The Best of Horror Library: Volumes 1-5

by Bentley Little

  As quietly as possible, he got out and detached the traveler car seat with Rose in it. She stirred slightly as he climbed the dusty wooden steps. It took him a minute to find the key that management had given him. The lock and hinges had been oiled and the door opened without a sound.

  The cabin was nice and big. Upstairs were two neatly arranged bedrooms with no frills: bed, dresser and wastebaskets, and an adjoining bathroom. The living area was warm looking—a rustic carpet, solid wood furniture, fireplace and big screen TV mounted over the mantle. The kitchen had black and white checkerboard tile and pale marble countertops.

  He placed the car seat down by the coffee table. There was a pine candle near the edge, so he moved it to the table’s opposite side, away from the baby. He went back outside. The brand new Expedition, now road-filthy, hummed and clicked as its engine cooled. The back hatch sighed as he lifted it. With great care, he moved the aluminum suitcase with the shotgun to the back seat. His brother Bill had talked him into the gun after frightening him about snakes invading the house. Jeff had never seen a snake out here in his many past visits, but it was worth the protection. He loaded up his arms and turned back for the cabin.

  The vulture from earlier lighted nosily on a cell phone tower. The tower was made to look like a scraggly palm tree, possibly to preserve desert aesthetics. It was a sturdy tower, and Jeff was confident even large carrion-eaters could do it no harm. With the vulture watching him, he went back and forth with several loads. On his last trip, box of diapers and toy bag in hand, he halted a moment, studying the bird. The vulture’s face was indistinct, just a slash of red atop black shoulders, and the beak wasn’t apparent at this vantage. What was apparent was a bulbous paunch that hung low from the bird’s midsection.

  “Good eating around here,” Jeff said.

  The vulture lowered its red head, slowly.

  Five days here will be enough, he decided, shutting the door, bolting it. A missed text had come through an hour earlier from his mother. Jeff scrolled down. It was a link to an article about the rise of delivery deaths from amniotic fluid embolisms. She always sent him this shit. It wasn’t that his mother was purposely insensitive, but she wanted him to feel less alone in all this. She didn’t realize that he wanted to feel alone, if only for a week.

  Jeff unzipped his duffel to take out a new pair of jeans. Rose rocked inside the traveler. Her gray eyes fluttered open and a smile hit her lips with a suddenness that had him smiling also. They stared at each other for a moment, father and daughter, the only thing that mattered now. Rose licked her lips and glanced around. She had on her hungry face. He was starting to know those faces well.

  “One bottle coming up.”

  On his way to the powdered formula, he stopped cold. He’d forgotten the nursery water. It was on the passenger seat.

  He went down the porch and almost slipped on a small gray thing. A hatchling desert tortoise struggled to swim through the brown-red sand. It had a pattern on its shell plates that almost resembled a smiley face.

  Jeff moved his eyes to the pseudo palm tree. The fat vulture wasn’t there anymore.

  Rose made a long mumbling sound from inside. He had to hurry. He moved the tortoise off the road into the shadow of a rough surfaced rock. Taking care of all the babies around here. Jeff dusted off his hands and made for the Expedition.

  * * *

  Watching the video monitor brought to mind the baby shower in Victorville. Kim hadn’t wanted to put the baby monitor on the store registries, because it was too expensive, and especially since it was presumptuous this child would actually come to be, after four other miscarriages. But Jeff bought the monitor anyway because he believed with every loss, Kim gained determination. It’d been a struggle to get pregnant, a struggle to carry a child past the second month, and the last pregnancy had ended in the third trimester. He didn’t think anyone, including himself, could bounce back after that, least of all a woman who insisted on blaming herself. But that day, Kim’s face had turned to him, apple shaped with high cheekbones ripe with blush, and her eyes nearly misted. Nearly, because Kim would seldom cry. “You got the monitor?” she’d said.

  God, how that moment had made Jeff feel good. He’d done the right thing, the best thing possible. After years of being with Kim, he’d realized that was difficult for a man to do. Too dumb or too oblivious, he never felt as though he could do anything right.

