The Best new Horror 4

by Stephen Jones

  Helicopters flutter overhead. Their searchlights bite holes in the darkness. At Houston you find a market that is still open, buy a carton of beer, and head back to the apartment.

  “Do you love her?” your mother had asked that first, and last, time the two of you visited. You didn’t know what to say. Of course you loved her. You had married her hadn’t you?

  You thought you would faint when you came home that night, in those long lost moments of shadow and flame. Miranda had been beautiful. That was the way you wanted to remember her. Like in the photographs her parents had sent, now on the mantle of the apartment, taken when she was younger than you had ever known her.

  You could have given her life eternal through the lens of your camera. Video. Film. Pictures. You could have loved her forever. How could you explain the feeling of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of the world, of watching the world as if it existed only when recorded and replayed on tape, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. You always believed that other people could see more directly, could actually see and understand the world through their own eyes, and didn’t worry quite so much about why. You could see it only through a lens, through what you could record and edit and assemble into a tangible, meaningful whole, locked safely and securely within the four walls of a picture. Then, and only then, could you see and understand . . . and yes, love.

  You drink more than one beer on your trek back to the apartment, and once there you drink more than one more. You slip another video into the deck. Deodato again. Camping del terrore, although for once you prefer the English title: Body Count. More beer and another video, and then another and another, and after a time the images blur and bleed into a single color.

  Sooner or later the telephone rings. It is time.

  GONE

  The barricades are back up at the major intersections, and the city has become very small. Your head is hollow, cracked and scooped out like an oyster on the half shell. You followed the flicker of red video across the television screen in pursuit of some kind of answer. Then the tapes ran out; as you watched the last line of credits, superimposed on a staggering horde of zombies as they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, you suddenly saw yourself in hideous closeup, gapemouthed in worship before a forty-inch altar of flickering light.

  You caught the telephone on the second ring. Through the noise and a distant sound that sooner or later you realized was gunfire, you heard that it was Jay, that he wanted you to meet him at Patchin Place. This is not a test. Your presence, and your videocamera, are required. You told him you’d be there in minutes, and now you’re there, camera in hand, and you can feel it about to happen.

  The alleyway is awash in the yellow spray of flares and flashlights. Elaine stands in the shadows, her pistol pointed into the night sky; at her side is some black guy with a shotgun. Jay is watchful; waiting, waiting. Finally he looks at you.

  “Do it,” he says, and then gestures grandly to the others. “Lights.” Shadows twist over a gas generator; a ratcheting, a cough, and a spray of white cuts the alley into an urban dreamscape, the stuff of Lang and Reed.

  “Something’s happening, uptown and down . . .” He wears a joker’s grin, a shotgun in his black-gloved hand. “Could be Black Wednesday all over again.” You hear a shout, footsteps racing on wet concrete. He shrugs and nods into the darkness. “Someone has to shoot the picture.” His hand busses your shoulder. “So do it,” he says again. “Sound,” he announces; and, as he walks away, “Speed.” Then you’re alone, with your finger on the trigger.

  Through the viewfinder you see the world, your world, the world made flesh on the grey-silver screen. Mad shadows chase one of Jay’s nerdy protégés into view, and he dances before you, arms in flight, and mugs breathlessly for the camera. Finally he leans in at you and cries: “They’re heeeeer!”

  Then he is gone, and your world is the world of the dead. The first one is an oldtimer, workshirt and spotted trousers, shuffling around the corner in vague pursuit. The left side of his face is gone; eaten. You can see the teeth marks as you smashzoom in on him. From somewhere to your left comes the bullroar of the black guy’s shotgun. The top of the oldtimer’s head lifts away. You watch him fall and see your take replayed endlessly on the monitors of an editing bay. Perfect. Picture perfect. He collapses to the sidewalk in an unceremonious and uncinematic heap.

