The Year's Best Horror Stories 16

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

And suddenly I went cold. Colder than the breeze that came at us from the tombstones.

  Muldoon or something, he had said.

  But he knew Mike. He’d known him for years, Mother fed him dinners and lunches, and he once even went on a vacation to the seashore with us.

  Muldoon or something.

  That’s when I thought I was starting to go crazy; that’s when I put my arm around Jeanne and held her so tightly she looked up at me and frowned, felt me trembling and held me back. And when it was over and we were walking away, she asked me what was wrong, and I told her.

  “So?” she said. “I don’t understand.”

  Neither did I, but it wouldn’t let go once it took hold. All day. All night. All the next day, even when Mother said a neighbor saw me walking Jeanne home after school and didn’t she tell me not to see her again?

  Last night ... last night was only a few hours ago.

  I was lying on my bed, not undressed, just lying there with my hands behind my head and thinking about Jeanne and how Mike wouldn’t mind if we got together or something; we’d been best friends, and Jeanne was ... she was special. Mike knew it. I knew it, and I didn’t have to worry with her about what to say or how to act. When I got stupid, she told me; when I did something nice, she told me. Mike wouldn’t care. Mike was dead, and God, I missed him.

  Then I heard voices downstairs. Arguing. My mother and father in the kitchen, and Father suddenly telling her to quiet down or the boy would hear.

  That was my signal. Whenever one of them said that, my ears got sensitive and I turned into a ghost, sneaking out of the room and into the hall, to the head of the stairs and down to the one I knew creaked when you breathed on it. All the lights were out, except over the kitchen table, and all I could see were moving shadows on the hall wall.

  “I think,” Father said, “it’s much too soon. He isn’t going to be able to take much more.”

  Mother was doing something at the stove. Probably baking another pie. “I don’t like bad influences, dear.”

  “She’s only a little girl.”

  “Big enough to cause trouble.”

  “I don’t know. I—”

  “Just get your coat, dear. And please watch the noise. I don’t want to wake Peggy.”

  Father’s voice changed. “An angel, you know that? God, I almost cry every time I look at her. She has so much to live for. Not like—”

  “I know, dear, I know.”

  “And when I think about Craig, I could—”

  “Your coat, dear. Please.”

  I backed away from the banister and watched the dark figure that was my father go to the closet and take out his leather jacket, walk back into the kitchen, and say something I couldn’t hear. The back door opened, closed, and I sat there with my knees close to my chest, my head turning side to side like something had broken in my neck and I couldn’t work it right anymore.

  I couldn’t really be sure what it was I heard, but it was the tone of their voices that frightened me. So controlled, so sure, and at the same time so threatening that I almost screamed.

  Instead, and I don’t know why because I was so scared, I crept down the rest of the steps and out the front door, then ran around the side of the house, back toward the shed.

  A light was on.

  I crouched beside the wall and hugged myself, my teeth chattering so loud I had to put a fist against my jaw to keep from biting my tongue in half.

  Then I looked in the window.

  Father had turned the chair around and was sitting in it, leaning forward a little and looking at the large wooden crate I had seen the week before. But it was black. So black the light didn’t touch it, and when I stared at it long enough I could see right through it, into more blackness, solid dark; and Father was rocking a little now, and I could hear him grunting every so often, rocking, and grunting, shaking his head once and rocking even faster. Grunting. Then, suddenly, he was humming in a high quiet voice, like a song without words, without notes, a child’s chant against the dark, driving away the demons until mommy or daddy could come in and save them.

  A car drove down our street, its radio loud with rock music.

  Humming. Chanting, Parting the black for more black, this time freckled with points of white light.

  A window was open in a neighbor’s house, and a telephone rang for almost a full minute before someone answered.

  Chanting. Rocking. The points beginning to swirl into a dense white cloud whose light was swallowed by the black.

  And in the white I saw something that looked like a face.

  I blinked quickly because I felt myself crying, felt the tears on my cheeks and I didn’t know why. It was stupid. There was some kind of electronic thing in my father’s stupid shed, and all that black and all that dead white were making me cry like a stupid little baby.

  For a minute, just a minute, I wanted to die.

  Father stopped.

  The white vanished.

  The black faded to normal black, and the wood crate was back.

  It was a few seconds before I was able to shake myself into moving around the corner so that, when he came out, whistling to himself, he wouldn’t see me. He strolled back to the house with his hands in his pockets, and Mother opened the door for him, nodded, and kissed his cheek.

  Then I looked up to the moon, saw the face, and I knew. One thing, then another, and something jumped inside my head and I knew what was going on, and I fell to my knees and put my head in my hands.

  Hate is a word I use only about my father, but I know now it’s a word both my folks use about me.

  It’s almost dawn. I’ve been sitting here so long I’m touched with dew, and I can’t move. Not an arm, not a leg, though my teeth stopped chattering a long time ago.

  Mike said his big brother was the favorite; Jeanne said it was her two sisters; Tony didn’t have anyone; and I have Peggy.

