The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  For a long moment we both stared at the cut, he as fascinated as I. A drop of clear fluid gathered in the deep furrow. I sighed and released his wrist, closed and pocketed the knife. He pursed his lips and considered me as he dabbed at his hand with a napkin. The cut was already closing. Exhaustion washed through me. It had taken so long ...

  “So.” It was a meditative rumble from that barrel chest. Then, gently, “Aren’t you afraid of me?”

  I looked inside myself and found only a bleak, frozen determination. “No.”

  The corners of his eyes crinkled with silent amusement. “Perhaps we should take this conversation elsewhere,” he suggested. I followed him out into the chill darkness.

  We were somewhere near the docks. The air stank of salt and rotten fish guts, spiced with pitch. A few streets away the ugly orange of sodium vapor lamps blazed over industrial yards and loading cranes, but we turned our steps toward the darker byways. My companion seemed to have no particular destination in mind, and was in no hurry to speak. I kept pace and waited.

  In some grimy alley he finally stopped and looked down at me. “What is your name?” I thought he was mocking me, but his face was serious.

  What did I care for names anymore? But somewhere, way back when, I had had one. I groped, fished up a dim memory. “Maria.” Perhaps it was mine, perhaps not. It would serve.

  “Maria,” he repeated, turning the name over on his tongue like the whiskey. He grinned. “You can call me David.”

  I snorted, unimpressed.

  “How long have you been looking for me?” he asked. His gaze had turned inward, and the battered features he wore had undergone a subtle shift. Now his profile looked somewhat classical, patrician.

  I shivered as an icy thread of air worked its way under my jacket and down the back of my neck. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t looking for you. Maybe my whole life.”

  “ ‘Follow me and I will make you’ ... what?” he mused. He focused on me again. “Others have found me, you know.”

  It hurt to breathe. “How many?” I whispered.

  “Twelve.” His gaze was clinical.

  “Then I am the last!” I wanted to trumpet my triumph to the stars. His chuckle stopped me.

  “If ... if I choose to accept you.” He was grinning again, watching my reaction.

  Rage flared. The thought that I might have come this far only to be played with and rejected ... Despite everything I knew about him—proving, I suppose, that I didn’t fear him at all—I grabbed his shirt front, and with a strength only he could have guessed I had, I spun him around and slammed his back against the alleyway bricks. Others had died, instantly and without appeal, for lesser offenses, but I think he was still testing me, goading me. “You will not refuse me!” I hissed into his face.

  His eyes had no depth, no color. I saw only my own reflection. “Show me,” he commanded.

  Anger still fueled me. I yanked down the zipper on my jacket and shrugged it off. I wasn’t wearing a shirt. The chill raised goosebumps over my shoulders and back; it can still do that, even after all these years. The cavern beneath my left breast yawned dark and empty, silent and cold.

  I had affected him at last. His eyes kindled, as austere and avid as a monk in rapture. I shuddered as his fingers traced the crisp, blackened edges of the hole. Then he pressed his whole hand inside.

  I screamed. Sweat drenched me. Pleasure such as I had never known shocked through me and nailed me to the ground. Long ago, in some other existence, I had known sexual ecstasies; they were dim shadows compared to the transports I felt now.

  David’s eyes were half-lidded with pleasure; beneath the crescents his pupils were red-hot tunnels into another universe. In such intimate connection I could at last see through the illusion in which he had wrapped himself to his true glory. Flames haloed his head; his face blazed like a hundred suns; vast, glittering wings stretched wide overhead. Electric-blue symbols of power writhed across his chest and arms. His beauty brought tears to my eyes—I, who had not cried since, since ... I gripped his arm to keep from fainting. “Father!” I wept.

  We were so consumed with our pleasure that we never heard the whispers and sniggers of our approaching audience. Only when a studded leather glove landed hard on my shoulder did I wake to this reality again.

  “Hey, baby, how ’bout letting us in on this action?” The street indian leered beneath an iridescent mohawk; implanted scales warpainted his cheeks and forehead. He and his two fellow braves had decorated their biker leathers with feathers and shells in their gang colors. They looked like exotic plumed serpents incongruously placed in that dingy alley.

