The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19

by Stephen Jones

  Is it a wig on a dummy head? It comes away in my hand, but it isn’t all that does. I manage not to distinguish any features of the tattered whitish item that dangles from it, clinging to my fingers until I hurl the tangled mass at the wall. I’m struggling to back away when the head jerks up to confront me with its eyes and the holes into which they’ve sunk. I shut mine as I thrust myself away from the cabinet, emitting a noise I would never have expected to make other than in the worst dream.

  I’m quiet by the time the rescuers arrive to collect their children and me. It turns out that Geraldine was in a fitting room in Girlz. The twins forgot most of their differences so as to take charge, leading me out to a table where there seems to be an insistent smell of stale sponge cake. Nobody appears to have noticed anything wrong in the clothes shop except me. I’m given the front passenger seat in Bertie’s car, which makes me feel like an overgrown child or put in a place of shame. The twins used their phones to communicate about me, having heard my cries, and to summon their parents. I gather that I’m especially to blame for refusing the loan of a mobile that would have prevented my losing the children and succumbing to panic.

  I do my best to go along with this version of events. I apologise all the way home for being insufficiently advanced and hope the driver will decide this is enough. I help Paula make a salad, and eat up every slice of cold meat at dinner while I struggle to avoid thinking of another food. I let the children raid the cupboard under the stairs for games, although these keep us in the dining room. Sitting with my back to the mirror doesn’t convince me we’re alone, and perhaps my efforts to behave normally are too evident. I’ve dropped the dice several times to check that nobody is lurking under the table when Paula suggests an early night for all.

  As I lie in bed, striving to fend off thoughts that feel capable of bringing their subject to me in the dark, I hear fragments of an argument. The twins are asleep or at any rate quiet. I’m wondering whether to intervene as diplomatically as possible when Paula’s husband says “It’s one thing your father being such an old woman—”

  “I’ve told you not to call him that.”

  “—but today breaks the deal. I won’t have him acting like that with my children.”

  There’s more, not least about how they aren’t just his, but the disagreements grow more muted, and I’m still hearing what he called me. It makes me feel alone, not only in the bed that’s twice the size I need but also in the room. Somehow I sleep, and look for the twins at the foot of the bed when I waken, but perhaps they’ve been advised to stay away. They’re so subdued at breakfast that I’m not entirely surprised when Paula says “Dad, we’re truly sorry but we have to go home. I’ll come and see you again soon, I promise.”

  I refrain from asking Bertie whether he’ll be returning in search of investments. Once all the suitcases have been wedged into the boot of the Jaguar I give the twins all the kisses they can stand, along with twenty pounds each that feels like buying affection, and deliver a token handshake to Paula’s husband before competing with her for the longest hug. As I wave the car downhill while the children’s faces dwindle in the rear window, I could imagine that the windmills on the bay are mimicking my gesture. I turn back to the house and am halted by the view into the dining room.

  The family didn’t clear away their last game. It’s Snakes and Ladders, and I could imagine they left it for me to play with a companion. I slam the front door and hurry into the room. I’m not anxious to share the house with the reminder that the game brings. I stoop so fast to pick up the box from the floor that an ache tweaks my spine. As I straighten, it’s almost enough to distract me from the sight of my head bobbing up in the mirror.

  But it isn’t in the mirror, nor is it my head. It’s on the far side of the table, though it has left even more of its face elsewhere. It still has eyes, glinting deep in their holes. Perhaps it is indeed here for a game, and if I join in it may eventually tire of playing. I can think of no other way to deal with it. I drop the box and crouch painfully, and once my playmate imitates me I poke my head above the table as it does. “Peep,” I cry, though I’m terrified to hear an answer. “Peep.”

  TIM PRATT

  From Around Here

  TIM PRATT’S STORIES HAVE appeared in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Best American Short Stories and other nice places, and have been collected in two books, Little Gods and Hart & Boot & Other Stories.

