The Best New Horror 2

by Ramsay Campbell

  “You better cool off, Brophy,” Anderson said. “It’s out of your hands.”

  “We’ll see about that!” Brophy shouted, releasing Anderson’s collar before slamming out of the squad car.

  I appreciated Brophy’s gesture, but I knew even then that it wouldn’t make any difference. I was going into the building alone. It was simply a fact. I knew it in my heart. I saw it in Chase’s ebony eyes. Some things are inevitable. So I said, “All right.”

  After a few more careful instructions from Mr Chase, I went over to the equipment truck to check out my radio and pick up some extra gear. If I refused the assignment and more people died as a result, it wouldn’t be worth the effort to live. I had to do it.

  But I was scared. Good Christ, I was scared.

  Once I had made up my mind, Brophy and the rest of the guys quit trying to talk me out of it, but I thought I saw tears in Zaluta’s eyes as I came down the ramp leading out of the truck. That’s when I nearly backed out; I came so close to backing out . . .

  But then Mr Chase was affixing something to the collar of my shirt. “This is the only thing that will work,” he whispered.

  I lifted my collar and saw an old fashioned hat pin inserted through the fabric. It was silver, about seven inches long and was topped with what looked like an enormous black pearl.

  I looked down at Mr Chase. “The heart,” he said. “Remember the heart.”

  I nodded, wondering who was crazier, him or me.

  “Keep your focus,” Chase continued. “None of it is real. Only the drude. But she cannot alter her own appearance before another formidable woman. Ignore everything else. Remember the signs I told you to look for and you’ll find her.”

  Fastening a string of small explosive charges to my vest and snapping a clip into a 9mm Baretta semiautomatic handgun equipped with a flashlight attachment, I figured that I would be carrying nearly seventy pounds. My antiballistic armor weighed forty eight pounds alone. The additional weight of the handgun, clips and my A-2 was finally the limit I could bear and still move.

  I had never really considered the utter strangeness of what I do for a living until I walked across that cold lot toward the building, the arsenal I carried swaying in time to my steps. I’m sure I must have looked like a erstwhile Valkyrie, except there was no Valhalla waiting for me—I was going in after a deranged witch who had taken up residence in a Detroit project building.

  The radio buzzed and cracked in my ears. I adjusted the earpieces one last time before I stepped across the lines and crossed the lot toward the building. Hustling as fast as I was able, I crossed the open area of the courtyard until I hugged the icy bricks forming the base of the building. I got a quick glimpse of Zaluta crouched beside a nearby trash dumpster, his face was turned up, his mouth open wide.

  Across the street, the crowd convulsed.

  I tilted my head back just in time to see a plastic trash can teetering on the ledge of a third floor window being turned over. Before I could move, I was struck full in the face with a splattering gush of hot, clotting blood. When I could get my eyes open, I saw my nemesis, Ralph Esposito, leaning over the windowsill, leering at me past the edge of the dripping can.

  I turned away, revolted and terrified. I tensed my body, trying not to retch, ignoring the shouting voice on the radio. Concentrate! I told myself. It’s not real!

  My breathing slowed and I looked down at myself. Clean and dry. Not a speck of blood. Chase had been right. It was going to be a battle of wills, not weapons. I looked up at the window. Nothing.

  “It’s all right,” I whispered into the radio mouthpiece. “I’m going in.”

  Having thus committed myself, I trotted up to the fire-blasted front entryway and slipped into the building. It was similar to other project apartment houses I’d been in, except for one thing: a naked overhead bulb glared across the writhing floor of the entry hall. I found myself standing up to my ankles in snakes.

  Something darted near my eyes and I instinctively batted it away with one hand. Panting, I watched my radio headset tumble into a thrashing reptilian mass at my feet. Stupid! I thought. I’d let myself be fooled into losing my communications. There were no snakes. Clamping down on my terror, I tried to concentrate, concentrate . . .

  I blinked my eyes and the snakes vanished.

