The Best new Horror 4

by Stephen Jones

  For a moment no one in the bar spoke. The line of light from the open space across the windows had already left the mirror, and was now approaching the place on the wall that meant it would soon disappear. Mike lifted the cover from one of the lamps and began trimming the wick.

  “How come you’re always fucked up when I see you?”

  “You have to ask?”

  He smiled. He looked very different from when I had seen him preparing to give a sales pitch to Senator Burrman at Camp White Star. His body had thickened and hardened, and his eyes had retreated far back into his head. He seemed to me to have moved a long step nearer the goal I had always seen in him than when he had given me the zealot’s word about stopping the spread of Communism. This man had taken in more of the war, and that much more of the war was inside him now.

  “I got you off graves registration at White Star, didn’t I?”

  I agreed that he had.

  “What did you call it, the body squad? It wasn’t even a real graves registration unit, was it?” He smiled and shook his head. “I took care of your Captain McCue, too—he was using it as a kind of dumping ground. I don’t know how he got away with it as long as he did. The only one with any training was that sergeant, what’s his name. Italian.”

  “DeMaestro.”

  Ransom nodded. “The whole operation was going off the rails.” Mike lit a big kitchen match and touched it to the wick of the kerosene lamp. “I heard some things –” He slumped against the wall and swallowed whiskey. I wondered if he had heard about Captain Havens. He closed his eyes. “Some crazy stuff went on back there.”

  I asked if he was still stationed in the highlands up around the Laotian border. He almost sighed when he shook his head.

  “You’re not with the tribesmen anymore? What were they, Khatu?”

  He opened his eyes. “You have a good memory. No, I’m not there anymore.” He considered saying more, but decided not to. He had failed himself. “I’m kind of on hold until they send me up around Khe Sahn. It’ll be better up there—the Bru are tremendous. But right now, all I want to do is take a bath and get into bed. Any bed. Actually, I’d settle for a dry level place on the ground.”

  “Where did you come from now?”

  “Incountry.” His face creased and he showed his teeth. The effect was so unsettling that I did not immediately realize that he was smiling. “Way incountry. We had to get the Major out.”

  “Looks more like you had to pull him out, like a tooth.”

  My ignorance made him sit up straight. “You mean you never heard of him? Franklin Bachelor?”

  And then I thought I had, that someone had mentioned him to me a long time ago.

  “In the bush for years. Bachelor did stuff that ordinary people don’t even dream of—he’s a legend.”

  A legend, I thought. Like the Green Berets Ransom had mentioned a lifetime ago at White Star.

  “Ran what amounted to a private army, did a lot of good work in Darlac Province. He was out there on his own. The man was a hero. That’s straight. Bachelor got to places we couldn’t even get close to—he got inside an NVA encampment, you hear me, inside the encampment and silently killed about an entire division.”

  Of all the people in the world at this minute, I remembered, the only ones he did not detest were already dead. I thought I must have heard it wrong.

  “He was absorbed right into Rhade life,” Ransom said. I could hear the awe in his voice. “The man even got married. Rhade ceremony. His wife went with him on missions. I hear she was beautiful.”

  Then I knew where I had heard of Franklin Bachelor before. He had been a captain when Ratman and his platoon had run into him after a private named Bobby Swett had been blown to pieces on a trail in Darlac Province. Ratman had thought his wife was a black-haired angel.

  And then I knew whose skull lay wound in rope in the back seat of the jeep.

  “I did hear of him,” I said. “I knew someone who met him. The Rhade woman, too.”

  “His wife,” Ransom said.

  I asked him where they were taking Bachelor.

  “We’re stopping overnight at Crandall for some rest. Then we hop to Tan Son Nhut and bring him back to the States—Langley. I thought we might have to strap him down, but I guess we’ll just keep pouring whiskey into him.”

  “He’s going to want his gun back.”

  “Maybe I’ll give it to him.” His look told me what he thought Major Bachelor would do with his .45, if he was left alone with it long enough. “He’s in for a rough time at Langley. There’ll be some heat.”

  “Why Langley?”

  “Don’t ask. But don’t be naïve, either. Don’t you think they’re . . .” He would not finish that sentence. “Why do you think we had to bring him out in the first place?”

  “Because something went wrong.”

  “Oh, everything went wrong. Bachelor went totally out of control. He had his own war. Ran a lot of sidelines, some of which were supposed to be under shall we say tighter controls?”

  He had lost me.

  “Ventures into Laos. Business trips to Cambodia. Sometimes he wound up in control of airfields Air America was using, and that meant he was in control of the cargo.”

  When I shook my head, he said, “Don’t you have a little something in your pocket? A little package?”

  A secret world—inside this world, another, secret world.

  “You understand, I don’t care what he did any more than I care about what you do. I think Langley can go fuck itself. Bachelor wrote the book. In spite of his sidelines. In spite of whatever trouble he got into. The man was effective. He stepped over a boundary, maybe a lot of boundaries—but tell me that you can do what we’re supposed to do without stepping over boundaries.”

  I wondered why he seemed to be defending himself, and asked if he would have to testify at Langley.

  “It’s not a trial.”

