He sank slowly. His collision with the floor was a soft landing. He bounced gently off the radiator then found himself grounded, lolling forward in a sitting position clutching the plant to his chest with his left hand. There were dozens of short but sharp spikes on the stalks of the plant that had penetrated his palm and fingers and caused him some mild discomfort. He tried to get rid of them with his free hand, but just got more ensnared, so he left them in place.
A woman standing near him squealed in a way that suggested rats to Erik, rather than anything directly life-threatening. This was confirmed when she said, “Christ, there’s something running up my arm,” then stepped back and tripped over Erik’s legs. She landed on top of him, but he hardly felt a thing. A numbness that had started in his hand soon after he’d clutched the plant cutting was spreading through his chest and out into his limbs. He closed his eyes, and for a moment he was under the illusion that he was back in the ward, plugged into painkillers again. The thought made him feel nostalgic. He wondered if he’d made a big mistake getting out of that bed.
The woman said, “Sorry,” then clambered up off him and started calling for someone called John.
A man said, “Ann, I’m over here, at the far end of the window. Come and see this.” His voice was hushed. From his calm tone he must have been unaware of much that had occurred in the main body of the hospital. He sounded like an ornithologist trying to draw attention to a rare finch he’d spotted without disturbing it.
The woman hurried away from Erik and joined her companion.
“Look there,” the man said, “I thought everyone had gone off somewhere, but something’s happening down by the gates. Can you see?”
“No, I can’t,” Ann said. “I just fell. My glasses must have dropped off.”
John gave a grunt of sympathy then said, “Yes, no doubt about it, there’s definitely something going on out there”
A second man said, “What’s this then? What have we got here, then? There’s a vehicle of some kind coming up the driveway towards us. A huge thing. I never saw anything like that before.”
“Me neither,” John said. “Looks military. There are people moving up behind it. A lot of them. Wearing some kind of protective clothing.”
The second man said, “I reckon there’s been a poison gas or biological weapons attack. They’ve got masks on under their helmets.”
“Must be police or the army. I expect they’ll soon have things under control.”
Ann squeaked nervously again and said, “There are more and more rats coming in here all the time, John. I can hear them moving all around us. I think they must be coming up from underground.”
“Ann,” John said paternalistically, all his attention now on the events outside. “Don’t worry about them. They won’t eat you.”
The man John had been talking to said, “That bloody great truck, or whatever it is, is getting very close.”
“No, I think it’s stopping now.”
“You’re right. And someone’s getting out.”
No one spoke for some time until John said, “Can you make out what’s written on the side of that vehicle? My eyesight is not much better than Ann’s. There are two words, and I believe the first one starts with ‘P’ but I don’t think it is ‘Police’.”
“ ‘Porlock’, that’s what it is,” the second man said. “Porlock Foundation. Don’t know who they are.”
“Me neither,” John said. “How about you, Ann?”
“No idea. Never heard of them.”
“Must be some kind of private security firm.”
“I don’t care who they are as long as they get us out of here.”
“From the way those men are spreading out and lining up,” the un-named man said, “you’d think they were getting ready to attack the place.”
“I expect they’re well trained and know what they’re doing,” John said. “They look well-equipped and very professional.”
“If they do come in hard,” the second man said, “through the windows, for instance, there’s going to be a lot of glass flying about.”
“He’s right, Ann,” John said, for the first time sounding slightly alarmed. “They do look rather – determined – as though they might do something rash. Do you think we’d better stand back a bit?”
Erik, merely bemused by the conversation he’d been overhearing, waited for an answer. But if one came, he didn’t hear it.
Someone outside, at the front of the hospital, blew a whistle.
During the next few moments Erik was vaguely aware that the men and women who had been standing nearby were hurrying away in some confusion, but he didn’t mind being left behind. It was a relief not to have to listen to their chatter. For a short while everything went quiet and that pleased him very much.
He sat clutching, cuddling really, his little plant in complete contentment. The rats bustling busily around him weren’t playing games, but they couldn’t trouble Erik any more. They couldn’t reach him. He’d given them the slip. He was off on a voyage, sailing away all on his own.
When all the lights in the hospital went out and did not come back on again, Erik fell into a doze, but one that did not last long.
At first, as the uniformed figures smashed their way in and woke him up, he assumed they were coming to rescue him, but soon realised he was wrong.
They didn’t have any interest in him or anyone else in the building. Their orders were to release the rats.
JOE HILL
Best New Horror
JOE HILL’S TALE “20th Century Ghost” appeared in the fourteenth volume of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and later became the title story of his first book, an acclaimed collection released by PS Publishing last year.
He was awarded the William Crawford Award for outstanding new fantasy writer in 2006 and his first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, is due is early 2007.
The author had a number of excellent stories published last year, but when it came to making a decision, how could I not include a tale with this particular title? It justifiably won the 2006 Bram Stoker Award for Long Fiction.
