The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  He had done it!

  When he arrived home, Joshua was relieved to find that Kevin was down the street playing with Jeremy and that Harlow was taking a nap. Joshua was unlocking the door when Socorro came to see who was there.

  “How was your little trip?” Socorro asked coldly. She did not move out of the way. She was still pissed to the gills. As she had a right to be. But there was nothing Joshua could do about it. Later tonight, maybe, he could soften her. He would certainly need her help. This was the most vile thing he had ever done. And he had done it. God, he had actually done it without trying to find another way. He should not have listened to his father. Something else would have worked. The neck giving, the skin cutting—Joshua could feel them still.

  But now that it was over, now that he was safely home, the relief he felt was even greater. Relief for not getting caught, yes. But, he had to admit there was another relief also: relief at having been able to do the most vile thing. Not a trace of remorse as he’d expected. Relief! He might be able to carry on these missions. The first had to be the worst.

  When he didn’t answer, Socorro asked, “Was it worth it?”

  “I won’t know for about ten years,” he answered.

  “Well,” she said, finally backing away from the door, “come on in.”

  “I’ll never know,” he said flatly, the words coming of their own volition. That was true, wasn’t it? And just so, his relief crumbled. What was he doing? What was he becoming? He would have to try and stop. His father had been able: he’d been preventing tragedies for over fifty years, and he’d been able to stop.

  But the visions would not allow him to stop. They came, unannounced, with terrible moments of suffering.

  His father helped him with money when he had to go to Cologne, Germany, on his second trip, a trip to prevent Wildmar Grun from planting and detonating a series of neutron bombs in the major cities of Israel. Twenty-seven years in the future that would be—if Joshua did nothing.

  Money, of course, was not the issue with Socorro. She wanted to know why, despite the fact that she already knew why. Joshua refused to give her any details. Not only for sound legal reasons did he want her to know nothing.

  In Cologne, with the aid of a telephone book and a friendly, English-speaking operator, he managed to find Wildmar Grun. He was fourteen years old and had the purest blonde hair a boy could manage. The hair blew lightly in the breeze as he rode up and down the street on a skateboard in front of his house. Kevin would admire this boy’s skateboarding.

  He could see Wildmar’s mother through one of the open windows of the house. She was an unremarkable looking woman—a peasant from the fifteenth century. Curtains billowed serenely. Her grief would be real enough. Joshua could imagine nothing worse than losing a child. No—he could not think thoughts like that. The boy did a trick on the skateboard, flipping it into the air as he stepped off. Joshua walked to him and dropped his map. The boy bent to help, and Joshua, according to his instructions, jabbed Wildmar in the back of the neck with a small syringe. He took the map from the boy’s hand and hurried away. He heard no screams.

  The next day he left after verifying that Wildmar had died.

  Again, he had done it. It had not been so difficult. Just following orders. Only in retrospect did his actions attack him.

  After three more trips, Joshua had to stop, had to find a way to stop. Each of the victims had been younger than the one before: a ten-year-old in Paraguay, a girl from Canada who was Harlow’s age, and finally, Raymo Scoth from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In each case, the vision of destruction to Jews and to the world had been worse and the method of execution prescribed in a secondary vision.

  Raymo Scoth had been three weeks old. Forty-five years in the future, he would set off a series of controlled explosions along a small, as yet undiscovered fault in the Mediterranean. The resulting earthquakes would shake Israel , and a large part of the Middle East and Europe into a destruction of Biblical proportions.

  By this time, Joshua wondered if the destruction of Israel and all the Jews would be such a bad thing.

  Raymo Scoth weighed three pounds and five ounces after having clung to life for three weeks. He had been the premature issue of a heroine addicted mother and no one knew who else.

  According to the instructions of the secondary vision, Joshua managed to unplug the respirator in the nursery without drawing attention to himself. All the babies were asleep, and the attending nurse slept also, perched precariously on a padded chair by the door.

  Somehow, Raymo Scoth had learned to breathe on his own. Not in the vision. The vision showed only the unplugging of the respirator, a brief struggle, then nothing.

  Joshua picked up the sickly infant—feeling at the moment of contact how frail and infantlike his own father had become—felt the residual warmth from the incubator, and ran. He was gone before the nurse stirred in her chair. To get past the front desk, he jammed the soft infant into his jacket pocket—ignoring the sounds and tiny breakings as he twisted Raymo into the jacket. In the underground parking structure, he pulled Raymo from his pocket—such a little thing. Without thought, he threw him as hard as he could against the wall. Raymo hit slightly below the “e” in the “PARK HEADING IN” notice painted on the wall.

  There was no blood. No blood that he could see. Only a quiet thud.

  Only a quiet thud.

  Thud.

  Joshua ran. If Raymo was not dead, Jews would have to take care of themselves. This time it was over for Joshua. Nothing could induce him, no vision no matter how horrible could make him do this again.

  And worse—this vision had been wrong in a detail! The infant had breathed on its own. The secondary vision had not shown that. Had been wrong! Factually wrong. What if it had been wrong in other respects? What if there were another way? His father had told him that there was no other way, but his father had been wrong before.

  Thud.

