The Year's Best Horror Stories 16 Part 20

Balmy Bill gulped, tossed back his gin and poured himself another. His eyes were huge now, skin white where it showed through his whiskers. "G.o.d, no-that wasn't it-there was more! See, I figured later that I must have got myself drunk deliberately that time-so's to go up there and spy on 'em. Oh, I now that sounds crazy now, but you know what it's like when you're drunk mindless. Jesus, these days I can't get drunk! But these were early days I'm telling you about."

"So what happened next?"

"Next-he's coming back down the street! I can hear him: click, pause ... click, pause ... click, pause, stilting it along the pavement-and I can see him in my mind's eye, doing his impression of a lamppost with every pause. And suddenly I get this feeling, and I sneak a look around. I mean, the frontage of this garden I'm in is so tiny, and the house behind me is-"

I saw it coming. "Jesus!"

"A thin house," he confirmed it, "right!"

"So now you were in trouble."

He shrugged, licked his lips, trembled a little. "I was lucky, I suppose. I squeezed myself into the hedge, lay still as death. And click, pause ... click, pause, getting closer all the time. And then, behind me, for I'd turned my face away-the slow creaking as the door of the thin house swung open! And the second thin person coming out and, I imagine, unfolding him or herself, and the two of 'em standing there for a moment, and me near dead of fright."

"And?"

"Click-click, pause; click-click, pause; click-click-and away they go. G.o.d only knows where they went, or what they did, but me?-I gave 'em ten minutes' start and then got up, and ran, and stumbled, and forced my rubbery legs to carry me right out of there. And I haven't been back. Why, this is the closest I've been to Barchington since that night, and too close by far!"

I waited for a moment but he seemed done. Finally I nodded. "Well, that's a good story, Bill, and-"

"I'm not finished!" he snapped. "And it's not just a story ..."

"There's more?"

"Evidence," he whispered. "The evidence of your own clever-b.u.g.g.e.r eyes!"

I waited.

"Go to the window," said Bill, "and peep out through the curtains. Go on, do it."

I did.

"See anything funny?"

I shook my head.

"Blind as a bat!" he snorted. "Look at the street lights-or the absence of lights. I showed you once tonight. They've nicked all the bulbs."

"Kids," I shrugged. "Hooligans. Vandals."

"Huh!" Bill sneered. "Hooligans, here? Unheard of, Vandals? You're joking! What's to vandalize? And when did you last see kids playing in these streets, eh?"

He was right. "But a few missing light bulbs aren't hard evidence," I said.

"All right!" he pushed his face close and wrinkled his nose at me. "Hard evidence, then." And he began to tell me the final part of his story ...

3.

"Cars!" Balmy Bill snapped, in that abrupt way of his. "They can't bear them. Can't say I blame 'em much, not on that one. I hate the noisy, dirty, clattering things myself. But tell me: have you noticed anything a bit queer-about cars, I mean-in these parts?"

I considered for a moment, replied: "Not a h.e.l.l of a lot of them."

"Right!" He was pleased. "On the rest of the Hill, nose to tail. Every street overflowing. 'Specially at night when people are in the pubs or watching the telly. But here? Round Barchington and the Larches and a couple of other streets in this neighborhood? Not a one to be seen!"

"Not true," I said. "There are two cars in this very street. Right now. Look out the window and you should be able to see them."

"b.o.l.l.o.c.ks!" said Bill.

"Pardon?"

"b.o.l.l.o.c.ks!" he gratefully repeated. "Them's not cars! Rusting old bangers. Spoke-wheels and all. Twenty, thirty years they've been trundling about. The thin people are used to them. It's the big shiny new ones they don't like. And so, if you park your car up here overnight-trouble!"

"Trouble?" But here I was deliberately playing dumb. Here I knew what he meant well enough. I'd seen it for myself: the occasional shiny car, left overnight, standing there the next morning with its tires slashed, windows smashed, lamps kicked in.

He could see it in my face. "You know what I mean, all right. Listen, couple of years ago there was a flash Harry type from the city used to come up here. There was a barmaid he fancied in 'The Railway'-and she was taking all he could give her. Anyway, he was flash, you know? One of the gang lads and a rising star. And a flash car to go with it. Bullet-proof windows, hooded lamps, reinforced panels-the lot. Like a b.l.o.o.d.y tank, it was. But-" Bill sighed.

