Best New Horror 29

by Stephen Jones

  “That makes it easy,” the voice inside the giant reindeer head replied. “I’ll just have Santa tell her she’ll get whatever she wants.”

  “Whatever she wants,” Trish repeated. “Well, isn’t that great. I’d just settle for getting what I deserve.”

  “Sometimes it’s the same thing, don’t you think? Go shop. We’ll take care of her. Everything will turn out as it should. I promise. On my oath as a reindeer!”

  Trish glanced at Bean, still transfixed, shuffling ahead with the other children. No other parents to be seen. She wouldn’t even notice her absence. Her daughter was so self-contained—she cared nothing for Trish at all. “I’ll hurry,” she said, and turned away.

  “Wait!” It was the old woman. Trish turned back around. “What do you want for Christmas? We’ll put in a word for you with the old man. Any-thing.”

  But Trish had no time to think. “Just tell him whatever I want, whatever I deserve.” She rushed off, relieved to have a few minutes of shopping time by herself. Bean’s dad probably wasn’t shopping—he probably wasn’t even celebrating Christmas. He was probably just sitting in front of his TV, drinking. Maybe that was sad, but Trish envied him.

  The first place she went into was an antique shop, apparently, and the items—a messy clutter of metal and wood, paper and cloth—were poorly displayed. Of course they were all going out of business, so a handsome display no longer mattered. And it also didn’t matter what she got the relatives, did it? Whatever she got them, Trish knew they would just politely nod—what was the point in trying to please them? She should just do all her shopping here.

  A grubby artificial Christmas tree stood just inside the door of the shop. It appeared to have been repaired many times, branches taped or wrapped in greying string. A tiny bird’s skull hung from one branch. Other items on the tree were so mossy with dust they were impossible to identify. Others were identifiable, but as inappropriate as the bird’s skull—a kitchen whisk, dental floss, a comb—mixed with such traditional decorations as a ceramic angel, an antique star, some lovely blue and green globes.

  Trish turned and glanced back at the distant Santa line, still moving slowly. She thought she recognised Bean’s yellow jumper. With no sales clerk in sight she ventured deeper into the store.

  Several collapsing cartons of grubby ornaments filled one table. The hand-lettered sign read SECONDS. She picked through a few, afraid to dig too deeply in case something nasty lay underneath. Each ornament was distorted in some way—imperfect spheres, lopsided egg shapes—irregular and shifting coloration. The softer ones resembled diseased organs.

  An assortment of Jesus dolls—folk art—were gathered in a bin. They all looked like bad Jesuses to her. A box labeled FIRE SALE was full of unidentifiable blackened things, all with hooks to hang from a tree.

  In the central part of the store stuffed rats hung from a line stretched overhead. Most wore Santa hats.

  “I had a bunch left over from Halloween, but it’s the red caps what make them festive, don’t you think?”

  A thin man with a very wide grin peered down at her. His hair was black and slicked back and had rolls of dust—her mother called them woollies—decorating it here and there.

  “Very…clever,” she replied.

  “Can I help you find what you want?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure I know.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” he said. “Most of us actually do—we’re just too afraid to say. We’ll be closing soon, by the way.”

  Trish glanced away, uncomfortable. “I just need a few things, and then I have to go retrieve my daughter. She’s visiting Santa.”

  “Are you sure? They haven’t had a Santa in years.” He moved a little closer. She could smell the oil in his hair. How could he not know? Santa was set up practically right outside his store.

  Trish felt she should leave, but stopped herself. She’d be done in just a few minutes, and then she and the B could go home. “Well, they must have changed their minds. I have to hurry along.” She went deeper into the shop, away from him and his greasy, dust-laden hair. She picked up a dusty old brooch for her mother—she could clean it, and she’d get one of those defective ornaments for her father. They never liked anything she gave them anyway. And this, this would let them know exactly how she felt about this horrible holiday. Maybe they would stop expecting her to come—what a relief that would be.