  So what can you do about it if you’re a parent? You give birth to the kid and you watch it grow up and into a person, and then you decide if you like it or not. Someone you meet that you don’t like you don’t have to see again, or you can be polite to, or you can ignore. A kid is there all the time—all day, all week, all year, all your life.

  It’s cold out here.

  So what can you do about it if you’re a parent and you don’t like your kid? What can you do if you don’t want him anymore?

  It’s very cold, and it’s dark.

  I think ... I think some parents go from hate to not caring, and that’s the worst of all. And if they look right, they can find someone who can see that, see the dark of it, and make it almost alive. Like a cloud, a black cloud that hangs over you in November, telling you it’s going to rain but not telling you when. Those kinds of days are the most rotten, and they make you feel rotten, on the outside where it’s raw, and on the inside where you wish you could just go away and find a place that has the sun.

  If the cloud stays long enough, you don’t wait for the next day, or the rain, or the snow—you go on your own, and you never come back.

  I didn’t call Mike. My father did.

  I didn’t talk to Tony. My father did.

  I wonder if Mr. Falkenberg hated his son?

  I keep trying to remember, but I can’t. Jesus. I can’t remember whose face I saw in that dying white light.

  But there’s no sense in running.

  I won’t go back in the house, but there’s no sense in running.

  I’m just going to wait here, and maybe think of a way to stop it.

  But sooner or later, when the sun comes out and the birds start flying and the kids are off to school and Peggy is laughing with my mother and my father is off to work, a telephone is going to ring.

  My father did the magic; my mother told him who to get.

  When that telephone rings, somebody is going to tell someone else that another kid is dead.

  Oh shit, Jeanne, don’t hate me, but I hope that it’s you.

  REPOSSESSION by
David Campton

  English playwright David Campton was born in Leicester on June 5, 1924, where he still makes his home. During World War II Campton served in the Royal Air Force, and afterward he began writing plays as well as pursuing an acting career. He gave up on the latter in 1963 in favor of writing and has since written more than seventy plays in addition to numerous radio and television plays (including a few in collaboration with Sheila Hodgson, who also appears in this collection). Campton’s most recent plays include Cards, Cups and Crystal Ball (about three clairvoyant sisters who foresee one murder and try to prevent another) and Can You Hear the Music (about mice succumbing to the temptations of the Pied Piper).

  When he—all too infrequently—turns his talents to short fiction, David Campton exhibits a precise control of language and a sophistication of style which deftly lead the reader to whatever sort of horrors Campton has in mind this time out. Since he has a penchant for dark humor as well as dark fantasy, it’s best to watch your step.

  The Johnson audit took longer than I anticipated, but I stayed working until it was finished, and was heading for home when a threatened wintery shower materialized. When I drove by the old Marlow factory I was concentrating on the wet road, so the light in the upper window barely registered and I was well past before the oddness struck me. What was a light doing on in a building that had been shut down for years? Was it vandals? Squatters? Should I do anything about possible trespassers?

  I could have telephoned the police, but was sure nobody would thank me. With the place scheduled for demolition there was every possibility it might fall down before the bulldozers moved in; so if some benighted soul had found shelter in the ruin, who was I to interfere? Constructed on the forbidding lines of a Victorian workhouse the derelict works offered only marginally better comfort than an exposed doorway. Let whoever was up there stay there.

  I continued to speculate on the light, though. Surely all services had been cut off when Marlow’s went into liquidation, so the gleam could hardly have been electric. Could a candle so far away have caught my attention through a sleet-spattered windscreen? Not even a hurricane lamp could have been expected to do that, so why had I even considered it? Except that the light forced itself more and more on my attention.

  I tried to shrug off the problem, yet found myself musing on alternatives, even with the car locked away and myself sinking into a reclining chair, keeping the chill at bay with a high-proof rum toddy.

  In my mind’s eye I could see that top window. Clearly now. No rain or sleet to obscure it. Harsh light streaming through. Who or what could be up there?

  From the point of view of the waste ground in front of the building, its grim silhouette made even more forbidding by the glow of city lights in the sky behind it, that solitary rectangle, like a single bright eye high above, was almost fascinating enough to make one forget the freezing slush underfoot. Who? Or what?

  I came to my senses when I dropped the toddy glass—fortunately empty by now. No, I was not shivering in the shadow of that monument to nineteenth-century economics. I was comfortably established in my own bachelor domain.

  In which case why were my feet so cold? Why were my sodden slippers caked with sludge? And why was icy cloth clammy against my legs?

  I was as wet as if I had been standing outside, exposed to the wintery weather. Impossible. But there were the dark stains. Had I been so engrossed that I had spilt the contents of my glass? No. Whatever was soaking into my clothes was not hot rum and lemon. I had not moved from my chair, and yet ...

  An accountant is expected to have a logical brain, and logically there was only one thing to be done—change into something warm and dry. The autopilot that guides us through daily routine took over while my thought processes slithered and foundered, trying to come to terms with the patently unbelievable.

  If I had not left the house why did my reflection in the wardrobe mirror look as though I had been trudging through fallow fields? There were actually blades of coarse grass sticking to the mud. A dried leaf. A fragment of paper. On slippers that since the day they were bought had never stepped farther than the front door. Half of me wanted to scream “there is something wrong here,” the other half laid out clean underwear, peeled off oozing socks and decided a shower was called for.

