The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  I cursed myself for being a prize chump, for I had lost the map earlier; I did not think it mattered since I was so familiar with this territory, or so I thought in my usual pig-headed fashion.

  The girl, seen up close, was decidedly attractive. Her face was very young, but the curves of her body gave a clue to her real age.

  She pointed to my personal stereo. “Can I try it on?”

  I adjusted the telescopic arch of the headset and positioned it carefully over her cropped brown hair. I felt a warm tingle in my hands as I fitted the cans upon her small ears. Listening to the faint distant tinkle, I could still just about follow the familiar music myself. Her face had filled with delight at the first surge of stereophonic sound.

  I smiled as I looked down the river. Uncanny, even without the headphones: I was still unable to hear it flowing, as if it were behind glass. Broken shards of the sun shone off its careering waters.

  Turning back to the girl, I had a sudden impulse to place my arm around her shoulders. Much as a father might ... but I was not her father nor was she my daughter.

  She had in fact begun to lean upon me, nodding her head gently to “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds,” and quietly singing along.

  Her gray dress was partially buttoned down the front, exposing small swelling patches of flesh. Could she really be from the hostel, as I had automatically assumed?

  I looked back at the rucksack where I had left it, beginning to steam in the growing heat of the morning sun. The umbrella, leaning against it, was opening gradually on its own accord, like a fast-motion flower. No, I looked again—it was my fancy playing tricks or the umbrella’s springloading was working loose, after being dropped.

  She abruptly jumped down from the rock, pulling me with her by the hand.

  “Follow me, I want to show this to my family,” she said, pointing to the throbbing cassette player which she held tightly against her breasts.

  She took off more like an animal, the obvious inner strength of her limbs belying their slender shapeliness. I admired the backs of her knees ... and the fine fuzzhair accentuated, rather than softened, the long new-moons of her calves.

  I realized there could not be any underwear within the skimpy gray dress, for no telltale lines marred the incipient cut and thrust of her buttocks. I could not help recalling in a new light how the dress had ridden to her upper thighs, whilst she was sitting on the rock. I followed, even in spite of myself, more to retrieve my expensive headset than to pursue a vision of delight, who should be beneath the concerns of a man of my years. Or that was what I told myself at the time.

  The woods that bearded the lower reaches of the valley were deceptive in their extent. Once through a seemingly slight outcrop of some trees which I could not recognize (their branches having thicker foliage than the lower ones intertwining in an apparent conspiracy to hide the sky), the two of us came into a large clearing unseen from my previous vantage point by the rock. Scattered over what was little better than colorless scrubland was a commune of wooden sheds, some leaning against each other in mutual support. Young men and women, also in gray dresses, like my guide, were waving.

  The girl tugged me by the hand toward one particular older man who stood in the middle, hands on his hips, arms splayed at odd angles, like a kite ready for flight.

  “Listen to the sounds that Steve has brought us,” said the girl excitedly.

  Wondering what the hell I had gotten into, I recalled that there was no way she could have known my name, other than by a wild guess.

  I decided to take the initiative.

  “Excuse me, I don’t know your names or who you people are ... or come to that, where I am ...”

  “Our names are forgotten,” interrupted the man I took to be the girl’s father, using the same strange lilt in his voice. He refused to try on the headset, and the girl took it back, as she was led away by a surly-looking individual who delivered her into the hands of the other females.

  “Can you show me the way back to my rucksack and umbrella?”

  Nobody moved. The father, after a while, pointed to the edge of the clearing whence I had originally appeared to them with the girl, and I could just make out a moving shape, human in its form, but weirdly treelike in its coloring. The face appeared to have on a cheap party mask, since it was painted a bright green and pig-snouted, its overlarge brown eyes with very little white, and fangs like large splinters of wood. I could discern a red tongue flickering from between the fenced lips. Its dress was an aged deeply wrinkled trunk, moving swiftly like a snake on end.

