The Best New Horror 2

by Ramsay Campbell

  “We’ve missed it, damn!” he cursed. Elizabeth stood and ran to the cave’s entrance. Dusk was beginning to carpet the distant sea a rich, wine-dark red from the setting sun. So, they’d missed their boat back to civilisation.

  “Where’ve you been, Steve?” Elizabeth felt slightly angry, but it was tempered with a desire to laugh at the absurdity of their situation.

  He looked her her sheepishly. “I fell asleep as well.” No more explanation was necessary. Delos had secured their undivided attention for at least the next eighteen hours.

  “Perhaps they’re still waiting,” Elizabeth said as the realisation sunk in, but no, she could still see the harbour and it was deserted. Nearby the museum building was in darkness. They were the only people left on Delos.

  “I’m sorry, Liz.” He looked like he genuinely was too. “We can sleep in this cave and be down at the harbour by midday tomorrow. We’ll be back on Naxos in time for dinner.”

  Elizabeth examined her surroundings, but the dream she’d half remembered had decided her. “I’d rather not,” she answered him. “Can’t we find a place nearer the shore?” But of course to trek down the hill in near darkness was foolish, it was bad enough trying to avoid the ankle-twisting, overgrown chunks of Delos’ former glory in daylight. Before he could answer, she said, jokingly, “No. I know this is the safest place to stay now. At least we have shelter should it rain!”

  They both sat quietly for a hour, saying very little. The sun finally gave up the day and the night was blacker than they could ever have imagined, except that there were stars in the sky, and over on Rhenea a few lights twinkled. A far cry, Elizabeth recalled, from Athens’ bejewelled night, where every precious gem’s colour was represented by streetlamps, houses, automobiles, displays, and sudden diamond-sparks from trolleybus cables.

  Dinner consisted of a can of beer each—how glad Elizabeth was that sleep had saved them!—and a few biscuits and pistachios Steve found in his rucksack. They both ate and drank slowly; there was a long night ahead and it was still quite early. There’d be no browsing down by the quayside to find a suitable taverna. No embarrassed look around the owner’s kitchen to choose their meal. No lingering, warm wash of wine and calm sea to lull the senses.

  Later, the quietness began to make Elizabeth’s flesh crawl. The atmosphere didn’t appear to affect Steve, who was leaning, like herself, at the entrance to the grotto, breathing deeply and gazing enigmatically at the starry heavens. For some reason the expected rasp of the cicadas was absent and the sea was so calm and distant that any sounds it issued did not reach them. She felt far from sleep now, yet yearned for a dream as powerful as that she had had earlier, as eloquent as all her dreams had been whilst on vacation. She hoped that the cool night would not drive her inside the cave. There might be snakes in there now. She was reminded of the serpentine forms that writhed beautifully, yet balefully she thought, in mosaics on the floor of one of the roofless temples they’d visited; of scorpions and the whole spectrum of beasts which, to modern Western minds, held evil intent but which soared to god-like heights in the ancients’ collective mind.

  When she looked up again out of her reverie, Steve was no longer there. Now where had he gone?

  “Steve,” she called gently towards the cave. There was no answer. The answer, she smiled, was simple: a call of nature. A small breeze cracked the dry grass at her feet and whispered around the sanctuary like a primeval, probing oread, wandering up the hill from its pleasures among the ruins and wondering at the strange being sitting in front of the antrum where once Apollo had been worshipped. Maybe that mountain nymph had never seen human-kind for hundreds of years on those desolate Delos nights?

  A mist was drifting up the hill and before he knew it, Steve was engulfed in its clammy caress. If anyone had asked why he had wandered off just then, he doubted he could consciously say. It felt the right thing to do, but the grey swathes curling around him were nightmarishly unreal on this warm night. He ought to return to Liz and try to settle down and get some sleep. Nothing could be done until morning. If he turned carefully he could easily grope his way back without getting lost.

  He took cautious steps, fretfully searching the ground for pitfalls and in his concentration the lone, quiet yowl of a dog went unheard. Had he heard the sound, his myth-imbued mind would immediately have realised its portent. It was made only once, though, before the hag came to him. Hecate, the Goddess that Appears on the Way, was monstrously garbed in the raimant of a cadaver, her dark hair like strings of snakes, her face dry and mummified, her eyes luminous shards. Under a shroud of fine-spun silk her withered breasts were clearly visible. His eyes met hers through the fog and he knew that time and reality had finally become spent forces for him. If the ritual purifications of Delos had been started by the Priests, these things were now continued under the guidance of Gods. Delos was still a place where no living being lingered after dark and if the dead returned, it was to ensure that sanctity was forever preserved.

