The Best New Horror 2

by Ramsay Campbell

  Robin walked on the beach for a moment and looked at the surface of the pool. Beneath the calm water, something seemed to be spying on him. In the middle of the pool, a black shape was floating. Floating? No, it was just the reflection of a crow gliding over his head. Alarmed, he took cover behind a bush. The bird tirelessly described a perfect circle, cawing shrilly from time to time.

  Unnerved, without quite knowing why, Robin retraced his steps and returned home.

  “You’re going up already?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t you want to stay with us and watch the TV?”

  “No. I’ve already seen this movie.”

  Robin hurried upstairs, catching only snatches of conversation coming from the living room. “—deliberately to annoy me—” “—always hope he’ll do what you want. He is twelve now, after all.”

  He closed his bedroom door and leant against it for a moment. Nothing. Without wasting any time, he went to his bed, arranged the bolster on the mattress, covered it with his pyjama jacket, and to complete the illusion, carefully placed the angel’s wig on the head of the makeshift dummy. He folded over the blanket and stepped back to judge the effect. It would do. Quietly, he opened the window, jumped onto the branch, climbed down the tree, and made off. It was still day, but dusk was approaching. Gradually, the shadows took possession of the bushes and trees.

  Once past the secondary road, he quickly found his first track-markers, but he soon had to use his torch to locate the later ones.

  Approaching the thicket, he stood still when he heard something cry out. What was happening? He moved forwards cautiously, now and again climbing a tree to find the notches he had carved that afternoon. Soon, there was only a bush separating him from the bank. Shapes moved about vaguely in the half-darkness. A stifled cry; the crack of broken glass; a high-pitched laugh. He squinted in vain; nothing was distinguishable. He could not catch any intelligible words; nothing but rumblings and eructations.

  He moved lightly to the left and cried out abruptly. The crow had darted into his face, flaying his skin with claws and beak. All was quiet on the beach, then came several shouts of surprise. Robin broke into a run, the fetid breath of the bird still lingering in his throat. He charged onwards, blindly.

  He found himself back on the secondary road without knowing how he had got there. Behind him, the exclamations were becoming fainter; he must have lost them.

  Slowing down, he walked toward the house. His parents were still watching television and he took every precaution as he climbed up the tree, advanced along the branch, opened the window, and slipped into his bedroom.

  The bed was empty.

  He had the sensation of plunging into a bottomless abyss. His mother must have come up to see if he was sleeping well, and discovered his trickery. It would be pointless to act as if nothing had happened. He opened the door and went downstairs; the tears which mingled with the blood on his cheeks had a sour taste.

  The glimmer of the television danced on the furniture and on the walls, carving up deep shadows swirling in the hidden recesses of the room. Facing the set, his mother and father, their back to him, and a third person. Who was it? The stranger, conscious of being watched, turned his gaze toward him, exchanged a look with his mother, who nodded her head, and got up.

  Robin stood paralysed on the threshold of the living room. The other, who had his build and wore his pyjamas, advanced toward him in silence. He refused to look at his face. The other stopped in front of him and lifted a hand toward his throat. He felt his flesh being crumpled and torn. The hand withdrew, covered with bloody feathers. Shaking, as if on the edge of a chasm of dark shadows, he saw them rise slowly in the air, thrown up by the stranger in a contemptuous gesture. They fluttered a moment, stars faintly flickering in a fading velvet sky, and then there was only the dark.

  J. L. COMEAU

  Firebird

  JUDITH LYNN COMEAU was born in Washington D.C. and is a full-time writer. Her interests include ancient music, 18th and 19th century English novels, anthropology and, of course, “all things dark and horrible.”

  Since 1987 her fiction has been published in such magazine and anthologies as Grue, Haunts, Twisted Night Slivers, Dreams & Nightmares, The Women Who Walk Through Fire, Women of the West, Borderlands II and The Year’s Best Horror Stories. She has recently completed her first novel, entitled Haunted Landscapes.