“Most of my short stories contain some element of fantasy or surrealism or supernatural horror,” explains Hill. “When I began to gather them together, with the idea of trying to sell them as a collection, I began to get this terrible urge to explain myself, to say why these tales, instead of Carveresque narratives about emotionally isolated bird-watchers, or stories of morally vacuous teens engaged in titillating acts of self-destruction.
“I knew the urge – that desire to explain – had to be strangled in its crib, needed to be killed and chucked in a dumpster, before it could grow-up and make me do things I would regret. I did away with it.
“The ghost of the urge, though, haunted me. I often woke to find it sitting on the end of my bed, a weeping homunculus, wrapped in death shrouds, giving me accusing looks. At last, it drove me to write this story, which is, I guess, not an explanation at all, but an argument for a certain kind of fiction: the depraved kind.
“Also, as I’ve said elsewhere, I felt like my collection needed a story with a chainsaw in it. ‘Best New Horror’ was the inevitable result.”
A MONTH BEFORE HIS DEADLINE, Eddie Carroll ripped open a manila envelope, and a magazine called The True North Literary Review slipped out into his hands. Carroll was used to getting magazines in the mail, although most of them had titles like Cemetery Dance and specialized in horror fiction. People sent him their books, too. Piles of them cluttered his Brookline townhouse, a heap on the couch in his office, a stack by the coffee maker. Books of horror stories, all of them.
No one had time to read them all, although once – when he was in his early thirties and just starting out as the editor of America’s Best New Horror – he had made a conscientious effort to try. Carroll had guided sixteen volumes of Best New Horror to press, had been working on the series for over a third of his life now. It added up to thousands of hours of reading and proofing and letter-wr
iting, thousands of hours he could never have back. He had come to hate the magazines especially. So many of them used the cheapest ink, and he had learned to loathe the way it came off on his fingers, the harsh stink of it.
He didn’t finish most of the stories he started any more, couldn’t bear to. He felt weak at the thought of reading another story about vampires having sex with other vampires. He tried to struggle through Lovecraft pastiches, but at the first painfully serious reference to the Elder Gods, he felt some important part of him going numb inside, the way a foot or a hand will go to sleep when the circulation is cut off. He feared the part of him being numbed was his soul.
At some point following his divorce, his duties as the editor of Best New Horror had become a tiresome and joyless chore. He thought sometimes, hopefully almost, of stepping down, but he never indulged the idea for long. It was twelve thousand dollars a year in the bank, the cornerstone of an income patched together from other anthologies, his speaking engagements and his classes. Without that twelve grand, his personal worst-case scenario would become inevitable: he would have to find an actual job.
The True North Literary Review was unfamiliar to him, a journal with a cover of rough-grained paper, an ink print on it of leaning pines. A stamp on the back reported that it was a publication of Kathadan University in upstate New York. When he flipped it open, two stapled pages fell out, a letter from the editor, an English professor named Harold Noonan.
The winter before, Noonan had been approached by a part-time man with the university grounds crew, a Peter Kilrue. He had heard Noonan had been named the editor of True North, and was taking open submissions, and asked him to look at a short story. Noonan promised he would, more to be polite than anything else. But when he finally read the manuscript, “Buttonboy: A Love Story”, he was taken aback by both the supple force of its prose and the appalling nature of its subject matter. Noonan was new in the job, replacing the just-retired editor of twenty years, Frank McDane, and wanted to take the journal in a new direction, to publish fiction that would “rattle a few cages”.
“In that I was perhaps too successful,” Noonan wrote. Shortly after “Buttonboy” appeared in print, the head of the English department held a private meeting with Noonan to verbally assail him for using True North as a showcase for “juvenile literary practical jokes”. Nearly fifty people cancelled their subscriptions – no laughing matter for a journal with a circulation of just a thousand copies – and the alumnus who provided most of True North’s funding withdrew her financial support in outrage. Noonan himself was removed as editor, and Frank McDane agreed to oversee the magazine from retirement, in response to the popular outcry for his return.
Noonan’s letter finished:
I remain of the opinion that (whatever its flaws), ‘Buttonboy’ is a remarkable, if genuinely distressing work of fiction, and I hope you’ll give it your time. I admit I would find it personally vindicating if you decided to include it in your next anthology of the year’s best horror fiction.
I would tell you to enjoy, but I’m not sure that’s the word.
Best,
Harold Noonan
Eddie Carroll had just come in from outside, and read Noonan’s letter standing in the mudroom. He flipped to the beginning of the story. He stood reading for almost five minutes before noticing he was uncomfortably warm. He tossed his jacket at a hook and wandered into the kitchen.
He sat for a while on the stairs to the second floor, turning through the pages. Then he was stretched on the couch in his office, head on a pile of books, reading in a slant of late October light, with no memory of how he had got there.
He rushed through to the ending, then sat up, in the grip of a strange, bounding exuberance. He thought it was possibly the rudest, most awful thing he had ever read, and in his case that was saying something. He had waded through the rude and awful for most of his professional life, and in those fly-blown and diseased literary swamps had discovered flowers of unspeakable beauty, of which he was sure this was one. It was cruel and perverse and he had to have it. He turned to the beginning and started reading again.
