The Year's Best Horror Stories 16

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  He had the struggling brute by the neck with a noosed stick. He stopped and looked at Patti with some intensity as she approached. The vine-drowned cottage whose lawn he stood on was dark, tight-shut, and seemed deserted—as did the entire block—and it struck Patti that the man might have spotted the dog by chance, and might now be thinking it hers. She smiled and shook her head as she came up.

  “He’s not mine! I don’t even live around here!”

  Something in the way her own words echoed down the stillness of the street gave Patti a pang. She was sure they had made the collector’s eyes narrow. He was tall, round and smooth, with a face of his employer’s type, though not as jovial. He was severely club footed and bloat-legged on the left, as well as being inordinately bellied, all things which the coveralls lent a merciful vagueness. The green baseball cap he wore somehow completed the look of ill balance and slow wit that the man wore.

  But as she got nearer, already wanting to turn and run the other way, she received a shocking impression of strength in the uncouth figure. The man had paused in a half-turn and was partly crouched—not a position of firm leverage. The dog—whose paws and muzzle showed some Bernard—weighed at least 170, and it resisted violently—yet scarcely stirred the heavy arms. Patti edged to one side of the walk, pretending a wariness of the dog which its helplessness made droll, and moved to pass. The collector’s hand, as if absently, pressed down on the noose. The beast’s head seemed to swell, its struggles grew more galvanic and constricted by extreme distress. And while thus smoothly he began throttling the beast, the collector cast a glance up and down the block, and stepped into Patti’s path, effortlessly dragging the animal with him.

  They stood face to face, very near. The ugly mathematics of peril swiftly clicked in her brain: the mass, the force, the time—all were sufficient. The next couple of moments could finish her. With a jerk he could kill the dog, drop it, seize her and thrust her into the van. Indeed, the dog was at the very point of death. The collector began to smile nastily and his breath came—foul and oddly cold—gusting against her face. Then something began to happen to his eyes. They were rolling up, like a man’s when he’s coming—but they didn’t roll white—they were rolling up a jet black—two glossy obsidian globes eclipsing from below the watery blue ones. Her lungs began to gather air to scream. A taxi-cab swung onto the street.

  The collector’s grip eased on the half-unconscious dog. He stood blinking furiously, and it seemed he could not unwind his bulky body from the menacing tension it had taken on. He stood, still frozen on the very threshold of assault, and the cold foulness still gusted from him with the labor of his breathing. In another instant Patti’s reflexes fired and she was released with a leap from the curb out into the street, but there was time enough before for her to have the thought she knew that stench the blinking gargoyle breathed.

  And then she was in the cab. The driver sullenly informed her of her luck in catching him on his special shortcut to a freeway on-ramp. She looked at him as if he’d spoken in a foreign tongue. More gently he asked her destination, and without thought she answered: “The Greyhound station.”

  Flight. With sweet, simple motion to cancel Hollywood, and its walking ghosts of murder, and its lurking plunderers of the body, and its nasty, nameless scribblers of letters whose pleasure it was to defile the mind with nightmares. But of course, she must pack. She re-routed the driver to her apartment.

  This involved a doubling-back which took them across the street of her encounter. The van was still parked by the curb, but neither collector nor dog were in sight. Oddly, the van seemed to be moving slightly, rocking as if with interior movement of fitful vigor. Her look was brief, from a half block’s distance, but in the shady stillness the subtle tremoring made a vivid impression.

  Then she bethought herself of Fat Face. She could report the collector to him! That just and genial face instantly quelled all the horror attaching to the collector’s uglier one. What, after all, had happened? A creepy, disabled type with some eye infection had been dangerously tempted to rape her, and she had lucked out. That last fact was grounds for celebration, while all that was strong and avuncular in the good doctor’s expression promised that she would be vigorously protected from further danger at the same hands. She even smiled to imagine the interview: her pretty embarrassment, the intimate topic, her warmly expressed girlish gratitude. It could become the tender seduction of her fantasy.