  Steve was surprised at his mind’s ability to think rationally as the corpse approached. Large hands, talons of aged flesh, reached to grasp his skull and he managed to scream only briefly as the cold, hard white thumbs forced their way between his lips and pressed his vibrating tongue down the back of his throat.

  As the breeze died away a noise below startled Elizabeth, somewhere on the darkened slope of Cynthus. It sounded like tumbling stones or loose footfalls among the debris. Why would Steve go that far for a pee?

  The night held a beauty that transcended her mundane thoughts. Its beauty was dark and alien, thousands of years old and still breathing a life as real as the lambent lights which now played over the remains of the cemetery. Elizabeth peered through the gloom, puzzling at the sudden flickering, flame-like flashes of light. Fireflies, maybe.

  A glow seemed to lift above Hecate’s Isle, or it may have been over Rhenea beyond. Immediately Elizabeth thought about the purification pit where Delos’ long dead were re-lain. Loose chippings of stone began again to tumble down the slope, with the loud clarity only former silence can imbue such sounds with.

  “Steve . . .?” Elizabeth stood and glanced around, finding only fear in her inability to penetrate the darkness. It was almost as if he’d never been here, a form as hallucinatory to her now as the city of Athens was. She began to feel anger at her descent into irrationality, but that descent was inexorable, driven by a growing terror at the dreamlike predicament she was in. She wanted to shout, to scream out Steve’s name, he must be nearby. He must . . . Had he caught the boat back to Naxos and left her stranded with a mischievious hallucination of himself for a companion? It dawned on Elizabeth that Steve may never have been real—

  Now she was being absurd!

  She finally overcame her fear of the benighted hill and took to the friendless maw of the cave. She felt her way in, choking on the dust her shoes raised. Something—only for a second did her mind feel relief that Steve had returned—with strong, cold hands grabbed her arms and she could smell an obnoxious, a poisonous fetor from the darkness a little above her face. “Ste—!” But it wasn’t, couldn’t have been him.

  The invisible figure was merciless in its actions, which Elizabeth quickly realised were those of something not living. Above all, the stench of death was forced into her nostrils and dry, crumbling flesh pressed down upon her. She was saved by the darkness from seeing the face that belonged to the hard, cold, half-slimy tongue which opened her lips and forced its attentions upon her own. Elizabeth felt silken fabric between her and the pressure of iron-hard breasts; and the posturing proboscis opening her jaws to cracking point while long-dead saliva dribbled down her throat. The sensation sent her reeling into the safe haven of unconsciousness, but not before her mind induced her to believe that this visitant to Delos was one of Rhenea’s long dead guardians.

  Dawn was like a red curse over the slopes of Delos. Steve and Elizabeth mused over it as they gazed hypnotically across the bay. They didn’t really app
reciate their changed viewpoint or their new flesh, such as it was. The vista from Rhenea was very familiar and had been for millenia. They sighed together, and gathering up age-tattered robes, made their way back down a long underground tunnel to join their purified dead as the sun’s strong light began to bask the empty slopes of distant Cynthus. They knew that Apollo’s birthplace could never harbour the dead, or the living, for long . . .

  GENE WOLFE

  Lord of the Land

  GENE WOLFE was born in New York and grew up in Houston, where he attended Edgar Allan Poe Elementary School, an accident which he admits seems to have shaped much of his life.

  In 1984 he resigned from his position as senior editor of Plant Engineering Magazine to write full time. Besides the four volumes that make up the award-winning “The Book of the New Sun” (The Shadow of the Torturer, The Claw of the Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor and The Citadel of the Autarch), his books include The Fifth Head of Cerberus, The Devil in a Forest, Peace, Free Live Free, Soldier of the Mist, The Urth of the New Sun, There Are Doors, Soldier of Arete and Castleview.

  Some of his short fiction has been collected in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories (“that’s the title,” he points out, “not a typo”), Gene Wolfe’s Book of Days, Storeys (“ditto”) From the Old Hotel and Endangered Species. His most recent book is Pandora By Holly Hollander, a mystery novel, and a new science fiction volume, titled Nightside the Long Sun, is forthcoming.

