The Year's Best Horror Stories 16

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  “I fear they have come too late,” I said.

  “Yes,” he replied. “They can do nothing now.”

  Next day the cold swept back, refreezing the snow which had melted in the heat, forming strange patterns on the ground, twisting curves and lines and rivulets of ice between the blackened walls. And so I left them side by side: the ancient ruin of the Abbey and the present wreck of Medborough Academy For Young Gentlemen.

  Two months after the disaster, Arthur Layton called on me at Cambridge. He seemed in low spirits, understandably. He sat drinking whiskey and bewailing his fate; he had moved his family into lodgings, he had written to the parents of one hundred children, and had arranged for some distant cousin to collect the luckless Harley. Life held nothing but misery and confusion. I offered conventional sympathy and more whiskey; the fellow appeared positively distraught, pacing backward and forward, and waving his arms in the old remembered semaphoring gesture. I had to stop him sitting down again upon my cat. Presently he leaned forward and whispered:

  “James. I am in serious difficulties.”

  Well, yes. One would have supposed as much, given the facts. Moreover I could not imagine why the man was whispering; we were quite alone and the door to my chambers shut. He glanced at it, then at the window, then he dropped his voice even lower and said:

  “The insurance company have refused to pay me.”

  Certain rather horrid suspicions began to form in my mind.

  “Oh dear me.”

  “A minor problem! Of no significance! They seem to find it odd that everybody had left the building before it went up in flames. Now, you and I know, Dr. James, we were playing a harmless Christmas game! Amusing the staff! Why, anything might start a fire at Christmas time—candles falling from the tree, a log rolling out onto the carpet, I can think of a dozen reasons.”

  I felt reasonably sure he could.

  “It’s utterly monstrous to suggest ... James, James, you were there! You can bear witness that we went to the Abbey because we had celebrated rather too well; we were merry, we needed fresh air, we decided to take a walk. The maids came with us because it was the festive season, peace to all men; I believe in a democratic society!” cried Layton. “We are brothers under the skin!”

  He had certainly made sure everybody got out. On my first arrival at Medborough Abbey I had been indignant, I had resented his suggestion that I might advertise his college; it seemed to me I was being manipulated. My feelings then were as nothing to my emotions now.

  “Layton. Are you telling me you are suspected of having started the fire yourself?”

  The cat got up and prudently removed itself to a distance.

  “It’s ludicrous! Absurd! Not that I blame them, no, no, obviously they have to be cautious. But I must have the money, James! I must! If you will just speak for me—explain the situation—a man of your reputation and standing should have no trouble persuading them.”

  “I see.”

  Alas, I did see, and all too clearly.

  “Could you oblige me? If you would be so very kind and write a suitable letter to the insurance company?”

  “No,” I said. I might have had more sympathy for the man but for his blatant attempt to use me, to exploit an early acquaintance.

  “But Dr. James ...”

  I opened the door. Embarrassment, distress, and a degree of justifiable annoyance gave too much edge to my voice.

  “I am very sorry. I fear I must absolutely decline to have any part in this business.”

  Do you blame me? It was fraud: plain, clumsy and criminal.

  He stood, the color flooding into his cheeks; then he gathered up his coat and left without looking at me. I could hear the bells ringing across the court as he went.

  I never saw Arthur Layton again. He wrote to me once; a wild incoherent epistle concerning Medborough Abbey. The monks’ treasure, wrote Layton; when they fired the Abbey where did they hide the treasure? The crucifix. I did remember the crucifix; in the general alarm of that night the crucifix had vanished, but was it possible, did I not think it probable the crucifix had formed part of their horde? And surely, surely if there had been one object there might be others: a chalice, candelabra, gold or silver plate; now where in my considered opinion would such valuables have been concealed? Where should he start digging?

  I had no opinion on the subject. My view of the thing had been altogether too brief; in any event it struck me as infinitely more likely that the monks’ possessions were scattered throughout England, and as for the folly of digging through the Medborough ruins—I replied in terms of gentle discouragement.

