The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  “Kevin!” Socorro shouted. “Let him have it.” Wrong choice of words, Joshua corrected silently.

  “Oh, Mom,” Kevin said. “He’s better than a dog.”

  “No fleas,” Joshua offered. As usual, Socorro ignored Joshua’s attempt at humor. She had talked to him about joking when she was trying to discipline. Lectured him.

  “That’s enough, Kevin. When he gets that one, that’s it. I don’t want him too hot.”

  “Can I call Jeremy to play?” Kevin asked.

  “Ask your father.”

  Joshua kept his eyes closed, not wanting to have to say “no” to his son. He heard Kevin approaching.

  “He’s resting his eyes,” Kevin said.

  Uncle Morry, Joshua thought, the family tradition, “rested his eyes” after dinner in the recliner. He never slept there, only rested his eyes, snoring like a steam radiator. Uncle Morry who always brought candy bars when he visited. The candy bars made Mother mad. But Joshua’s father would defend his brother Morry, not his wife.

  What kind of man was he who would take his brother’s side in preference to his wife? Joshua knew what kind of a father he had. Now, he knew. He’s in the synagogue right now, no time for children, no time for Mother. I’ll never, he vowed for the thousandth time, treat my kids like that. Kids were far more important.

  “Yes,” Joshua said, “go call Jeremy. He can come over here and you can both play with Harlow.” The wisdom of Solomon: make it so Kevin didn’t want to go.

  Kevin started to complain, but when Joshua opened his eyes, he saw Kevin running toward the back door. He ran better than Harlow by a long shot. Of course, Harlow would do as well when he was nine, too. They’d get older, learn more things, marry, but Joshua would always know them, love them. He’d never disown them, pretend they were dead, cease to love them.

  The patterns of the leaves and branches overhead shifted slightly. Everything seemed to move sideways as if an earthquake had hit the hammock. After an initial queasiness, Joshua recognized the warmth as it crept up from his toes.

  Oh, shit, he thought. Why me? He knew another “vision” was coming. Another pogrom, another massacre. Why? he wondered. Why now? He didn’t want another vision. At all. Ever. There was too much blood and too much gore in them. But he had no choice. Dr. Veille told him they were some sort of seizures that might be controlled by phenobarbital. Phenobarb—he had spent many a college night trying to get phenobarb. Probably the phenobarb would not work anyway—these were not normal seizures, he knew that instinctively.

  Black uniforms—goddamned Nazis in S.S. uniforms, and locals in black uniforms with gray sleeves—formed a line. Inside the line, the Jews’ faces were packed tightly, some screaming, some crying, some oddly silent, dull with resignation. One woman’s nose was flattened against the hair of the man in front of her. She sobbed silently. Like some monstrous, multilimbed insect, the naked people inside the line of guards moved. Slowly, lashed and taunted by the guards. Joshua glimpsed a single female breast forced out from the crowd. A large cowhide whip slashed across it.

  He could not move to help. He could only witness. As always. He wanted to scream. He could not. He watched through tightly closed eyes as the line was whipped relentlessly forward. A woman of sixty fell to the ground. She smiled as she was crushed. The rest pressed forward, surged forward, were beaten forward. A machine gun fired tiny holes which spouted red into ten naked men and seven naked women who were lined up against a rock cliff. The bodies fell into a very large pit where others—some writhing, most still—awaited them.

  Eight men and seven women took their places against the cliff face, and the red spouted again. And again.

  “Joshua!”

  The machine gun fired again.

  “Joshua!!”

  And again.

  Joshua opened his eyes. He saw Socorro’s concerned black eyes staring down at him.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I ...” He had to clear his throat before he could speak. “I had another ...”

  “Poor baby,” she said. “Okay now?”

  “No. It was ... No. Yeah. It was—”

  Harlow interrupted. “Can I ride on rocking Daddy?”