  So she re-routed the driver again—not without first giving him a ten-dollar tip in advance—to the boulevard. There she walked a while, savoring the sunlight, and lunched opulently, and went to two different double-bills, one right after the other.

  But her mood could have been better. She kept remembering the collector. It was not his grotesqueness that nagged at her so much as a fugitive familiarity in the whole aura of him. His chill, malignant presence was like a gust out of some place obscurely known to her. What dream of her own, now lost to her, had shown her that world of dread and wonder and colossal age which now she caught—and knew—the scent of, in this man? The thought was easy to shake off as a freak of mood, but it was insistent in its return, like a fly that kept landing on her, and after the movies, feeling groggy and cold in the dusk, she called Sheri.

  Her friend had just got home, exhausted from a multiple trick, and wearing a few bruises from a talk with Rudy afterward.

  “Why don’t I come over, Share? Hey?”

  “Naw, Patti. I’m wrung out, girl. You feel OK?”

  “Sure. So get to sleep then.”

  “Naw, hey now—you come over if you want to, Patti. I’m just gonna be dead to the world is all.”

  “Whaddya mean? If you’re tired you’re tired and I’ll catch you later. So long.” She could hear, but not change the anger and disappointment in her own voice. It told her, when she’d hung up but remained staring at the phone, how close to the territory of Fear she still stood. Full night had surrounded her glass booth. Against the fresh, purple dark, all the street’s scribbly neon squirmed and swam, like sea-things of blue and rose and gold, bannering and twisting cryptically over the drowned pavements.

  And, almost as though she expected watery death, Patti could not, for a moment, step from the booth out onto those pavements. Their lethal, cold strangeness lay, if not undersea, then surely in an alien, poisonous atmosphere that would scorch her lungs. For a ridiculous moment, her body defied her will. Then she set her sights on a bar half a block distant. She plunged from the booth and grimly made for that haven.

  Some three hours later, no longer cold, Patti was walking to Sheri’s. It was a weeknight and the stillness of the residential streets was not unpleasant. The tree-crowded streetlamps shed a light that was lovely with its whiskey gloss. The street names on their little banners of blue metal had a comic flavor to her tongue and she called out each as it came into view.

  Sheri, after all, had said to come over. The petty cruelty of waking her seemed, to Patti, under the genial excuse of the alcohol, merely prankish. So she sauntered through sleeping Hollywood, knowing the nightwalker’s exhilaration of being awake in a dormant world.

  Sheri lived in a stucco cottage that was a bit tackier than Patti’s, though larger, each cottage possessing a little driveway and a garage in back. And though there was a light on in the livingroom, it was up the driveway that Patti went, deciding, with sudden impishness, to spook her friend. She crept round the rear corner, and stole up to the screened window of Sheri’s bedroom, meaning to make noises through a crack if one had been left open.

  The window was in fact fully raised, though a blind was drawn within. Even as Patti leaned close, she heard movement inside the darkened room. In the next instant a gust of breeze came up and pushed back the blind within.

  Sheri was on her back in the bed and somebody was on top of her, so that all Patti could see of her was her arms and her face, which stared round-eyed at the ceiling as she was rocked again and again on the bed. Patti viewed that surging, gr
appling labor for two instants, no more, and retreated, almost staggering, in a primitive reflex of shame more deep-lying in her than any of the sophistications of her adult professional life.

  Shame and a weird, childish glee. She hurried out to the sidewalk. Her head rang, and she felt giggly and frightened to a degree that managed to astonish her even through her liquor. What was with her? She’d been paid to watch far grosser things than a simple coupling. On the other hand there had been a foul smell in the bedroom, and there had been a nagging hint of music too, she thought, a faint, unpleasant twisty tune coming from somewhere indefinite ...

  These vague feelings quickly yielded to the humorous side of the accident. She walked to the nearest main street and found a bar. In it, she killed half an hour with two further doubles and then, reckoning enough time had passed, walked back to Sheri’s.

