The Best New Horror 2

by Ramsay Campbell

  He was filling the drinking glass with water when he noticed that his hands were those of an old man.

  An old man’s. Not his hands. Nor his the face in the bathroom mirror. Lined with too many years, too many cares. Hair gray and thinning. Nose bulbous and flecked with red blotches. Left eyebrow missing the thin scar from when he’d totaled the Volvo. Hands heavy with calluses from manual labor. No wedding ring. None-too-clean flannel pajamas, loose over a too-thin frame.

  He swallowed the water slowly, studying the reflection. It could have been him. Just another disturbing dream. He waited for the awakening.

  He walked down the hall to his brothers’ room. There were two young boys asleep there. Neither one was his brother. They were probably between nine and thirteen years in age, and somehow they minded him of his brothers—long ago, when they were all young together on Cedar Lane.

  One of them stirred suddenly and opened his eyes. He looked up at the old man silhouetted by the distant bathroom light. He said sleepily, “What’s wrong, Uncle Gary?”

  “Nothing. I thought I heard one of you cry out. Go back to sleep now, Josh.”

  The voice was his, and the response came automatically. Garrett Larkin returned to his room and sat there on the edge of his bed, awaiting daylight.

  Daylight came, and with the smell of coffee and frying bacon, and still the dream remained. Larkin found his clothes in the dimness, dragged on the familiar overalls, and made his way downstairs.

  The carpet was new and much of the furniture was strange, but it was still the house on Cedar Lane. Only older.

  His niece was bustling about the kitchen. She was pushing the limits of thirty and the seams of her housedress, and he had never seen her before in his life.

  “Morning, Uncle Gary.” She poured coffee into his cup. “Boys up yet?”

  Garrett sat down in his chair at the kitchen table, blew cautiously over the coffee. “Dead to the world.”

  Lucille left the bacon for a moment and went around to the stairway. He could hear her voice echoing up the stairwell. “Dwayne! Josh! Rise and shine! Don’t forget to bring down your dirty clothes when you come! Shake a leg now!”

  Martin, his niece’s husband, joined them in the kitchen, gave his wife a hug, and poured himself a cup of coffee. He stole a slice of bacon. “Morning, Gary. Sleep well?”

  “I must have.” Garrett stared at his cup.

  Martin munched overcrisp bacon. “Need to get those boys working on the leaves after school.”

  Garrett thought of the smell of burning leaves and remembered the pain of vaporizing skin, and the coffee seared his throat like a rush of boiling blood, and he awoke.

  Garrett Larkin gasped at the darkness and sat up in bed. He fumbled behind him for the cowboy-silhouette wall lamp, couldn’t find it. Then there was light. A lamp on the night-stand from the opposite side of the king-size bed. His wife was staring at him in concern.

  “Gar, are you okay?”

  Garrett tried to compose his memory. “It’s all right . . . Rachel. Just another bad dream is all.”

  “Another bad dream? Yet another bad dream, you mean. You sure you’re telling your shrink about these?”

  “He says it’s just a nostalgic longing for childhood as I cope with advancing maturity.”

  “Must have been some happy childhood. Okay if I turn out the light now?”

  And he was dreaming again, dreaming of Cedar Lane.

  He was safe and snug in his own bed in his own room, burrowed beneath Mom’s heirloom quilts against the October chill that penetrated the unheated upper storey. Something pressed hard into his ribs, and he awoke to discover his Boy Scout flashlight was trapped beneath the covers—along with the forbidden E.C. horror comic books he’d been secretly reading after bedtime.

  Gary thumbed on the light, turning it about his room. Its beam was sickly yellow because he needed fresh batteries, but it zigzagged reassuringly across the bedroom walls—made familiar by their airplane posters, blotchy paint-by-numbers oil paintings, and (a seasonal addition) cutout Halloween decorations of jack-o’-lanterns and black cats, broom-riding witches, and dancing skeletons. The beam probed into the dormer, picking out the shelved books and treasures, the half-completed B-36 “Flying Cigar” nuclear bomber rising above a desk strewn with plastic parts and tubes of glue.