  Socorro laughed, rubbed the boy’s head. “No, Daddy’s done rocking the hammock,” she said. She picked him up onto her hip. God, Joshua thought, I wish I could hug them as easily as she does. It didn’t feel right to him. Thanks again to Father. But there was more to love than the physical.

  Joshua reached out and stroked the back of Socorro’s leg. The contact soothed him. The vision was past, receding. And Socorro was here, present. The sexiest part of a female body, he thought, the back of the leg. He squeezed her his desire.

  “Later,” she winked. She put Harlow down, kissed him on the head, and sent him into the house. “This was bad?”

  “This was bad,” he echoed. “It looked like World War II. They’re moving closer and closer to the present.”

  “Are you ready to see Dr. Veille again?”

  “No, drugs won’t help. I know that.”

  “How?” she had asked him several times, “how do you know that?” He didn’t know how he knew. He just knew this wasn’t a problem that doctors or drugs could treat. This was not merely an abnormal form of epilepsy. It wasn’t that simple.

  “We’ve got to do something.”

  Joshua turned and sat awkwardly, his feet barely touching the ground. He tried to stand, but his legs gave way and he fell to the ground.

  “Klutz,” Socorro laughed quietly, but Joshua could feel the concern behind the voice. How many words like klutz did she use now? How many words like miho did he?

  Joshua laughed his agreement, yes—it always was tricky getting out of a hammock, wasn’t it—not admitting that it was a lack of strength in his knees which had made him fall, not wanting to add to her worry. This vision had taken a lot out of him, more than any of the others.

  At first the visions come only rarely. Now they were occurring more and more frequently. All were murder and butchery, blood and brutality. From the seventeenth century until World War II. All the victims were Jews.

  Jews. All the victims had been Jews. Joshua had been brought up as a practicing Jew. At thirteen he had stood before the Torah next to his adoring father. His first public speaking—he remembered the terror. And the money which put him through college. When it came to Judaism, his father was adoring. When it came to atheism, the crime Joshua committed in his fourteenth year, his father had turned his face away. Shocked. Scandalized. Unforgiving. His father became cold and distant—if he won’t talk to God, he won’t talk to me! the old man had bellowed. The phrase became an incantation. He spoke only to correct his son. Mealtimes became a deadly chore. God, how Joshua had hated dinner!

  Religion, Joshua understood early, meant more to his father than blood, God more than love. If Joshua would not have the Lord, then neither would he have his father’s love.

  Three days out of Princeton’s M.B.A. program, two weeks before he started his job he married Socorro. That was it, the final blow. “He married an Indian!” became the new refrain. Socorro was not kosher. Beautiful, but not Jewish, not even white. Trayfe. Not even mentioned in Scripture. Central America was not in the Scriptures. (But then, neither was North America, South America, most of Asia, etc.)

  Socorro was love and joy and freedom. She reveled in the fact that she was four months’ pregnant with Kevin at the wedding. The contest between honoring his father and mother and cleaving unto his wife had been no contest at all: Socorro won. She would always win. The boys would always win. Who needed the old man, anyway? For ten years he had not come to look at his grandchildren, had not spoken to his son. His God must be a cold comfort.

  After the boys had been told for the final time to stay in bed, Socorro and Joshua lay together. The television flickered a pale blue light and droned in the background. Joshua liked making love with some light in the room. He could see all the fine smoothness tha
t he felt.

  “I called your father today,” Socorro said.

  “You what?” Joshua was aware that he had spoken too loudly.

  “I explained about your dreams.”

  He sat up against the scrolled headboard. “They’re not dreams.”

  “I know that. You know that. I was in a hurry to get his attention before he hung up on me.”

  “You called him!” She nodded her head. “Really?” He found it impossible to believe.

  “He wants to talk to you. He’s coming tomorrow night for dinner.”

  Joshua stood up. “Dinner? He’s coming here?” He started pacing around the bed. “For dinner?” My mother will be in trouble, he thought. Harlow will blow her cover. “Hi, Gramma,” he’ll say and Father will know that she’s been sneaking visits.