  “Get the goads!” shouted the father.

  I was frozen to the spot, not through fright so much, but by the anger at suddenly realizing that the creature was dragging my opened umbrella behind it over the tussocks and thus damaging it beyond repair.

  The gray people had by now gathered several long rods, thicker than the fishing variety, but just as bendy. I was handed one and encouraged to help the group in cornering the creature between two conjoining shed walls—which, to me, looked so ill-constructed that it would only take a light touch to topple. However, the silent creature, evidently smiling—though it was difficult to tell whether it was indeed a smile or a grimace—stood its ground, accepting that it was trapped. The father started prodding its chest with the “goad” and black sap oozed from the rupture. We all had a go, me included, for I had not forgiven it for the umbrella (its shattered skeleton now lying by the creature’s feet, shreds of material still clinging to the ribs).

  The creature’s carcass eventually became little better than that umbrella, its life force mercifully long departed—mercifully, because I could not accuse myself of acting cruelly in continuing to pierce the sides of something that was already dead.

  Toward the end of our bloodthirsty ruck, I turned to see the girl who had led me here, heaving with tears, the upper part of her dress now sodden and doing little to hide the pert, lightly-nippled breasts. The shattered cassette player was in her hands, the headphones still resting from ear to ear, its sound pads yellowed over with some sort of earwax.

  I could not believe my eyes. Could any of this have happened? Why had I taken it all as a matter of course? The girl’s eyes indeed told me that the creature I had helped flay to death had only brought me my umbrella in its own clumsy fashion because it thought I had forgotten I left it behind.

  She must have listened right to the end of Sergeant Pepper for, as she handed back the case (but at the same time keeping on the earphones as a sort of ornamental souvenir), I could see that the tape had certainly run to the end.

  This was a day in the life, and more! Grabbing the wreck of the brolly as an insane keepsake, I took to my heels, with the whirring, whirling crescendo of nightmare in my ears, fleeing, as I now understood, from a people more monstrous than the monsters they feared. Except, of course, the sweet girl who knew not who she really was and would figure no doubt in all my erotic dreams for ever and ever.

  And dreams would certainly be very wet, when all I’d have was that brolly to guard me against the drenching nights. My mother’d turn in her grave with worry, I thought, as I entered the trees which rustled behind me, camouflaging my escape.

  It was twenty years ago today.

  TRACKS by Nicholas Royle

  Do you love me?”

  “Of course I love you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  I used to torment Melanie like this a lot, unintentionally, constantly asking the same questions when the answer should have been abundantly clear: of course she loved me. She told me sometimes how irritating it was and in exasperation asked: “What do I have to do to convince you I love you?”

  “Nothing,” I’d say. “Just keep on loving me.”

  She’d reply: “But if you constantly doubt me, I feel undermined. It’s tiring.” An edge would have crept into her voice and I’d feel compelled to ask again: “Do you love me?”

  Egerton spoke: “That company
in Birmingham have paid, Alex.” He flashed me a proud smile as he passed on this information. Egerton was responsible for chasing up bad debts. “That means you can go ahead and process their festival entry. The check arrived in the lunchtime delivery.”

  I couldn’t care less about the Birmingham company paying up—I’d already processed their festival entry in the knowledge that I could delete it in one keystroke if they failed to pay—but Egerton’s interruption reminded me of what had happened before I left home for work that morning.

  Melanie lived in the Midlands, which accounted in part for my insecurity in our relationship: I lived in London and missed her during the week when we were not together. We wrote letters so I was always eager for the sound of the postman in the mornings. He often came when I was in the bath, gaining entry from the street by pressing the service bell, then climbing the stairs to deliver letters to the individual flats. I waited for the rattle of the letter box.