  “Firebird” is a fast-paced blend of police procedural and witchcraft that is guaranteed to make your palms sweat . . .

  CONCENTRATION IS THE THING.

  You have to block out everything but the task at hand if you want to succeed. In my mind, I am the Firebird, soaring above the ashes of my own extinction.

  Ignoring the sweat pouring down my face, I stand before the mirrored wall, one hand lightly touching the barre. I bring my knee up steadily and lay it alongside my nose, then ever so slowly extend the calf, arching my toes toward the ceiling.

  Technique, line, proportion, balance: these are the classical elements of the dance. Ballet is a celebration of the physical instrument, a ruthless, brutal discipline from which mastery of movement emerges. I try to think only of the dance as I push away from the barre and glissade to the center of the cold, silent studio.

  I want to pretend that it is not nearly four a.m., that I am not exhausted, that I am not courting injury by pushing myself too hard. Going up on pointe, I turn a dozen mad fourettes, one-legged spins that confuse the mind and challenge the spirit. I want to forget what happened last night. I want to fill my empty soul with the dance.

  I keep my balance by means of light and gravity. I focus on the staccato tock-tock-tock of my toeshoes against the hardwood floor. I will myself to forget, but even as my body transcends exhaustion and pushes into the realm of pure bliss, I remember . . . I remember . . .

  The dream is always the same: I’m charging through a long, dim hallway surrounded by shadowy blue figures running ahead and beside me. Blood crashing in my temples all but obliterates the thunder of our heavy boots as we approach a scarred metal door at the end of the hall. Amid angry shouts and confusing clamor, the door suddenly bursts open. (At this point in the dream, I start struggling to awaken myself because I can’t bear to see what I know waits in that apartment.) My screams reach out of my dream and into my consciousness. I awaken on my feet, engulfed in a blind panic.

  The dream is a remnant of the other side of my life. Of necessity, most dancers live two-sided lives. Foremost always is the grand passion—the dance—but unless one is a principal dancer in a large company, there is also a full-time outside job that pays the rent and buys the toeshoes.

  When I’m not dancing, I work for the city. I’m one of a five-member tactical assault team the Detroit Police Department secretly calls “The Nut Squad”. We’re specifically trained to respond to barricade situations, which are often precipitated by emotionally disturbed persons, hence the nickname.

  My given name is Julianna Christine Larkin. At the dance studio, I’m addressed as Julianna, but inside the police department, I’m often referred to as “Twinkletoes” or “The Sugarplum Fairy” behind my back. At one time, the guys on my squad gave me a hard time, making ballerina jokes and crude references to my gender. Now they simply call me Larkin, and that suits me just fine.

  When I pack up my toeshoes and go out with my squad, the mandatory gear is decidedly different. Instead of a skimpy leotard, I wear heavy pads of flexible armor covering my chest, back and groin. A spidery two-way radio headset with multiple channels allows us to communicate quietly. We each carry a different weapon: a shotgun for support fire, an M16 A-2 automatic rifle for close-range management, a .223-caliber assault rifle for long-range control. I carry the A-2, which is relatively light but effective. We also have hydraulic jacks to crack open locked doors, systems to deliver tear gas canisters, and a contraption that shoots explosive diversion devices called “Thunder Flashers”.

  Like ballet, tactical police work requires ag
ility, strength, endurance and a rigorous training schedule, so the two are not quite so disparate as they might at first seem. These are the areas where I excel. It’s a grasp of social competence that has so far eluded me.

  For me, adolescence was a nightmare. Girls who reach a height of six feet by junior high school might as well have leprosy. But after a full day of peer indifference or outright scorn at school, I would become a swan in dance class, envied for my length of limb.

  “Stand tall, Julianna! Reach for the clouds!” Madame Jedinov would bark from the back of the studio as she pounded her baton in time to the music. “Arch the neck! Extend the arm!”

  In the grace and beauty of the dance I found pleasure in being me.