  All they could see was a middle-aged working stiff copping a feel off a tart’s breast. Now they wanted to make it a gang bang. Their youthful arrogance assumed the three of them were more than a match even for David’s hulking build.

  “Mohawk” frowned at my serene smile and tried to yank me away from David. He would have had more luck trying to move the alleyway wall. The serrated studs on his glove cut into my skin; the trickle of blood that coiled down my breast was as easy to read as tea leaves at the bottom of a cup.

  Freedom: that was the boy’s key. A minor chord in his stormy eyes; a deeper, yearning wail in the blood that pulsed in his neck. I could feel David’s equal yearning to give the boy his heart’s desire. David smiled at the lad and reached a golden talon up to touch the center of his patterned forehead. Blood erupted from the boy’s eyes, nose, and ears. He opened his mouth to scream and choked as his heart burst into his throat.

  The second boy was all frost: white bleached hair, white leather jacket, white-on-white warpaint; even the irises of his eyes had been bleached white. He was so beautiful I had to claim him for my own. I grasped his arm and pulled him close, smothered his protests with my lips. I savored the skunky taste of his despairing sweat; the sphincter-loosening bitterness of his terror; the metallic, salt spiciness of his blood. His cool exterior camouflaged a molten core: he burned with rages unvented, lusts unsated, ambitions unsatisfied. When I released him, he flamed up white like a moth in a candle. Pale ash sifted over my feet.

  The last apache turned to run, but David’s will trapped him in amber light. Fear had stripped away his toughness, and it was possible to see how young he really was. Little more than a child, but he understood that he was going to die. Tears streamed down his painted cheeks as he sobbed “Ohjesusohjesusohjesus” like a mantra. “Not this time,” David whispered as he grasped one outflung hand. I clasped the other, completing the circuit.

  Instantly I knew this lost boy, his every weal and woe. Cast out of a broken home, brutalized by a culture at war with itself, he could not separate his hate for those who abused him from his love and his need. Ah, poor youth, divided allegiances are always the most cruel.

  Leathers, feathers, and chains flashed away to reveal the perfection of the naked human. But his destiny was written in his flesh; as he wailed, a fissure, straight-edged as a razor cut, opened at his sternum and spread upward and downward. He stared in horror as his guts spilled steaming into the cold night. His scream lofted as sweet and pure as a cherub’s praises, until the fissure cracked the chest cavity and his lungs deflated with a wet slap. When the aortic trunk ruptured, blood fountained into the air and fell back as pink snow. From genitals to skull crest he split, like a ripe fruit under the grocer’s knife. His eyes issued a mute, stereoptic appeal before the last connection between the hemispheres of the brain parted. The two halves of the body leaned together like tired sentinels until David and I released the hands, then crumpled to the pavement.

  The death of sentiment is the beginning of real love.

  The bodies burned with pale, witchy flames. I had never felt so fulfilled. Only then did David withdraw his hand from my chest. Cupped in his palm, afloat on a crimson lake, was a tiny, perfectly-formed human heart. It beat with a slow, hypnotic rhythm. Within the fluttering valves ruby highlights gleamed.

  Marveling, I bent l
ow over the treasure and wrapped my lips around it. For a moment it rested on my tongue; I felt its cool pulse against my cheeks. Then I opened my throat and let it slide down. David emptied his hand over my head; the flaming blood etched words of power upon my shining skin. Then at last I did throw back my head and howl my triumph to the cold, dead stars.

  “Come, my daughter.” My Lord held out his hand to me. Beneath my feet the paving stones shuddered and cracked; all across the city, infants expired in their cribs, poets screamed and went mad, dogs began to howl and buildings to crumble. My transfigured face shed a radiance the color of molten copper over my unfurling wings. “Tonight my reign begins,” He said, “and there is much to do.”

  The skies were ours; we took to them.