  The flashlight’s fading beam shifted to the other side of his room and paused upon the face that looked down upon him from beside his bed. It was a grown-up’s face, someone he’d never seen before, ghastly in the yellow light. At first Gary thought it must be one of his brothers in a Halloween mask, and then he knew it was really a demented killer with a butcher knife like he’d read about in the comics, and then the flesh began to peel away in blackened strips from the spotlit face, and bare bone and teeth charred and cracked apart into evaporating dust, and Gary’s bladder exploded with a rush of steam.

  Larkin muttered and stirred from drunken stupor, groping beneath the layers of tattered plastic for his crotch, thinking he had pissed himself in his sleep. He hadn’t, but it really wouldn’t have mattered to him if he had. Something was poking him in the ribs, and he retrieved the half-empty bottle of Thunderbird. He took a pull. The wine was warm with the heat of his body, and its fumes trickled up his nose.

  Larkin scooted farther into his cardboard box, to where its back propped against the alley wall. It was cold this autumn night—another bad winter, for sure—and he wondered if he maybe ought to crawl out and join the others around the trash fire. He had another gulp of wine, letting it warm his throat and his guts.

  When he could afford it, Larkin liked to drink Thunderbird. It was a link to his boyhood. “I learned to drive in my old man’s brand-new 1961 Thunderbird,” he often told whoever was crouched beside him. “White 1961 Thunderbird with turquoise-blue upholstery. Power everything and fast as shit. Girls back in high school would line up to date me for a ride in that brand-new Thunderbird. I was ass-deep in pussy!”

  All of that was a lie, because his father had never trusted him to drive the Thunderbird, and Larkin instead had spent his teenage years burning out three clutches on the family hand-me-down Volkswagen Beetle. But none of that really mattered in the long run, because Larkin had been drafted right after college, and the best part of him never came back from Nam.

  V.A. hospitals, treatment centers, halfway houses, too many jails to count. Why bother counting? Nobody else gave a damn. Larkin remembered that he had been dreaming about Cedar Lane again. Not even rotgut wine could kill those memories. Larkin shivered and wondered if he had anything left to eat. There’d been some spoiled produce from a dumpster, but that was gone now.

  He decided to try his luck over at the trash fire. Crawling out of his cardboard box, he pocketed his wine bottle and tried to remember if he’d left anything worth stealing. Probably not. He remembered instead how he once had camped out in the huge box from their new refrigerator on Cedar Lane, before the rains melted the cardboard into mush.

  There were half a dozen or so of them still up, silhouetted by the blaze flaring from the oil drum on the demolition site. They weren’t supposed to be here, but then the site was supposed to have been cleared off two years ago. Larkin shuffled over toward them—an identical blob of tattered refuse at one with the urban wasteland.

  “Wuz happnin’, bro?” Pointman asked him.

  “Too cold to sleep. Had dreams. Had bad dreams.”

  The black nodded understandingly and used his good arm to poke a stick into the fire. Sparks flew upward and vanished into the night. “About Nam?”

  “Worse.” Larkin dug out his bottle. “Dreamed I was a kid again. Back home. Cedar Lane.”

  Pointman took a long swallow and backed the bottle back. “Thought you told me you had a happy childhood.”

  “I did. As best I can remember.” Larkin killed the bottle.

  “That’s it,” Pointman advised. “Sometimes it’s best to forget.”

  “Sometimes I can’t r
emember who I am,” Larkin told him.

  “Sometimes that’s the best thing, too.”

  Pointman hooked his fingers into an old shipping crate and heaved it into the oil drum. A rat had made a nest inside the packing material and it all went up in a mushroom of bright sparks and thick black smoke.

  Larkin listened to their frightened squeals and agonized thrashing. It only lasted for a minute or two. Then he could smell the burning flesh, could hear the soft popping of exploding bodies. And he thought of autumn leaves burning at the curbside, and he remembered the soft popping of his eyeballs exploding.

  Gary Blaze sucked in a lungful of crack fumes and fought to hold back a cough. He handed the pipe to Dr Syn and exhaled. “It’s like I keep having these dreams about back when I was a kid,” he told his drummer. “And a lot of other shit. It gets really heavy some of the time, man.”

