The Best of Horror Library: Volumes 1-5

by Bentley Little

  Gina had captured the corpse when it was changing from the bludgeoned man to a woman.

  Maybe, Derek thought, the thing in the chair was some type of shapeshifting creature that absorbed the physical characteristics of the immediately departed, picking up the essence of the dead like an antenna.

  No. He’d touched that last corpse. It had been human. And real.

  It was the room and the gas station that was so wrong and evil, not the figures in the chair. They were pawns…or victims…or something…

  The phone rang, and Gina picked it up. She didn’t call his name, so it obviously wasn’t for him, and he didn’t pay attention at first. He kept looking at the photos, including one shot of the gas station taken with a zoom lens from the boulder area. But gradually he began to realize that her tone of voice was too somber and she wasn’t saying much. He looked up just as she asked, “When did he die?”

  Eavesdropping on the last part of her half of the conversation told him nothing, but finally she hung up the phone, stunned. “Sue’s husband died. Heart attack.”

  His first reaction was shock—Jim was two years younger than he was—but fear beat out sadness for the emotion that immediately followed. He met Gina’s eyes. “Do you think he went…there?”

  She looked quickly away, but he knew she’d been wondering the same thing, and he glanced down at the prints in his hand, at that dark top photo where the man was changing into a woman, and he shivered.

  * * *

  That night, in bed, Gina turned to him just as he was about to roll over and go to sleep. “I’ve been thinking,” she said.

  He didn’t want to hear this.

  “About the gas station.”

  He remained silent, refusing to take the bait.

  “Do you think everyone goes there when they die?”

  “No.”

  “But who does? And why?” She moved onto her side, finding a more comfortable position. “There must be a way to find out, to test it. What if we knew someone was going to die?” she asked. “I mean imminently. One of us could wait with the person, and the other one could wait at the gas station, and we’d both have cell phones—”

  Derek shook his head.

  “Or, even better, we could take the person there! And when he died—or she—we could see what happens. Right at that moment.”

  He didn’t like the direction in which this was headed, and he cut off conversation then and there, saying that he was tired and needed to sleep. But in his dreams, Gina kidnapped a little boy, drove him out to the desert, and strangled him in the back room of the gas station and watched with excitement as a carbon copy of the child appeared in the chair.

  In the morning, when he awoke, Gina was gone. He gave her the benefit of the doubt, told himself that she was just exercising, walking around the neighborhood, maybe going over to Starbuck’s to grab a latte. But when he saw that she’d taken his Toyota instead of her old Dodge, and when she hadn’t returned after an hour, he knew what had happened, he knew where she was.

  On her way to the gas station.

  Derek had no idea if the Dodge would make it out of Orange County, let alone all the way out to the middle of the Mojave, but he had no choice but to follow his wife. He didn’t pretend to understand what was driving her, the impetus behind her pilgrimage. But if he was completely honest with himself, didn’t he feel it, too? The abandoned gas station terrified him, and if he had his druthers, he would never see or even think of the building ever again. Hell, he wished they’d never encountered it. But at the same time, deep down, there was an impulse to return, a barely acknowledged, almost subconscious desire to know what was happening in that back room, to see who was in the chair.

  She had more than an hour’s head start. Maybe two, possibly three. Even if he drove at top speed and the car did not break down somewhere on the way, she would be at the gas station long before he was.

  What would happen when she got there?

  He didn’t know.

  He was afraid to even think about it.

  He drove as fast as the car would go, well over the speed limit, and it was only dumb luck that prevented him from getting a ticket. The trip seemed to take forever, despite his speed—wasn’t that one of Einstein’s theorems?—and it was nearly noon when he finally pulled off the highway onto the unmarked dirt road that led to the gas station. Shot shocks bouncing, he sped past the collection of boulders that had originally attracted Gina to this place, cursing both the site and the photography obsession that had led to her interest in it. Coming over the rise, he saw the forsaken gas station on the desert plain below.

