Year's Best Horror Stories XVIII Part 19

Geoff asked. "Who are they?" The Asian shop owner was still looking outward, not moving. The video game flashed and buzzed nervously. The pale strip light by the window superimposed the interior on the view. The darkness outside was an impersonal pressure that felt charged with threat.

"Over the ca.n.a.l," the shop owner said at last. "They're just a gang of hooligans. Or they were. There are more of them every day. I don't know why the soldiers don't stop them. The soldiers interfere in everything else." He turned away and began stacking cans and boxes behind the counter. His hands were unsteady, but an effort of concentration kept him from knocking anything over. Geoff hoped the man wouldn't mind him leaving without buying anything. He had to catch up with the group. Mark would know what they were up to.

He got back to the ca.n.a.l just in time to see the last of the crowd disappearing along the towpath, under and around the bridge. Near his barge, Mark was sprawled at the water's edge. He had fallen down; one of his hands gripped the metal ring that the mooring-rope was tied to. Geoff turned him over; he was breathing heavily, and bleeding from his mouth. His eyes opened. "I'm all right,"

he said. "They knocked me over, that's all." He coughed hard and sat up. There was mud on the arm and shoulder of his coat from the ground. He held onto Geoff s arm and pulled himself to his feet, then stood very still, as though he were about to fall again. His face was pa.s.sive, lost to thoughts that n.o.body could share.

Then he knelt, dipped a hand in the murky water, and wiped the blood from his mouth. "This is the Wheel," he said. "We can go and watch if you want. You ought to see it once." Picking his way carefully in the poor light, he led Geoff down the towpath, then up into a maze of side streets and bridges where the ca.n.a.l and railway network had been overlaid with a perpetuation of the town. More strongly than before, Geoff could feel the tension that the gang left in its wake -- a stillness heavy with anger, like a cloud that was about to turn itself inside-out and discharge its secret violence in one blinding shock. They caught up with the mob at a crossroads, where a valley in one plane coincided with a hilltop in another. His father would have called it a saddle-point, Geoff reflected.

There was rain in the air now, a vague drizzle that could be felt only when it settled against the skin, and only seen when it made the pavements reflect the lamplight. From a distance, Geoff and Mark watched the crowd of youths gather closer together at the crossroads. There were about a hundred of them; some were older than Geoff, some younger than Mark. There were women among them, though not many. The crowd would block off any traffic. But no soldiers or police came to break them up. They were completely quiet now, drawn toward some common purpose. Geoff's chest tightened as he saw that their focus was a prisoner: someone half-lifted in the middle of the gang, his arms held apart. His face was gagged, and there was a rope around his neck being used to prevent him from struggling. Geoff pressed himself back in the shadow of the wall, trying to make himself smaller; and to make the image smaller, reduce it to a television screen, a photograph. The boy was silent beside him, watching. On the far side of the crossroads, the wire fence had been torn down from in front of a power generator. Between the red DANGER sign and the two black tanks set in the ground, some kind of machine had been installed. As far as Geoff could see, it was a metal cross-supported on a crude motor, which was connected to the generator by heavy black cables. Some of the crowd was chanting now, but out of unison; Geoff could not make out any of the words. Two men tied the prisoner to the iron cross, which was then tilted backward to free it from the ground. Now he was suspended in mid-air, unable to move; his arms and legs were stretched out in a regular X. Throughout this process he had shown no sign of resistance. The nearest of the crowd to the center drew back. A mist of raindrops hung in stasis between the sodium lamps and the pavement, increasing Geoff s sense of being witness to something detached from reality.

Everyone was looking at the helpless figure, directing their tension inward to the crossroads. Violence flickered in the air like dark moths; energy twitched the wires of falling rain. But nothing happened, and the mob was as pa.s.sive as their victim. Then his gag started to burn. His face was obscured by smoke as the cross began turning. Sparks jumped between the limbs, hissing. Then the motor was coughing with life, and the cross was spinning into a blur of crimson and blue flame. The air became dense with the mixed odors of burning materials: rubber, paint, flesh and cloth. That and the drifting smoke made Geoff feel drugged to the point of insensitivity. The Wheel dimmed, its blackened weight appearing ma.s.sive as it stopped moving. The face was no longer distinct. Without a focus, the crowd drifted apart uneasily. Some of them stood as though lost, taken over by the night that pressed in from all directions.

In minutes, they had dispersed entirely, leaving only the outstretched figure that had formed the center of the gathering. At a distance, what was visible looked like the negative image of one of Blake's angels. "Who was it?" Geoff asked.

"n.o.body," the boy answered. "Could have been anyone." As they walked back toward the ca.n.a.l, he added, "You'll see it again. Happens all the time now.

But we saw it together. That means neither of us can go away and say he didn't see it. True?" When they reached the towpath, they were alone. Mark leaned on Geoff s arm for support. "I need to rest a bit," he said. They stopped at a bench lit from overhead. The rain had intensified, darkening their coats. Geoff held the boy's shoulders while he shook with a fit of coughing.