  But she still needed something for her sister, the cousins, and whoever else she’d probably forgotten. At the back of the store was a stack of Victorian Christmas cards. She began thumbing through them quickly, seeking something that might actually impress.

  The first card to catch her eye bore a picture of an unhappy looking man in stocks being tormented by a jester. HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO YOU! it proclaimed. In the next, a seriously wintry scene of ice and snow, a man was being mauled by an angry polar bear. On another there was some sort of bifurcated root thing with a human head wearing a top hat and monocle. A root branch stuck out like an arm, clutching a heart-shaped object with the message A MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU. She held on to these—she didn’t really understand them, but they still perfectly expressed everything she was feeling.

  On one card a snowman had turned sinister and was threatening a little boy. And here were two dead birds, their feet pointing stiffly upwards—MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR! Then another, MAY CHRISTMAS BE MERRY, with a frog dancing with a hideous black beetle as a giant fly held aloft a golden ring. They were all suitably unpleasant. What a wonderful, wonderful shop!

  On another card a hideous goat creature with long black fur, twisted horns, and a forked tongue threatened a tub full of babies with a giant fork. Was he really planning to skewer them? Maybe this one was too much. She would give it to her father.

  “That be Krampus,” the skinny clerk croaked at her elbow.

  “Wha-at?” He’d scared her so bad she felt dizzy.

  “Krampus. He’s the opposite of the Santa Claus. He’s the other one, the one what punishes the children who misbehaved during the year. Tortures them, I reckon. I’ve got loads of Krampus gear, if you’re interested.”

  “No!” she cried. “What a terrible idea! Who’d want to invent such a thing?” Guiltily, she dropped the cards. She glanced at her fingertips—they were filthy. She quickly rubbed them on her sleeve.

  “They invented him to protect the kiddies, I reckon. Keep them from getting into trouble. Sometimes you have to scare those little ones, just to make them behave. They can be like little animals, if you don’t.”

  “No, no you don’t!” she cried, and started for the door.

  “Sometimes the truth is a scary thing.”

  She turned and stared at him. “What’s that?”

  “She needs something she’s not getting, but the hateful creature won’t tell you what it is. You didn’t sign up for this, now did you? You didn’t ask for this. This is not what you wanted at all.” The clerk’s face had gone dark, as had most of the shop.

  “I have to go,” Trish said, crying. “I have to pick her up.”

  “But it’s too late for all that now,” the clerk said, invisible, just a rough voice issuing from the dark. “You already made your choice. They’re shutting us down. They’re tearing down the mall.”

  “Who are they-ey?” Again the quake in her voice, the awful evidence that she was terrified.

  “Why the ones what make the holidays. The ones what make the malls and then tears them all down. The ones what know all the rules in the rule books, but refuse to tell you what they are. The ones what takes the kiddies and does what needs to be done.”

  Trish ran from the store. “B—Bean!” She shouted at the dark. All light was gone except for a thin line of silver overhead illuminating a narrow shaft of bright dust. Or was it snow?

  She wandered around in the thickening black calling her daughter’s name, running into things, tripping over what might have been loose tiles or ceiling debris. Once she touched what she was sure wer
e antlers, and begged Santa’s assistant for help. But there was no answer. Feeling further down she realised it was just a head with nothing inside.

  Eventually the dark ahead of her lightened into shadow, and then lightened again into an amber mist. She stumbled forward into a field where the mall used to be—after they tore it all down. The grass and the tall weeds were whitening gradually under a silencing fall of snow. There the distant trees whose edges still showed a glimmer of flame. There the collapsing haystacks and the broken fences. And then among the naked trees the worn and battered chair and the withered old man dressed in faded red hunched over a yellow bundle in his lap. He appeared to be mumbling something. Or was that just Trish, mumbling to herself?

  “Please,” she said, like that beggar she’d encountered earlier. “Please, there’s been a misunderstanding.”

  He looked up at her, his beard torn apart, the surrounding skin raw and bleeding. He held the yellow bundle up. “No,” he said. “You were asked whatever you wanted.”

  “But I don’t know what I wanted! I never have!”