  His work has been nominated for various awards, including the Nebula and the Mythopoeic, and in 2007 his story “Impossible Dreams” won the Hugo Award, much to his surprise.

  The author’s first novel, The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, appeared in 2005 and won the Joshua Norton Award. More recently, he has been working on an urban fantasy series under the byline “T. A. Pratt”. He is a senior editor at Locus magazine and co-edits a tiny ‘zine called Flytrap. Pratt lives near a lake in Oakland, California, with his wife Heather Shaw and their son, River.

  “I don’t believe in fate,” he admits, “but I do believe in synchronicity – the appearance of seemingly related events that don’t have a causal relationship. One day, many months ago, I was in a Starbucks coffee shop (I know, I know, I’m ashamed, but I was craving a caramel apple cider). I noticed these weird little Java jackets on the counter, each of which bore a single strange word, with pronunciation marks and a definition.

  “The one I picked up said ‘Autochthonous’. Later, I realized the coasters were part of a promotion for the spelling bee movie Akeelah and the Bee, but at the time I just thought, ‘Hey, Starbucks, way to increase my word power’. Later that same day, John Klima sent me an invitation to submit a story to Logorrhea, an anthology of stories based on winning spelling bee words, and when I saw ‘Autochthonous’ on the list of available words, I submitted to the whims of synchronicity and chose that one. (It means ‘indigenous’ or ‘native’ or ‘occurring where it is found’.)

  “I’d been thinking a lot anyway about the role of place and setting in my work, and about my own shifting notions of home, and hit on the idea to write about a genius loci who’d lost his loci – my protagonist is a little god, native to a particular island in the Pacific that sank a long time ago. Deprived of his own home, he travels the world, trying to save the homes of others. Naturally, he occasionally encounters local resistance. The story is about yearning, and rootlessness, and nostalgia, and weird serial killers.

  “So basically, a typical Tim Pratt story.”

  I ARRIVED ON A FERRY made of gull cries and good ocean fog, and stepped from the limnal world into Jack London Square, down by Oakland’s fine deep-water port. I walked, pre-dawn, letting my form coalesce from local expectations, filtered through my own habits and preferences. I stopped at a plate glass window downtown by the 12th Street train station and took a look at myself: dreads and dark skin, tall but not epic tall, clothes a little too raggedy to make robbing me worth a mugger’s time. I walked on, feeling the thrums and creaks of a city waking up or going to sleep or just keeping on around me. I strolled past the houses of sex offenders, one-time killers with high blood pressure, altruists, guilty activists, the good-hearted, the fearful, and all the rest of the usual human lot. I was looking for the reek of the deeply crazy, the kind of living crack in a city that can swallow whole neighbourhoods and poison the well of human faith in a place utterly. The kind that could shatter lives on an afternoon spree or corrode them slowly over decades.

  After a while, I found a street like that, and then I went to get some breakfast.

  It was the kind of diner where you sit at a counter and the menus are sticky with the last customer’s pancake syrup and you hope for the best. There were no other customers – I was between morning rushes, which made me lonely – and when the waitress came to take my order she was frazzled, like nobody should look at five in the morning. I said, “I don’t have any money, but maybe we can work something out.” Either she was from around here, and I’d get some breakfast, or she wasn’t,
and I’d get thrown out.

  She got that faraway look like they do, and said, “Let’s work something out.”

  I nodded. “Where you from?”

  “Grew up in Temecula.”

  “Ah. The Inland Empire. Pretty black walnut trees down that way.”

  She smiled, the way people do when you prod them into a nice memory.

  People have different ideas about what “home” means. For her, home meant a good chunk of California, at least, since Temecula was down south a ways. I’d never been there, but I’d probably go eventually. For some people, home just means one town, and if they stray from there, they feel like foreigners in strange territory. For others, home is a neighbourhood, or a block, or a street, or one room in one house where they grew up. And for some, home is nowhere, and me, I have a hard time talking to people like that.