It was about a girl named Cate – an introspective seventeen-year-old at the story’s beginning – who one day is pulled into a car by a giant with jaundiced eyeballs and teeth in tin braces. He ties her hands behind her back and shoves her onto the backseat floor of his station wagon . . . where she discovers a boy about her age, who she at first takes for dead and who has suffered an unspeakable disfiguration. His eyes are hidden behind a pair of round, yellow, smiley-face buttons. They’ve been pinned right through his eyelids – which have also been stitched shut with steel wire – and the eyeballs beneath.
As the car begins to move, though, so does the boy. He touches her hip and Cate bites back a startled scream. He moves his hand over her body, touching her face last. He whispers his name is Jim, and that he’s been traveling with the giant for a week, ever since the big man killed his parents.
“He made holes in my eyes and he said after he did it he saw my soul rush out. He said it made a sound like when you blow on an empty Coke bottle, real pretty. Then he put these over my eyes to keep my life trapped inside.” As he speaks, Jim touches the smiley-face buttons. “He wants to see how long I can live without a soul inside me.”
The giant drives them both to a desolate campground, in a nearby state park, where he forces Cate and Jim to fondle one another sexually. When he feels Cate is failing to kiss Jim with convincing passion, he slashes her face, and removes her tongue. In the ensuing chaos – Jim shrieking in alarm, staggering about blindly, blood everywhere – Cate is able to escape into the trees. Three hours later she staggers out onto a highway, hysterical, drenched in blood.
Her kidnapper is never apprehended. He and Jim drive out of the national park and off the edge of the world. Investigators are unable to determine a single useful fact about the two. They don’t know who Jim is or where he’s from, and know even less about the giant.
Two weeks after her release from the hospital, a single clue turns up by US Post. Cate receives an envelope, containing a pair of smiley-face buttons – steel pins caked with dry blood – and a Polaroid of a bridge in Kentucky. The next morning a diver finds a boy there, on the river bottom, horribly decomposed, fish darting in and out of his empty eye sockets.
Cate, who was once attractive and well-liked, finds herself the object of pity and horror among those who know her. She understands the way other people feel. The sight of her own face in the mirror repels her as well. She attends a special school for a time and learns sign language, but she doesn’t stay long. The other cripples – the deaf, the lame, the disfigured – disgust her, with their neediness, their dependencies.
Cate tries, without much luck, to assume a normal life. She has no close friends, no employable skills, and is self-conscious about her looks, her inability to speak. In one particularly painful scene, Cate drinks her way into courage, and makes a pass at a man in a bar, only to be ridiculed by him and his friends.
Her sleep is troubled by regular nightmares, in which she relives unlikely and dreadful variations on her abduction. In some, Jim is not a fellow victim, but in on the kidnapping, and rapes her with vigor. The buttons stuck through his eyes are mirrored discs that show a distorted image of her own screaming face, which, with perfect dream logic, has already been hacked into a grotesque mask. Infrequently, these dreams leave her aroused. Her therapist says this is common. She fires the therapist when she discovers he’s doodled a horrid caricature of her in his notebook.
Cate tries different things to help her sleep: gin, painkillers, heroin. She needs money for drugs and goes looking for it in her father’s dresser. He catches her at it and chases her out. That night her mother calls to tell her Dad is in the hospital – he had a minor stroke – and please don’t come to see him. Not long after, at a day care for disabled children, where Cate is part-timing, one child pokes a pencil into another child’s eye, blinding him. The incident c
learly isn’t Cate’s fault, but in the aftermath, her assorted addictions become public knowledge. She loses her job and, even after kicking her habit, finds herself nearly unemployable.
Then, one cool Fall day, she comes out of a local supermarket, and walks past a police car parked out back. The hood is up. A policeman in mirrored sunglasses is studying an overheated radiator. She happens to glance in the backseat – and there, with his hands cuffed behind his back, is her giant, ten years older and fifty pounds heavier.
She struggles to stay calm. She approaches the trooper, working under the hood, writes him a note, asks him if he knows who he has in the backseat.
He says a guy who was arrested at a hardware store on Pleasant Street, trying to shoplift a hunting knife and a roll of heavy-duty duct tape.
Cate knows the hardware store in question. She lives around the corner from it. The officer takes her arm before her legs can give out on her.
She begins to write frantic notes, tries to explain what the giant did to her when she was seventeen. Her pen can’t keep pace with her thoughts, and the notes she writes hardly make sense, even to her, but the officer gets the gist. He guides her around to the passenger seat, and opens the door. The thought of getting in the same car with her abductor makes her dizzy with fear – she begins to shiver uncontrollably – but the police officer reminds her the giant is handcuffed in the back, unable to hurt her, and that it’s important for her to come with them to the precinct house.
At last she settles into the passenger seat. At her feet is a winter jacket. The police officer says it’s his coat, and she should put it on, it’ll keep her warm, help with her shivering. She looks up at him, prepares to scribble a thank you on her notepad – then goes still, finds herself unable to write. Something about the sight of her own face, reflected in his sunglasses, causes her to freeze up.
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