  You slide the camera over the corpse and up the wall, where the shadow of the next one spiderwebs nicely into p.o.v. “Got him,” you hear Elaine call. This one is a kid, your random Puerto Rican street punk, and he looks fairly fresh. You hit him with a medium closeup just in time to catch the jagged line of bulletholes that Elaine punches into his chest. Craters erupt—grey skin, blood and squirming maggots—and you zoom into one then out just in time to catch the headshot as the black guy steps in stage right, swings his shotgun up and lets both barrels go. The body cartwheels back, out of the light, and you’ve lost it to the black beyond.

  “Take . . . it . . . easy.” Jay sounds anxious and upset. “Not . . . so . . . fast.” But there are sirens in the distance and the sound, you think, of radios and marching feet. White noise and distant voices. Order is about to be restored. You don’t have much time.

  You peek over the viewfinder and there is another shadow climbing the wall. Elaine is twisting a speedloader from her belt. Shell casings ping-pong down the alley. You look in again and see shadow turn to skin. It’s a woman. Tall. Long blond hair. Pale skin. As you squint and let the focus go, ready for a soft fade-in, you hear her footsteps stumble forward. Your finger finds the autofocus as you let the lens sweep the pavement slowly to her feet. Black Keds. Then up. Bleached jeans. Slowly. White blouse, half-unbuttoned, a tiny pearl necklace at her throat, and pale, pale skin. Slowly up to her face. Her beautiful face. A small clicking sound is coming from your throat. The picture shivers once, twice, then dims. Finally you hear your voice: “Mir-an-da!”

  You pull the shot away from her and left. Elaine kneels, stiffarms the handgun. You hear sounds like belches and swing your eyes, the camera, back. Miranda’s left forearm angles impossibly, then breaks, strands of flesh stretching, then snapping, hand clutching at empty air as it spins and floats away. You see the shot in slow motion, a mad Peckinpah pirouette, suddenly shattered in midturn as the force of a shotgun blast kicks out her legs. You fall to your knees with her, losing your balance, nearly dropping the camera; still you hold onto the shot. You have her now. She can’t escape you. You feel the urge for a closeup, but you cannot risk moving from the medium shot as Miranda rears back into frame. Another roar, and the top of her right shoulder explodes. A great brown geyser of blood erupts, grey flesh and bone graffiti the alley wall.

  Somehow she stands, keeps walking. Her head jerks to the right as the black guy chunks in another round; the shotgun kicks again, a miss that showers a grey snow of brick and dust. You swing the camera down then up from her bulletblown knees in time to catch Elaine’s next volley, three shots that spit through Miranda’s chest and neck and crease her cheek. Her mouth opens wide in response. You don’t know if it is a laugh or a scream.

  Still she is coming, past the black guy, past Elaine, who looks at you with angry fear. They can’t fire now, not back at you and Jay and the rest of the crew. Your shot is steady, sure, a reverse zoom that frames her just so, the alley seeming to widen behind her as she approaches. Now your back is against the wall and the lens is open wide; she walks on and gives you your closeup. She is yours, all yours.

  A flash of movement cuts the picture; the camera is nearly lost from your arms as she skitters backward. Then you see the muzzle and hardwood butt of the shotgun, and Jay’s gloved right hand as he hits her again, and you hold the shot as she falls and you’re down on the ground with her, the camera looking up across her body into a night sky punctured by distant stars. You can see her tongue through the open left side of her face. One of her eyes is blinking out of control; the other one is gone. You know she has never been more
beautiful than now. She is yours, and will be yours forever.

  You watch as Jay joins you at her side. He lowers the shotgun; the barrel slides along her stomach, her chest, her neck, to the tip of her chin. Finally its hot and smoking mouth kisses hers. And as you hold her in lingering close-up, he shoves the barrel down. You hear the crack of teeth and bone and then the shotgun kicks and there is a shriek and you are caught in a warm wet rain that washes over the lens until you can see nothing, nothing, nothing at all but red.

  You hear laughter and you know that it is your own. You can no longer see, but you can run, and you drop the camera, hear the shatter of glass and plastic, the whir of the eject as you grab at the tape and you run, you run and run into the darkness, into the night until at last you can see a distant light, and you run in its direction. You hold on to your tape and run.