  While not exactly washing my bewilderment away, the hot water was at least soothing. As circulation returned, my numbed mental powers recovered sufficiently for me to take stock of the situation. I had been sitting back indulging—as surely as a man is entitled to after a long day with ledgers—in idle reverie. Something to do with a light, wasn’t it? In the old Marlow place. Yes, now I remembered the lighted window. At the top of ... and the warm water was rinsing away fresh streaks of dirt from my feet.

  Later, wrapped in my bathrobe, I took the rum bottle to my empty glass. Such refinements as lemon and hot water were dispensed with. My present state of nerves called for undiluted restorative. When I stopped shaking I tried to consider what might have happened.

  Surely such things did not happen. A person cannot be here one minute and somewhere quite different the next. Yet what could not have happened seemed to be connected in some way with ... No! Don’t think about the light. That light was part of the—illusion?—delusion?—phenomenon. Comforting word—phenomenon. A word for papering over cracks. Phenomenon can be applied to anything from young Miss Crummies to a light that ... No, not that light again! Even at the flicker of memory a gust of night wind seemed to ruffle my hair. I must not think about a light in an upper window.

  How to keep at bay those insistent, intrusive images? The baleful hulk of the factory ... Take a swig of neat rum, fierce enough to concentrate attention on tongue and throat ... with the glowing rectangle ... More rum ... like a signal ... At this rate I should soon be tight, and how much control would be left then? Another tot. The alcohol was taking effect. Even if I happened to think of a lighted window, it would be a blurred window because I was by now experiencing difficulty in focusing on anything; and at last stopped caring about anything ...

  I woke with a head like an echo chamber and a mouth like a sweaty sock. A thin ray of sunlight picked its way through a gap where the living room curtains failed to overlap. I had passed the night in my reclining chair and the empty bottle on my chest explained why. There are few things to be said in favor of a hangover, but at least its demands take precedence over other preoccupations. I was washed, dressed, aspirin-dosed and halfway through my second black coffee before I recollected the light and what had apparently followed.

  Perhaps fully dressed in daylight I felt bolder; perhaps the ache behind my eyes left me feeling that nothing worse could happen; at any rate I tried to repeat last night’s experience. Nothing happened.

  Somehow I could not exactly picture the way the window had appeared in the looming wall. Anyway, everything there would have been different in the stir of morning. My feet remained firmly planted on the kitchen floor. Whatever had (or had not) taken place was over now. Just something to look back on. “A funny thing once happened ...” becoming dimmed and distorted with time. The detail was blurred already. Ah, well ...

  The day’s work was something to be staggered through. Making allowances for impaired concentration, by midday I was almost normal again.

  Though I still could not face a meal. Ploughman’s cheese-and-pickle at the pub round the corner lacked appeal; as did the alternative little spaghetti place. I suppose I could have worked through the lunch-hour on more coffee, but I felt a need for fresh air. So I took a walk.

  The weather had improved and a fitful sun struggled through thin clouds. There was no mysterious inner compulsion and I did not wander in a daze; but I ended my stroll outside the Marlow factory.

  It had once been surrounded by rows of inadequate houses, built to accommodate mill-hands as cheaply as possible. Those streets had been swept away in the first stage of a massive slum-clearance project, but Local Authority had not yet raised finance for the se
cond phase; and the inner-city area, flat as a highwayman’s heath, had become an urban wilderness. Playground and natural hazard for stray animals and children, it stretched like an abandoned battlefield, strewn with discarded cans, bottles and waste paper, between a rusted chain-link fence and the grimy factory walls.

  I had never been so close to the place before, hardly ever having paused to give the eyesore a glance. After all, on that stretch of road a motorist usually concentrates on rush-hour queue-jumpers and the traffic lights ahead. I felt no more than mild curiosity, but I had half an hour to play with before being due back at the office. So I stepped cautiously across a broken section of fencing, and picked my way through the rough grass and tough weeds that sprouted as mangy covering over the broken ground. Underfoot was still spongy after last night’s wintery showers, though to a pedestrian mud was the least noxious of the hazards. By the time I reached the factory I needed the piece of sodden newspaper blown against the door for cleaning my shoes.

  Wiping away as much of the mess as I could, I leaned against the door. It opened. I might have guessed the lock would have been smashed. Architectural derelicts tend to attract human counterparts.

  Technically I suppose I was trespassing too; but there was no one to stop me—or even shout a word of warning. (Notices warding off intending intruders had long since been burned.) Having seen Marlow’s monument from the outside, why pass up the chance to look inside? If anyone should ask, I was interested in industrial archeology. I stepped over the threshold and pulled the door shut behind me.

  The entrance lobby was small with narrow stairs in one corner. When first built it must have constituted a natural fire hazard: so many employees jammed into so little space; but in old Marlow’s heyday human lives were just so much raw material. Such paint as had not peeled off the walls was mostly obscured with dust, cobwebs and handprints. The floor was littered with torn packets and empty bottles—evidence of previous interlopers.