The Best new Horror 4

by Stephen Jones

  I tiptoed quietly through the house of this man who thought he knew the secret of how to hide from evil. (If he could ask me now, I would tell him what I have learned: that evil cannot hide from evil, or from good.) For all my youth, the inventory I took on my wide-eyed tour was not difficult to interpret. It was as if a gruesome Grimm’s fairy tale had suddenly become real before me.

  Pots and pans of a slowly simmering stew bubbling on the kitchen burners.

  The walls a badly patched tent, sewn together of children’s clothes.

  In the basement, which I descended into most trepidatiously, deep trenches filled with bones. I prayed they were those of neighborhood cats and dogs, but knew they were not.

  I returned upstairs and surveyed the sleeping man. Unconscious as he was, he did present an appearance of innocence, did seem as innocent as he hoped was the cloth which his obsession told him would protect him from whatever unknown evil was his demon. The flesh of his face hung calmly, peacefully, unmolded by his mania, and I could almost believe the man belied his environment. But then I looked down to see my clothing within his slack fingers.

  I grasped hold of my collar, and started slowly to pull my shirt from those fingers. If the man’s digits jerked or tightened, I would stop my efforts, but as soon as he relaxed again, I would begin once more to pull. I stared at his trembling eyelids while I worked, wondering what dreams raced through his mind. After a span of time that to me seemed longer than my life had been up until then, at last it was in my hands.

  I calmly watched him breath (oh how amazed I was at my own calmness), and at that very special moment when, chest concave and mouth wide, he reached for his next breath, I as quickly as I could shoved the fabric into his open mouth and pinched his nostrils closed. His eyes immediately bulged wide, and as he looked at me, I knew he was looking into me. I knew what he saw there, and I was afraid of it. I jumped atop him and wrapped my spindly legs about his chest, and amazed myself by holding on tightly as he bucked and tried to knock me from his chest, me, a six year old. Where did my strength come from to be able to steal the life from a grown man, and a lunatic at that? I do not know.

  I never know.

  Once I was sure that he was dead, I pulled my shirt from his mouth, and the rest of my clothing from his hands. I took them to the bathroom sink, the grout of which was red from the man’s madness. There, I carefully washed my clothes. In the kitchen, I found an old iron with which to dry them as I had sometime seen my Momma do.

  Momma. As I dressed I thought of Momma, and wondered how it was that she had failed to meet me at our appointed time. She had never failed me before. I hurriedly rummaged through the man’s pockets, and found a key, with which I made my escape. I did not take the time to lock the door behind me. I had to get home quickly, to tell Momma . . . I was not sure what.

  It took many long hours of wandering before I found a street that was familiar to me. I then walked slowly home in a dark that I had never before seen alone. Even after what I had endured, maybe because of what I had endured, I took my time, almost blinded by the beauty of the night sky. As I turned the corner onto my street, I saw a police car parked in front of my house, its light flashing soundlessly. I well recall thinking that the lights flashed for me, for my absence. I was wrong.

  I have perfect recall for so much else, yet I cannot remember how I reacted when they told me that Momma was dead. I can remember the moment before I learned of that death, and the moment after, but of the moment itself . . .

  She died, as I understand it, as she lived, always racing. She had been rushing towards me as if by a pull of gravity, probably after having grown impatient behind a slow moving driver, or perhaps after having been frustrated even earlier behind a long line at the supermarket, and so zoomed forward at the sight of an amber light. She had not deviated from her usual style, only this time she was hit by another car jumping at the first trace of green. One of my great losses is that I do not know what I would have told Momma had we been reunited that night, had I returned home from my detour to discover her sitting pale and worried in our living room. I never had the chance. My father and the other relatives were too lost in their grief to notice anything other than my reappearance itself. They did not act as if anything unusual could have occurred during the absence that prefaced it. They never questioned me about anything that might have happened; perhaps they lacked the imagination.