  “What can I offer you?” I said. My stomach rumbled. I’d never eaten before, at least, not with these teeth, this tongue, this stomach. I couldn’t even remember what food tasted like. Things of the body are the first things I forget.

  She told me, and I knew it was true, because I wasn’t talking to her conscious mind, the part that’s capable of lies and self-deception. I was talking to the deep down part of her, the part that stays awake at night, worrying, and making bargains with any gods she can imagine. She had a son, and he was in some shitty public school, and she was afraid he’d get hurt, beat up, hassled by the gangs, maybe even join a gang, though he was a good kid, really.

  “Okay,” I said. “Give me breakfast, and I’ll make sure your son is safe.”

  She said yes, of course, and maybe that seems like a lopsided bargain, keeping a kid safe through years of school in exchange for a plate of eggs and sausage and toast and a glass of OJ, but if it’s in my power to give, and doesn’t cost more than I can afford, I don’t worry much about parity.

  The waitress snapped out of that deep down state and took my order, knowing she’d pay for it, not sure why, but probably not fretting about it – and for the first time in however long, she wasn’t worried about her boy getting stabbed in the school parking lot.

  Breakfast was fine, too. Tasted as good as the first meal always does, I imagine.

  The neighbourhood I settled on wasn’t in the worst part of Oakland, or the best – it was on the east side of Lake Merritt, maybe a mile from the water, in among a maze of residential streets that mingled million-dollar homes and old stucco apartment complexes. I walked there, over hills and curving streets with cul-de-sacs, through little roundabouts with towering redwoods in the middle, tiny triangular parks in places where three streets all ran into one another, and past terraced gardens and surprise staircases providing steep shortcuts down the hills. A good place, or it could have been, but there was a canker along one street, spiderwebbing out into the neighbourhoods nearby, blood and crying and death somewhere in the near past, and lurking in the likely future.

  First thing I needed was a place to stay. I picked a big house with a neat lawn but no flowers, out on the edge of the street that felt bad. I knocked, wondering what day it was, if I was likely to find anyone home at all. An old man opened the door and frowned. Was he suspicious because I was black, because I was smiling, because of bad things that had happened around here? “Yes?”

  “I’m just looking for a room to rent for a few weeks,” I said. “I can make it worth your while, if you’ve got the space.”

  “Nope,” he said, and closed the door in my face.

  Guess he wasn’t from around here.

  I went a little closer to the bad part, passing a church with a sign out front in Korean, and was surprised to see people sitting on their stoops drinking beers, kids yelling at one another in fence-hidden backyards, people washing their cars. Must be a Saturday or Sunday, and the weather was indeed springtime-fine, the air smelling of honeysuckle, but I’d expected a street with bars on the windows, people looking out through their curtains, the whole city-under-siege bit. This place pulsed with nastiness, the way an infected wound will radiate heat, and I knew other people couldn’t feel the craziness the way I could, but shouldn’t there have been some external sign? I wasn’t sensing some hidden moral failings here – this was a place where violence had been done.

  I looked for a likely house, and picked a small adobe place near a corner, where an elderly Chinese woman stood watering her plants. I greeted her in Cantonese, which delighted her, and it turned out she was from around here, so it only took a few minutes to work something out. She took me inside, showed me the tiny guest room, and gave me a spare key, zipping around the house in a sprightly way, since I’d gotten rid of her rheumatism and arthritis in exchange for bed and board. “We’ll just tell everyone you’re my nephew,” she said. “By marriage. Ha ha ha!” I laughed right along with her, kissed her cheek – she was good people – and went out onto the street.

  I strolled down the sidewalk, smiling and nodding at everyone I met. The street was long and curving, cut off at either end by a couple of larger cross streets. There were some apartment houses near one end, with younger people, maybe grad students or starving artists, and some nice bigger houses where families lived. The residents were pure Oakland variety – Koreans, Chinese, whites, blacks, Latinos of various origins. Even the cars on the sidewalks were diverse, with motorcycles, beaters held together with primer and care, SUVs, even a couple of sports cars. I liked it. It felt neighbourly. But it also felt wrong, and I couldn’t pinpoint the badness. It was all around me. I was in it, too close to narrow it down further.