  “I’m making a kosher ham.” Socorro said keeping a straight face for a long moment before breaking up. Reluctantly, Joshua laughed, too. “I really should—but Mother is bringing her own food.”

  And her own dishes, Joshua added silently. But her joke had broken Joshua’s mood.

  “I already told Kevin to pretend he doesn’t know Grandma.” She was so smart. Nothing to do about Harlow, though. He couldn’t keep a secret, not at three.

  But then, his father would ignore his grandchildren as he had ignored his own children, so he probably wouldn’t notice. What could children know? What could children offer? They weren’t old enough to talk seriously about God.

  “Why? Why did you call him?”

  “We’ve got to do something.”

  “I know just the something, too,” he offered as he returned to the bed.

  Joshua helped the frail, old, so suddenly old, man out of the front seat of the car. He felt so light, so brittle. He might break if dropped. Certainly, this wraith could not hold much power over him anymore.

  “You see,” the old man said—the same voice, pitched slightly higher, squeaked, “what it is to throw over your God.” No “Hello, Son,”—he hadn’t spoken Joshua’s name in twenty-two years—no hello of any kind, nothing but God first, and the lecture.

  “Oh, Pop.” Joshua hated himself for reverting to a phrase he hadn’t used in years. Still, he could not hold onto the anger he had held for years. The old man was too pitiful a sight.

  “You have heard, of course, the stories!” The old man walked on his own, but Joshua’s mother walked close by, with one hand ready to reach out and steady him.

  “This must be Socorro,” she said. Always the diplomat, always willing to step into the fray, even when her husband would side with Uncle Morry. “And Kevin and Harlow.”

  Kevin said a simple, “Hello,” smiled obviously behind his hand, and tried not to laugh. Harlow chirruped his glad welcome in a language which the old man would not grasp, would not try to understand. His father, the redoubtable Benjamin Yosevs, simply did not listen to children. His own or people’s.

  “We brought our own food,” Benjamin informed Joshua, pointedly ignoring Socorro. Socorro shrugged a smile at Joshua. Her body told him, “It’s what I expected.”

  Joshua was not happy to have to endure the rituals before eating. Kevin kept asking questions with his eyes and body. But his father was a guest and would not have eaten otherwise. The meal itself was anticlimactic. His father ate in stolid silence. Just like dinner at home, the same, the same slow torture.

  After dinner, Joshua helped his father to the sofa in the living room while Socorro and his mother stayed in the kitchen with the boys. Joshua sat in his own chair, but he did not recline it.

  “The visions—you have them, too?” The old man looked at Joshua with a puzzled expression.

  “Too?”

  “What did you see?” his father asked.

  “See. Hear. Smell. Everything. Massacres, pogroms, murders, mass executions.”

  “Names?” the old man asked quietly. “Did you receive names?”

  “No. What do you mean, names?”

  His father smiled painfully. “You may receive names. You will. You must act when you do. You must.” He was as serious in this as in anything Joshua could remember. He slumped back into the sofa when he finished speaking. Old, Joshua thought. He was so old. In the ten years he had aged, gone from a vigorous seventy to this.

  “Why? What did you see?”

  His father grimaced noticeably, took a deep breath. “It is very distressing. I was no Joseph. I could not tell a true dream.”

  “I know.” Joshua did know what the old man meant. He wished that he wouldn’t couch it in such Biblical terms. Everything had to come from the Bible. His own visions had seemed real—in certain ones he had verified certain facts. But still, he could not, would not say they were “true.”

  “Tell me of the last one,” his father said, leaning forward again, “the first one and the last one.”

  Joshua told his father about the early pogrom. His father nodded his head but kept silent as Joshua struggled with the words. He told him of the machine-gunning in the ravine. When Joshua finished speaking, his father sat back onto the couch to think. He closed his eyes and tipped his head forward onto his steepled fingers. A gesture which had not changed in ten years. Except for the exceptional thinness of the fingers and the liver spots on his hands. His father did not speak for many moments. This also had not changed. Joshua remembered having to tiptoe around the house while his father thought with his eyes closed. He didn’t rest his eyes, like Uncle Morry, just thought with them closed.