  Not wanting to waste the time it would take to rehook my headset, I left it lying on the filthy grey linoleum. The building was still as a tomb. There wasn’t a sign of a single living soul. Remembering Chase’s instructions, I strained to hear a high-pitched keening sound, and I thought I could hear something fading in and out like a remote radio signal, a fluttering wail hovering on the far edge of my audial range. It was coming from above. I headed for the stairs.

  When I reached the second floor, I edged around the corner and stood against the wall at the end of the corridor. Nothing moved. A coppery tang hung in the air, a salty odor I recognized instantly. Above it rode the sharp smell of cordite. Most of the lightbulbs lining the ceiling had been long since smashed or stolen, so the corridor lay in an eerie half-light. Hugging the wall, I inched down the corridor to find that all of the apartment doors had been left standing ajar.

  Toeing open the first door, I discovered the bodies of several people strewn like smashed mannequins across the dimly lit living room. One of the dead, a large man with a rough beard, lay sprawled on his back, his hand still clutching a plastic handled steak knife with which he’d apparently slashed his own throat.

  Feeling sick and lightheaded, I turned away from the carnage, taking deep draughts of air into my lungs. Back in the corridor, I leaned against the wall for a moment trying to regain my bearings and wondered what my odds of escape might be if I made a dash for the stairs.

  I was thinking, shit on this—I’m bailing out, when I heard something behind me move.

  I couldn’t help screaming when I turned and faced the dark, bloodied figures that shambled toward me from the interior of the apartment. They jerked and hobbled as if drawn along by some mad puppeteer, eyes glazed and fixed on nothing.

  Flashes of fire began strobing in front of me and there was thunder in my ears. A bitter cloud of blue smoke rose near my face, through which I could see the advancing corpses exploding and flying apart. It wasn’t until after I’d expended my entire 30-round clip that I realized I had been firing my A-2 through the apartment doorway.

  And they were still coming.

  I turned and made a panicky run for it, breaking for the stairs. Honor and duty be damned. I couldn’t think of anything but getting the hell out. I didn’t care what happened as long as I got away.

  I only made it as far as the top of the stairs when I heard a familiar voice call my name.

  “Julianna,” it barked in a familiar tone.

  And I knew goddamned well that if I turned around, it would be a stupid, perhaps fatal, mistake. But I couldn’t help it. I just had to look.

  There in the filthy tenement corridor, not ten feet behind me, stood Madame Jedinov, starkly majestic in her wispy dancing skirts, baton in hand, a fierce look on her stern Baltic face.

  I stared, astonished, as a huge black tongue snaked out of her mouth like lightning, wrapping itself around my neck and yanking me off my feet. I hit the linoleum floor like a sack of cement and my A-2 skittered out of my hands and bounced down the stairs. As the constriction around my neck tightened, I could hear braying laughter booming over my head.

  No, I thought as little lights danced in my head. I won’t go down like this. Clamping down on every fiber of my imagination, I forced myself to concentrate. It’s not real. It can’t hurt me.

  When the corridor swam back into focus, I found myself on my knees with my own hands clenched around my throat. Releasing them, I stood, coughing, and looked down the hallway. It was silent and empty. The buzzing in my head cleared until all that was left was that strange, electrical keening sound I’d first detected downstairs, stronger now.

  I touched the collar
of my uniform and found I’d almost dislodged the hatpin that Chase had inserted there. So that was the game: Get Rid of the Pin. The bitch was scared.

  Jamming the pin tightly into my collar, I glanced down at my A-2 lying at the bottom of the stairs. I wouldn’t be needing it. In my mind, I conjured up an image of a bent, hideous crone wearing a peaked black hat and focused on it. Placing my boot squarely on the first step leading to the third floor, I silently called out, I’m coming for you.

  Soft laughter echoed above. A shimmering image appeared on the stairway, an abortive, half-formed horror that I was able to sweep away with a wave of my hand. I’m wise to you now.

  Confident of my own power to dispel the drude’s best efforts to fake me out, I jogged up the stairs, heart racing, hot for the game. Go ahead, I thought wildly. Hit me with your best shot, honey.