  “A debriefing.”

  “Sure, a debriefing. They can ask me anything they want. All I can tell them is what I saw. That’s my evidence, right? What I saw? They don’t have any evidence, except maybe this, uh, these human remains the Major insisted on bringing out.”

  For a second, I wished that I could see the sober shadowy gentlemen of Langley, Virginia, the gentlemen with slicked-back hair and pinstriped suits, question Major Bachelor. They thought they were serious men.

  “It was like Bong To, in a funny way.” Ransom waited for me to ask. When I did not, he said, “A ghost town, I mean. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of Bong To.”

  “My unit was just there.” His head jerked up. “A mortar round scared us into the village.”

  “You saw the place?”

  I nodded.

  “Funny story.” Now he was sorry he had ever mentioned it. “Well, think about Bachelor, now. I think he must have been in Cambodia or someplace, doing what he does, when his village was overrun. He comes back and finds everybody dead, his wife included. I mean, I don’t think Bachelor killed those people—they weren’t just dead, they’d been made to beg for it. So Bachelor wasn’t there, and his assistant, a Captain Bennington, must have just run off—we never did find him. Officially, Bennington’s MIA. It’s simple. You can’t find the main guy, so you make sure he can see how mad you are when he gets back. You do a little grievous bodily harm on his people. They were not nice to his wife, Tim, to her they were especially not nice. What does he do? He buries all the bodies in the village graveyard, because that’s a sacred responsibility. Don’t ask me what else he does, because you don’t have to know this, okay? But the bodies are buried. Generally speaking. Captain Bennington never does show up. We arrive and take Bachelor away. But sooner or later, some of the people who escaped are going to come back to that village. They’re going to go on living there. The worst thing in the world happened to them in that place, but they won’t leave. Eventually, other people in their family will join them, if they’re still alive, and the terrible thing will be a part
of their lives. Because it is not thinkable to leave your dead.”

  “But they did in Bong To,” I said.

  “In Bong To, they did.”

  I saw the look of regret on his face again, and said that I wasn’t asking him to tell me any secrets.

  “It’s not a secret. It’s not even military.”

  “It’s just a ghost town.”

  Ransom was still uncomfortable. He turned his glass around and around in his hands before he drank. “I have to get the Major into camp.”

  “It’s a real ghost town,” I said. “Complete with ghosts.”

  “I honestly wouldn’t be surprised.” He drank what was left in his glass and stood up. He had decided not to say any more about it. “Let’s take care of Major Bachelor, Bob,” he said.

  “Right.”

  Ransom carried our bottle to the bar and paid Mike. I stepped toward him to do the same, and Ransom said, “Taken care of.”

  There was that phrase again—it seemed I had been hearing it all day, and that its meaning would not stay still.

  Ransom and Bob picked up the Major between them. They were strong enough to lift him easily. Bachelor’s greasy head rolled forward. Bob put the .45 into his pocket, and Ransom put the bottle into his own pocket. Together they carried the Major to the door.

  I followed them outside. Artillery pounded hills a long way off. It was dark now, and light from the lanterns spilled out through the gaps in the windows.

  All of us went down the rotting steps, the Major bobbing between the other two.

  Ransom opened the jeep, and they took a while to maneuver the Major into the back seat. Bob squeezed in beside him and pulled him upright.

  John Ransom got in behind the wheel and sighed. He had no taste for the next part of his job.

  “I’ll give you a ride back to camp,” he said. “We don’t want an MP to get a close look at you.”

  I took the seat beside him. Ransom started the engine and turned on the lights. He jerked the gearshift into reverse and rolled backwards. “You know why that mortar round came in, don’t you?” he asked me. He grinned at me, and we bounced onto the road back to the main part of camp. “He was trying to chase you away from Bong To, and your fool of a Lieutenant went straight for the place instead.” He was still grinning. “It must have steamed him, seeing a bunch of round-eyes going in there.”

  “He didn’t send in any more fire.”

  “No. He didn’t want to damage the place. It’s supposed to stay the way it is. I don’t think they’d use the word, but that village is supposed to be like a kind of monument.” He glanced at me again. “To shame.”

  For some reason, all I could think of was the drunken Major in the seat behind me, who had said that you were responsible for the people you wanted to protect. Ransom said, “Did you go into any of the huts? Did you see anything unusual there?”

  “I went into a hut. I saw something unusual.”

  “A list of names?”

  “I thought that’s what they were.”

  “Okay,” Ransom said. “You know a little Vietnamese?”

  “A little.”

  “You notice anything about those names?”

  I could not remember. My Vietnamese had been picked up in bars and markets, and was almost completely oral.

  “Four of them were from a family named Trang. Trang was the village chief, like his father before him, and his grandfather before him. Trang had four daughters. As each one got to the age of six or seven, he took them down into that underground room and chained them to the posts and raped them. A lot of those huts have hidden storage areas, but Trang must have modified his after his first daughter was born. The funny thing is, I think everybody in the village knew what he was doing. I’m not saying they thought it was okay, but they let it happen. They could pretend they didn’t know: the girls never complained, and nobody ever heard any screams. I guess Trang was a good-enough chief. When the daughters got to sixteen, they left for the cities. Sent back money, too. So maybe they thought it was okay, but I don’t think they did, myself, do you?”