  “The first one I recognize,” his father said, leaning forward. “It is the same as the first one I had. In Poland. The last, I did not see. It sounds like Babi Yar. In the Ukraine.”

  “Could be,” Joshua said.

  “And the others?” his father asked. “Are they sequential? Do they follow a pattern?”

  “A pattern through time, yes, but there are gaps. Do you still have them?” Joshua asked.

  The old man leaned back in the chair. “Like David, I have been denied the way to God.”

  The simple statement brought chills to Joshua’s neck. The way to God. He had not thought of God at all in any of this. Jew, yes, he had been forced to think of Jews, but not of God. He had not thought seriously of God since—he did not know how long. The God of the Old Testament. The Old Testament—his father would have gone through the ceiling if he heard Joshua say that. The Holy Scriptures! They are not Testaments—an old implies a new. That, and “B.C.” “B.C.E.” was all right—before the common era. The old man had his little ways.

  The Old Testament God. The God of Vengeance. Was he suffering the Wrath of God? Bruce Silverstein in Hebrew class used to mock: there is no God and Jesus is his son, there is no God and Mohammed is his prophet. With no God how could there be a Wrath of God?

  Benjamin huddled into himself and wept quietly. The way to God. Denied the way to God. This was enough to make his father cry. Joshua felt the distance between himself and his father as if it were a solid object. A solid, brick wall. His father had sought the way to God ever since Joshua could remember. And he had been denied. While Joshua, the apostate, had been rewarded. What kind of God was it that would do that to His believers?

  Joshua did not know how to react to his father’s tears. He wanted to console the old man but knew the resentment that would follow.

  “In 1916,” the old man said without raising his head, “in a vision of awful clarity, I was given the name of the little Austrian.” Hitler—his father never called him anything but “the little Austrian.”

  “What?”

  “I did nothing about it. At the end of the vision I was told what to do—where to find him during the Great War, and how to kill him. But I did nothing.”

  “You were only thirteen at the time,” Joshua said.

  “It was my first vision of the future, of atrocities that could have been prevented, and I did nothing. Thirteen was old enough.” He stared at the ground. “Old enough. Thirteen is old enough to be a man. And later, that chance was gon
e. The little Austrian lived—and six million Jews died. Six million.”

  “You couldn’t have done anything,” Joshua said.

  Benjamin looked up at Joshua. “Yes, I could have. I could have changed everything.”

  Everything. Changed everything. The words reverberated in Joshua’s head. Everything. He had seen—and done nothing.

  “Did you ever change the future?” he asked his father bluntly.

  “Ah,” the old man replied, raising his finger stiffly to make his point, “the import sinks in.” This was the same gesture he had seen his father use in making a thousand points. The Talmudic finger.

  “Yes,” Joshua said. Getting information from his father was a tiresome, trying thing. “The import sinks in! Did you?” His father nodded. “How do you know it worked?”

  “You never heard of the Fairfax Massacre—1958? And why not? Because I prevented it. I took the blueprint that God gave me, and I prevented it. Fairfax Massacre, Bronx Butchery of 1977, Tel Aviv Crater, the Rio River of Blood—none of them took place. Because I acted.” The effort of the speech caused Benjamin to sit back in the sofa, to rest again.

  “How did you do it?”

  “God showed me a way. In every case, God showed me a way.” Now Joshua was uneasy. God showed him a way. Of course. If he were not himself having the visions, he would suspect that his father was crazy. He would know it. Maybe they both were crazy.

  “You were seeing into the future in 1916?”

  “Yes, since 1916 when I could have done so much. So much.”

  Benjamin said he couldn’t speak anymore. He was obviously worn out by his efforts. Joshua helped him back to his car, rediscovering the frailness. Harlow went unbidden to the old man and kissed him good-bye. Kevin remained in the house watching a rerun of “Three’s Company” on television.