  Dr Syn was the fourth drummer during the two-decades up-and-down career of Gary Blaze and the Craze. He had been with the band just over a year, and he hadn’t heard Gary repeat his same old stories quite so many times as had the older survivors. Just now they were on a very hot worldwide tour, and Dr Syn didn’t want to go back to playing gigs in bars in Minnesota. He finished what was left of the pipe and said with sympathy, “Heavy shit.”

  “It’s like some of the time I can’t remember who I am,” Gary Blaze confided, watching a groupie recharge the glass pipe. They had the air conditioner on full blast, and the hotel room felt cold.

  “It’s just all the years of being on the road,” Dr Syn reassured him. He was a tall kid half Gary’s age, with the obligatory long blond hair and heavy-metal gear, and getting a big start with a fading rock superstar couldn’t hurt his own rising career.

  “You know”—Gary swallowed a lude with a vodka chaser— “you know, sometimes I get up onstage, and I can’t really remember whether I can play this thing.” He patted his vintage Strat. “And I’ve been playing ever since I bought my first Elvis forty-five.”

  “Hound Dog and Don’t Be Cruel, back in 1956,” Dr Syn reminded him. “You were just a kid growing up in East Tennessee.”

  “And I keep dreaming about that. About the old family house on Cedar Lane.”

  Dr Syn helped himself to another hit of Gary’s crack. “It’s all the years on the road,” he coughed. “You keep thinking back to your roots.”

  “Maybe I ought to go back. Just once. You know—see the old place again. Wonder if it’s still there?”

  “Make it sort of a bad-rocker-comes-home gig?”

  “Shit!” Gary shook his head. “I don’t ever want to see the place again.”

  He inhaled forcefully, dragging the crack fumes deep into his lungs, and he remembered how his chest exploded in a great blast of superheated steam.

  Garrett Larkin was dreaming again, dreaming of Cedar Lane.

  His mother’s voice awoke him, and that wasn’t fair, because he knew before he fell asleep that today was Saturday.

  “Gary! Rise and shine! Remember, you promised your father you’d have the leaves all raked before you watched that football game! Shake a leg now!”

  “All right,” he murmured down the stairs, and he whispered a couple swear words to himself. He threw his long legs over the side of his bed, yawned and stretched, struggled into blue jeans and high school sweatshirt, made it into the bathroom to wash up. A teenager’s face looked back at him from the mirror. Gary explored a few incipient zits before brushing his teeth and applying fresh Butch Wax to his flattop.

  He could smell the sausage frying and the pancakes turning golden-brown as he thumped down the stairs. Mom was in the kitchen, all business in her apron and housedress, already serving up his plate. Gary sat down at the table and chugged his orange juice.

  “Your father gets back from Washington tomorrow after church.” Mom reminded him. “He’ll expect to see that lawn all raked clean.”

  “I’ll get the front finished.” Gary poured Karo syrup over each pancake in the stack.

  “You said you’d do it all.”

  “But, Mom! The leaves are still falling down. It’s only under those maples where they really need raking.” Gary bolted a link of sausage.

  “Chew your food,” Mom nagged.

  But it was a beautiful October morning, with the air cool and crisp, and the sky cloudless blue. His stomach comfortably full, Gary attacked the golden leaves, sweeping them up in swirling bunches with the rattling leafrake. Blackie, his aged white mutt, swayed over to a warm spot in the sun to oversee his work. She soon grew bored and fell asleep.

  He started at the base of the pink marble front of the house, pulling leaves from under the shrubs and rolling them in windrows beneath the tall sugar maples and then onto the curb. Traffic was light this morning on Cedar Lane, and cars’ occasional whizzing passages sent spirals of leaves briefly skyward from the pile. It was going faster than Gary had expected it to, and he might have time to start on the rest of the yard before lunch.

  “There’s really no point in this, Blackie,” he told his dog. “There’s just a lot more to come down.”

  Blackie thumped her tail in sympathy, and he paused to pat her head. He wondered how many years she had left in her, hoped it wouldn’t happen until after he left for college.