  “How would I know? But there’s a man in my platoon, a guy from – ”

  “I think there’s a difference between private and public shame. Between what’s acknowledged and what is not acknowledged. That’s what Bachelor has to cope with, when he gets to Langley. Some things are acceptable, as long as you don’t talk about them.” He looked sideways at me as we began to approach the northern end of the camp proper. He wiped his face, and flakes of dried mud fell off his cheek. The exposed skin looked red, and so did his eyes. “Because the way I see it, this is a whole general issue. The issue is: what is expressible? This goes way beyond the tendency of people to tolerate thoughts, actions, or behavior they would otherwise find unacceptable.”

  I had never heard a soldier speak this way before. It was a little bit like being back in Berkeley.

  “I’m talking about the difference between what is expressed and what is described,” Ransom said. “A lot of experience is unacknowledged. Religion lets us handle some of the unacknowledged stuff in an acceptable way. But suppose—just suppose—that you were forced to confront extreme experience directly, without any mediation?”

  “I have,” I said. “You have, too.”

  “More extreme than combat, more extreme than terror. Something like that happened to the Major: he encountered God. Demands were made upon him. He had to move out of the ordinary, even as he defined it.”

  Ransom was telling me how Major Bachelor had wound up being brought to Camp Crandall with his wife’s skull, but none of it was clear to me.

  “I’ve been learning things,” Ransom told me. He was almost whispering. “Think about what would make all the people of a village pick up and leave, when sacred obligation ties them to that village.”

  “I don’t know the answer,” I said.

  “An even more sacred obligation, created by a really spectacular sense of shame. When a crime is too great to live with, the memory of it becomes sacred. Becomes the crime itself – ”

  I remembered thinking that the arrangement in the hut’s basement had been a shrine to an obscene deity.

  “Here we have this village and its chief. The village knows but does not know what the chief has been doing. They are used to consulting and obeying him. Then—one day, a little boy disappears.”

  My heart gave a thud.

  “A little boy. Say: three. Old enough to talk and get into trouble, but too young to take care of himself. He’s just gone—poof. Well, this is Vietnam, right? You turn your back, your kid wanders away, some animal gets him. He could get lost in the jungle and wander into a claymore. Someone like you might even shoot him. He could fall into a boobytrap and never be seen again. It could happen.

  “A couple of months later, it happens again. Mom turns her back, where the hell did Junior go? This time they really look, not just Mom and Grandma, all their friends. They scour the village. The villagers scour the village, every square foot of that place, and then they do the same to the rice paddy, and then they look through the forest.

  “And guess what happens next. This is the interesting part. An old woman goes out one morning to fetch water from the well, and she sees a ghost. This old lady is part of the extended family of the first lost kid, but the ghost she sees isn’t the kid’s—it’s the ghost of a disreputable old man from another village, a drunkard, in fact. A local no-good, in fact. He’s just standing near the well with his hands together, he’s hungry—that’s what these people know about ghosts. The skinny old bastard wants more. He wants to be fed. The old lady gives a squawk and passes out. When she comes to again, the ghost is gone.

  “Well, the old lady tells everybody what she saw, and the whole village gets in a panic. Evil forces have been set loose. Next thing you know, two thirteen-year-old girls are working in the paddy, they look up and see an old woman who died when they were ten—she’s about six feet away from them. Her hair is stringy and grey
and her fingernails are about a foot long. She used to be a friendly old lady, but she doesn’t look too friendly now. She’s hungry too, like all ghosts. They start screaming and crying, but no one else can see her, and she comes closer and closer, and they try to get away but one of them falls down, and the old woman is on her like a cat. And do you know what she does? She rubs her filthy hands over the screaming girl’s face, and licks the tears and slobber off her fingers.

  “The next night, another little boy disappears. Two men go looking around the village latrine behind the houses, and they see two ghosts down in the pit, shoving excrement into their mouths. They rush back into the village, and then they both see half a dozen ghosts around the chief’s hut. Among them are a sister who died during the war with the French and a twenty-year-old first wife who died of dengue fever. They want to eat. One of the men screeches, because not only did he see his dead wife, who looks something like what we could call a vampire, he saw her pass into the chief’s hut without the benefit of the door.

  “These people believe in ghosts, Underhill, they know ghosts exist, but it is extremely rare for them to see these ghosts. And these people are like psychoanalysts, because they do not believe in accidents. Every event contains meaning.

  “The dead twenty-year-old wife comes back out through the wall of the chief’s hut. Her hands are empty but dripping with red, and she is licking them like a starving cat.

  “The former husband stands there pointing and jabbering, and the mothers and grandmothers of the missing boys come out of their huts. They are as afraid of what they’re thinking as they are of all the ghosts moving around them. The ghosts are part of what they know they know, even though most of them have never seen one until now. What is going through their minds is something new: new because it was hidden.

  “The mothers and grandmothers go to the chief’s door and begin howling like dogs. When the chief comes out, they push past him and they take the hut apart. And you know what they find. They found the end of Bong To.”