  There is a certain grace and beauty to be found in the savage Detroit inner city streets as well. Instead of a joyous dance of life, it is a desperate dance of death, beautiful in its own wretched way.

  My first police assignment was a barricade situation located in a shabby, drug-riddled housing project downtown. When I arrived, the building had been pinned to the night sky by spotlights and ringed by armed personnel.

  Lieutenant Steven Brophy, my squad leader and veteran of two tours of combat in Vietnam, told me, “I want you to stay in back of the team, young lady. Don’t want any trouble on this one. We’ve got our hands full and we don’t need to be babysitting you.”

  His doubts about my competence did not annoy me—I was having my own misgivings. Everyone in the department was aware that I had received my placement in the unit to squelch a rash of sexual discrimination suits filed against the city. I thought I would be able prove myself when the time came, but right then, I was just plain rabbit scared.

  As I adjusted my radio headset, a sharp cry pulled my attention to the third floor apartment window where something dangled beneath the windowsill. Pushing my hair up under my cap I saw that it was a child—a baby!—being held by one ankle, bobbing precariously above the bleak tundra of the courtyard thirty feet below.

  The baby screamed in terror, windmilling its little arms, arching its back. My heart froze. Seconds later, the child was jerked roughly back through the window and disappeared from view. Only its wails echoed in the cold night air.

  “That’s right,” Brophy said as he motioned for me to follow him toward the equipment truck. “We got us a maniac, little girl.”

  After handing me a heavy hydraulic jack, which I would carry during the assault, we joined the rest of the squad for a fast briefing. It was terrifying. Unconfirmed reports indicated that there was a psycho in apartment 302 named Ralph Esposito who had taken his former wife and children hostage. Sporadic gunfire heard earlier in the evening was shortly followed by the ejection of an object from the window which was later identified as his ex-wife’s head. Of the six children presumed to be inside the apartment with him, it was unsure how many survived. The situation had been deteriorating rapidly for several hours and the life of the single known surviving hostage, the baby, had reached an unacceptable level of risk.

  Our task: Full-Assault Scenario/Termination of Suspect Authorized.

  We crept into the building past a dozen uniformed officers and waited for one breathless minute at the end of the third floor hallway until Lieutenant Brophy gave the signal to move. At that point, I was so frightened and everything started moving so fast that the whole sequence of events always comes back to me in blurs and flashes:

  Midnight blue figures hustling down the hallway—the sound of our boots against the linoleum floor—halting outside the door to 302—handing the jack to Fred Zaluta, second in command—dragging my A-2 off my back, throwing the safety—the door buckling and bursting open—gunfire—Zaluta on the floor, writhing—I know he’s moaning, but all I can hear is my own blood crashing in my ears—a naked man, clotted with gore, pointing a rifle at me—no!—the end of the barrel explodes with light and something punches me hard in the shoulder—I start to go down, sure that I’m already dead—automatically, I train the red dot of my laser aiming device on the center of the madman’s forehead and squeeze off a fast burst.

  As I go down, I see the top of the suspect’s head lift off and explode in hundreds of shards and droplets that fan out in every direction—swiveling my head, I see another spray of dark blood pumping out of the torn meat of my shoulder—I think very clearly, “Where’s the baby?” as I hit the floor—there is shouting and commotion—I lay injured and dazed, but not actually registering pain yet—the medical people swarm over me, lift me onto a stretcher that puts me at eye level with a strange object that looks like a raw roast beef pinned to the wall with a big cooking fork.

  Time twists and stretches now, slowing to a crawl.

  How odd, I think, running my eyes over the blue veins marbling the strangely shaped piece of meat. Rivulets of blood trace down the dingy wall beneath. How very, very odd.

  People talk to me as I’m carried toward the door, but all I can hear is the hushed voice of one uniformed policeman addressing another officer.

  “That’s the way it goes with these screwballs,” he was saying, shaking his head sadly. “The bastard killed every one of them. Skinned the baby alive and staked it to the wall with a fork right before the rescue unit got in. Five more minutes might have saved it. Ain’t that a shame?”