  It had become one of my favorite sounds, and I invariably jumped out of the bath to see what the postman had brought, then got straight back in. Bills I dropped unopened on the bathroom floor where they generally stayed for at least a week. Circulars and marketing scams from Reader’s Digest went straight behind the laundry basket and only when the basket started to walk did I take them and put them in the rubbish. If there was a letter from Melanie, I would open it and read it in the bath, sinking down in the bubbles and steam, always a sensuous experience, to be enjoyed to the full, even if it meant being late for work.

  She wrote long, involved letters. They all said how much she loved me, but I still found it hard to believe anyone could love me as much as she claimed to. Does she love me? I used to ask the inflatable frog soapdish. Does she really love me?

  The letter box rattled and I jumped up, quickly drying my feet before stepping out onto the bathmat. It was only three steps out of the bathroom and into the hall to reach the front door.

  There was nothing lying on the Oh-No-Not-You-Again doormat. I lifted my leather jacket which hung on a hook on the back of the door, but there was nothing sticking out of the letter box. I unlocked the door and opened it a crack, the cold draft reminding me I was naked and wet. The postman sometimes left larger items outside in the hallway but there was nothing there today. Puzzled, I closed the door. I had heard the flap bang shut. It was an unmistakable sound. I bent down and opened the flap again, peering inside, even pushing open the exterior flap with my dripping fingers. Not a thing.

  I lifted the doormat. On the carpet underneath the mat were just the familiar brown stains left by the stenciled words.

  Nothing.

  It was impossible. I had heard it. I got down on my hands and knees and scanned the hall floor. I looked behind the storage heater and in the wardrobe cupboard in case the letter had broken the usual laws of movement through space.

  Disconsolately I drained the bath and tried to come to terms with the possibility that the luxury of my bath had lulled me to sleep and I dreamed the rattling letter box out of wish fulfilment.

  Egerton was always a source of acute irritation, but inadvertently reminding me of the morning’s phantom delivery was too much for me to bear. I cleared my screen with a short sequence of angry keystrokes and left the office. From behind his desk in his own office Whitehead saw me slamming out. I hoped I hadn’t incurred Whitehead’s displeasure. I tolerated him marginally better than Egerton, but Whitehead was the boss and I needed the job.

  Across the road I bought a bar of chocolate in the shop and ate it sitting on a railing. There was a pay phone nearby and I contemplated ringing Melanie to see if she’d posted me a letter the day before. I still wasn’t completely satisfied by the dream theory. I wondered if maybe the postman had rattled my box in error or—and my chest tightened as I thought of this—on purpose to torment me because he knew how much I looked forward to receiving letters.

  I didn’t phone Melanie because it seemed silly to pay when I could call her from the office for nothing.

  “The Arsenal stuffed up their chances yesterday, eh, Alex?” Egerton asked just as I was reaching for my phone. He seemed to think that if he leavened his accountancy qualifications with a little authentic-sounding football chat and the odd reference to his heavy weekend drinking, people would not think him a boring bastard. But it didn’t seem to work.

  “I really don’t know,” I replied with deliberate pomposity. I’d stopped indulging Egerton after only a couple of weeks in the same office, yet still the man persisted. He was either thick-skinned or completely mad; I hadn’t made up my mind. In any case, Arsenal’s cup chances were of no concern to me.

  I rang Melanie’s number but she was in a meeting. I was glad to get away when 6 p.m. came around. I said goodnight to Whitehead on my way out. He gave me one of his weak smiles: it lurked behind his thick moustache and failed to light up his eyes.

  I thought about Melanie on the way home: was it my imagination or was she writing fewer letters these days and saying less in them? It seemed to me that I used to get one a day. The relationship is changing, part of my mind told me, she doesn’t need to write so many letters. Another part of my mind told me: she’s starting to love you less. But she’ll deny it if you confront her with it. She’ll deny it and deny it then one day she’ll say you were right and she doesn’t love you any more.