  A thrashing against the cabin scattered his thoughts. Jeff shot up from under the cool sheets. He leaned over to the windowsill. There was a bright halogen light on the porch. Under its manipulation, the desert floor crawled like gray television static. A shape moved off the hood of the Expedition, then was gone. Jeff waited a few minutes, trying to see. Probably that damn buzzard. After a moment, he drew away from the window and dropped back down in bed.

  A feeling of panic tightened around him, as it always did now when he couldn’t go straight to sleep. Time to face it—that’s what coming out here was all about. Jeff would raise the baby alone. He’d have help, but largely, it all rested on his shoulders. Alone. He knew the terror of that reality would subside when he went to sleep. Kim was in his dreams, and in them her being alive seemed so… natural, like the idea of her death had been precisely sliced from his mind. Yet sometimes he had flashbacks to that hallway in labor and delivery. Things crashed down; terror and misery and a resounding numbness that dubiously questioned it all. When Kim had started to code, some doctor in blue scrubs, a powder blue assassin, pushed him out the door, incomprehensible words flowing beyond that surgical mask, from which later, in that hall, that horrible fucking hall, Jeff would try—for the love of Christ—to derive meaning.

  He never had.

  “Stop,” he muttered and breathed slow to calm his heart. “Just stop it… stop.”

  What if it had been both of them? Rose and Kim.

  Stop it. Just stop!

  What if you’d refused to try for another child? Kim would still be alive.

  The pillow under his face was wet. He refused to turn it over, though. He’d like to sleep in his tears for a while longer. They were for Kim, and in a way, for the grayscale baby gently sucking her pacifier on the monitor’s screen.

  Jeff wasn’t as strong as Kim. But now he had to be. His whole life would be for Rose. Raising her the right way, yes, that would get him through this pain. He’d get out of debt with the life insurance and save for Rose’s first car, her college, and maybe the down payment on a house when she got married.

  The last was too depressing of a thought to endure. Losing Rose from his life someday. His last piece of Kim. He’d be so much less useful when Rose had someone else in her life. He’d be the old gray face that showed up on holidays and birthdays, and then afterward he’d be alone in his empty house. How else could it be? He didn’t have the courage to ever marry again; he knew that better than anything else. Solitude was his destiny and such ideas put Jeff over the top.

  And so he slept.

  * * *

  In a riptide of diaper changes, bottle preparation, and naps, the next day pulled into dusk. Rose had taken only catnaps and her sleep would be deep tonight. No early morning surprises like yesterday when she’d taken a Thanksgiving Day shit.

  That reminded Jeff that he needed to get his anti-bacterial gel from the car.

  At once, he heard a tearing sound from outside. It was abrasive, like packing tape being pulled off. Jeff squinted, not believing his eyes. Off to the side of the car, in the scrub, a large tortoise rested upside down, leathery legs splayed. The turkey vulture dipped its beak down and ripped a piece of snotty flesh from the side of the turtle’s sagging head. The shelled reptile looked withered and ancient, and from what Jeff knew of tortoises, that could mean over one hundred years old.

  Repulsed, he stormed loudly down the stairs, threw his arms forward and shouted, “Blah!”

  The vulture’s gait shifted only a little and it went for another bite.

  “Blah!” he said again. />
  With that the bird flew off. It glided back to the cellular palm tree, which seemed to be its home.

  Jeff approached the tortoise and shook his head at the massacred throat and the black rheumy eyes. “Poor old guy,” he said. “Live all those years, for this.” Could this be a female? Maybe that little baby from yesterday had crawled out of her eggs nearby. Pretty old looking tortoise to have children, though.

  He managed to turn it over but it was too damned heavy and awkward. Lifting the tortoise into the dumpster would not be possible, he soon found out. The best he could manage was covering it with an old blanket. He’d have to report it to the property manager and have them deal with it. Once he was certain the edges were tucked under securely, he grabbed his hand sanitizer from the car and squirted some into his palms. Thinking about it now, that tortoise had the same smiley face pattern on its back that the baby had. Perhaps they were related after all.

  Rose was awake when he got back inside.