  Joshua returned to the house of his youth to speak to his father. He had not been home in over ten years. The house looked small and dark. The trees in the yard had grown, and one, a peach had died. The crack in the entryway tile had spread an inch or so.

  A week had passed since his “trip” to Philadelphia. The quiet thud had only increased in volume. He heard it more frequently, wondered if he would ever be free of it. The tell-tale thud.

  In the living room, his father sat in his favorite chair. This chair was a replacement for one which Joshua remembered. The chair Joshua sat in was old. He remembered dropping a lit match in it when he was eight. If he turned over the cushion, he knew, the burned spot would be there, a scorched hole the size of a walnut and shaped like the big island of Hawaii.

  “So?” his father asked.

  “How did you stop?”

  “Stop? The visions? I see.” He steepled his fingers and closed his eyes.

  Joshua waited for his father to continue. He looked over the knickknacks in the room. None had changed, not even in location. This room was a fossil, a museum. Just as his father was, a fossil of faith gone by. The past had been so comfortable and safe, so calm and innocent. His problems were with and in the future.

  “God,” his father abruptly said, “when He discovers a good trick, He uses it over and over.”

  If this comment was meant to illuminate, it failed. “And?” Joshua prodded.

  “Why do you do these things?” Benjamin asked.

  These things. These things? This neck yielding to a wire—the quiet thud! “What things?” Joshua asked.

  “Let us not play word games. Why do you frustrate these visions?”

  “Frustrate these visions?” Talk about playing word games. Let’s call a spade a spade here. “You mean why do I fly around and kill babies?”

  His father was surprised or shocked by the brutality of the question. Maybe he hadn’t been prepared for not playing word games.

  “No need to shout,” he replied. “Your mother ... But yes, why did you ... kill babies?”


  “Because you told me I must,” Joshua said. Obey your father. He knew it was not true, even as he said it. He wanted to hurt the old man, blame him for what he himself had done.

  “But why?” his father asked, nonplussed. “You could have sat on your hands and done nothing.”

  Why is he doing this to me? Joshua asked himself. He’s the one who told me I couldn’t do nothing.

  “Let me tell you,” his father said. “You do it to protect your own children.”

  Without having to think about it, Joshua knew this was true. If not his children, then his children’s children. Unto the fourth generation. His children’s future. His own children, not the Jews of the world.

  His father continued, “You remember the story of Abraham and Isaac in the land of Moriah?”

  More Biblical cant, Joshua thought. But what other explanation could there be. Insanity? “Yes, when God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son. So?”

  The finger rose into the air, the point was about to be made. “It is well that you remember your boyhood lessons. That was a good trick.”

  There was nothing more his father would tell him, nothing about how to stop. Which meant that Joshua would have to continue. To find the strength to go on. Or the strength to stop without help. Where, he wondered, could he find the strength. In a belief in God? Did he believe in God now? Only God could make him do what he had done.

  But did he believe?

  Joshua’s last vision came when he was about to take a shower. He reached for the shower handles and stopped before turning them.

  “Are you sure, sir?” a very young lieutenant asked. His voice was shaky.

  “Yes. Input your code and turn the key!” It was an older man speaking. Joshua could only see the gray of the man’s hair and the general’s stars on his shoulders. When the lieutenant did nothing, the voice said, “This is a direct order from a superior officer.”

  The lieutenant chewed his lip as he typed his code into the launch computer.

  “Bear up, Lt. Mollar.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mollar replied. He was unable to turn the key.

  “Let me help you.”

  “I’m sorry, General Yosevs, it’s mated to my fingerprint. I’ll be able in a moment.”

  “Take your time, soldier. We can wait another thirty seconds.”

  The young lieutenant waited another moment, sweat beading on his face. Then he turned the key.

  Horrified, Joshua looked at the shower head and saw a mushroom cloud. He backed away and soon mushroom clouds filled the shower. Buildings on the tile melted. Cities crumbled. Forests burned away in seconds. Oceans evaporated. People disappeared in flashes of light. Not only Jews, but everyone, the entire future itself. Gone, Joshua knew without question, because of the madness of one man. A man who had managed to hide his insanity until it was too late.

  Joshua had clearly heard the general’s name.

  General Yosevs. “I’m sorry, General Yosevs, it’s mated to my fingerprint.”

  Yosevs. I’m sorry, General Yosevs. Yosevs, the last name of Joshua’s father who was too old to be the general in the vision.

  Naked, Joshua walked to the bedroom and dialed his father. He tried to think as the phone rang.

  Yosevs was Joshua’s own last name. Joshua would never be a general.

  “Hello,” his father answered the telephone cheerfully.

  Yosevs was the name of perhaps one hundred others in the country. Maybe fewer.

  Joshua did not know what to say. He held the phone and listened as his father asked, “Yes, who is there, please?”

  Yosevs was the last name of Harlow and Kevin, both of whom, either of whom would be the proper age at the proper time. Another of God’s good tricks. Abraham asked to sacrifice his son.

  “Which of my boys did you see?” Joshua managed to ask finally. To the silence which met his question he added, “In your last vision. Which of my boys did you see destroy the world?”

  Still the silence from his father.