More than rain was visible in the air now. Ashes were blowing toward them across the ca.n.a.l, like creased snowflakes of carbon. Where they struck Geoff's face and hands they felt clinging, permanent. He felt as though his own core had been blackened, and the night had come in to claim all of his memories, his debts, and his future. Mark was whispering something in a tired but urgent voice. "It all goes on and on," he was saying; "the more you take in, the more gets taken out of you.

I'm just a watcher and a listener... I can't change anything. I can't even tell you where to look, or who to go to. I'm losing myself, that's why... Nothing in my lungs but pollution and bad dreams." His words dissolved into a kind of helpless choking; he pressed a handkerchief into his mouth. It came away deep red. That could be a disease or an internal wound; Geoff couldn't tell which.

A breeze caught the stained handkerchief and made it flutter. The rain diluted the blood, running it through the boy's fingers. The color washed out with unnatural speed; within a minute the cloth was entirely white. Perhaps there was some active chemical in the rain. Or, Geoff realized, perhaps the blood was not as material as it looked. Mark clenched his fist. He was trembling with cold; his eyes stared at something in the distance. "We ought to get you to a hospital," Geoff said.

Mark shook his head and smiled briefly. "Just get me back to the boat," he said. "I'll feel better when things have changed a little. You should understand that by now." The strength was coming back into his voice. He leaned nearer to Geoff; close up, his eyes appeared blue-black, like bruises. "But what are you going to do?" he asked. "You still don't know where to start, do you? Everything you see here makes you want to run away. You see your parents everywhere, and instead of looking for them, you're looking for a way to get free of them. All you want is something else, somewhere else. Do you wonder you can't begin to work out what it is?"

Several minutes pa.s.sed in silence. Mark's face seemed to undergo conflict from within; it gave way to a community of faces, old and young, male and female.

Then he regained himself. "Make contact somewhere," he said quietly. "If you give yourself up to everyone, you'll be torn apart. But if you hold off too long, you'll never be able to earth yourself. You're like a Catherine wheel, spinning instead of moving. True? Plug in somewhere, connect yourself." He reached up and touched Geoff's cheek; a fragile pulse of warmth pa.s.sed through his fingertips.

Soon after, Geoff was standing alone on the ca.n.a.l towpath, looking at the black barge with its curtains drawn against the lamplight. He had helped Mark walk back to his boat and climb inside. As Geoff had last seen him, the boy was lying on his side in the narrow bunk, turning the k.n.o.b on the radio endlessly back and forth in search of the wavelength by which the dead spoke. It was a small portable radio, run on batteries, and weakened by Mark's recurrent tinkering with its circuits. "Be careful," were Mark's final words to him. Geoff stood beside the still barge for an hour or more, knowing that he had no reason to stay.

When he began to walk, his limbs felt mechanical and foreign. The empty night stripped him of identifying features. Whatever had kept him waiting by the boat faded into the blur of the thoughts that could not be remembered. In the distance, a few city lights shone yellow and silver. They looked nearer than they were. Geoff thought of the Wheel, flaming with all the vivid colors of terror and denial; and he thought of the red handkerchief whitening faster than a person could die. At the first bridge, he turned back and tried to make out the shape of the barge against the dark water. He fought off the impression that it was being carried away into the distance by water currents. This was a ca.n.a.l, not a river. Nothing moved here. Indeed, nothing much had changed here in a hundred years.

Sponge And China Tea.

by D.F. Lewis.

During the late 1960s, August Derleth offered one of the few markets for aspiring horror writers, either through his Arkham House anthologies or his house magazine, The Arkham Collector. As aspiring horror writers of that time were generally writing Lovecraftian pastiches, Derleth was the perfect mentor as well as fearless publisher. Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, and David Drake are writers in this book who benefited from Derleth's advice and early publication of their work. D.F. Lewis would have been another, but after Derleth rejected two of Lewis' stories in 1968 as being "pretty much pure grue," Lewis dropped out of sight for twenty years. Hey, we all get rejection slips.

Since then, Lewis has decided to make up for lost time, with some seventy- five stories published over the last three years, mostly in the British small press.

He has gained a vocal following there, and "Sponge and China Tea" is reprinted from a special D.F. Lewis issue of the British small press magazine, Dagon.

Lewis seems to have recovered with a vengeance. The author currently resides in Coulsdon, Surrey and has two teenaged children.

John crept into my life when I was at my lowest ebb, with my fireguard missing and other defenses dropped. I had just spent the last two years or so caring for my sick mother, a rather messy affair ending in inevitable tears, men in tall hats and black suits and a convoy of dark limousines winding through the town. Don't get me wrong, I loved my mother dearly and still do of course. And, really, at that time, it was because of that love, I was pleased to watch her gradually depart this life for what she had in fact told me would be a better place, especially as a result of her arrival there. The body wherein she lived toward the end had been little better than a wrinkled sack of rattling bones, which sometimes spoke up for itself with a voice I no longer recognized.