"He used to park it up here, right?"

He nodded. "Thing was, you couldn't threaten him. You know what I mean? Some people you can threaten, some you shouldn't threaten, and some you mustn't He was one you mustn't. Trouble is, so are the thin people."

"So what happened?"

"When they slashed his tires, he lobbed bricks through the windows. And he had a knowing way with him. He tossed 'em through thin house windows. Then one night he parked down on the corner of Barchington. Next morning-they'd drilled holes right through the plate, all over the car. After that-he didn't come back for a week or so. When he did come back ... well, he must've been pretty mad."

"What did he do?"

"Threw something else-something that made a bang! A d.a.m.n big one! You've seen that thin, derelict sh.e.l.l on the corner of Barchington? Oh, it was him, sure enough, and he got it right, too. A thin house. Anybody in there, they were goners. And that did it!"

"They got him?"

"They got his car! He parked up one night, went down to 'The Railway,' when the bar closed, took his lady-love back to her place, and in the morning-"

"They'd wrecked it-his car, I mean."

"Wrecked it? Oh, yes, they'd done that. They'd folded it!"

"Come again?"

"Folded it!" he snapped. "Their funny science. Eighteen inches each way, it was. A cube of folded metal. No broken gla.s.s, no split seams, no splintered plastic. Folded all neat and tidy. An eighteen-inch cube."

"They'd put it through a crusher, surely?" I was incredulous.

"Nope-folded."

"Impossible!"

"Not to them. Their funny science."

"So what did he do about it?"

"Eh? Do? He looked at it, and he thought, 'What if I'd been sitting in the b.l.o.o.d.y thing?' Do? He did what I would do, what you would do. He went away. We never did see him again."

The half-bottle was empty. We reached for the beers. And after a long pull I said: "You can kip here if you want, on the floor. I'll toss a blanket over you."

"Thanks," said Balmy Bill, "but no thanks. When the beer's gone I'm gone. I wouldn't stay up here to save my soul. Besides, I've a bottle of my own back home."

"Sly old sod!" I said.

"Daft young b.u.g.g.e.r!" he answered without malice. And twenty minutes later I let him out. Then I crossed to the windows and looked out at him, at the street all silver in moonlight.

He stood at the gate (where it should be) swaying a bit and waving up at me, saying his thanks and farewell. Then he started off down the street.

It was quiet out there, motionless. One of those nights when even the trees don't move. Everything frozen, despite the fact that it wasn't nearly cold. I watched Balmy Bill out of sight, craning my neck to see him go, and- "Across the road, three lampposts-where there should only be two! The one on the left was okay, and the one to the far right. But the one in the middle? I never had seen that one before. I blinked bleary eyes, gasped, blinked again. Only two lampposts!

Stinking drunk-drunk as a skunk-utterly boggled!

I laughed as I tottered from the window, switched off the light, staggered into my bedroom. The balmy old b.a.s.t.a.r.d had really had me going. I'd really started to believe. And now the booze was making me see double-or something. Well, just as long as it was lampposts and not pink elephants! Or thin people! And I went to bed laughing.

... But I wasn't laughing the next morning.

Not after they found him, old Balmy Bill of Barrows Hill. Not after they called me to identify him.

"Their funny science," he'd called it. The way they folded things. And Jesus, they'd folded him, too. Right down into an eighteen-inch cube. Ribs and bones and skin and muscles-the lot. Nothing broken, you understand, just folded. No blood or guts or anything nasty-nastier by far because there was nothing.

And they'd dumped him in a garbage-skip at the end of the street. The couple of local youths who found him weren't even sure what they'd found, until they spotted his face on one side of the cube. But I won't go into that ...

Well, I moved out of there just as soon as I could-do you blame me?-since then I've done a lot of thinking about it. Fact is, I haven't thought of much else.

And I suppose old Bill was right. At least I hope so. Things he'd told me earlier, when I was only half listening. About them being the last of their sort, and Barrows Hill being the place they've chosen to sort of fade away in, like a thin person's "elephant's graveyard," you know?

Anyway, there are no thin people here, and no thin houses. Vandals aplenty, and so many cars you can't count, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Lampposts, yes, and posts to hold up the telephone wires, of course. Lots of them. But they don't bother me anymore.

See, I know exactly how many lampposts there are. And I know exactly where they are, every last one of them. And G.o.d help the man ever plants a new one without telling me first!