  When I start screaming, the ambulance attendant jabs me with a needle. Fadeout.

  The first thing I thought of when I woke up in the hospital was that poor mutilated baby fastened to the wall, and I’ve thought about it every day for the past two years. I learned afterwards from the reports that the man I’d . . . killed . . . had a history of mental problems and had been released from a state hospital that same morning because of budgetary cutbacks. Ralph Esposito. The sound of his name makes my neck prickle. The baby he murdered along with his ex-wife and five other children was named Carmelita. Carmelita. Such a musical name. So full of laughter and promise. I can’t stop hearing it in my mind.

  Well, months of sweaty work in the dance studio and the department gym healed my shoulder. I’ve always been able to handle the physical demands of life. It’s my head that keeps giving me trouble. If I could only banish the image of that poor child . . . poor Carmelita, from my dreams.

  The guys on my squad welcomed me whole-heartedly into the unit when I came back to work. I was no longer considered an irksome political placement to bolster the department’s image.

  Lieutenant Fred Zaluta, who was also wounded during the raid on 302, became my champion. He still insists that I saved his life, but I don’t know—I was just doing my job. He knows I live alone in a coldwater flat downtown, so he and his wife invite me over for a home-cooked meal with them and their three kids at least once a month. I love watching the Zalutas together. They’re a volatile group, always fighting and bickering, but you can feel the love radiating from every cluttered corner of their home. I was raised an only child. My parents’ house was cool and hushed, the corners immaculately bare.

  My squad leader, Lieutenant Brophy, and the other two men on the team, Parks and Channing, treat me equitably, but we don’t socialize. While we’ve become an extremely tight working unit, the prevailing wisdom is that it’s dangerous to become emotionally involved. I guess Zaluta and I are just asking for trouble, but I can’t imagine losing those wonderful evenings with his family. I’m willing to risk it.

  When I first started having the dream about the raid on 302, I asked Zaluta if he thought I was going crazy.

  “Naw,” he said. I could tell by the way he wouldn’t look me in the eye that discussing it troubled him. “We all get dreams. I heard once that the only way to get rid of one entirely is to replace it with something even worse.”

  “You have one, too?”

  “Aw, sure. There was a raid back in seventy-two. A psycho twisted some pitiful old lady’s head around two full turns while I stood there with my mouth hanging open. I always thought maybe I could have saved her if I hadn’t been so green and scared. I don’t dream abo
ut it as much as I used to, though. It gets better little by little, Larkin. You’ll see.”

  I nodded, disturbed by the way his shoulders sagged and his broad face had grown pinched. I decided not to mention the subject again.

  These past two years since the raid on 302 have rocketed past. I divide my time between police work and ballet and, usually, that’s enough . . . until I key the lock to the dreary little closet I rent downtown. At some point, even cops and ballerinas have to go home. Maybe someday I’ll buy some curtains, or a cat . . .

  Detroit is often referred to as “Murder City” by the press, and from my own vantage point, the inner city resembles a monstrous, diseased organism that seems to grow exponentially by feeding on its own overabundance of poverty and rage. I don’t know if a cure exists—I just help fight the symptoms: teenage gangs warring over drug turf, crazies strung out on crack and PCP, plus the usual family violence. Automatic weapons like Uzis and Baretta handguns equipped with 100-round banana clips are common in the rougher projects downtown. Drug turf battles are dangerous, but I would much rather respond to a gang war barricade then a nut barricade. Gang members usually surrender quickly—they’re willing to trade their machismo for survival. But the whackos, they just don’t give a damn, which makes them infinitely more treacherous.

  Whatever the particular scenario happens to be, each assault is virtually the same, a tightly choreographed dance that never becomes routine. It’s the part of my job I dread the most and love the best. The sweats and the jitters I experience seconds before an assault are indistinguishable from the butterflies I get backstage just before dancing in front of an audience. It’s thrilling and terrifying at once.