  While I was in the kitchen making some tea, the phone rang. I put down the knife I was using to slice some lemon and went to get the phone, but it rang off after the first ring. My hand hovered over the handset in case the caller redialed immediately. The apparatus remained silent. I went back to slicing lemon and it rang again. I ran to get it, but again it rang off. Someone was having trouble. Then I remembered that a similar thing had happened a week before. Twice in one night the phone had rung off before I had been able to get it. It could only have rung once on each occasion because my flat is hardly big enough to get lost in. I finished making my tea and sat down on the sofa by the open window. The street smelled of dogs, petrol and fish and chips. I felt on edge.

  I wondered if it had been Melanie. I went and got the phone and carried it over to the sofa.

  I punched in her number. “That wasn’t you, was it, just then?” I asked her when I got through. For some reason my question confused her, even when I repeated it, so I assumed it hadn’t been her and we just talked. “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Yes. Why?” That slight catch was in her voice, the one that meant stop, don’t continue with this line of questioning. But I always did.

  “You sound a bit funny, that’s all.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. I was fine.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “I mean until you started the cross examination.”

  “All right. I’m sorry.”

  “Yes, but it’s so irritating. I’m all right, but you make me not all right when you ask so many questions. Don’t you see?”

  I saw only too well. I had to stop it before she did. “Do you love me?” I asked meekly.

  “I’m going,” she said abruptly and hung up.

  I replaced the receiver and dithered for a minute or two, not knowing whether I should ring her back or not and apologize. I waited five minutes and made another cup of lemon tea, then I pressed the redial button.

  “Melanie?” I ventured.

  “Yes?” She sounded tired.

  “I’m sorry for being a pain. It’s just that when I can’t see you I don’t know what you look like. You could be smiling or frowning, but I don’t know because I can’t see you. Do you know what I mean? Just hearing your voice it’s hard to tell if you’re all right or not.”

  “Alex.” Her exasperation could be heard in just my name. “Will you stop worrying if I’m all right? It wears me down. OK?”

  I agreed and we tried to chat about nothing in particular, but I could tell I’d annoyed her and brought the call to an end before I could do any m
ore damage. Later the same evening the phone rang again while I was dozing on the sofa. I stretched out an arm to pick it up, but my hand seemed to move very slowly as if in a dream and it rang off before I was able to reach it.

  I went to bed hoping a letter would arrive from Melanie in the morning.

  Again I was in the bath, luxuriating, possibly dozing, when I heard the letter box. I made to get out, but my arms slipped from the sides of the bath and fell into the water with a splash that shocked me out of my torpor. My empty stomach was aching, yearning for food, yet my mouth was dry and slightly bitter. I levered myself out of the bath and didn’t bother drying my feet before padding into the hall.

  The doormat was clear. I lifted the leather jacket and raised the flap.

  Nothing.

  Oh, shit. This isn’t happening.

  But it was.

  I grabbed my dressing gown from the back of the bathroom door and unsnapped the locks on the front door. I fled down the airy staircase to the communal hallway. There were no letters on the window ledge by the door, where the postman left them if he couldn’t be bothered to climb the stairs. There was nothing but a pile of last week’s free local newspapers, and a couple from the week before. I opened the door to the street and looked up and down for the postman, but he wasn’t around. He moved quickly, I knew, but not that quickly. I shivered and stepped back inside.

  Back in the flat I conducted a brief, futile search around the hall. I had to have been dreaming: it was the only explanation.

  I was shaken from my gnawing displeasure by the phone. I went to go and get it, but to my dismay it rang off. I picked it up and heard the dialing tone.

  Losing my temper, I threw the receiver back at its cradle. It bounced off and I had to control myself and reposition it more carefully.

  As I swayed through the Piccadilly Line tunnels on my way to work, I hoped for his sake that Egerton wouldn’t come near me today. The mood I was in, I was liable to twist his unpleasant cheap polyester tie around his furry, animal neck until he choked to death. That way the day, which had started extremely badly, would yield some small pleasure.