FAT FACE.

by Michael Shea.

Michael Shea's books include A Quest for Simbilis, Nifft the Lean, The Color Out of Time, as well as his recent Arkham House collection, Polyphemus. Born in Los Angeles in 1946, Shea currently lives with his wife and two kids in the hinterlands of Windsor, California. Shea is an unpredictable writer, capable of superior pastiches of Jack Vance or of H. P. Lovecraft and of generating nastiness all of his own, as in his celebrated novella, "The Autopsy."

"Fat Face" is a Cthulhu Mythos story treated in contemporary terms. Michael Shea enjoys writing in this sub-genre, despite the fact that all too many amateurish excesses here have made it difficult to find serious markets. In defense, Shea maintains: "HPL had one of the essences of good horror down pat-that endlessly drawing-aside of a transparent veil from an already-known horror. The pantomime of disclosure-Revelation constantly looms at hand, only to withdraw penultimately, whisked away by the narrator's impossibly lucid and eloquent obtuseness." Well, I guess. "Fat Face" was published as a limited edition chapbook, and it's my pleasure to unveil it to a wider audience.

"They were infamous, nightmare sculptures, even when telling of age-old, by-gone things; for Shoggoths and their work ought not to be seen by human beings, nor portrayed by any beings ..."

At The Mountains of Madness.

by Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

When Patti started working from the lobby of the Parna.s.sus Hotel again, it was clear she was liked from the way the other girls joked her, and un.o.btrusively took it easy on her for the first few weeks, while she got to feel steadier. She was deeply relieved to be back.

She had been doing four nights a weeks at The Encounter, a ma.s.sage parlor. Her man was part-owner, and he insisted that this schedule was to her advantage, because it was "strictly a hand-job operation," and the physical demands on her were lighter than with street-work. Patti would certainly have agreed that the work was lighter-if it hadn't been for the robberies and killings. The last of these had been the cause of her breakdown, and though she never admitted this to her man, he had no doubt sensed the truth, for he had let her go back to the Parna.s.sus, and told her she could pay him half-rate for the next few weeks, till she was feeling steady again.

In her first weeks at the ma.s.sage parlor, she had known with all but certainty of two other clients-not hers-who had taken one-way drives from The Encounter up into the Hollywood Hills. These incidents wore, still, a thin, merciful veil of doubt. It was the third one which pa.s.sed too nearly for her to face away from it.

From the moment of his coming in, unwillingly she felt spring up in her the conviction that the customer was a perfect victim: physically soft, small, fatly walleted, more than half-drunk, out-of-state. She learned his name when her man studied his wallet thoroughly on the pretext of checking his credit cards, and the man's permitting of this liberty revealed how fuddled he was. She walked ahead swinging her bottom, and he stumbled after, down the hall to a ma.s.sage room, and she could almost feel in her own head the ugly calculations clicking in her man's The ma.s.sage room was tiny. It had a not-infrequently-puked-on carpet, and a table. As she stood there, pounding firmly on him under the towel, trying to concentrate on her rhythm exclusively, a gross, black c.o.c.kroach ran boldly across the carpet. Afterward, she was willing to believe she had hallucinated, so strange was the thing she remembered. The bug, half as big as her hand, had stopped at midfloor and stared at her, and she in that instant had seen clearly and looked deep into the inhuman little black-bead eyes, and known that the man she was just then firing off into the towel was going to die later that night. There would be a grim, half-slurred conversation in some gully under the stars, there would be perhaps a long signing of travelers checks payable to the fict.i.tious name on a certain set of false I.D. cards, and then the top of the plump man's head would be blown off.

Patti was a lazy girl who lazily wanted things to be nice, but was very good at adjusting to things that were not nice at all, if somebody strong really insisted on them. This, however, struck her with a terror that made her legs feel rubbery under her. Her man met her in the hall and sent her home before the mark had finished dressing inside. The body was found in three days and given scarcely two paragraphs in the paper. Patti was already half sick with alcohol and insomnia by the time she read them, and that night she took some pills which she was lucky enough to have pumped out of her an hour or so later.

But if her life-patterns offered any one best antidote for her cold, crippling fear, it was working out of the Parna.s.sus. Some of her sweet-bitter apprentice years had been spent here or near it, and the lobby's fat, shabby red furniture still showed a girl to advantage, to the busy streets beyond the plate-gla.s.s windows.

