trip out, and there were excursions along the way, and we even did a bit of bird hunting in Arkansas. Stopped there for a couple of days and stayed in some cabins up in the mountains where the woods were thick.

  It was September, and there were some brisk mornings, some warm mid-days, and then at night there was the cool again. But it was never miserable. We spent the nights in the cabins, but before bedtime we all sat around a campfire that was prepared by our guides, and there was entertainment. Singers and even some skits that weren’t really all that good but seemed a lot better under the circumstances.

  As I said, it was a good trip in that everything went smooth, but it wasn’t good when it came to Livia and I, and considering all that had gone before, I didn’t expect it to be, but it was good that the trip itself wasn’t bad to make matters worse. At least we had that going for us, the smoothness of the trip.

  During the day while we were in Arkansas we hunted. Mostly we were done by noon, and when we came in the guides would have the birds cleaned right away and put in the refrigeration car, and that night they would be our meal, that and some good beans and fresh baked cornbread.

  Frankly, though I like shooting birds, I don’t much care for the meat. But I ate it well enough, and by the end of the day, tromping around with the hunting dogs that had been provided by the Arkansas cabin owner where we stayed, I most likely could have eaten anything and thought that it was good. I think I would have thought that cornbread was good anytime; I’m a big fan of cornbread.

  The first night in the Arkansas accommodations, Livia and I went to our cabin and decided to take showers, since we smelled of smoke from the campfire. Livia wanted to go first. She began to undress. I watched her. Even though she was nearing the age of forty, she had a youthful body, and I enjoyed watching her take off her clothes and pause before a mirror in the bedroom to shake out her hair, which had been tied back in a ponytail.

  When she walked to the bathroom, I enjoyed the view, and was sorry that even though we were sharing a bed, we wouldn’t be sharing one another. I wished then that I had things to do over, but I didn’t, and it was my hope in time that we could reconcile things, and not just so we could have sex, but so we could have peace and things would be like they used to be; that was the purpose of the hunt; time together and reconciliation.

  Anyway, she showered, and came into the room, and pulled a huge red night shirt over her head, and without putting on panties got into bed. A year ago, that would have been a kind of silent invitation, but tonight I knew it was just a tease, something to make me feel bad about what I had done, and about what I wasn’t going to get tonight because of it. It had been that way every night since she found out about the infidelity. That was eight months ago, but things hadn’t changed much in that time, except we could talk a little more civilly most of the time.

  I showered, and while in the shower I masturbated, thinking it would be a lot better to do that than to lie in the bed and think about what was under her night shirt all night. There was also in me a bit of defiance. I was truly sorry for what I had done, and I had tried in every possible way to make it up.

  I didn’t think just because I was sorry that should be the end of the matter, as that kind of betrayal is serious and nothing anyone can get over easily. I know I would have had problems, but damn it, I was trying, and I didn’t seem to get points for trying. I felt she was enjoying punishing me a little too much.

  By the time I had satisfied myself and washed the results down the drain, I was feeling less bold, and
understood exactly why she felt the way she did. I took a long time drying off and brushing my teeth, and by the time I got in bed, Livia was sound asleep.

  We stopped in Palo Duro Canyon in northern Texas, and that night there was a play about statehood. It was performed in a beautiful part of the mountains, and there were lots of lights, and there were horses and cowboys and they rode the horses along the rim to the sound of tiny, but inspiring music, that seemed to be as loud as the canyon was normally silent.

  It was a good show, and it even included the changes that had occurred, and there were people dressed up like the dead people, shuffling along, and there were a few comic bits associated with it, and then it was over.

  As we were bussed back to where the tracks were, and where our hotel was, Livia said, “You know, that was hokey, but I really enjoyed it.”

  “So did,” I said, though that wasn’t entirely true. I had begun to see that Livia was looking at other men in a way she hadn’t before. I don’t know if it was because she was thinking about cheating to even up the score, or if what I had done had just opened her mind to someone other than me. Anyway, I had watched her and I thought I had seen something in her eye when she was watching some of the male actors in the plays. They were all young, and most likely gay, I told myself, but still, Livia was watching. I felt certain of it. Nonetheless, I liked that she had spoken to me in that way, as it seemed natural, and for a few seconds it seemed as if she had forgotten all about being mad at me.

  But, back at the room we went straight to bed, and I lay there and looked at the ceiling for a long time. Eventually I heard Livia breathing evenly as she slept, and I turned and looked at her.

  There was enough moonlight through a part in the curtains to fall on her face and make her look angelic. I thought she was the kind of woman that could easily attract a much younger man, and I was the kind of man that if I managed to keep my business and money, could most likely attract a younger woman, but only if they didn’t know I was in debt. She had options, and I didn’t have any real ones. Just ones I might be able to lie about.