  And the red Toyota parked next to one of the empty islands, sunlight glinting off its windshield.

  Derek’s heart was triphammering in his chest, and he was filled with a cold fear far greater than any he had previously experienced. He honked the horn as he approached, hoping the noise would draw Gina out, but he saw no movement through the broken window or open office door, and his hands were shaking as he pulled next to the Toyota and shut off the car.

  He opened the driver’s door, got out. “Gina!” he called as loudly as he could. He was afraid to go inside the building, wanted her to come out and meet him, but he knew that wasn’t going to happen. “Gina!” he called again, angrily this time.

  Nothing.

  The world was silent.

  Derek slammed the car door, and the noise was flat, muffled by the oppressive heat and heavy air. He could still see no movement in the office, and the doorway to the back room was completely dark. He hurried in, wishing he’d thought this through more thoroughly and brought something with him. A flashlight. A weapon.

  A weapon?

  Yes, he thought as he sped past that by-now-familiar metal desk. Just in case.

  He stopped in the doorway of the secret room. “Gina?”

  He didn’t know why she’d come here, what she’d planned to do or what had actually happened, but her body lay sprawled on the dusty floor, unmoving, one hand stretched out as though reaching for the digital camera that was just beyond her reach.

  She was also in the chair.

  With an involuntary cry of anguish, Derek fell to his knees and shoved his face next to Gina’s. The skin of her cheek was cold, and her eyelids were frozen halfway over her pupils, as though she’d died instantly in the middle of a blink. He reached for her hand, grabbed it, but it too was cold. Limp and heavy at the same time. She was dead, but he had no idea how she’d died, and he looked to the body in the chair for clues. Other than the fact that she was sitting up instead of lying on the floor, however, there was nothing that to his eyes indicated a cause of death.

  He was too stunned to cry, though he was having a difficult time drawing breath and a low continuous moan was escaping from between his lips. He knew that he should have expected this, but somehow he hadn’t, and the shock seemed to have rendered him incapable of coherent thought.

  He suddenly realized that the body in the chair could disappear at any time, replaced by the corpse of another, and he quickly grabbed this Gina around the waist and, with considerable difficulty lowered her to the floor. On impulse, he kicked over the chair and shoved it into a corner of the small room.

  He turned to look at his wife. Both versions of her. Other than their postures, they were exactly the same, down to the half-mast eyelids and the partially open mouth. His gaze was drawn by the dull silver of the camera that lay just beyond the reach of what he considered Gina’s real body. It was her digital camera, not her 35mm, and it dawned on him that if she’d taken any photos, he would be able to look at them.

  Did he really want to?

  It was not a question Derek even considered. He picked up the camera and pressed the button to scroll back through the last pictures taken. He overshot his mark and had to scroll forward through a series of photos taken on Mother’s Day: Gina with her mom, unwrapping presents, eating at a salad buffet. The sadness was sharp and painful, bringing with it logistical and prac
tical issues as well as memories. Then he was past the personal pictures and in the desert. The gas station. The front office. The back room. There was a child in the chair, a dark-skinned nearly naked boy who appeared to have died from malnutrition. And the last shot: the boy disappearing, Gina taking his place, both figures ethereal and nearly transparent.

  Derek stared at the small camera screen, trying to figure out what was happening in the picture. As far as he could tell, the dead Gina had started to appear in the chair even as the real Gina was alive and photographing the scene. He had no idea how that was possible or what it meant, but Gina had not taken another photo. Whatever had happened to her had happened then or immediately after. He looked down at the body lying on the ground, arm outstretched. She must have seen something, because after she’d been struck or smitten or however incapacitated, she’d still attempted to reach for her fallen camera. Her last act had been to try and take a picture, and he was filled with guilt that he had ever belittled her passion.

  His eyes went to the section of wall that resembled a face. The visage looked exactly as it had before, rotted wood and shadow and mold combining to create that disturbingly intense countenance. Only from this angle, the black eyes appeared to be looking straight at him with what could have been anger, could have been hunger.