The big, dowdy hotel stood in the p.o.r.no heartland of Hollywood. It was a district of neon, and snarled traffic on narrow, overparked streets engineered back in the thirties. It offered a girl a host of strolling and lounging places good for pick-ups, and in fact most of the girls who spent time at the Parna.s.sus spent as much or more of each night at other places too.

But Patti liked to work with minimum cruising. Too much walking put her in mind of the more painful recollections from her amateur years-the alley beatings, the cheats who humped and dumped and drove off fast, the quick, sticky douches with a shook-up Coca-Cola taken between trash-bins in back of a market ... All the deskmen at the Parna.s.sus were fairly unextortionate. They levied an income-related tax, demanded only that a reasonable protocol govern use of the lobby, and made a small number of rooms available for the hookers' use. Patti worked the nearest bus stops from time to time, or went to the Dunk-o-Rama to sit over coffee and borrow many napkins and much sugar from single male customers, but primarily she worked the Parna.s.sus, catching the eyes of the drivers who slowed to turn at the intersection, and strolling out when she noticed one starting to circle and trying to catch her eye. She usually took her tricks to the Bridgeport, or the Azteca Arms, which were more specifically devoted to this phase of the trade than the Parna.s.sus was.

The virtual exemption of her home base from the ultimate s.e.xual trafficking suited Patti to the ground. It aided a certain sunny sentimentalism with which she was apt to regard the "little community" that she and her colleagues were, after all, long-term members of. Because of these views, and also, perhaps, because she came from a rural hamlet, her friends called her Hometown.

And though they could always get her to laugh at her own notions, it still comforted her-for instance-to greet the man at the drug store with cordial remarks on the traffic or the smog. The man, bald and thin-mustached, never did more than grin at her with timid greed and scorn. The douches, deodorizers and fragrances she bought from him so steadily had prejudiced him, and guaranteed his misreading of her folksy genialities.

Or she would josh the various pimply employees at the Dunk-O-Rama in a similar spirit, saying things like, "They sure got you working, don't they?" or, of the tax, "The old Governor's got to have his bite, doesn't he?" When asked how she wanted her coffee, she always answered with neighborly amplitude: "Well, let's see-I guess I'm in the mood for cream today." These things, coming from a vamp-eyed brunette in her twenties, wearing a halter top, short-shorts and Grecian sandals, disposed the adolescent counter-hops more to sullen leers than to answering warmth. Yet she remained persistent in her fantasies. She even greeted Arnold, the smudged, moronic vendor at the corner newsstand, by name-this in spite of an all too lively and gurgling responsiveness on his part.

Now, in her recuperation, Patti took an added comfort from this vein of sentiment. This gave her sisterhood much to rally her about in their generally affectionate recognition that she was much shaken and needed some feedback and some steadying. A particular source of hilarity for them was Patti's revival of interest in Fat Face, whom she always insisted was their friendliest "neighbor" in their "local community."

An old ten-story office building stood on the corner across the street from the Parna.s.sus. As is not uncommon in L.A., the simple, box-shaped structure bore ornate cement frieze-work on its facade, and all along the pseudo-architraves capping the pseudo-pillars of the building sides. Such friezes always have exotic cliches as their theme-they are an echo of DeMille's Hollywood. The one across from the Parna.s.sus had a Mesopotamian theme-ziggurat-shaped finials crowning the pseudo-pillars, and murals of wrenched profiles, curly-bearded figures with bulging calves.

A different observer from Patti would have judged the building schlock, but effective for all that, striking the viewer with a subtle sense of alien portent. Patti seldom looked higher than its fourth floor, where the usually open window of Fat Face's office was.

His appeared to be the only lively businesses maintained in that building. He ran two, and their mere combination could still set people cackling in the lobby of the Parna.s.sus: a hydrotherapy clinic, and a pet refuge.

The building's dusty directory listed other offices. But the only people seen entering were unmistakably Fat Face's-all halting or ungainly, most toiling along on some shiny prosthetic or other.

Fat Face himself was often at his window-a dear, ruddy, bald countenance beaming, as often as not, avuncularly down on the hookers in the lobby across the street. His bubble-baldness was the object of much lewd humor among the girls and the pimps. Fat Face was much waved-at in sarcasm, whereat he always smiled a crinkly smile that seemed to understand and not to mind. Patti, when she sometimes waved, did so with pretty sincerity.