  “Lord of the Land” is the author’s tribute to both Edgar Allan Poe and particularly H.P. Lovecraft, who he describes as “the only writer of stature to extend the tradition in horror Poe created.”

  THE NEBRASKAN SMILED WARMLY, leaned forward, and made a sweeping gesture with his right hand, saying, “Yes indeed, that’s exactly the sort of thing I’m most interested in. Tell me about it, Mr Thacker, please.”

  All this was intended to keep old Hop Thacker’s attention away from the Nebraskan’s left hand, which had slipped into his left jacket pocket to turn on the miniature recorder there. Its microphone was pinned to the back of the Nebraskan’s lapel, the fine brown wire almost invisible.

  Perhaps old Hop would not have cared in any case; old Hop was hardly the shy type. “Waul,” he began, “this was years an’ years back, the way I hear’d it. Guess it’d have been in my great granpaw’s time, Mr Cooper, or mebbe before.”

  The Nebraskan nodded encouragingly.

  “There’s these three boys, an’ they had an old mule, wasn’t good fer nothin’ ’cept crowbait. One was Colonel Lightfoot—course didn’t nobody call him colonel then. One was Creech an’ t’other ’un . . .” The old man paused, fingering his scant beard. “Guess I don’t rightly know. I did know. It’ll come to me when don’t nobody want to hear it. He’s the one had the mule.”

  The Nebraskan nodded again. “Three young men, you say, Mr Thacker?”

  “That’s right, an’ Colonel Lightfoot, he had him a new gun. An’ this other ’un—he was a friend of my grandpaw’s or somebody—he had him one everybody said was jest about the best shooter in the county. So this here Laban Creech, he said he wasn’t no bad shot hisself, an’ he went an’ fetched his’un. He was the ’un had that mule. I recollect now.

  “So they led the ol’ mule out into the medder, mebbe fifty straddles from the brake. You know how you do. Creech, he shot it smack in the ear, an’ it jest laid down an’ died, it was old, an’ sick, too, didn’t kick or nothin’. So Colonel Lightfoot, he fetched out his knife an’ cut it up the belly, an’ they went on back to the brake fer to wait out the crows.”

  “I see,” the Nebraskan said.

  “One’d shoot, an’ then another, an’ they’d keep score. An’ it got to be near to dark, you know, an’ Colonel Lightfoot with his new gun an’ this other man that had the good ’un, they was even up, an’ this Laban Creech was only one behind ’em. Reckon there was near to a hundred crows back behind in the gully. You can’t jest shoot a crow an’ leave him, you know, an’ ’spect the rest to come. They look an’ see that dead ’un, an’ they say, Waul, jest look what become of him. I don’t calc’late to come anywheres near there.”

  The Nebraskan smiled. “Wise birds.”

  “Oh, there’s all kinds of stories ’bout ’em,” the old man said. “Thankee, Sarah.”

  His granddaughter had brought two tall glasses of lemonade; she paused in the doorway to dry her hands on her red-and-white checkered apron, glancing at the Nebraskan with shy alarm before retreating into the house.

  “Didn’t have a lick, back then.” The old man poked an ice cube with one bony, somewhat soiled finger. “Didn’t have none when I was a little ’un, neither, till the TVA come. Nowadays you talk ’bout the TVA an’ they think you mean them programs, you know.” He waved his glass. “I watch ’em sometimes.”

  “Television,” the Nebraskan supplied.

  “That’s it. Like, you take when Bud Bloodhat went to his reward, Mr Cooper. Hot? You never seen the like. The birds all had their mouths open, wouldn’t fly fer anything. Lost two hogs, I recollect, that same day. My paw, he wanted to save the meat, but ’twasn’t a bit of good. He says he thought them hogs was rotten ’fore ever they dropped, an’ he was ’fraid to give it to the dogs, it was that hot. They was all asleepin’ under the porch anyhow. Wouldn’t come out fer nothin’.”

  The Nebraskan was tempted to reintroduce the subject of the crow shoot, but an instinct born of thousands of hours of such listening prompted him to nod and smile instead.

  “Waul, they knowed they had to git him under quick, didn’t they? So they got him fixed, cleaned up an’ his best clothes on an’ all like that, an’ they was all in there listenin’, but it was terrible hot in there an’ you could smell him pretty strong, so by an’ by I jest snuck out. Wasn’t nobody payin’ attention to me, do you see? The women’s all bawlin’ an’ carryin’ on, an’ the men thinkin’ it was time to put him under an’ have another.”

