The Best new Horror 4

by Stephen Jones

  “Where is this club?” Ghost asked nervously.

  “Well . . . I know we’re near it.” Steve stopped at the corner, shoved sweaty hair out of his face, and looked around hoping the place would appear. “The guy who gave me directions said it would be hard to find in the daytime. We’re supposed to look for an unlit neon sign that says Beware.”

  “Great.”

  “WHAT PLACE YEZ LOOKIN’ FOR?” boomed a voice behind them. It took Steve several seconds to realize that the vendor had spoken and was now motioning them over.

  “Yez look like gentlemen in search of the unusual,” the vendor told them before they could say anything about clubs or directions. He was a white man of indeterminate age, dishwater-brown hair thin on top but straggling halfway down his back in an untidy braid. His eyes were hidden behind black wraparound shades, his grin as sharp and sudden as a razor. Steve noticed a strange ring on the second finger of the guy’s right hand: a bird skull cast in silver, some species with huge hollow eyesockets and a long, tapering, lethal-looking beak that jutted out over the knuckle. It was lovely, but it also looked like a good tool for putting an eye out or ventilating a throat.

  “Well, right now we’re looking for this club – ”

  “Something UNUSUAL,” the vendor overrode. “A collector’s item maybe.” His hand hovered over his wares, straightened tubes and straps, caressed the artificial leg. “Something yez don’t see every day.” His face went immobile, then split back into that sharp crazy grin. “Or rather—something yez DO see every day, but most of the time yez can’t take the fuckers HOME WITH YA!”

  His hand twitched back the army blanket covering the jar-shaped humps. A small cloud of dust rose into the air. Sunlight winked on polished glass. Steve cussed, took two steps back, then came forward again and bent to look.

  Ghost, who had never in his life felt so far from home, burst into tears.

  The man had six big glass jars arranged in two neat rows, sealed at the tops and filled with what could only be formaldehyde. Inside each jar, suspended in the murky liquid, was a large, pale, bloated shape: an undeniably real human head.

  The necks appeared to have been surgically severed. Ghost could see layers of tissue within the stumps as precisely delineated as the circles of wood inside a tree trunk. One head was tilted far enough to the side to show a neat peg of bone poking from the meat of the neck. Several had shaved scalps; one had dark hair that floated and trailed like seaweed. Parts of faces were pressed flat against the glass: an ear, a swollen nostril, a rubbery lip pulled askew. Blood-suffused eyeballs protruded from their sockets like pickled hard-boiled eggs.

  “How much do you want for them?” Steve asked. Ghost sobbed harder.

  The grin seemed to throw off light, it was so wide and dazzling. “Two apiece. Ten for all six of ’em.”

  “Ten dollars?”

  “Hey, I’m in a hurry, I gotta unload these puppies today, yez think this is legal or something’?”

  As if on cue, sirens rose out of the general distant cacophony, approaching fast. A pair of police cars rounded the corner and came shrieking up the block. Revolving blue light flickered across the lenses of the black wraparound shades. The grin disappeared. Without even a good day to yez the vendor scooped up the artificial leg and took off down the street. One car roared after him. The other slammed to a halt at the curb where Steve and Ghost still stood staring stupidly at the heads.

  “You weren’t really going to buy one, were you?” Ghost whispered.

  “Course not.” Steve snorted. “I don’t have any money anyway, remember? The bums got it all. I’m lucky to have an I.D. to show this cop.” He dug out his wallet and flipped it open. “We’re just a couple of hicks from North Carolina, Officer. We lay no claim to these jars or their contents.”

  Minds like butterflies preserved in brine, trapped under thick glass . . .

  It seemed that their friendly vendor, a gentleman whose given name was Robyn Moorhead but who was known variously as Robyn Hood, Moorhead Robbins, and (aptly enough) “More Head,” had robbed a medical transport truck en route from Beth Israel Hospital to the Mutter Medical Museum in Philadelphia while it was stopped at a gas station. The truck’s door had not latched properly, and More Head and an unidentified girlfriend had simply climbed in and cleaned it out. He had already sold several items before Steve and Ghost came along. The artificial leg, though, was his own. He used it for display purposes only, to call attention to whatever shady wares he sold; it was a valuable antique and not for sale; he carried it everywhere.