  When I reached the third floor, I stopped dead in my tracks. Suspended from the overhead light fixtures that lined the ceiling were eight large, meticulously skinned human bodies. It was obscene. They swung like smokehouse hams in small, lazy circles spotlighted by naked bulbs above their dreadfully glazed, fleshy heads.

  My hands flew to my mouth and I gagged. Looking away, I called back the imagery of the witch-crone and concentrated upon it, hating her, crowding out the revulsion and terror with rage. With a strangled cry, I turned and charged down the hallway directly at the swaying atrocities the drude had conjured to stop me. I would reduce them to vapor like the one on the stairs.

  It’s impossible to describe how horrible, how shocking, how loathsome it was when I collided with that cold, wet slab of human meat. I struck it hard, bouncing backward off of it and hitting the floor hard. I lay there looking up, seeing that terrible dripping thing dangling over me, trying to get my breath back.

  There was a soft popping noise and the corpse, evidently released from its mooring, toppled from the ceiling and collapsed on top of me.

  A woman’s shrieking laughter filled the corridor, drowning out my screams as I struggled to get out from under the inert body pinning me on my back, holding me in a repugnant embrace.

  Her laughter racketed in my ears, making it impossible to think. My heart pounded painfully hard, forcing great pulsing torrents though my body. My will and concentration had been pushed to the wall. I was unsure if I possessed the emotional strength to handle my predicament. Surely my spirit could not survive one more shock.

  And then the lights went out.

  Silence. Not a sound except my own breathing. I managed to push away the thing on top of me and it hit the floor with a wet, slapping noise that reverberated oddly, like in a cavern.

  Grabbing the handgun out of my belt holster, I flicked on the flashlight attachment and swung the beam out across a domed roof that undulated with the squirming bodies of huge brown bats. One of them disentangled itself from the seething mass and flew at me, striking my chest, snapping at my throat.

  As I grappled with it, trying to tear it away, I dragged my left hand across the point of the pin in my collar, painfully ripping open the skin of my palm. Remember the pin! The drude is trying to get the hatpin, I thought wildly. There’s no cave, no bats. Concentrate.

  The cavern rippled and shimmered, then faded into the walls of the tenement corridor. Arcing my flashlight to the end of the hallway, I saw that the shadows pooling there seemed to be alive, thrashing like storm clouds. This was a sign, according to Mr Chase. She couldn’t bear the light, he’d said, and threw out darkness like a squid expels ink. Being careful to avoid contact with the remaining bodies suspended from the ceiling, I followed the beam to the end of the hall. I flashed the light on the door. The numbers on the scarred metal fire door read, “302”.

  I should have known.

  This is it, I told myself as I pressed a small clay charge beneath the doorknob. Standing well to one side of the door, I triggered the charge. The door blew open and stood ajar, smoking.

  Edging past the door, I played the beam of my flashlight around the room, but the darkness was so thick that the light scarcely cut three feet into the gloom. A bright pain blossomed in my heart with each breath I took. My soul was exhausted and damaged. I truly did not think I would be alive much longer, and the unadorned reality of that absolute belief somehow washed away my dread of death, filling me with one burning conviction: to make my last act on earth a meaningful one.

  I was going to take that crazy bitch down with me.

  “Where are you, you fucking hag?” I shouted, ignoring the tears blurring my vision. I whipped the flashlight beam back and forth, until it fell upon a pale figure standing in the whirling darkness.

  His naked body was very white where it was not splashed with blood. My own personal nightmare, Ralph Esposito, stood with a viciously gleeful smile on his mad face. In front of him, he clutched a beautiful little girl by her dark hair, holding a dimestore pocket knife to her throat.

  Little Carmelita begged me to save her with desolate brown eyes.

  “I’ll peel her like a grape if you take one more step,” her father growled.

  I didn’t have the strength to banish the delusion, so I let it play itself out. Sobbing like a child, I moved forward.

  Ralph Esposito drew the blade evenly across her smooth neck. She went rigid and shrieked as a crimson trickle necklaced her tender throat.

  “Stop it!” I screamed. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t bear the child’s agony, real or imagined. Dropping to my knees, I begged, “please . . .”