  * * *

  During naptime the next day, he woke from a dream about Kim’s funeral. It seemed like a retelling of that day, but that turkey vulture was there, perched on a headstone in the old section of graves. The bird had gray dust on its beak. Jeff awoke as he connected the idea that Kim had been cremated.

  He was still dwelling on the dream later that evening. After a bottle of chardonnay, he wasn’t really asleep yet, just drifting, listening to the monitor, to the breathing, soft baby snores, and the whispering. The words were sharp but light, bladed feathers falling into the eardrum, seesawing on the air, razor-slicing the ear canal as they fell.

  Jeff cracked an eye. On the monitor, something dark covered the screen. “What the shit?” He slid off the couch and slammed his funny bone on the table. Gritting his teeth at the deep pain, he scrambled upstairs. The door was not shut completely, only cracked—he rushed through. Over the baby, talons wrapped around the cherry wood frame, the vulture perched, beak inches from Rose’s ear. Jeff grabbed the first thing he saw, a Grover doll, and hurled it. The vulture had already turned for departure and the doll struck it in the back as it flew for the torn screen. A few black feathers came loose as it awkwardly regained itself and flapped off into the desert void.

  Softly whining, Rose twisted back and forth. She’d somehow burst free of her swaddling blanket. Jeff pushed out the torn screen and slammed the window shut. He carried the baby into his room, a safer room. She was getting so heavy lately. Growing so fast. He imagined Kim yelling at him in that cracking, stressed-out voice she’d sometimes harness, Why aren’t you checking the baby? Check the baby! Jeff put Rose down on his bed. Her eyes were open and expression perplexed. Jeff checked her for bleeding. His handling made her cry but his mind raced too fast to hear her pleas. He’d wanted to bring her out to the cabin because nobody gave them time alone. They all thought he wanted their company. But Jeff only wanted to be alone so he could deal with this…this goddamn calamity his life had been made into.

  And to do that he’d brought Rose into a dangerous place. Why did he leave that window open? It was a warm night. No! You don’t leave windows open! You were drunk and stupid. Yes, he was a fucking idiot.

  “I’m so stupid, I’m sorry, so sorry, goddamn it if you’re hurt,” he told the baby, who’d stopped crying and acutely regarded him through tear-streaked eyes.

  Something was wrong with her.

  Something about Rose had changed. Her eyes were no longer gray—they were a deep brown. She had hair. Lots and lots of hair, blonde like her mother’s. Jeff took a step back, hand quivering to his mouth, mind questioning his drunkenness. Rose’s body was even larger. He hadn’t noticed at first, not in his hysteria, but it was plain.

  The baby on the bed looked over a year old.

  * * *

  Jeff had nearly everything packed in the car before sunrise. The desert, once his special childhood refuge, had the look of a wasteland about to dissolve under the final blow of atomic war. Hot red energy from the escaping morning sunlight struggled in each rock and boulder. Something evil had come into Rose’s bedroom and now he had to answer for it. But how?

  He called his parents, and when that didn’t go through, he texted them. They were floating on the Mexican Riviera, oblivious. Jeff had inspected Rose almost every waking moment since the attack and he saw no other change. His mind started questioning reality. He didn’t know much about babies, but he knew his daughter. He could tell when diapers changed scent or when her eczema scarcely changed. This wasn’t natural. He knew that. But if he could just find someone to tell him he was crazy, he’d feel so much better. Maybe Kim’s death had happened much longer ago—maybe he’d mentally buried months in his emotional trauma.

  Whatever the hell this was, he’d assembled and loaded the shotgun right away and kept it close while he packed. Rose hadn’t figured how to walk yet, but rocked sideways on a quilt in the living area, intrigued by her newfound muscle power. It had taken him over an hour to feed her. The formula wasn’t cutting it. He was hoping she’d knock out but it wasn’t the same as with five-month-old Rose.

  They were ready to go just as the sun passed over the top of the hills. The driver’s side door screeched as it opened. Cheap steel. Rose hardly fit in her traveler car seat, legs dangling over the side, arms pumping her body up and down in the restraints like a lunatic. What had happened to his baby girl? What had that monster done to her?