  DEFINING THE COMMONPLACE SLIVER by Wayne Allen Sallee

  We all lead commonplace lives, he had said in a time that seemed so long ago that he might have actually only written it down. He was a writer, but he had bills, and rent, and health insurance. Things he once had to think about the same way he thought about his writing. Feeling on top of things until the sensation was so good that it only made some perverse sense that things come crashing down.

  Commonplace vignettes written down in commonplace books with whatever ink pen might be handy right then and there. He had been talking to a waitress in a diner on Montrose, a dark-haired woman whose eyes spoke of their own secrets, who simply wanted to know what the hell a Belmont-Cragin cop was doing writing stories in a notebook. Maybe I’m writing out possible health violations, he smiled. Maybe you’re writing about me, she said back. If he thought hard enough, he could recall how her nostrils flared, how her chin tilted up. Then every image in his mind toppled into the next like apologies on the tip of an epileptic’s tongue.

  My name is Dave Slenium, he whispered/narrated in his mind because he knew he would never live to write his last tale. It would be a short one. He was not expected to last out the night. Or so he thought he had heard. Maybe he had whispered it himself, in a kind of prayer. And I was a writer who believed in what I was doing. It was important to me that I told people what my life was like, who I encountered, why they did what they did. It was too difficult to narrate and sad, as well.

  He wrote stories with few slivers of hope because that is all he saw every day. Eyes, set into faces barely two decades old that were either pissed off, pissed on, or simply drawn out and tired. He was writer, but he was a cop first. He had been a cop longer, for ten of his thirty-three years. He had only been writing, and for contributor copies at that, for less than two. But he was getting better at his writing, defining the slivers in ways unique to his point of view. Had been getting better with his writing, rather. Before he’d been shot.

  He reflected on his first sales—really, for the most part, acceptances—in the minutes he lay on the floor of the Eddy Street garage waiting for another squad to respond to shots fired. Neither he nor his partner, Tim Hauser, had an opportunity to call in an officer-down. They had responded to the 10-1, a domestic disturbance, twenty minutes before their shift ended. Domestic disturbances were worse than picking up a D & D, because even a stewbum swinging a gun couldn’t be expected to shoot straight.

  Family holidays were the worst, and this time it was a Mother’s Day fight.

  Hauser called it in as a 10-1 Edward after they found the perpetrator gone by the time their squad rolled down the street of the three-flats. The perpetrator was a disassociated schizophrenic, one Howard Shehostak, who had been on holiday release from County to visit his grandmother, Josephine. She had called the Belmont-Cragin district house after he began threatening her with a cake knife. Hauser and Slenium were on their way back to the squad when they heard the scraping coming from the vacant garage on the corner of Eddy and Wolcott.

  Slenium went down first with a knife gouge in the armpit. His partner was stabbed in his left eye. Both were then shot a total of five times with Tim Hauser’s police-issued revolver.

  And now Slenium thought about what he had written, the stories over coffee that relieved his stress better than any six-pack of beer or endless shot glass of bourbon. Write what you know, a New York editor had told him once. His early stories were the clichés every editor dreads, he learned that quickly enough. The girl in the tavern who isn’t what she seems, that kind of thing.

  But he’d added a twist borne of his career as a cop that made a “Cat From Hell” story become the “Pit Bull From Hell” story. Still a horrid tale, with the owners getting their just rewards after the cops can’t shut down their operation, but with fresh characters in an all-too-real setting. His only professional sale was to a crime anthology. “Incident in the Van Buren Corridor” was about a druggie on PCP and a rookie cop.

  Slenium wondered if there would be any posthumous pro sales. The right side of his face had gone numb, and he figured he had about two pints of his blood mixed with the oil on the garage floor. When he held his breath, he could hear nothing coming from his partner’s gaping mouth. He knew he’d been hit in the chest several times.

  He measured out his remaining life in eight minute rumblings, a product of the subway line running beneath Milwaukee. He wished he could smell the heady mix of piss and rain water the train’s passing brought. All he smelled was death.