  Momma would have questioned me.

  And so it is that up until this day I have told no one about what that dying man saw in my eyes—that (are you ready?) I enjoyed his death. Even then, even before my newfound discovery turned to well worn habit, it seemed . . . apt. I knew that he deserved his end and his end came in a way which made artistic sense of his life, such as it was, transforming chaos into poetry. And to discover that my mother had been taken from this world with that same sense of correctness, of artistry, of flair, well . . . that taught me a lesson.

  I learned how death should be.

  And that was a good thing, too, because there seemed to be so much of it.

  I haven’t yet told you about the rest of my family, and I’m sure you’re probably wondering about them. (No? How sad. Yet how typical of you, to be so self-centered. I should have expected it.) I’ll have you know that Momma’s death affected not just me. It affected the entire family. Dad, oh how Dad did change. And Kate. It affected Kate.

  Kate was my older sister by four years, which meant that she was almost ten when Momma died. Once we were down to a familial trinity, the whole chemistry of our house changed. At first, Kate tried to be Momma for both of us, but it didn’t work for long. She would cook for us, and play with me, and when Dad would come home from work and sit wet-eyed before the flickering television set, silent to both of us, she would bring him a drink, and massage his temples. She so wanted to make his pain go away. She never seemed to act with as much tenderness to me, but I guess she figured I was too young to have any true pain.

  The more she became like Momma to my father, the less she could be a Momma to me.

  There came a time when I was awakened by Kate crying late at night. The wall between our rooms was not sufficient to contain her sobbing. My first thought was one of surprise, for Kate had always been a stoic, never one to give in to outward displays of emotion. She hadn’t even cried at Momma’s funeral. My next thought was fear. For if Kate was crying, something was terribly wrong. (Notice that I had not yet learned of the healthy, curative power of tears. I now know that I should have rejoiced at my sister’s tears; they were the first sign of true recovery in our home in months.) I slipped from my room into hers quietly.

  I had learned to move quietly through the house. I’d had to learn that; my survival depended on it. If I became an actual presence in the home, my father would sense me and look up and remember his pain, and I did not want to be the cause of that pain, both because of the way it would make him feel, and the way causing it would make me feel. (Guilt is another one of the lessons life teaches us young. It is one I have spent a lifetime, however, trying to forget.) I entered the room without my sister noticing.

  She was curled up on one side, facing away from me. Her sheet was wrapped around her, and the moonlight made her bare shoulders gleam with perspiration. Her crying, as I stopped and watched her, grew very quiet. Now and then her body would tremble. Her pajamas were in a pile with her blankets in a far corner of the room. The sheet which enfolded her had been gathered and stuffed between her legs, and the panda bears were stained red. She moaned, and I crept over and lightly placed a hand on her arm to comfort her.

  She screamed and spun, flinging me from her. Her eyes were full of hate and fear. As I was babbling apologies, the light clicked on. I covered my eyes with my hands, and squinted through the cracks between my fingers. Dad stood beside me, a towel wrapped around his waist, the dark hair on his chest damp, as if fresh from a shower. I looked from Dad to Kate and back again.

  “Go to your room,” Dad whispered. I
turned to Kate. She nodded.

  I went back to my room.

  Do I have to make it any plainer? You are an adult, I was a child, do I have to decode it for you? Well, I will not. I refuse.

  I grow tired of the explicitness you demand. Can’t I just tell you that not long thereafter my father died, and leave it at that? I am a doer, a man of action, not one of your foul storytellers. Can’t I just slip ahead past all of this . . . horror, and make my point?

  No, you will not let me. And I guess . . . I guess that if I am to make you see whereof I speak, that part deserves to be told.

  Having gone back to my room, I did not simply go to sleep that night. I snuck past my sister’s closed door and went back to the house where death had first shown me its bulging face. Though weeks had passed, the door was unlocked, as I had left it. That no one had been there since me I could tell before I entered the room, for the rotting body announced its presence to me before I ever saw it. The man still lay on the bed, his flesh puffy and foul-smelling.