  I felt the light touch of a hand on my back. I turned to face whatever new demon had been summoned to torment me and looked into the jet black eyes of a divinely beautiful goldenhaired woman.

  “You’re tired,” she murmured. “So tired.”

  Her sympathy drained me. I slumped at her feet, my face against the silken fabric of her long skirt. If I could close my eyes and rest a while . . .

  I felt her hand slide to my collar and gently tug at the pin, but her soothing voice lulled me into a dreamy fantasy. I was wearing a crystalline costume, dancing on a mirror in a child’s jewel box, spinning round and round—

  A sudden thunder pounded overhead, shaking the floor beneath me, jarring me awake. I reached up and grasped the hand fumbling with my collar.

  The drude screeched in my ear and tore at my face with her free hand. Feeling her nails tear deep furrows across my cheek, I jerked my handgun up until the barrel jammed under her chin and emptied the clip into her head.

  The drude screamed with laughter and knocked the gun out of my hand, the flashlight beam pinwheeling through the roiling dark and coming to rest beyond my reach. If anything, she had grown even stronger, fighting like a wildcat. Though barely half my size, she possessed at least twice my strength. And she was choking the life out of me. I couldn’t allow her get hold of the pin.

  The bass thrumming overhead increased, filling the room with its heavy pulsations.

  The sound distracted her for a scant moment and I took advantage of it, knocking her off balance as she sat on my chest. Whipping my leg around, I caught her across her neck and levered her onto her back.

  Above us, the booming throb increased to a deafening intensity.

  I yanked the hatpin out of my collar and held it out before me. The drude disappeared into the shadows.

  I spun around, my heart banging painfully in my chest. She could be anywhere, ready to pounce on me from behind. I edged over to where my gun lay and picked it up, flashing the beam around me.

  The building pulsed and shook. Whop-whop-whop.

  I found her. She was cowering in a dark corner, shielding her eyes from the light, making pitiful mewling sounds.

  She looked up, her lovely face stricken with pain and fear. “Please,” she whimpered. “Please. Don’t kill me.”

  Her anguish caught me by surprise and that one moment of hesitation on my part was all she wanted.

  She sprang at me with blinding speed, but I was ready for her. When she grabbed my wrist, I felt bones
splinter but held fast to the hatpin. It was her own hand that helped drive the pin up beneath her ribcage and into her heart.

  She stiffened, her black eyes wide with surprise. Exhaling a gust of foul breath into my face, she went limp and her knees buckled. I went down with her, driving the pin hard, setting it deep.

  Pulling myself to my feet, I looked down at her small, crumpled form. There was no victory here. The swirling darkness receded, leaving the room in its former dingy, trash-strewn verity. Above the thunderous pandemonium roaring over my head, I heard the wail of a baby.

  Emerging from a cluttered corner, Carmelita Esposito, the most beautiful child ever born on this planet, wobbled unsteadily toward me on pudgy toddler’s legs, arms outstretched.

  A indescribably intense rush of joy surged through me when I picked that precious baby up and held her in my arms. She was safe. She was mine. I would never let her go. Never.

  Hugging her close, I sidled up to a bare window where jagged shards of windowpane rattled in the casement from the bedlam outside. Gales of cold wind blew into our faces, bright lights shone down from overhead. I recognized the insectile outlines of the black shape hovering over us.

  A Chinook helicopter hung above the building, its rotors roaring and throbbing.

  What are they doing up there? I wondered, certain that any rescue operation would certainly be ground-based.

  Something was being lowered from the side of the chopper, something that looked like a large coffee can on a wire.

  A bomb. They were going to bomb the building! Images of the Philadelphia MOVE house bombing, the explosion and subsequent conflagration leaped into my mind.

  The chopper eased up to a higher altitude, readying for the drop. There would be no time to escape from the building’s entrance door. I screamed up at them, but my voice was lost in the chopper’s backwash. There was only one alternative left for Carmelita and me, and not a very good one.

  My mind set, I kicked the remaining glass out of the window and looked down. At least a thirty foot drop to frozen turf. If I wrapped myself around the child and let my legs take the impact, she might not be injured. My legs would be shattered. The dance . . .