  No, Ghost told himself. You did not feel their minds beating against the jars like dying insects. You did not feel the raw burn of formaldehyde against your eyeballs, the dead taste of it in your mouth; you did not feel the subtle breakdown of the molecular dream that was your brain. They were not alive. You could not feel them.

  “I gotta know,” said the cop as he finished writing up their statement. “How much did he want for ’em?” Steve told him, and the cop shrugged, then sighed. He was a decent sort and the affair seemed to have put him in a philosophical mood. “Man, even’f I was a crook, even’f I was tryna sell yuman heads, I’d’t least be askin’ more’n ten bucks. Kinda devalues the sanctity a’yuman life, y’know?”

  Jewelled wings, beating themselves to powder against thick glass . . .

  They had overshot the club by five blocks. The cops pointed them in the right direction and ten minutes later they were descending below street level again, past the unlit neon sign that said not Beware but Be Aware, though Ghost guessed it amounted to the same thing, and into the club. The poster they had sent was plastered everywhere: TONIGHT—LOST SOULS? They were too tired to consider doing a soundcheck yet, but it was just the two of them, Steve’s guitar and Ghost’s voice, and they didn’t really need one. At any rate they wouldn’t be going on till midnight. Right now they needed sleep. One of the bartenders was out of town and had left them the keys to her apartment, which was just upstairs.

  Too tired for the stairs, they rode the ancient, terrifying elevator up seven stories. Steve had bummed two beers at the bar. He guzzled most of one as they rode up. “New York is pretty interesting,” he said.

  “No shit.”

  Steve snorted into his beer. And then at once they were both laughing, losing it in a rickety box suspended from an antique cable in a building that was taller than any building in Missing Mile but small by the standards of this magical, morbid, million-storied city. They fell against each other and howled and slapped high-five. They were young and the one had a voice like gravelly gold and the other could play guitar with a diamond-hard edge born of sex and voodoo and despair, and it was all part of the Great Adventure.

  They staggered out at the top still giggling, fumbled with three unfamiliar locks, and let themselves into the apartment. The place was decorated all in black: black walls, black lace dripping from the ceiling, black paint over the windows, black silk sheets on a huge futon that covered the floor. The effect was soothing, like being cradled in the womb of night. Their laughter wound down.

  Steve stood his guitar case in a corner, gulped the second beer after Ghost refused it, and stretched his tired bones out on the futon. Ghost toed his sneakers off and lay down beside him. It was absolutely dark and, for the first time since Port Authority, nearly quiet. How strange to think that the whole teeming city was still out there, just beyond the walls of the building. Suddenly Ghost felt disoriented in the little pocket of blackness, as if the compass he always carried in his head had deserted him.

  He shifted on the mattress so that his shoulder touched Steve’s arm, so that he could feel Steve’s familiar warmth all along the left side of his body. Steve heaved a great deep sigh like a sleeping hound. Ghost thought of all the highways, all the back roads, all the train tracks and green paths that led back home, and he did not feel so far away.

  And there was music, there was always music to carry him wherever he wanted to go. Soon the distant thrum
of the city and the tales it wanted to tell him faded completely, and the gouge of Steve’s bony elbow in his side lulled him to sleep.

  JOHN BRUNNER

  They Take

  JOHN BRUNNER is one of Britain’s most prolific and respected science fiction authors. Since the late 1950s, he has won two British Science Fiction Awards, The British Fantasy Award, the French Prix Apollo, Italy’s Cometa d’Argento twice and the Europa Award. He also received the Hugo, science fiction’s top honour, in 1969 for his novel, Stand on Zanzibar.

  His many other books include The Sheep Look Up, The Jagged Orbit, The Compleat Traveller in Black, Shockwave Rider and the recent Muddle Earth.

