The Best New Horror 5

by Ramsay Campbell

  The story was expanded to novel-length in the American bestseller The Ceremonies (winner of the British Fantasy Award), and the author followed it with Dark Gods (collecting three novellas, “Petey”, “Black Man With a Horn”, the World Fantasy Award-winning “Nadelman’s God”, and the short novel “Children of the Kingdom”).

  For five years Klein was the editor of the successful Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone Magazine, he edited the now defunct true-crime monthly CrimeBeat, and more recently put together the first edition of Sci-Fi Entertainment before resigning. He also scripted Dario Argento’s movie Trauma (which he describes as “easily the worst film he ever made”), and he is still working on a new novel, entitled Nighttown.

  It should be pointed out that the following story was originally written for children. The new outdoors magazine Outside/Kids (a companion to the popular adult publication Outside) asked the author for a “campfire chiller”. “One Size Eats All” certainly fits that criterion, no matter what the age of the reader . . .

  THE WORDS HAD been emblazoned on the plastic wrapper of Andy’s new sleeping bag, in letters that were fat and pink and somewhat crudely printed. Andy had read them aloud as he unwrapped the bag on Christmas morning.

  “ ‘One size eats all.’ What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Jack, his older brother, had laughed. “Maybe it’s not really a sleeping bag. Maybe it’s a feed bag!”

  Andy’s gaze had darted to the grotesquely large metal zipper that ran along the edge of the bag in rows of gleaming teeth. He’d felt a momentary touch of dread.

  “It’s obviously a mistake,” Andy’s father had said. “Or else a bad translation. They must have meant ‘One size fits all.’ ”

  He was sure that his father was right. Still, the words on the wrapper had left him perplexed and uneasy. He’d slept in plenty of sleeping bags before, but he knew he didn’t want to sleep in this one.

  And now, as he sat huddled in his tent halfway up Wendigo Mountain, about to slip his feet into the bag, he was even more uneasy. What if it wasn’t a mistake?

  He and Jack had been planning the trip for months; it was the reason they’d ordered the sleeping bags. Jack, who was bigger and more athletic and who’d already started to shave, had picked an expensive Arctic Explorer model from the catalogue. Nothing but the best for Jack. Andy, though, had hoped that if he chose an obscure brand manufactured overseas, and thereby saved his parents money, maybe they’d raise his allowance.

  But they hadn’t even noticed. The truth was, they’d always been somewhat inattentive where Andy was concerned. They barely seemed to notice how Jack bullied him.

  Jack did bully him – in a brotherly way, of course. His bright red hair seemed to go with his fiery temper, and he wasn’t slow to use his fists. He seemed to best the younger boy in just about everything, from basketball to campfire-building.

  Which was why, just before they’d set out for Wendigo Mountain, Andy had invited his friend Willie along. Willie was small, pale, and even less athletic than Andy. His head seemed much too big for his body. On a strenuous overnight hike like this one, Andy thought, it was nice to have somebody slower and weaker than he was.

  * * *

  True to form, Willie lagged behind the two brothers as they trudged single-file up the trail, winding their way among the tall trees that covered the base of the mountain, keeping their eyes peeled for the occasional dark green trail-markers painted on the trunks. It was a sunny morning, and the air had begun to lose some of the previous night’s chill.

  By the time Willie caught up, winded and sweating beneath his down jacket, Andy and Jack had taken off their backpacks and stopped for a rest.

  “It’s your tough luck,” Jack was telling him. “You’ve heard the old saying, ‘You made your bed, now lie in it’?”

  Andy nodded glumly.

  “Well, it’s the same thing,” said Jack. “You wanted the damn bag, so tonight you’re just gonna have to lie in it.”

  All morning, that’s exactly what Andy had been worrying about. He eyed the pack at his feet, with the puffy brown shape strapped beneath it, and wished the night would never come. You made your bed, he told himself. Now die in it.

  “Andy, for God’s sake, stop obsessing about that bag!” said Willie. “You’re letting your fears get the best of you. Honest, it’s a perfectly ordinary piece of camping gear.”