  It took me hours, but I ripped down the clothing that lined the living room walls. Neatness scored no points for my purpose. I carried the fabric to the basement and used the swatches to make bundles of the bones. The stew, which had long since congealed in its pots, I took to the bathroom and poured down the drain. In an upstairs bedroom, I found a display cabinet filled with a variety of trinkets: bracelets, some jacks and balls, baseball cards, barrettes, some rolled comic books, a necklace locket with a picture of a dog, a pair of broken glasses. I added these things to my packages. Throughout the night I walked back and forth to our house, secreting what I’d brought with me in our basement.

  My task completed, I peered in once more upon my sister. She slept, but from the noises that she made, I could tell her sleep was not a peaceful one.

  I punched three buttons on the phone, and whispered briefly to the man who answered.

  I tucked into my bed, content.

  Later, as the sun was beginning to rise, I was awakened by a loud knock on the door. Out the window I could see a police car parked out front. One policeman was already at our front door while a second moved around towards the back. I stayed in my room, listening to what transpired, acting as an uninvolved audience as my father’s voice grew very loud and then quiet again, before seeing him walk off between the two policemen.

  I was not to be left alone with him again before his death.

  I met with him once in a small room with a large guard, and he seemed very confused, unsure why it was what had happened to him had happened. The guard kept his eyes fixed on my Dad’s hands during the entire visit. Dad felt that for him to be there in prison meant there was no justice in the world. I left him with comforting words, but little else. I wonder whether Dad had that look of confusion on him still when he was stabbed to death in the showers by an embezzler bereft with grief who had lost a child to cancer just before coming into custody.

  My sister and I were split up between family members, and never spoke about any of the things that had happened. I guess I can understand why she would feel that way. I don’t like having to speak of any of it to you.

  But you insist, don’t you?

  You’d have me tell you about all the deaths that followed, about the boy in grade school who would beat me up daily and take my lunch money, about the cigarette executive who pimped for the coffin nails that killed an uncle, about . . .

  Never mind. You’d have me tell you about all of them, and the ends they met, each and every one, in extreme and nauseating detail.

  But no.

  I’d rather talk about you. You, who sit there reading these words, you who delight in the reading of these words, when you know as well as I, if you’d only admit the truth about yourself, that there is something oh so wrong with your liking of them.

  I know you as well as I know myself.

  You are reading these words in a magazine. On its cover is some putrid illustration of a man being tortured, or eaten by monsters, or having rotting flesh fall off his face. Maybe a woman is being raped. Maybe a child is being threatened. Perhaps the picture is crudely drawn. Perhaps it is not.

  Maybe you are not holding a flimsy magazine, maybe it is a sturdy book, a handsomely bound volume with gold lettering embossed across its spine.

  It does not matter. You have been reading my words, and you have actually, may God forgive you, been enjoying them. You have read the other stories before mine, both at this time and for years before, and you have smiled at the most horrible of things.

  I have lived these things. This is not a story to me. I must continue living with them forever. If I could trade my life for another’s, I would pay any price. And yet you find in yourself the ability to think it is fun to visit with me. You actually consider this a way of having a good time.

  You go to movies of this type, with people in pain and buckets of blood. You read novels with rats gnawing still pulsing flesh. You read comic books, rife with mass-produced nightmares.

  You discuss these books, these movies, with your friends, as casually as discussing a lunch order. You are the deadly market which creates these horrible demons. Just as illegal narcotics would not be grown if there were no addicts to purchase them, so it is that no miseries would be nurtured in the lonely dark if you were not there to be an audience for them.

  And what an enthralled audience you are.

  So enthralled, in fact, that as you read these words, you will not hear me creeping up behind you, coming to direct you to your most poetic of ends. Of all the fiends I have known, and I have had the misfortune to know many, there has been none who has so enjoyed the agony of others as have you. For you I have a special plan. I will not tell you of it. It must be a surprise.