  “Joshua, I am sorry,” the old man said painfully. “It has come to you, too. This final dilemma. I am so sorry.”

  “Which one?” Joshua asked. The less time this took ...

  “I,” his father said. After another pause he said, “I saw only you, Joshua. Only you. You were the only one I saw. Not your boys, neither of them. And the vision that it would be the end of everything if I did not ...”

  “Kill me,” Joshua muttered. More loudly he said, “The end of everything, and you didn’t kill me.”

  “I was not Abraham. I could not give up what he was asked to give up. I loved my son too much. Even though you had given up the faith, Joshua, you were still my son.” Even though he had married Socorro and his father hadn’t spoken to him in ten years, still he was his father’s son.

  Harlow and Kevin—they were both his sons.

  “What can I do?” Joshua knew what he could not do, but not what he could.

  “Trust in God. Trust in love.” The two were mutually exclusive.

  “Help me,” Joshua begged.

  “I can’t,” his father answered.

  Joshua put the telephone down on his bed. Yosevs was the last name of Kevin and Harlow, both of whom would be of the proper age at the proper time. Since his father had seen Joshua as the nexus, it must be either Kevin or Harlow. Either. Both.

  Which? Joshua had no way of knowing. If the visions went to one of the boys, would they be the force that drove him insane? He could not know. Better dead than insane.

  Socorro came to check on Joshua after he had been in the shower for more than an hour.

  “Another vision?” she asked from outside the door.

  He didn’t answer. He couldn’t speak. The water ran off Joshua, not cleaning what could never be cleaned. It was appropriate that he was in the shower. Many a good Jew had died in the shower.

  Gas.

  She helped him to dry, dress, and to bed.

  “You know I love you and the boys,” he said, helplessly from the bed.

  Socorro turned off the lights by the beds. “We’ll talk about it in the morning. Now, go to sleep.”

  He slept.

  When he woke, Kevin was standing at the foot of the bed. Harlow ran in and said, “Good morning, Dad,” with his usual chirrup, bounced up onto the bed.

  “Mom went to the doctor,” Kevin said. “She’ll be back for lunch, she said, so don’t eat anything. She wants to go out.”

  “McDonalds!” Harlow added.

  Joshua wondered which doctor she was arranging for him to see. A psychiatrist, no doubt, who wanted to talk to her first. A psychiatrist couldn’t help him now.

  Gas, he thought as he got dressed. Not Zyklon-B, like the Nazis had used in the camps. Carbon monoxide—they had used that, too, in early experiments.

  “Come on, boys,” he said when he found his sons watching television. It was the last week before Kevin had to go back to school, his last week of Superheroes during the day.

  “Where?” Harlow asked.

  “The mall,” Joshua said. “The toy store.”

  Kevin didn’t want to miss the show, but the toy store was too much for him to resist. “What about Mom?” he asked.

  “We’ll be here when she gets back.”

  Yes, they would be there when she got back. Poor Socorro. Pity poor Socorro finding them. Socorro who was innocent of all this.

  “Can I get a model rocket,” Kevin asked. He turned off the television.

  “And a shopping cart? They were out of them before,” Harlow said.

  “We’ll see,” Joshua answered.

  “That means ‘no,’ ” Kevin said to Harlow.

  Joshua closed the door to the garage. He didn’t push the automatic door opener. “Get in and buckle up,” he said. How many times had he said that. He got into the car and started the motor.

  “You better open the door,” Kevin said.

  “In a minute.” Joshua got out of the car and opened Harlow’s door
. He adjusted the car-seat belt, kissed Harlow on the cheek.

  “You dumb-head,” Harlow said.

  He didn’t know how long it would take. He could smell the supposedly odorless gas. Or maybe the car needed a tune-up. Probably did, hadn’t been tuned up in ...

  He got back in his seat.

  “Dad.”

  Socorro didn’t mind the rabbi talking over the boys. Joshua might have minded, but she didn’t know anymore. He had changed so much in the last months.

  The old man, Joshua’s father, had arranged everything. If it had been left to Socorro, they would still be—

  She didn’t mind the rabbi talking. She listened to his words, the rolling murmur of them, but didn’t understand, even when he spoke English. It didn’t matter. What could words do? What could anything do?

  The old man, Joshua’s father, sat next to Socorro, and next to him was his wife. They had grown gray together. To lose a son was their grief. But she had lost two. And a husband.

  The old man held his prayer book so tightly his knuckles showed white. More words.

  She didn’t mind the rabbi and his words. What did he understand? The music was strange, and he never mentioned death.

  Life. All he talked about was life. Those who go on, not those who have left. Those who have chosen to leave.

  Life ... she never had the chance to tell Joshua ...

  How could he have done such a thing? To his own sons? She knew it was no accident.

  She was almost glad she hadn’t been able to tell him the news from the doctor. Two children were enough for him to take. She would protect the third, the one in her womb. Yes, for the good man that Joshua had been, for the man she had loved and married—not for the monster he had become—she would protect their child. She would give Joshua someone to carry his name, Yosevs, down through the years. She would protect his heir. Their child.

  She placed her hands on her belly.

  Their son.