  The livingroom light was still on. Patti rang the bell and heard it inside, a rattly probe of noise that raised no stir of response. All at once she felt a light rush of suspicion, like some long-legged insect scuttling daintily up her spine. She felt that, as once before in the last few days, the silence she was hearing concealed a presence, not an absence. But why should this make her begin, ever so slightly, to sweat? It would be Sheri, playing possum. Trying by abruptness to throw off her fear she seized the knob. The door opened and she rushed in, calling:

  “Ready or not, one two three!”

  Before she was fully in the room, her knees buckled under her, for a fiendish stench filled it. It was a carrion smell, a fierce, damp rankness which bit and pierced the nose. It was so palpable an assault it seemed to crawl all over her—to wriggle through her scalp and stain her flesh as if with brimstone and graveslime.

  Clinging still to the doorknob she looked woozily about the room, whose sloppy normality, coming to her as it did through that surreal fetor, struck her almost eerily. Here was the litter of wrappers, magazines and dishes—thickest round the couch—so familiar to her. The tv, on low, was crowned with ashtrays and beercans, while on the couch which it faced a freshly open bag of Fritos lay.

  But it was from the bedroom door, partly ajar, that the nearly visible miasma welled most thickly, as from its source. And it would be in the bedroom that Sheri lay. She would be lying dead in its darkness. For, past experience and description though it was, the stench proclaimed that meaning grim and clear: death. Patti turned behind her to take a last clean breath, and stumbled toward the bedroom.

  Every girl ran the risk of rough trade. It was an ugly and lonely way to die. With the dark, instinctive knowledge of their sisterhood, Patti knew that it was only laying out and covering up that her friend needed of her now. She shoved inward on the bedroom door, throwing a broken rhomb of light upon the bed.

  It and the room were empty—empty save for the near physical mass of the stench. It was upon the bed that the reek fumed and writhed most nastily. The blankets and sheets were drenched with some vile fluid, and pressed into sodden seams and folds. The coupling she had glimpsed and snickered at—what unspeakable species of intercourse had it been? And Sheri’s face staring up from under the shadowed form’s lascivious rocking—had there been more to read in her expression than the slack-faced shock of sex? Then Patti moaned:

  “O Jesus God!”

  Sheri was in the room. She lay on the floor, mostly under the bed, only her head and shoulders protruding, her face to the ceiling. There was no misreading its now frozen look. It was a face wherein the recognition of Absolute Pain and Fear had dawned, even as death arrived. Dead she surely was. Living muscles did not achieve that utter fixity. Tears jumped up in Patti’s eyes. She staggered into the livingroom, fell on the couch and wept. “O Jesus God,” she said again, softly now.

  She went to the kitchenette and got a dishtowel, tied it around her nose and mouth, and returned to the bedroom. Sheri would not, at least, lie half thrust from sight like a broken toy. Her much-used body would have a shred of that dignity which her life had never granted it. She bent, and hooked her hands under those dear, bare shoulders. She pulled, and, with her pull’s excess force, fell backward to the floor. For that which she fell hugging to her breasts needed no such force to move its lightness. It was not Sheri, but a dreadful upper fragment of her, that Patti hugged: Sheri’s head and shoulders, one of her arms ... gone were her fat, funny feet they had used to laugh at, for she ended now in a charred stump of ribcage. As a little girl might clutch some unspeakable doll, Patti lay embracing tightly that which made her scream, and scream again.

  Valium. Compazene. Mellaril. Stellazine. Gorgeous technicolored tabs and capsules. Bright-hued pillars holding up the Temple of Rest. Long afternoons of Tuonol and tv; night sweats and quiet, groggy mornings. Patti was in County for more than a week.

  She had found all there was to be found of her friend. Dismemberment by acid is a new wrinkle, and Sheri got some press, but in a world of trashbag murders and mass graves uncovered in quiet back yards, even a death like Sheri’s could hope for only so much coverage. Patti’s bafflement made her call the detectives assigned to the case at least once a day. With gruff tact they heard through her futile rummagings among the things she knew of Sheri’s life and background, but soon knew she was helpless to come up with anything material.