  A pretty woman, probably half-Japanese, half-black – I’m good at guessing ethnicities and extractions, and the look is a unique one – sat on the steps of a three-storey apartment house with decorative castle crenellations on the roof, sipping an orange cream soda from a bottle and reading a slim book. There was something about her – ah, right, I got it. I was in a body again, and she was beautiful, and I was attracted.

  “Afternoon,” I said, walking up to the steps and nodding a greeting. “You know Miss Li?”

  “Down on the corner?” she said. “Sure.”

  “I’m her nephew. I’ll be staying with her for a while, maybe a few weeks, while I get settled.”

  “Nephew, huh?” She looked up at me speculatively. “By marriage, I’m guessing.”

  “You guessed right,” I said, and extended my hand.

  “I’m Sadie.” She shook my hand. “Welcome to the neighbourhood.” There was no jolt of electricity, but she wasn’t giving me go-away vibes, either, so I gave it a try.

  “Are you from around here?”

  “Me? No. I’m from Chicago, born and raised. Just came out here for school.”

  I grinned wider. I couldn’t have a dalliance with someone from around here – it would be too easy to steer them, compel them, without even intending to, too easy to chat with their deep down parts by accident. But she had a different home, so we could talk, like people. I was a person now, for the moment, more or less. “I could use someone to show me around the neighbourhood, help get me oriented.”

  She shrugged. “What do you want to know?”

  I sat down, not too close. “Oh, I don’t know.” How about “Why aren’t you terrified? Don’t you sense the presence of something monstrous in this place?” “Who’s that guy?” I pointed at a young Latino man tinkering on a motorcycle in the garage across the street.

  “Hmm. I think his name’s Mike? I don’t really know him. He goes on motorcycle rides most weekends.”

  “Okay. How about him?” This time I pointed at a big man in an unseasonable brown coat, walking up the hill dragging a wire grocery cart behind him. He was middle-aged, and had probably been a real bruiser in his prime.

  “That’s Ike Train,” she said. “Nice guy, but kind of intense. He’s a plumber, and he fixes stuff for people in the neighbourhood for free sometimes, but he likes to hang around and talk for a while afterward, and he gets bad BO when he sweats, so not a lot of people tak
e him up on it. He’s got a deal with whoever owns my building, though, and he does all the plumbing stuff here.”

  “How about her?” I said. A woman in sunglasses, attractive in a blonde-and-brittle-and-gym-cultured way, was walking a little yipping dog.

  “Martha.” Sadie rolled her eyes. “Put your trash cans out on the curb a day early and you’ll catch hell from her. I think she’s in a hurry for this neighbourhood to finish gentrifying. So why all the questions?”

  “I just like talking to you,” I said, which was the truth, but not the whole truth. “Asking about people passing by seemed like a good way to do that.”

  She laughed. “You never told me your name.”

  Why not? No one ever even remarked on the name – except to say it was weird – unless I was on a Pacific island, and even then, it meant so many things in so many different languages, no one ever guessed. “I’m Reva,” I said.

  “Interesting name. Where you from?”

  “I was born on a little island in the Pacific,” I said. “You wouldn’t have heard of it. But I didn’t stay there long. I’ve lived all over since then.” I thought this was going well, but we were reaching the point where the conversation could founder on the rocks of nothing-in-common. “You said you’re here for school? What do you—”

  Someone shouted “Sadie!” A short man with wispy hair, dressed like an IRS agent from the 1950s – black horn-rimmed glasses, white shirt, narrow black tie – bustled over from the house across the street, an ugly boxy two-storey with heavy drapes in the windows. He reached our side of the street and said “Vocabulary word: ‘Obstruction’.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Sadie muttered.

  “Something that gets in the way,” he continued. “Another: ‘Obstinate’. Unreasonably stubborn; pig-headed.”