  The old man’s cane fell with a sudden, dry rattle. For a moment as he picked it up, the Nebraskan glimpsed Sarah’s pale face on the other side of the doorway.

  “So I snuck out on the stoop. I bet it was a hundred easy, but it felt good to me after bein’ inside there. That was when I seen it comin’ down the hill t’other side of the road. Stayed in the shadow much as it could, an’ looked like a shadow itself, only you could see it move, an’ it was always blacker than what they was. I knowed it was the soul-sucker an’ was afeered it’d git my ma. I took to cryin’, an’ she come outside an’ fetched me down the spring fer a drink, an’ that’s the last time anybody ever did see it, far’s I know.”

  “Why do you call it the soul-sucker?” the Nebraskan asked.

  “’Cause that’s what it does, Mr Cooper. Guess you know it ain’t only folks that has ghosts. A man can see the ghost of another man, all right, but he can see the ghost of a dog or a mule or anythin’ like that, too. Waul, you take a man’s, ’cause that don’t make so much argyment. It’s his soul, ain’t it? Why ain’t it in Heaven or down in the bad place like it’s s’possed to be? What’s it doin’ in the haint house, or walkin’ down the road, or wherever ’twas you seen it? I had a dog that seen a ghost one time, an’ that’n was another dog’s, do you see? I never did see it, but he did, an’ I knowed he did by how he acted. What was it doin’ there?”

  The Nebraskan shook his head. “I’ve no idea, Mr Thacker.”

  “Waul, I’ll tell you. When a man passes on, or a horse or a dog or whatever, it’s s’pposed to git out an’ git over to the Judgment. The Lord Jesus Christ’s our judge, Mr Cooper. Only sometimes it won’t do it. Mebbe it’s afeared to be judged, or mebbe it has this or that to tend to down here yet, or anyhow reckons it does, like showin’ somebody some money what it knowed about. Some does that pretty often, an’ I might tell you ’bout some of them times. But if it don’t have business an’ is jest feared to go, it’ll stay where ’tis—that’s the kind that haints their graves. They b�
��long to the soul-sucker, do you see, if it can git ’em. Only if it’s hungered it’ll suck on a live person, an’ he’s bound to fight or die.” The old man paused to wet his lips with lemonade, staring across his family’s little burial plot and fields of dry cornstalks to purple hills where he would never hunt again. “Don’t win, not particular often. Guess the first ’un was a Indian, mebbe. Somethin’ like that. I tell you how Creech shot it?”

  “No you didn’t, Mr Thacker.” The Nebraskan took a swallow of his own lemonade, which was refreshingly tart. “I’d like very much to hear it.”

  The old man rocked in silence for what seemed a long while. “Waul,” he said at last, “they’d been shootin’ all day. Reckon I said that. Fer a good long time anyhow. An’ they was tied, Colonel Lightfoot an’ this here Cooper was, an’ Creech jest one behind ’em. ’Twas Creech’s time next, an’ he kept on sayin’ to stay fer jest one more, then he’d go an’ they’d all go, hit or miss. So they stayed, but wasn’t no more crows ’cause they’d ’bout kilt every crow in many a mile. Started gittin’ dark fer sure, an’ this Cooper, he says, Come on, Lab, couldn’t nobody hit nothin’ now. You lost an’ you got to face up.

  “Creech, he says, waul, ’twas my mule. An’ jest ’bout then here comes somethin’ bigger’n any crow, an’ black, hoppin’ ’long the ground like a crow will sometimes, do you see? Over towards that dead mule. So Creech ups with his gun. Colonel Lightfoot, he allowed afterwards he couldn’t have seed his sights in that dark. Reckon he jest sighted ’longside the barrel. ’Tis the ol’ mountain way, do you see, an’ there’s lots what swore by it.

  “Waul, he let go an’ it fell over. You won, says Colonel Lightfoot, an’ he claps Creech on his back, an’ let’s go. Only this Cooper, he knowed it wasn’t no crow, bein’ too big, an’ he goes over to see what ’twas. Waul, sir, ’twas like to a man, only crooked-legged an’ wry neck. ’Twasn’t no man, but like to it, do you see? Who shot me? it says, an’ the mouth was full of worms. Grave worms, do you see?