  She rushed forward and yanked the bundle from his arms, holding it tightly against her chest as she ran.

  She didn’t look until later, when she had her child back safely in her car. She wept and apologised, and she promised all she would do to make up for her mistake. But the twisted and weathered log inside the bundle remained silent, although Trish could just make out the beginnings of a nose, and the lines of a delicate mouth, if she stared long enough into the cracked wood.

  GARTH NIX

  THE SEVENTEEN-YEAR ITCH

  GARTH NIX has been a full-time writer since 2001, but has also worked as a literary agent, marketing consultant, book editor, book publicist, book sales representative, bookseller, and as a part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve.

  His books include the “Old Kingdom” fantasy series (comprising Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen, Clariel and Goldenhand); SF novels (Shade’s Children and A Con-fusion of Princes), and a Regency romance with magic (Newt’s Emerald).

  Amongst Nix’s novels for children are The Ragwitch, the six books of “The Seventh Tower” sequence, “The Keys to the Kingdom” series, and others. He has co-written several books with Sean Williams, including the “Troubletwisters” series, Spirit Animals Book Three: Blood Ties, Have Sword Will Travel and the forthcoming sequel, Let Sleeping Dragons Lie. A contributor to many anthologies and magazines, the author’s selected short fiction has been collected in Across the Wall and To Hold the Bridge.

  More than five million copies of his books have been sold around the world, they have appeared on the best-seller lists of The New York Times, Publishers Weekly and USA Today, and his work has been translated into forty-two languages. His most recent book is Frogkisser!, now being developed as a film by Twentieth Century Fox/Blue Sky Animation.

  “The genesis of this story was, perhaps unsurprisingly, an unbearable itch,” Nix reveals. “I’d been bitten by something on the chest, probably a small spider, that was lurking in a shirt I took off the washing-line.

  “As I tried not to scratch and scratch and scratch at the bite on my chest, I thought of a character also suffering an unbearable and, in his case, endless itch, and that in turn led to thoughts of how that might be dealt with and what might be causing it…”

  Six Weeks Before Halloween

  “WHAT IS THIS?” The new hospital administrator was peering through the peculiarly curved door, into the interior of the twelve-foot diameter sphere of heavy steel that sat in the middle of the otherwise empty room. The curious object looked like a bathyscaphe or diving bell somehow lost far from the sea. Further compounding the mystery, the interior was completely lined with some sort of rubber or foam-like material, heavily impregnated with the stale smell of ancient piss and shit, hosed out but not forgotten.

  “It says here ‘Special Restraint Sphere: Broward’ on the floor plan,” replied her assistant, a young man called Robert Kenneth, a failed MD who was hoping to make a new career in hospital administration. He’d only been at the place—an institution for restraining and forgetting the criminally insane—for two months longer than Dr. Orando, the administrator, who’d arrived the previous Friday and was now looking into every nook and cranny of the place, which had been built in three great surges in 1887, 1952 and 1978.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Uh, I don’t know,” said Kenneth. “Um, we do have a patient called Broward. I think.”

  “What can you tell me about this?” asked Orando, turning to the third member of their tour of inspection party. Templar McIndoe, senior orderly, was by far the oldest employee in the hospital, almost seventy and working on past retirement age by special permission and his own dire financial need. He knew everything there was to know about the hospital, though he didn’t always share this information.

  “Stephen Broward,” said the old man. “They built this for him, special, back in ’49. That’s when he came here, after what he did.”

  “Nineteen forty-nine? How old is this prisoner?”

  “Oh, he’s old,” said MacIndoe. “Older’n me. Must be ninety-five, ninety-seven, something like that. You’ve seen him, Mister Kenneth. Guards call him Stubbsy.”

  “Oh, him,” said Kenneth, trying and failing to contain a twist of his mouth, a visceral sign of distaste. “The one with no fingers or toes.”

  “He’s got fingers, sort of,” said McIndoe stolidly. “He only cut ’em off from the middle knuckle. But you’re right about the toes.”