  “Willie’s right,” said Jack. Hoisting his backpack onto his shoulders, he grinned and added cruelly, “And the people it eats are perfectly ordinary too!”

  As they continued up the trail, the trees grew smaller and began to thin; the air grew cooler. Andy could feel the weight of the thing on his back, heavier than a sleeping bag ought to be and pressing against him with, he sensed, a primitive desire – a creature impatient for its dinner.

  Ahead of him, Jack turned. “Hey, Willie,” he yelled. “Did Andy tell you where his bag is from?”

  “No,” said Willie, far behind them. “Where?”

  Jack laughed delightedly. “Hungary!”

  They made camp at a level clearing halfway up the mountain. Andy and Willie would be sharing a tent that night; Jack had one to himself. Late afternoon sunlight gleamed from patches of snow among the surrounding rocks.

  The three unrolled their sleeping bags inside the tents. Andy paused before joining the others outside. In the dim light his bag lay brown and bloated, a living coffin waiting for an occupant. Andy reminded himself that it was, in fact, a fairly normal-looking bag – not very different, in truth, from Jack’s new Arctic Explorer. Still, he wished he had a sleeping bag like Willie’s, a comfortable old thing that had been in the family for years.

  Willie lagged behind again as the brothers left camp and returned to the trail. They waited until he’d caught up. Both younger boys were tired and would have preferred to stay near the tents for the rest of the day, but Jack, impatient, wanted to press on toward the summit while it was still light.

  The three took turns carrying a day pack with their compasses, flashlights, emergency food, and a map. The slope was steeper here, strewn with massive boulders, and the exertion made them warm again. Maybe, thought Andy, he wouldn’t even need the bag tonight.

  The terrain became increasingly difficult as they neared Wendigo’s peak, where the trail was blanketed by snow. They were exhausted by the time they reached the top – too exhausted to appreciate the sweeping view, the stunted pines, and the small mounds of stones piled in odd patterns across the rock face.

  They raised a feeble shout of triumph, rested briefly, then started down. Andy sensed that they would have to hurry; standing on the summit, he’d been unnerved at how low the sun lay in the sky.

  The air was colder now, and shadows were lengthening across the snow. Before they’d gotten very far, the sun had sunk below the other side of the mountain.

  They’d been traveling in shadow for what seemed nearly an hour, Jack leading the way, when the older boy paused and asked to see the map. Andy and Willie looked at one another and realized, with horror, that they had left the day pack at the top of the mountain, somewhere among the cairns and twisted trees.

  “I thought you had it,” said Andy, aghast at the smaller boy’s carelessness.

  “I thought you did,” said Willie.

  No matter; it was Andy that Jack swore at and smacked on the side of the head. Willie looked pained, as if he, too, had been hit.

  Jack glanced up the slope, then turned and angrily continued down the trail. “Let’s go!” he snapped over his shoulder. “Too late to go back for it now.”

  They got lost twice coming down, squeezing between boulders, clambering over jagged rocks, and slipping on patches of ice. But just as night had settled on the mountain, and Andy could no longer make out his brother’s red hair or his friend’s pale face, they all felt the familiar hard-packed earth of the trail beneath their boots.

  They were dog-tired and aching by the time they stumbled into camp. They had no fla
shlights and were too fatigued to try to build a fire. Poor Willie, weariest of all, felt his way to the tent and crawled inside. Andy hung back. In the darkness he heard Jack yawn and slip into the other tent.

  He was alone now, with no light but the stars and a sliver of moon, like a great curved mouth. The night was chilly; he knew he couldn’t stay out here. With a sigh, he pushed through the tent flaps, trying not to think about what waited for him inside.

  The interior of the tent was pitch black and as cold as outdoors. Willie was already asleep. The air, once crisp, seemed heavy with an alien smell; when he lifted the flap of his sleeping bag, the smell grew stronger. Did all new bags smell like this? He recognized the odors of canvas and rubber, but beneath them lurked a hint of something else; fur, maybe, or the breath of an animal.