  Jeff took off down the road, furiously kicking up pebbles and dust. He eased off the gas a little. The engine struggled. Gradually the temperature gauge sped up into the red zone. They got about a mile down the road when the SUV seized and rolled to a stop.

  “Of course this would happen,” he said and fought a nasty curse at the back of his tongue. Rose had her hand in her mouth. She suddenly cried when she bit herself with her new teeth. “Hold on baby.” He reached under the dashboard and popped the hood.

  Jeff knew nothing about cars. The Expedition’s inner workings were a mess of dusty mechanical things he didn’t plan to ever understand. He struck the side of the car with his palm. The engine compartment had looked so clean at the dealership. The desert dirt must have kicked up and made the mess—but some of the dirt looked crusty and old.

  “Fuckin new car. Nothing’s made good anymore. Nothing!”

  The baby squealed and he clenched his eyes together at the sound. He went for the owner’s manual. The glove box dropped open quickly and he noticed cracks in the plastic. After inspecting the contraption for a long moment, he looked around. Like with the glove box, there were cracks up and down the leather upholstery, and a piece of vinyl peeled away from under the dashboard. Confusion took his breath away. He dragged his eyes to the odometer. 333,657 miles. He blinked and shook his head, then reflexively glanced at his watch.

  He popped up in his seat when his cell phone blared. Unknown caller. It could be Billy, who had a landline with caller ID shutoff, or it could be his parents from Mexico. He answered and got a voice cloaked in static.

  “Mom?” he said. “You’re breaking up. I need help. Help me please. I’m at the cabin, just down the road. I’m going into town. Something’s wrong with Rose—”

  The voice on the line warbled and droned for a moment. Then he heard the chanting. The whispers he’d heard through the monitor the night before. The vulture’s whispering…Jeff pulled the phone away from his ear, aghast, then yelled into the phone, “What is this? Who is this?”

  A piece of plastic nearly caught him in the eye. The cell phone’s frame crumbled to pieces in his hand; the screen grew long cracks and the circuit board and other components fell into his lap. He hadn’t even put any pressure on the device.

  In the rearview he noticed bold gray streaks at his temples. He leaned closer. Several forehead wrinkles he’d never seen before had cut into his flesh. Jeff adjusted the mirror, slowly, to get a view back to the cabin. With a casual expansion of its shadowy wings, the vulture took flight off the cell phone tower.

  * * * />
  Jeff hadn’t convinced himself earplugs would protect them from the vulture’s unutterable sounds, but it was better than nothing. Rose immediately pulled hers out. They hadn’t really fit inside her small ear canals anyway. Jeff put a pair into his ears and thought about what to do next. The shotgun rested across his lap. It was surreal to see it out, assembled, in his hands. Jeff hated guns. Hated that people could easily hurt other people and animals. Take lives. But this was necessary. It made him feel alive and good, not resolved from his recent failings, but good.

  They would head out on foot at first light with a backpack filled with water bottles. The park was less than ten miles away. It would be a hike, and it would be difficult with Rose, but it could be done.

  Jeff would shoot every bird that came near them.

  Rose was sobbing. Following one fit of disoriented planning, he’d left some of the formula in a box on the porch. It was stupid, he knew, but at the time he just wanted to get them through the door. Rose’s volume increased. That trek from the Expedition had been terrifying. He figured the vulture would swoop down and peck out their brains, right there. Then when they got inside, he wondered if that thing could chant to the cabin and make all the wood rot, bringing the roof down on them. Rose screamed in confused terror. The baby’s pleas echoed off the cabin ceiling, stabbing his eardrums. The vulture had destroyed his car, his phone—made them brittle with age. It’s bringing us closer to death and it closer to mealtime. Jeff scrubbed at his eyes as Rose whimpered before another scream. The bawling sounded like calls from the slaughtered. Jeff had carried weakness with him almost nonstop for five months now.

  “All right!” he cried out suddenly. Rose’s screams had penetrated through the invisible walls he’d put up. Because he’d never before grown frustrated with her, she responded to his panicked tone by frowning deeply and wailing. Jeff held her, her heart beating with his. “I’ll go out and get your formula, okay, but you’re not coming little girl.”