  Do you think you feel my breath hot on your neck even now, even though I am not yet there? Good. That is how I want it to be, until I come for you. You shall have no peace ever again as you read your morbid fantasies, for you will constantly be thinking, “Is that him yet? Is it time?” The sensation of my breath on your neck will be a constant companion. And when the anticipatory tingle you presently feel is replaced by warm reality, and you start to turn, but do not turn quickly enough, you will realize that yes, everything I have told you is true, your death is right, it is just, this is your correct and proper end.

  You disagree? You think your final thoughts when I shortly come for you will be different ones? I don’t see how you will possibly be able to deny the aptness of it all. Do you know why?

  For you have had the stomach to travel with me so that we find ourselves still together at the end of this tale.

  I look forward to meeting you in the flesh.

  Soon.

  ROBERTA LANNES

  Dancing on a

  Blade of Dreams

  ROBERTA LANNES lives in Southern California where she works as a fulltime teacher, graphic designer and photographer, writing whenever she can find the time.

  Since the publication of her story, “Goodbye Dark Love”, in Dennis Etchison’s 1986 anthology Cutting Edge, her dark and distinctive short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Lord John Ten, Alien Sex, Fantasy Tales 5, Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror, The Bradbury Chronicles: Stories in Honor of Ray Bradbury, Still Dead: Book of the Dead 2, Dark Voices 5: The Pan Book of Horror, and such magazines as Iniquities and Pulphouse. She is currently working on a novel titled The Hallowed Bed.

  The author should have made her debut in this series with “Apostate in Denim” in Best New Horror 2. However, at the very last moment, the publisher decided the story was too extreme for the sensibilities of British book retailers and cut it from that volume. Most of Lannes’ stories are deeply disturbing but then, after all, isn’t that what all the best horror fiction should be? “Dancing on a Blade of Dreams” is no exception, and we extend to her a belated welcome to these pages . . .

  THE COUPLE UPSTAIRS WAS SCREWING. Loudly. Patty picked up the book from her nightstand and tossed it to the ceiling. It made a barking noi
se and fell into her lap, along with some flakes of plaster. She dusted the book off and sent it up again. This time a little harder. For a moment, they were quiet. Then, with dramatic flourish, they resumed their debauchery.

  “Assholes! It’s two-thirty in the morning. People do sleep at this hour!” she yelled.

  She threw off the blanket and stormed into the living room. She paced, lit a cigarette, trailing smoke like a locomotive.

  It was the trial. Normally, she would be asleep by ten o’clock, but jury duty was fouling up her routine. The case was stirring—a kidnapping-rape-murder—they hadn’t gotten into anything juicy yet. But, Patty found it difficult to sit still all day, felt that she had to be moving, doing something. She found herself wound up at night, unable to fall easily to sleep.

  The trial had taken over her thoughts. She wanted them to get to the point and be done with it. All she knew from the testimony and legal drivel was that the accused, David Allen Garrick, believed that the death of Marianne Murphy was not by his hand, but a frame by an ex-army buddy of his. Alibis had been devised and told, the chronology of the case delineated, and witnesses brought in to corroborate the same old stuff. The case was four weeks old and due to go on for another two.

  Patty stared out her window to the silent street below. She could still hear them upstairs. Her stomach churned. It had been a long time since she’d last been in someone’s arms.

  The defendant, Garrick, was something of an anomaly. She had expected someone deranged, loutish, over the edge. Garrick was a startlingly handsome man in his early forties; over six feet tall, fair-skinned with a slight blush to his cheeks, dark haired, with intense, intelligent looking, brilliant-blue eyes rimmed with dark lashes. Then there was his white, even smile. He hadn’t shown it much in the four weeks. His pose was that of a victim. He often peered into the jury box from under his eyebrows, shyly reverent, hopeful.