  He never answered. I opened my newspaper one morning to read the unhappy news that the schoolmaster had been found dead near Medborough Abbey, apparently of a heart attack. I would have written to his wife but was quite unable to discover her address. Whether the man had indeed been engaged on some frantic treasure hunt, whether he met again the whispering brothers and saw again their gaping faces, we shall never know.

  VISITORS by Jack Dann

  Born in Johnson City, New York on February 15, 1945, Jack Dann presently lives with his wife in Binghamton, New York in “an old Greek Revival, which could fit the Third Regiment.” Dann has written or edited more than twenty-one books to date, some of them in collaboration with Gardner Dozois. Recent books include his mainstream novel, Counting Coup, and an anthology of stories concerned with the Vietnam War, In the Fields of Fire, edited with his wife, Jeanne Van Buren Dann.

  Jack Dann’s stories often exemplify what Charles L. Grant calls “quiet horror”—a sense of melancholy and unease devoid of bloody chainsaws and exploding heads. Noted fantasy critic, E. F. Bleiler, commenting on Dann’s story, “Tattoos,” in The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XV, wrote that it “has suggestions of Chagall and Isaac Bashevis Singer.” Not bad company for a writer.

  After Mr. Benjamin died, he came back to Charlie’s room for a visit. He was a tall man, taken down to the bone by cancer. His face had a grayish cast; and his thick white hair, of which he had been so obviously proud, had thinned. But he was still handsome even as he stood before Charlie’s bed. He was sharp-featured, although his mouth was full, which softened the effect of his piercing, pale blue eyes; he wore white silk pajamas and a turquoise robe, and was as poised and stiff as an ancient emperor.

  “They closed all the doors again,” Charlie said to Mr. Benjamin—they always closed the doors to the patients’ rooms when they had to wheel a corpse through the hallway.

  “I guess they did,” Mr. Benjamin said, and he sat down in the cushioned chair beside Charlie’s bed. He usually came for a visit before bedtime; it was part of his nightly ritual.

  But here he was, and it was mid-afternoon.

  Sunlight flooded through a tripartite window into the large high-ceilinged room, magnifying the swirling dust motes that filled the room like snow in a crystal Christmas scene paperweight. The slate-gray ceiling above was barrel-vaulted and although cracked and broken and discolored, the plaster was worked into intricate patterns of entwined tendrils. A marble fireplace was closed off with a sheet of metal, and there was an ancient mahogany grandfather clock ticking in the corner. The hospital had once been a manor, built in the eighteen hundreds by the wealthiest man in the state; its style was Irish gothic, and every room contained the doric columns and scrolled foliage that was a trademark of the house.

  “I wonder who died?” Charlie asked.

  Mr. Benjamin smiled sadly and stretched his long legs out under Charlie’s bed.

  Charlie was fifteen and had had an erection before Mr. Benjamin came into the room, for he was thinking about the nurses, imagining how they would look undressed. Although Charlie’s best friend had been laid, Charlie was still a virgin; but he looked older than he was and had even convinced his best friend that he, too, had popped the cork. He had been feeling a bit better these last few days. He had not even been able to think about sex before; there was only pain and drugs, and e
ven with the drugs he could feel the pain. All the drugs did were let him investigate its shape; Charlie had discovered that pain had shape and color; it was like an animal that lived and moved inside him.

  “How are you feeling today?” Mr. Benjamin asked.

  “Pretty good,” Charlie said, although the pain was returning and he was due for another shot. “How about you?”

  Mr. Benjamin laughed. Then he asked. “Where’s Rosie?” Rosie was Charlie’s private nurse. Charlie’s father was well-to-do and had insisted on round-the-clock private nurses for his son. But Charlie didn’t want private nurses or a private room; in fact, he would have preferred a regular double-room and a roommate, which would have been much less expensive; and if Charlie had another setback, his roommate would be able to call for a nurse for him. Charlie had been deathly ill: he had developed peritonitis from a simple appendectomy, and his stomach was still hugely distended. Drainage tubes were sunk deeply into his incisions, and they smelled putrid. He had lost over thirty pounds.