  Finally you see the sanitation trucks lined before you on this side of Union Square. You watch as body bags are carried out by men in gasmasks and white camouflaged parkas, and dumped onto the fire, sending smoke, and the smell, over you. No matter how far you run, the smell will follow you. It recalls you to another morning. You arrived home from the magazine after drinking most of the night; Miranda had called just before midnight, wondering where you were. When you arrived, the apartment was steeped in this same aroma. The soldiers stood warming themselves around the flames. Miranda was gone. You could count the bullet holes across the lobby, the stairway, and the walls of the apartment itself; you could count the bodies sprawled in the streets, fuel for the flames. You had seen it all before; you had seen it all, but you had never believed in it. It wasn’t real; it could never be real. But it was. The films, the videos, were just the coming attractions, a sneak preview of the epic now playing around the clock in the world outside.

  You approach the last of the trucks. A sanitation worker hefts another body bag from its wide belly, drops the heavy plastic cocoon unceremoniously to the pavement.

  “Dead.” This is what you say to him, although you meant to say something more.

  “What was your first clue?” He turns and walks toward the Square. The fire rages high, a false dawn. The workers, and the soldiers who guard them, look at the flames, and not at you.

  You get down on your knees and tear open the body bag. The smell of the corpse envelops you. When you touch it your hands find something soft and wet. The first bite sticks in your throat and when you try to swallow, you almost gag.

  You will have to go very slowly.

  You will have to forget most everything you have ever learned.

  for Steve Bissette

  PETER STRAUB

  The Ghost Village

  PETER STRAUB is one of America’s most respected authors. He was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and was a teacher before his first novel, Marriages, was published in 1973.

  Since then he has published a number of acclaimed books, including Under Venus, Julia (filmed as Full Circle/The Haunting of Julia), If You Could See Me Now, Ghost Story (filmed with an all-star cast), Shadowland, Floating Dragon (currently being developed for TV), The Talisman (a collaboration with Stephen King), Koko, Mystery, Mrs God and The Throat.

  A winner of both the British Fantasy Award and the World Fantasy Award, Straub has published two books of poetry, Open Air and Leeson Park & Belsize Square, and some of his best short fiction is collected in Houses Without Doors.

  “ ‘The Ghost Village’ is an early version of a section of The Throat,” explains the author, “and a condensed and altered form of the story still exists in that novel.”

  We are proud to present a powerful novella of ancient myth and modern hauntings by one of the genre’s finest craftsmen . . .

  IN VIETNAM I KNEW A MAN Who went quietly and purposefully crazy because his wife wrote him that his son had been sexually abused—“messed with”—by the leader of their church choir. This man was a black six-foot-six grunt named Leonard Hamnet, from a small town in Tennessee named Archibald. Before writing, his wife had waited until she had endured the entire business of going to the police, talking to other parents, returning to the police with another accusation, and finally succeeding in having the man charged. He was up for trial in two months. Leonard Hamnet was no happier about that than he was about the original injury.

  “I got to murder him, you know, but I’m seriously thinking on murdering her too,” he said. He still held the letter in his hands, and he was speaking to Spanky Burrage, Michael Poole, Conor Linklater, SP4 Cotton, Calvin Hill, Tina Pumo, the magnificent M. O. Dengler, and myself. “All this is going on, my boy needs help, this here Mr Brewster needs to be dismantled, needs to be racked and stacked, and she don’t tell me! Makes me want to put her down, man. Take her damn head off and put it up on a stake in the yard, man. With a sign saying: Here is one stupid woman.”

  We were in the unofficial part of Camp Crandall known as No Man’s Land, located between the wire perimeter and a shack, also unofficial, where a cunning little weasel named Wilson Manly sold contraband beer and liquor. No Man’s Land, so called because the C.O. pretended it did not exist, contained a mound of old tires, a pisstube, and a lot of dusty red ground. Leonard Hamnet gave the letter in his hand a dispirited look, folded it into the pocket of his fatigues, and began to roam around the heap of tires, aiming kicks at the ones that stuck out furthest. “One stupid woman,” he repeated. Dust exploded up from a burst, worn-down wheel of rubber.