  “A self-mutilator?” asked Orando, with clinical interest. “Why do we have him? And why has he been held so long?”

  “Murder,” replied McIndoe laconically. “Multiple murders. Back in ’65 he killed near everyone in the place he was at then, an asylum down at Wickshaw. Twenty, thirty people.”

  “What?” asked Orando. She frowned. “He can’t have. I’d know about something like that. My second doctorate was on the psychology of mass murderers. I covered everyone who killed more than a dozen.”

  “Just what I was told,” said McIndoe, with what he hoped came across as an apologetic shrug. He already knew not to argue with this new administrator, and he needed to keep the job. Just for a few more years…

  “And this sphere?”

  “Somewhere to put him over Halloween,” said McIndoe. “That’s when he’s particularly…upset.”

  “You put a patient in there?” asked Orando. She had drawn up to her full, impressive height and was looking at McIndoe like he was some sort of vicious animal.

  “Nope,” said McIndoe. “He puts himself in there. Morning before Hallow-een, he asks nice as pie to go in his special room and to not be let out till after the following dawn. Every Halloween, though it’s the seventeenth he’s always particularly wound up about.”

  “It looks airtight,” said Kenneth. “He’d asphyxiate if he was in any longer than overnight. And there’s no facilities…”

  “Nothing to scratch with, neither,” said McIndoe softly.

  “What was that?” asked Orando. “And what’s this seventeenth Halloween business?”

  “He has this terrible itch,” explained McIndoe. “It builds up over time, and it’s always worse at Halloween, and it gets worse every year. The peak comes every seventeen years. After that, it ebbs away, builds up again slowly. Nothing to scratch himself on, inside that sphere.”

  “That’s why he cut off his fingers and toes?” asked Kenneth, the twist in his mouth coming back, but fascination in his eyes.

  “Reckon so,” said McIndoe. “Pulled all his teeth out, too. He hands over his false ones before he goes in.”

  “What a ludicrous waste of space, not to mention the original investment to build this…this sphere,” said Orando with decision. “What were my predecessors thinking to pander to a patient’s delusion in such a way? Well. He’s not going in that sphere any more. A ninety year-old patient in such a restraint? Not in my hospital. We’ll sedate him if necessary,
but it’s still six weeks to Halloween. A course of therapy—under my direction—should ameliorate or even remove the problem. You said something, McIndoe?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” replied McIndoe. “This Halloween is a seventeenth year. Broward will be real, I mean real bad—”

  “I’ve already mentioned pandering to delusions!” snapped Orando. “I trust I will not have to deal with psychoses from staff members as well as the patients?”

  “No, ma’am,” said McIndoe. Already he was thinking ahead to be sure he was rostered off over Halloween. Him and the few friends he still had among the staff.

  McIndoe had seen Broward in 2001, and seventeen years before that in 1984, and even seventeen years before that, when he’d first started at the hospital. On each of these three past occasions, he had been greatly relieved there was a sphere to put him in.

  Ten Days Before Halloween

  “How ya doing, Mister Broward?” asked McIndoe, stopping by the tall but stooped old man who was slowly refilling his paper cup from the water cooler in the recreation room.

  “Bad,” said Broward, grimacing. “That new doctor, the boss one, she keeps giving me different tablets, trying out stuff, and she talks to me during rest period. It’s called rest period! I want to sleep then, like I’m supposed to.”

  “How’s the…how’s the itch?” asked McIndoe carefully.

  Broward looked down at his chest and his stubby, shorn hands in their leather gloves began to close on his sternum before he visibly willed them back to his sides.

  “It’s bad,” he said gloomily. “That doctor reckons she’s hypnotised me so I don’t want to scratch. But I do. Ten days to go…this is going to be a terrible one, I can tell. Even for the full seventeen.”

  “Seventeen years,” whispered McIndoe, looking carefully around the room. He didn’t want any of the other staff reporting him as insane.

  “Yeah,” said Broward. “If old Doc Gutierrez hadn’t got me that sphere I’d be really worried right now.”