  No, he was imagining things. The only irrefutable fact was the cold. Feeling his way carefully in the darkness, Andy unlaced his boots, barely noticing that his socks were encrusted with snow. Gingerly he inserted one foot into the mouth of the bag, praying he’d feel nothing unusual.

  The walls of the bag felt smooth and, moments later, warm. Too warm. Surely, though, it was just the warmth of his own body.

  He pushed both legs in further, then slipped his feet all the way to the bottom. Lying in the darkness, listening to the sound of Willie’s breathing, he could feel the bag press itself against his ankles and legs, clinging to them with a weight that seemed, for goosedown, a shade too heavy. Yet the feeling was not unpleasant. He willed himself to relax.

  It occurred to him, as he waited uneasily for sleep, what a clever disguise a bag like this would make for a creature that fed on human flesh. Like a spider feasting upon flies that had blundered into its web, such a creature might gorge contentedly on human beings stupid enough to disregard its warning: One size eats all . . . Imagine, prey that literally pushed itself into the predator’s mouth

  Human stomach acid, he’d read, was capable of eating through a razor blade; and surely this creature’s would be worse. He pictured the thing dissolving bones, draining the very life-blood from its victim, leaving a corpse sucked dry of fluids, like the withered husk a spider leaves behind . . .

  Suddenly he froze. He felt something damp – no, wet – at the bottom of the bag. Wet like saliva. Or worse.

  Kicking his feet, he wriggled free of the bag. Maybe what he’d felt was simply the melted snow from his socks, but in the darkness he was taking no chances. Feeling for his boots, he laced them back on and curled up on top of the bag, shivering beneath his coat.

  Willie’s voice woke him.

  “Andy? Are you okay?”

  Andy opened his eyes. It was light out. He had survived the night.

  “Why were you sleeping like that?” said Willie. “You must be frozen.”

  “I was afraid to get back in the bag. It felt . . . weird.”

  Willie smiled. “It was just your imagination, Andy. That’s not even your bag.”

  “Huh?” Andy peered down at the bag. A label near the top said Arctic Explorer. “But how – ”

  “I switched your bag with Jack’s when the two of you were starting for the summit,” said Willie. “I meant to tell you, but I fell asleep.”

  “Jack’ll be furious,” said Andy. “He’ll kill me for this!”

  Trembling with cold and fear, he crawled stiffly from the tent. It was early morning; a chilly sun hung in the pale blue sky. He dashed to Jack’s tent and yanked back the flaps, already composing an apology.

  The tent was empty. The sleeping bag, his bag, lay dark and swollen on the floor. There seemed to be no one inside.

  Or almost no one; for emerging from the top was what appeared to be a deflated basketball – only this one had red hair and a human face.

  DONALD R. BURLESON

  Mulligan’s Fence

  DONALD R. BURLESON’S stories have appeared in several anthologies, including Best New Horror, MetaHorror, The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories, Post Mortem, 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories and others, as well as in Twilight Zone Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Deathrealm, Grue, 2AM and many other periodicals. A collection of his short fiction, Lemon Drops and Other Horrors, was published by Hobgoblin Press in 1993.

  He is also the author of several books of criticism including Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe (University Press of Kentucky) and Begging to Differ: Deconstructionist Readings (Hobgoblin).

  According to the author, the setting of the following story is “a vague reflection of the site of a creepy apartment building where my wife Mollie tells of having lived as a child in Chicago; the building has long since been torn down, but lives on in nightmare.”

  IN THE MOONLIGHT the gaunt wooden slats of the fence looked like a long row of lupine teeth, weedy at the gumline, grinning all the way to the corner where 47th Street met Ames Street. She followed the grimy sidewalk down to Ames and turned left to see another wan line of incisors stretching away into the dark. Siamese mouths joined at the corner. She wondered why she was here.

  At least when she had been chunky, awkward little Kelly Flynn with her thick glasses and pigtails, she had had a reason for standing around this dismal corner which hadn’t been quite so dismal in those days. She had lived here. Now that she was chunky, awkward old widowed Kelly Flynn McNeill with her thicker glasses and only a distant memory of pigtails, her presence here was strange. She had been about nine when her family had moved away, and in the forty-odd intervening years she had seldom even thought of this neighborhood.