  Charlie seemed to be slipping in and out of a dream; it was just the Demerol working through his system.

  “Rosie’s off today,” he said after a long pause. He had been dreaming of whiteness, but he could hear clearly through the dream. He came fully awake and said, “I love her, but it’s such a relief not to have her banging everything around and dropping things to make sure I don’t fall asleep. The regular nurses have been in a lot, and I got two backrubs.” He grinned at Mr. Benjamin. It was a game he played with Mr. Benjamin: who could win the most points in wooing the nurses. One night, when Charlie had been well enough to walk across the hall and visit Mr. Benjamin, he found him in bed with two nurses. Mr. Benjamin had a grin on his face, as if he had just won the game forevermore. The nurses, of course, were just playing along.

  Mr. Benjamin leaned back in the chair. It was a bright, sunny day, and the light hurt Charlie’s eyes when he stared out the window for too long. Perhaps it was an effect of the Demerol, but Mr. Benjamin just seemed ... not quite defined, as if his long fingers and strong face were made out of the same dustmotes that filled the air and the room.

  “Is your wife coming over today?” Charlie asked. “It’s Wednesday.” Charlie was in on Mr. Benjamin’s secret: two women came to visit him religiously. His mistress, a beautiful young woman with long red hair, on Tuesdays and Thursdays; and his wife, who wasn’t beautiful, but who must have been once, and who was about the same age as Mr. Benjamin, came every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. His friends came to see him on Saturday, but not his women.

  “No, not today,” Mr. Benjamin said.

  “That’s too bad.”

  And just then one of the nurses came into the room. She was one of the old hands, and she said hello to Charlie, fluffed up his pillow, took his temperature, and gave him a shot all the while she talked, but it was small-talk. The nurse ignored Mr. Benjamin, as she tore away the bandages that covered the drainage tubes in Charlie’s stomach. Then she pulled out the tubes, which didn’t hurt Charlie, and cleaned them. After she had reinserted the tubes—two into the right side of his abdomen, one into the left—and replaced the bandages, she hung another clear plastic bag of saline solution on the metal pole beside the bed and adjusted the rate of fluid that dripped into the vein in Charlie’s right wrist.

  “Who died?” Charlie asked her, wishing one of the pretty nurses’-aides had been sent in, or had at least accompanied her.

  She sat down on the bed and rubbed Charlie’s legs. He had lost so much weight that they were the size his arms had once been. This nurse was one of Charlie’s favorites, even though she was old—she could have been fifty or sixty-five, it was difficult to tell. She had a wide, fleshy face, a small nose, and perfect, capped teeth. “You’ll have to know anyway,” she said without looking up at him. “It was Mr. Benjamin. I know how close you felt to him, and I’m so very sorry, but as you know he was in a lot of pain. This is the best thing for the poor man, you’ve got to try to believe that. He’s in a happier place now.”

  Charlie was going to tell her she was crazy, that he was right here, and had a mistress and a wife and an architect job to go back to and that it was all bullshit about a happier place, but he just nodded and turned toward Mr. Benjamin. She made a fuss over Charlie, who was ignoring her, and finally left. “Are you sure you’ll be okay?” she asked.

  Charlie nodded. His mouth felt dry; the Demerol would soon kick in. “Yeah, I’ll be fine.” Then, turning back to Mr. Benjamin, he asked, “Are you really dead?”

  Mr. Benjamin nodded. “I suppose I am.”

  “You don’t look dead.”

  “I don’t feel dead. My goddamn legs are still aching and itching like hell.”

  Charlie’s face felt numb. “Why are you in here if you’re dead?”

  “How the hell should I know. There are worse places I can think of. I just got out of bed and walked in here, same way as I always do.”

  “Are you going to stay?”

  “For a while. Do you mind?”