  He wanted to tear down this building, wanted to come back with a fucking bulldozer and raze it. He even considered running out to the cars, getting the tire irons out of each trunk and coming back to smash that chair and gouge out that face, whaling on the walls, ripping off those boards and destroying as much of the room as he could.

  But he didn’t. Instead, he looked down at the bodies of his wife, trying to read the expression shared by both faces. She had died in mid-blink, he decided, and that partial hooding of her eyes made it difficult to ascribe an emotion to her death. Body language said more. The sitting Gina appeared rapt, as though viewing or hearing something absolutely fascinating. The Gina lying on the floor and reaching for the camera seemed desperate to record something of vital importance. Neither of them appeared to be in pain, but while his wife had not died in agony, she had died, and he would probably never know why or how.

  He walked over to the face on the wall and spit on it.

  This close, it did not even resemble a face. The individual components looked like what they were: rot and mold, shadow and grain. But nothing was what it seemed here. He glanced toward the overturned chair in the corner, then walked over, picked it up and set it right again, in exactly the same spot it had been in before.

  He should get out of here, drive back to civilization, call the police, make arrangements. But he looked at the two Ginas and knew he couldn’t leave. No matter how much he hated this place. No matter how scared he was.

  Like her, he had to know.

  Taking a deep breath, he sat in the chair.

  And waited.

  After

  by Kealan Patrick Burke

  This time tomorrow, they’ll be asking why he did it.

  This time tomorrow, he’ll be dead by his own hand, or from a nervous policeman’s bullet. Either way, it’ll be checkout time and the method by which David Hoffman leaves this world will “make no never mind” as his mother used to say. He’ll be gone and finally, mercifully free of the torment, the rage, the hurt that has torn him asunder all these years.

  This time tomorrow he’ll be dead.

  But first he’s going to shoot up the school.

  And because they’ll want to know why he did it and he won’t be around to tell them, they will try to tell the story of his life based on the details available, accrued via neighbors (“He was so nice…”), family (“There has to be some mistake; he would never do such a thing…”), the old notebook found under his bed (“Fiery stars shining in the ragged black sockets of my enemies…”), and those who suddenly know him in light of the tragedy but never claimed to know him before.

  They will look for answers, because such things cannot be let lie without them.

  * * *

  His childhood was not a turbulent one, no matter what spin the media put on it in the days after his death. There was discipline yes, sometimes severe, but no worse than the punishment doled out to any other child who grew up in the Catholic faith, a religion insistent in its belief that harsh words are never enough. You must be physically and emotionally bruised so that, when the blood rushes back into the hollows in your body and mind, it carries with it an awareness of what you’ve done, why it was wrong, and why you won’t be doing it again.

  Catholic children rarely make the same mistakes twice.

  His mother liked to use the wooden spoon, but with strict control. Every whack across his backside was a measured one, borne not of anger, but of necessity. One-two-three, now think about what you’ve done.

  His father, on the other hand, had no such control, and David came to understand after years spent curled up in a wailing ball after weathering his furious rages and the hard bite of the belt across his legs, or a fist across his face, that his father’s punishments were driven by disappointment, partly in the boy, mostly in himself. Frank Hoffman’s life, it seemed, had somewhere along the line derailed and brought him to a place he had not planned on ever visiting, and surely did not want to stay—a place where his wife showed him affection that was more dutiful than genuine, as if she were following guidelines set out in some marital textbook; his son tested his patience and temper at every turn, and his boss treated him little better than a dog. He felt he did not make enough money and yet drank way too much, cursed even more, and seemed to hate himself a little more each day. Despite it all, some of David’s best memories were of spending time with his old man, the weary smiles as some piece of paternal wisdom—which would invariably prove to be false—was handed down. Nevertheless the boy loved his father, and when cancer claimed him, two weeks shy of David’s fourteenth birthday, he stood at the edge of the grave and begged him to come back, or at least, to move over in the bed so they could lie side by side, as he had been allowed to do, somewhat begrudgingly, whenever a storm battered their old house, or the monsters began to poke their gnarled bony fingers against the underside of David’s mattress. They would sleep together, Laura Hoffman snoring softly on the far side of the bed, and all fear would vanish, swept away in a nothingness that smelled of Brut aftershave and whiskey.