  I wanted to make sure Hamnet knew he was angry with Mr Brewster, not his wife, and said, “She was trying – ”

  Hamnet’s great glistening bull’s head turned toward me.

  “Look at what the woman did. She nailed that bastard. She got other people to admit that he messed with their kids too. That must be almost impossible. And she had the guy arrested. He’s going to be put away for a long time.”

  “I’ll put that bitch away, too,” Hamnet said, and kicked an old grey tire hard enough to push it nearly a foot back into the heap. All the other tires shuddered and moved. For a second it seemed that the entire mound might collapse.

  “This is my boy I’m talking about here,” Hamnet said. “This shit has gone far enough.”

  “The important thing,” Dengler said, “is to take care of your boy. You have to see he gets help.”

  “How’m I gonna do that from here?” Hamnet shouted.

  “Write him a letter,” Dengler said. “Tell him you love him. Tell him he did right to go to his mother. Tell him you think about him all the time.”

  Hamnet took the letter from his pocket and stared at it. It was already stained and wrinkled. I did not think it could survive many more of Hamnet’s readings. His face seemed to get heavier, no easy trick with a face like Hamnet’s. “I got to get home,” he said. “I got to get back home and take care of these people.”

  Hamnet began putting in requests for compassionate leave relentlessly—one request a day. When we were out on patrol, sometimes I saw him unfold the tattered sheet of notepaper from his shirt pocket and read it two or three times, concentrating intensely. When the letter began to shred along the folds, Hamnet taped it together.

  We were going out on four- and five-day patrols during that period, taking a lot of casualties. Hamnet performed well in the field, but he had retreated so far within himself that he spoke in monosyllables. He wore a dull, glazed look, and moved like a man who had just eaten a heavy dinner. I thought he looked like he had given up, and when people gave up they did not last long—they were already very close to death, and other people avoided them.

  We were camped in a stand of trees at the edge of a paddy. That day we had lost two men so new that I had already forgotten their names. We had to eat cold C rations because heating them with C-4 it would have been like putting up billboards and arc lights. We couldn’t smoke, and we were not supposed to talk. Hamnet’s C rations consisted of an old can of Spam that dated from an earlier war and a can of peaches. He saw Spanky staring at the peaches and tossed him the can. Then he droppe
d the Spam between his legs. Death was almost visible around him. He fingered the note out of his pocket and tried to read it in the damp grey twilight.

  At that moment someone started shooting at us, and the Lieutenant yelled “Shit!”, and we dropped our food and returned fire at the invisible people trying to kill us. When they kept shooting back, we had to go through the paddy.

  The warm water came up to our chests. At the dikes, we scrambled over and splashed down into the muck on the other side. A boy from Santa Cruz, California, named Thomas Blevins got a round in the back of his neck and dropped dead into the water just short of the first dike, and another boy named Tyrell Budd coughed and dropped down right beside him. The F.O. called in an artillery strike. We leaned against the backs of the last two dikes when the big shells came thudding in. The ground shook and the water rippled, and the edge of the forest went up in a series of fireballs. We could hear the monkeys screaming.

  One by one we crawled over the last dike onto the damp but solid ground on the other side of the paddy. Here the trees were much sparser, and a little group of thatched huts was visible through them.

  Then two things I did not understand happened, one after the other. Someone off in the forest fired a mortar round at us—just one. One mortar, one round. That was the first thing. I fell down and shoved my face in the muck, and everybody around me did the same. I considered that this might be my last second on earth, and greedily inhaled whatever life might be left to me. Whoever fired the mortar should have had an excellent idea of our location, and I experienced that endless moment of pure, terrifying helplessness—a moment in which the soul simultaneously clings to the body and readies itself to let go of it—until the shell landed on top of the last dike and blew it to bits. Dirt, mud, and water slopped down around us, and shell fragments whizzed through the air. One of the fragments sailed over us, sliced a hamburger-sized wad of bark and wood from a tree, and clanged into Spanky Burrage’s helmet with a sound like a brick hitting a garbage can. The fragment fell to the ground, and a little smoke drifted up from it.