  Besides science fiction, Brunner has written mysteries, thrillers and fantasy, and he has turned his hand to horror in recent years, with great success, in Weird Tales and the Dark Voices series.

  “They Take” is proof (if any was needed) that the author is as proficient in this genre as he is in all the others . . .

  “ARE YOU SURE WE’RE GOING THE RIGHT WAY?” demanded Ann Bertelli. Strictly she was Annunziata, but in the trendy circles of Milan and Turin the shorter English name was far more fashionable, like her sleekly coiffed fair hair, her wraparound sunglasses, her brief clinging frock and massy gold bracelets.

  At the wheel of their Alfa Twin Spark, whose shiny red paintwork was dull with dust, her husband Carlo snapped, “It’s the way you told me to take! You’ve got the map Anzani sent us!”

  “Who in his right mind trusts a lawyer?” Ann retorted. “In his letter he described Aunt Silvana’s estate as ‘fertile and productive,’ but I can’t imagine that being true of any land in this area!”

  Late summer sun beat down on the countryside. Either side of the rough road crops bent their weary heads: beans, maize, tobacco. In the distance they now and then saw peasants at work, helped or hindered by balky donkeys and scrawny oxen. More than once Ann had said this trip was like travelling back in time—yet it wasn’t as though they were in the deep Mezzogiorno. Indeed, they were still well north of Rome!

  Ahead lay a T-junction. Braking, wiping sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his slub-silk jacket, Carlo demanded, “Which way now? Right or left?”

  And when she delayed an answer, trying to orientate the photocopied sketch-map that was their only guide, he went on savagely, “When I think that but for your damned aunt we could have spent the rest of our fortnight in Nice – ”

  “Getting off with that German girl you had your eye on?” murmured Ann.

  “Oh my God!” Carlo shifted out of gear and applied the handbrake. “We’re not going to have another fit of jealousy, are we?”

  Ann raised her head and glanced around. “Not right now,” she replied composedly, pointing through the dusty windscreen. “Later if you like . . . But what about that?”

  Fallen from its post, a white on blue sign lay among dry yellow grass, spattered with rust-marks as if it had been used for target practice. But the name Bolsevieto was just legible, and its arrow-shaped end pointed right.

  Annoyed at having overlooked it, Carlo spun the car’s wheels in dust as he made the turn. From the corner of his mouth he said, “What’s the time?”

  “Two hours later than it ought to be.”

  “How the hell was I to know there’d be such a jam on the autostrada? A crash like that happens only – ”

  “It would have helped if we’d got away on time! We’re only going to look my aunt’s place over and you insisted on packing enough for a month in – ”

  “Oh, shut up! At least we’re practically there.”

  “There”—Bolsevieto—was a village of a hundred or so houses, plus outlying farms, encircled by a ring of low hills. The central square, where they were to meet Signor Anzani, was easy to find, for it was the only place the road led to. There was a church, of course; there were a few trees, a few shops, and a bar ristorante outside which stood iron chairs strung with red and yellow plastic.

  And sitting on one of the chairs, looking distinctly bad-tempered, was a glum middle-aged man sweating in a black suit, with an empty glass and a briefcase on the table at his side. Parking the car, jumping out without waiting for Ann, Carlo strode over hand outstretched.

  “Signor Anzani? I’m sorry we’re late! There was a big crash on the autostrada—did you hear?”

  The lawyer hoisted himself to his feet, forcing a polite expression that didn’t really qualify as a smile.

  “Ah, what is another couple of hours when you had to miss the funeral of your wife’s aunt more than a week ago? You are Signora Bertelli?”—to Ann as she joined them. “Charming, charming!” He bent to kiss her hand. But Carlo detected a transient frown of disapproval at her too-short dress.

  There were few other people in sight: the waiter at the door of the bar; a blank-faced man of about thirty with a slack mouth and dirty clothes, possibly a village idiot—such creatures did still exist in remote areas like this—two elderly women in black who seemed to be complaining about the price of tomatoes, although their accent was so thick he couldn’t tell whether it was the cost in a shop or what they were offered for their garden produce; and, glimpsed at opening shutters, people rising from siesta.