  Gary applied matches to the long row of leaves at the curbside. In a few minutes the pile was well ablaze, and the sweet smell of burning leaves filled the October day. Gary crossed to the front of the house and hooked up the garden hose to the faucet at the base of the wall, just in case. Already he’d worked up a good sweat, and he paused to drink from the rush of water.

  Standing there before the pink marble wall, hose to his mouth, Gary suddenly looked up into the blue sky.

  Of course, he never really saw the flash.

  There are no cedars now on Cedar Lane, only rows of shattered and blackened stumps. No leaves to rake, only a sodden mush of dead ash. No blue October skies, only the dead gray of a long nuclear winter.

  Although the house is only a memory preserved in charcoal, a section of the marble front wall still stands, and fused into the pink stone is the black silhouette of a teenaged boy, looking confidently upward.

  The gray wind blows fitfully across the dead wasteland, and the burned-out skeleton of the house on Cedar Lane still mourns the loss of those who loved it and those whom it loved.

  Sleep well, Gary Larkin, and dream your dreams. Dream of all the men you might have become, dream of the world that might have been, dream of all the people who might have lived—had there never been that October day in 1962.

  In life I could not spare you. In death I will shelter your soul and your dreams for as long as my wall shall stand.

  What we see.

  And what we seem.

  Are but a dream.

  A dream within a dream.

  —From the Peter Weir film of Joan Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock

  KIM ANTIEAU

  At a Window Facing West

  KIM ANTIEAU lives in the Pacific Northwest of America and is married to Canadian author Mario Milosevic, whom she met at the 1980 Clarion Writer’s Workshop.

  Her first story was published in 1983 in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Since then she has appeared in various mainstream, horror, mystery, science fiction and fantasy publications, including The Clinton Street Quarterly, Twilight Zone Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fantasy Book, Cemetery Dance, Pulphouse, Shadows, The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories, The Year’s Best Horror Stories, Doom City, Borderlands II and The Ultimate Werewolf. Blossoms was a short story paperback from Pulphouse Publishing.

  She has recently written a science fiction novel, Ruins, and is at work on another, entitled Fool’s Child. Meanwhile, Deere Crossing is the first volume in a new mystery series.

  “At a Window Facing West” is another of those nightmare holiday stories that seem to crop up regularly in Best New Horror . . .

  “I STILL CAN’T FIND THIS PLACE on t
he map,” Rich said, smoothing out the coffee-stained map across the metal tabletop. “Don’t worry about it,” Maggie said. She squinted as she looked out across the Gulf of California. A pelican followed the line of waves for a moment before diving into the turquoise water.

  “I don’t like it here,” Rich said. He leaned toward Maggie and Peter and whispered, “They all seem so poor.”

  Maggie took a sip of beer to keep herself from saying something cruel to Rich. They should never have suggested he come along on this trip. Because Rich could not bear to stray off the beaten path, they had spent over two weeks in tacky tourist towns. He did not trust waiters who could not speak English, and he turned pale at the sight of dirty children.

  Peter glanced at Maggie. She put down her glass and squeezed lemon along the rim. She wished they had been able to find limes. Of course, she supposed, they had been lucky to find a restaurant at all. And hotel rooms. She doubted that many tourists came to this place—wherever it was.

  “I wish I could do something for all those poor dirty little children,” Rich said. He glanced about uncomfortably.

  Maggie sighed. Peter shook his head at her.

  “Give them money if you think they’re so poor,” Maggie said. “Or throw a bucket of water over them. That should clean up a few of them.”

  “Don’t be nasty,” Peter said.

  Rich pushed away from the table. “It must be nice to be so fearless, Maggie.” He strode from the table and the restaurant. He stopped at the edge of the dirt road leading back to the village center and looked in either direction. A truck rumbled by and covered him with a cloud of dust.

  “I hope he finds his way back to the hotel,” Peter said. “He can’t help the way he is, Maggie. The divorce has really shaken him.”

  Two boys ran up to the table. One carried a bucket of dirty water; the other held a squeegee. “Windows! Windows!” they cried together. Good thing Rich was gone, Maggie thought; these kids would scare him to death. Maggie nodded to the boys, and they ran to Peter’s blue van and began washing the windows.