  Well, she did have an excuse for having come back to the city, though if a librarians’ convention had been anything thrilling to stay around the hotel for, she wouldn’t have been out walking the streets, even to see where she had spent her early childhood. She usually wasn’t the type to reminisce about such things, and hadn’t been back to see any of the other places her folks had lived. Looking at this forlorn spot with its tall L-shaped fence guarding a now vacant corner lot, she found it hard to believe that the scene was only seven or eight blocks from the hotel with its multilevel parking garage and keycards and opulent carpets. Here, there was only a deserted fence-lined sidewalk dimly lit at long intervals by half-hearted gooseneck streetlamps, the nearest of which stood at the intersection as if deciding which way to turn. Across the street, brownstone buildings were gradually closing all their paper-lidded yellow eyes and settling into sleep. An occasional distant car horn honked; otherwise all was silence. She drew her coat collar closer to her throat and studied the scene. This corner had changed a great deal over the years.

  For one thing, the five-story apartment building that had stood behind this fence no longer existed; the old opening in the fence was now solidly boarded over, and the boards had sprouted staples, with tattered yellow signs that shouted NO TRESPASSING in officious block lettering. She remembered hearing news of the fire, several years ago. The fence, Mulligan’s fence – how odd it was to whisper that to herself after all this time – had stayed, probably to keep people out of the charred rubble that must still lie back there, rubble never really cleaned up, city budgets being what they were. But the fence itself, heavy planking that had pretty well withstood the ravages of time and urban humanity, looked somewhat different from the way she remembered it. It looked smaller, for one thing; wasn’t that the way it was always supposed to be, though, when you were revisiting childhood haunts? She wondered what else was different about the fence.

  And it all began to come back to her. Good heavens; Mulligan, Mulligan and his fence.

  Sidling along, she peered closely at the wooden surface, which for one thing now wore a number of coats of cracked and peeling paint; the uppermost layer was a dreary brown. The neighborhood kids had evidently had a good time scratching initials and names and various slogans into the paint, which was crisscrossed many times over and, in some places, embellished with the inevitable swaths of spray-paint, atop which in one spot a squad of scratchy little letters marched in a drunken line to pro
claim: For a good time call Cindy 884-, but the rest of the telephone number had been savagely crossed out, perhaps by an indignant Cindy. Some things never changed.

  Anyway, Kelly knew that these countless markings were merely a surface phenomenon, feeble and evanescent. Beneath the paint layers and the scratchings would lie more durable inscriptions, names and initials of a bygone day, carved deeply into the wood like the original manuscript state of a medieval palimpsest. In those days the fence itself had never known the paintbrush, and there had been no such thing as a can of spray-paint, so if you were going to leave your mark, you wielded a pocket knife. Mostly the boys did it, of course, but some of the girls, making their way through tomboy phases toward puberty, had carved on the fence as well. Kelly had. You were a real outcast if you didn’t join in, and even at that time the wooden slats had been a welter of crude letters, so much so that the expression “Mulligan’s fence” had always put Kelly in mind of Mulligan’s stew; it had indeed been a stew of its own kind, a graphic concoction redolent of many contributing chefs.

  And that brought back thoughts of Mulligan, who had owned the fence, not to mention the corner lot and the apartment building itself, in which he occupied a ground-floor apartment. She had no particular memory of what kind of landlord he had been, and in fact couldn’t remember his ever being excited about anything but his fence.

  You kids mark up my fence, you’re going to wish you hadn’t. She could hear him now, could see him standing plump, untidy, and sour-faced on the crumbling steps. You’re going to be sorry. You write on my fence, you’ll be coming to see me. You just wait. Somehow the way he delivered this vague threat was frightening, but in the paradoxical way of the childhood world, it only made the kids who lived in the building more perversely determined to leave their initials carved into the boards. Mulligan’s fence was sacred ground, and they were strongly inclined to commit sacrilege.