  And all he saw, all at once, was stories he would never write. Ideas he had yet to have. The first one was simple: an elderly woman staring out the window after hearing shots in her garage, afraid to move toward the phone to call the police. Scene shift to a cement floor stained with copper tears.

  The thoughts became clearer as he lost more of his life. It made sense to him. Writing about what you know is the hardest sacrifice. Giving up all your worst fears and secret concerns. He couldn’t recall the last thing he had written in his commonplace notebook. When he coughed, it tasted like he was licking a battery.

  And the images went through a red gauze and touched him with comforting, soothing caresses. The lady in red is dancing with comforting, soothing caresses. “The lady in red is dancing with me,” song lyrics that became the dirge of an infantryman, spastic in machine gun fire in the Gulf War. “The devil with the blue dress on” was Lake Michigan and the scene of a drowning.

  He would have written stories about real life, paring down his soul, allowing his veins to bleed onto the lines of his notebook. Tapping out his pulse with a coffee spoon. He would write about the retarded girl who got pregnant and gave her babies to a neighbor, who in turn sold them to a certain man who ran a certain strip joint in a western suburb. He encouraged the retarded girl to get pregnant again, eventually doing the job himself. He’d write about the waitress, and maybe call her Lisa, or Lilah. Words clicked against each other. A Leland Street hooker called herself Shelby, shortened from her given name Michelle Beatrice. Another writer he admired became Willy Sid, a small-time hustler. And in a burst of wonder, he thought of his boyhood dreams of Betty Page, good girl model of the 50’s. Of how her fame might be construed to her resemblance to the infamous Black Dahlia, murdered in Los Angeles in 1947. And what a story it would be if a young punk, hip to both legends, decided that, if he found the right gold coast hooker, well, his Rogers Park girlfriend might become the next super-model of the nineties. Maybe pattern her after the waitress at the diner, give her a mysterious name like Lisa Sestina.

  The words became ideas that were more fantastical than he had ever thought he could create. A girl in the subway carried around a box, its contents were the shadows of fingers from beneath spinning plates. A man with no fingers waited in the begging room for a bastardized phone to shudder. A man was thrown off a bridge and it sounded like skeleton keys being dropped down a vacant stairwell.

  The Fremont hotel is saved the indignity of being demolished because a local historian torches the place the night before the wrecking crew moves in. The rags that were ignited were being worn at the time by a toothless bum named Blackstone Shatner, who drank his Wild Irish Rose from a detergent measuring cup. So many wonde
rful tales. He knew how to give of himself. How to define the slivers with his own last breaths.

  But he would not allow himself to smile at the rush of a dream realized, at least in some small way. When the next squad car showed, his blood had pooled against the far wall of the garage. It had started to dry up.

  In memory of Ray Rexer: 1953-1991

  FEEDING THE MASSES by Yvonne Navarro

  The man on Seymour Tussard’s front doorstep smiled pleasantly.

  “You realize, of course, that life goes on. There are thousands of people just like yourself who have suffered even greater losses, yet they continue to be loyal Americans and do their duty—without complaint, I might add.” The man pulled a pen from his pocket, clicked it open with his thumb—a clean, well-manicured thumb—and ran it down the information sheet on his clipboard. “It says here you have a wife and two daughters, Mr. Tussard. It also says that you’re a successful attorney with an average income before deductions of approximately one hundred and fifty thousand dollars per year. Is that correct?”

  Tussard squinted at him. “I—well—no, I don’t have a job—”

  “But you did have a job, isn’t that true? Up until a month ago?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose I did.” His eye was burning again and Tussard resisted the urge to scratch at it. He’d rubbed the left one too hard last Thursday and it had popped; though it had been sightless for weeks he’d felt slightly off-balance ever since.

  Bennigan—Tussard remembered the man’s name from the I.D. he’d flashed—stretched his neck slightly to see over Tussard’s shoulder. “May I come in, Mr. Tussard? I’m sure we’d both be more comfortable.”

  “Uh, sure, sure.” He stepped back and pulled the sheet covering the doorway of his ranch-style house to one side so the younger man could enter; his fingers left a sort of smudgy print on the already filthy material.