  Those apart, there were no living creatures in view save birds, flies and a couple of large, loose-limbed black dogs that now and then yawned to display their red maws, but showed scant interest in the arrival of strangers.

  Yet he felt a sense of being under scrutiny, like an itch. As he and Ann accepted Anzani’s offer of a drink he cast his eye around the square in search of its cause. The fronts of the houses—some of them once fine, now losing plaques of stucco, the ornamentation of their porches eroded by wind and weather—offered no clue. The façade of the church, on the other hand . . .

  Yes, the church struck him as unusual, more French perhaps than Italian. It bore many carved faces, most of a style he would term demonic, up to its eaves and beyond. He turned to ask Ann’s opinion. He himself was an ordinary commercial sort of person and earned his living selling whatever might turn a profit: formerly, food and furniture, at present life insurance. Ann, though, had graduated in the history of art and currently worked for one of the most prestigious galleries in Milan. Occasionally he felt a trifle envious of her broader knowledge.

  But she was already riffling papers that the lawyer had produced from his briefcase, saying, “Carlo darling, you ought to be looking at these. You’re much more business-like than I am.”

  Sighing, Carlo complied.

  Yet there seemed to be no real need to consult him, for shorn of legal jargon her aunt’s will said what had been summarized in Anzani’s letter: she had become the owner of a run-down house, its contents, and a parcel of land. They had promptly reached an agreement to dispose of the lot, in spite of their frequent quarrelling—and why not? As the proverb put it, L’amore non e bello se non e litigiello. An occasional row lent spice to life. But it didn’t have to affect genuinely important decisions.

  He cut short the pointless conversation by suggesting that they ought to head for the house at once if they were not unduly to delay Signor Anzani. His office was not here in tiny, time-forgotten Bolsevieto, but the nearest town of any size, Matignano, eleven kilometres away.

  Glancing gloomily at his watch, the lawyer nodded agreement, drained his glass, and rose.

  So, to the second, did one of the dogs. He had been stretched out on the church steps. Now he jumped up, tail wagging, as the door swung open and a priest emerged in a black cassock and a broad-brimmed hat: a thick-set man, heavy boned, heavy jowled, clean shaven but with what Ann and Carlo had learned to call by the English name “five o’clock shadow” in preference to that absurd American term “designer stubble”.

  By now, Carlo noticed, people had begun to appear on the street again. The opening of shutters at the end of the siesta had harbingered their emergence. Unlike the incurious dogs they stared at the outsiders, making him feel like a specimen under a microscope
with a score of observers.

  Yes: definitely it would be best to sell Ann’s inheritance for whatever they could obtain. Small towns—town? Bolsevieto was at best a village!—got on his nerves.

  Hers too, he imagined.

  Elderly people, slow moving, crossed themselves on noticing the priest, who responded with a wave as, the dog at his heels, he headed towards Anzani. The two were clearly well known to one another. Each uttered a few phrases in a dialect too broad to follow. Then Anzani addressed the Bertellis in a formal tone.

  “As possible future residents of our community, you should be introduced to Father Maru.”

  Ann and Carlo exchanged glances on hearing the peculiar name, but forbore to comment. Presumably it was a local pronunciation of Mario, conceivably still influenced by the Latin Marius after all these centuries.

  Its bearer, with an expression appropriate for meeting people who had so recently lost a relative, shook their hands, regretted that they had been unable to attend their aunt’s funeral, and said he would expect them at Mass next Sunday (Fat chance! freethinker Carlo married to a freethinker growled to himself). Then he tried to present his dog, who turned out to be called Ercle. But the animal’s only response was another yawn.

  To Carlo’s surprise, and somewhat to his annoyance also, for he was anxious to avoid more delay, Ann reacted on hearing the dog’s name. “That’s unusual!” she exclaimed. “Isn’t it the Etruscan for Hercules?”