  Charlie just shook his head and took comfort, as he always did, in Mr. Benjamin’s presence. But then the man in the next room started screaming again, praying to God to relieve him of his pain, begging and whining and whimpering and waking up the other patients.

  It was difficult to rest with all that commotion going on.

  The Demerol came upon him like a high-tide of anesthesia. It soaked into him and everything in the hospital room turned white, as if the molding and wall panels and ceiling scrollwork and inlaid marble chimney piece were carved out of purest snow. He dreamed of winter and castles and books he had read when he was a child. He was inside a cloud, his thoughts drifting, linking laterally, as he dreamed of chalk and snow and barium, of whitewash and bleach, of silver and frost and whipped cream, of angels and sand, of girls as white as his Demerol highs, chalky and naked with long white hair and pale lips, long and thin and small breasted, open and wet and cold, cold as snow, cold as his icicle erection, cold as his thoughts of glacially slow coitus.

  He woke up shivering in a dark room, sweat drying on his goosebumped skin. Gray shadows crawled across the room, a result of traffic on the street below.

  Mr. Benjamin was still sitting beside the bed.

  “Have you been here all this time?” Charlie asked. It was late. The nurses had turned out the lights in his room, and the hallway was quiet. If he listened carefully and held his breath, he could hear the snoring and moaning of other patients between the tickings of the clock. His mouth was parched, and he reached for the water tumbler. It sat on his nineteen-fifties style nighttable, which also contained the remote control unit that turned the television on and off and also allowed him to buzz the nurse’s station. He poured some icewater into a paper cup. “You look more ... real,” Charlie said.

  “What do you mean?” Mr. Benjamin asked.

  “I dunno, you looked kinda weak before.”

  “Well, I’m feeling better now. My legs stopped itching, and they only ache a little bit now. I can stand it, at least. How about you?”

  “I feel like crap again,” Charlie said. “I thought I was getting better.” The pain in his stomach was intense and stabbing; it hadn’t been this bad in a long time. “And I know that old fat Mrs. Campbell isn’t going to give me another shot until I start screaming and moaning like the guy across the hall.”

  Charlie’s night-nurse thought he was becoming too dependent on painkillers.

  “He’s getting worse,” Mr. Benjamin said.

  “Who?” Charlie asked.

  “The guy across the hall, Mr. Ladd. Rosie told me he’d had most of his stomach removed.”

  “I just wish he would stop crying and begging for the pain to go away. I can’t stand it. He makes such a racket. There’s something pitiful about it. And he’s not the only one who’s in pain around here.”

  “Well, who knows, maybe he can cut a deal,” Mr. Benjamin said.

  “You’re not dead,” Charlie said.r />
  Mr. Benjamin shrugged.

  “I thought you said you had all kinds of contracts to build new buildings and stuff. You said you wanted to work until you dropped dead, that you wanted to travel and all. And what about Miss Anthony ... and your wife?”

  “It’s all gone,” Mr. Benjamin said.

  “Doesn’t it bother you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, surprised. “I don’t really feel anything much about it. Maybe a little sad. But I guess not even that.”

  “Tell me what it’s like to be dead.”

  “I don’t know. The same as being alive, I would suppose, except my legs feel better.”

  “You’re not dead,” Charlie said.

  “I’ll take your word for it, Charlie.”

  Charlie became worse during the night. He used the speaker in the nighttable to call Mrs. Campbell for a shot, but she told him he wasn’t due for another hour. He tried to argue with her, he kept calling her, but she ignored him. He listened to the clock on the wall and turned this way and that, trying to find a comfortable position. Goddamn her, Charlie thought, and he tried to count himself to sleep. If he could fall asleep for just a little while, it would then be time for his shot.

  Goddamn it hurts ...

  And Mr. Ladd across the hall started screaming and whining and trying to make a deal with God again. Charlie gritted his teeth and tried to pretend that the room was turning white, and that he was numb and frozen, made of blue ice. Ice: the absence of pain.