  The body in the coffin smelled nothing like his father. It looked like a wax representation of him that had started to melt in the heat. In the year of agony it took him to die, he’d wasted away to nothing, and not even the mortician could restore that weight to his corpse. Only the queer plastic face with its expression of forced serenity suggested there was anything beneath that cheap suit but clothes hangers.

  They put him in the ground and, as that final shovel-load of dirt was tamped down on his grave, the light in Laura Hoffman’s eyes went out like a snuffed candle. She had loved him, it was supposed, but had never quite learned how to show it beyond looking after him. It was probably how she’d been taught to love: cook, clean, and minimize the amount of hassle your man has to contend with when he arrives home from work, and surely he’ll know you care. Over the next year, she grew almost as thin as David’s father had been while the disease fed on him. It was as if she was suffering on his behalf, showing sympathy, empathy, though he was no longer around to observe or appreciate it. And though she was never cold to her son, he learned to rely on nobody but himself. He cooked, cleaned up, got up on time for school, and never missed a day.

  Perhaps if he had, his own life would not have derailed and delivered him to his death.

  It started when he turned fifteen, an event that, like so many things, passed by virtually unnoticed by his mother. He celebrated it by staying up an hour later than usual and watching The Outer Limits on TV. Then in bed, came hostile dreams in which the world was shrinking around him, the stars coming ever closer until each one was as big as the sun and burned the skin from his face. Frequentl
y, he once confessed to his mother, he was subjected to such terrors, the world rushing in to suffocate him, making him feel vulnerable, ill at ease.

  Never popular in school, he seemed to possess one of those dispositions that attracted the worst kinds of people—those who so desperately needed an outlet for their own unhappiness and inadequacies that, without a target, they risked implosion. The simple name-calling—”Dickless Dave,” “Homo Hoffman”—and the shoving, shouldering, and sneering, didn’t bother him so much. Despite the unfortunate fragility of his physical appearance, he was made of stronger stuff than that. He had lost his father, after all, and still moved about in a sluggish shell of grief that kept him numb, insensate. But that protective shell, the blinds he had kept drawn down to shield him from the world, had an adverse effect too. So tucked away was he that it made listening and learning difficult. His grades began to fail, not because of laziness, but because David found it almost impossible to retain the information being fed him.

  It was only a matter of time before the lackluster grades came to his mother’s attention. He had managed to hide from her the report cards, having learned to forge the wild loops and jagged scratches that were her signature, but there was only so much he could do about the phone calls from teachers, and ultimately, his principal, who insisted that they meet and discuss the boy’s future, assuming, as he put it, his mother still wanted David to have one at Denmark High School.

  Evil dictatorial principals are stereotypes—after all, no kid wants to go to school, and much like bullies, a candidate for the blame is essential—but the genesis of stereotyping is fact, and Mr. Brunner fit it perfectly. He was a thin, bald, sallow-faced man who wore suits he would like to pass off as expensive, a facade foiled by the frayed hems of his sleeves, the inward curl of his shirt-collars, and a single button on his blazer that didn’t quite match the others. He wore glasses so thick they made his eyes seem stretched and made entirely of water. Even thicker were the dark hairs that poked from his wide nostrils, as if small animals had nested in his nasal passages. His mouth was set in a permanent expression of disapproval, and it was not hard to imagine him as a baby, fresh from the womb, his lips turning down as he critically appraised the world into which he’d been thrust. He seemed born to find flaws in everything, a task at which he excelled and in which he seemed to delight.