  She desperately wanted a period of thoughtless rest, but always a vague, unsleeping dread marred her drug-buoyed ease. For she could be waked, even from the glassiest daze, by a sudden sense that the number of people surrounding her was dwindling—that they were, everywhere, stealing off, or vanishing, and that the hospital, and even the city, was growing empty around her.

  She put it down to the hospital itself—its constant shifts of bodies, its wheelings in and out on silent gurneys. She obtained a generous scrip for Valium and had herself discharged, hungry for the closer comfort of her friends. A helpful doctor was leaving the building as she did, and gave her a ride. With freakish embarrassment about her trade and her world, Patti had him drop her at a coffee shop some blocks from the Parnassus. When he had driven off, she started walking. The dusk was just fading. It was Saturday night, but it was also the middle of a three-day weekend (as she had learned with surprise from the doctor) and the traffic on both pavement and asphalt was remarkably light.

  Somehow it had a small-town-on-Sunday feel, and alarm woke in her and struggled in its heavy Valium shackles, for this was as if the confirmation of her frightening hallucinations. Her fear mounted as she walked. She pictured the Parnassus with an empty lobby, and imagined that she saw the traffic beginning everywhere to turn off the street she walked on, so that in a few moments, it could stretch deserted for a mile either way.

  But then she saw the many lively figures through the beloved plateglass windows. She half ran ahead, and as she waited with happy excitement for the light, she saw Fat Face up in his window. He spotted her just when she did him, and beamed and winked. Patti waved and smiled and heaved a deep sigh of relief that nearly brought tears. This was true medicine, not pills, but friendly faces in your home community! Warm feelings and simple neighborliness! She ran forward at the “walk” signal.

  There was a snag before she reached the lobby, for Arnold from his wooden cave threw at her as she passed a leer of wet intensity that scared her even as she recognized that some kind of frightened greeting was intended by the grimace. There was such ... speculation in his look. But then she had pushed through the glass doors, and was in the warm ebullience of shouts and hugs and jokes and droll nudges.

  It was sweet to bathe in that bright, raucous communion. She had called the desk man that she was coming out, and for a couple of hours various friends whom the word had reached strolled in to greet her. She luxuriated in her pitied celebrity, received little gifts and gave back emotional kisses of thanks.

  It ought to have lasted longer, but the night was an odd one. Not much was happening in town, and everybody seemed to have action lined up in Oxnard or Encino or some other bizarre place. A few stayed to work the home gr
ounds, but they caught a subdued air from the place’s emptiness at a still-young hour. Patti took a couple more Valium and tried to seem like she was peacefully resting in a lobby chair. To fight her stirrings of unease, she took up the paperback that was among the gifts given her—she hadn’t even noticed by whom. It had a horrible face on the cover and was entitled At The Mountains of Madness.

  If she had not felt the need of some potent distraction, some weighty ballast for her listing spirit, she would never have pieced out the Ciceronian rhythms of the narrative’s style. But when, with frightened tenacity, she had waded several pages into the tale, the riverine prose, suddenly limpid, snatched her and bore her upon its flowing clarity. The Valium seemed to perfect her uncanny concentration, and where her vocabulary failed her, she made smooth leaps of inference and always landed square on the necessary meaning.

  And so for hours in the slowly emptying lobby that looked out upon the slowly emptying intersection, she wound through the icy territories of the impossible, and down into the gelid, nethermost cellars of all World and Time, where stupendous aeons lay in pictured shards, and massive, sentient forms still stirred, and fed, and mocked the light.

  Strangely, she began to find underlinings about two-thirds of the way through. All the marked passages involved references to shoggoths. It was a word whose mere sound made Patti’s flesh stir. She searched the fly-leaf and inner covers for explanatory inscriptions, but found nothing.

  When she laid the book down in the small hours, she sat amid a near-total desertion which she scarcely noticed. Something tugged powerfully at memory, something which memory dreaded to admit. She realized that in reading the tale, she had taken on an obscure, terrible weight. She felt as if impregnated by an injection of tainted knowledge whose grim fruit, an almost physical mass of cryptic threat, lay a-ripening in her now.