I became a bag of nerves myself. I even slept on tenterhooks. My own spine felt like a giant rotting tooth, as I rocked her from side to side in desperate attempts to prevent bedsores forming. The anxiety became worse and worse, as unconfirmed reports of her state of death became more and more common from the various doctors I had got in to see her. In the end, I slept in the same bed so that I would be there if life returned, albeit momentarily. Finally, I determined that life would never show its face again in that swamp of flesh that the mattress had become. That's when I called in the black suits and the limousines. My diagnosis was final.

I sat in the back of the hea.r.s.e with the coffin (which I had asked specially should be made of steel), amid a flurry of meadow flowers and holly wreaths. I myself felt I was a demure bloom, done up in a black headscarf as I was. I wished I had chosen to wear the wild lace veil of which my mother had been so fond (and still is, no doubt), but I had burnt that with the rest of her clothes upon a huge bonfire in the backyard, in a fit of catharsis.

As the hea.r.s.e horse-paced through those remnant streets of our old town that it had not yet toured, I was becoming tired of acknowledging all the gentlemen who stood in attention along the yellow lines, each wearing hats specifically for raising in respect as mother and I pa.s.sed.

It was then I saw John smiling straight into my eyes. Large as life, he was. I recalled him from schooldays, when we had shared a double-desk: you know the sort, with the sloping lids. Odd moments of communication had rarely interrupted the studied mutual stand-offishness -- but I know I had always liked the way he smiled, with even teeth more sparkling than a TV advert. And, again, it was the power of his smile that struck me that day, when I had no protection, least of all the knowing of my own mind.

He visited me soon afterward, leaving it a few days as a mark of patience.

He came without appointment, interrupting my afternoon nap with a loud cannonade upon my knocker. I had been sleeping a lot since the day of the hea.r.s.es, catching up on two years almost completely without it.

He said he had come to pay his respects to my mother. She had been his G.o.dmother, as she had been with most new arrivals in the town of the male variety. Blinded by the smile, I invited him in to partake of sponge and china tea.

He took off his well-worn hat, bent his head under the top of the doorframe and lingered in the dark hallway for my direction-finding.

It was particularly gloomy at the foot of the stairs: not only was the air dour outside but the bulb in the hall had recently gone.

"What you doing now, John?"

We stood awkwardly -- he not knowing which room to enter, me too bewildered to indicate. And, to my surprise, I had opened the conversation -- small talk had never previously been my forte.

"I'm in rubber dipped goods."

"That sounds interesting."

"I sell them. You know -- things like diaphragms, slimming trunks, valves, medical sheaths and probes, urinary rubbers, colostomy tubing, diagnostic fingerstalls, sphygmomanometer bulbs, ostomy bags, veterinary gloves, soil test membranes, gaiters, diving hoods, neck and cuff seals, pneumatic face masks, shot blast capes, helmet covers, incontinence stockings, specialized prophylactics..."

The list was mesmerizing, so much so I did not appreciate the imbecility of detailing such items as part of small talk. He had to lightly support my elbow to prevent me swaying in the darkness.

"If you tell me where the kitchen is, I'll make the tea. Sorry, I forget your name..."

"Dell. We sat together at school..."

"Yes, yes, Dell. I believe we did."

From that day on, he visited me often: he said he liked my cla.s.s of afternoons. Quiet, contemplative, china tinkling. He spoke of my mother as if she were alive, which, of course, to me, she is. I would stay in the parlor, whilst he went up to her bedroom and paced about, much like she used to do in the old days.

He thought it gave me great comfort. He even offered to dress up like my mother.

But I said that would never do. In any event, I had burnt all the clothes. He could buy duplicates, he said. No, that would never do, I maintained.

Sometimes, he showed me his wares. He had a large soft suitcase in the boot of his old Bentley, which, on toting it inside, he would open with a creaking lid. Its elasticated lining and inner compartments contained neat rows of diverse rubber products, some as small as my fingernail, others big enough to skin a whole body.

He handled them delicately, even lovingly, as he would expensive crockery: he stretched them slowly over his hands to show them off to the best advantage. I did not like, however, the way the tongue flopped from his mouth, as he concentrated on his mock sales demonstration.

Looking back at it, I find it hard to believe. My defenses were low, true. My heart was not in anything. But was that reason enough to allow him to use me the way he eventually did? I was little better than a tailor's dummy to him, I guess. He said he wanted to test out his goods on reliable property.

So, between the stirrings of the tea and of the smoldering coals in the parlor grate, I felt his eyes undressing me, sizing me up, though I did not then exactly think of it in that way. I felt honored, basking in his smile (which actually lit up the room with its glint) and, for the first time for many years, I felt a stirring in my loins as well.

I knew deep within me that it would only be a matter of time before he required more than just eyes to undress me. Ma.s.saging my toes before using them to stretch his rubber thimbles into shape would surely not be enough for him at the end of the day.

Finally, I told him not to come any more. My resources were back, I said, and I could see through him. He looked sad, rather than angry, as he left down the garden path, tail between his legs, toting his black suitcase. I nearly called him back. But I could still feel his probing fingers from the afternoon before... the last straw was when he lost one of his thingies. So, I just let him leave, with no further word nor future promise of meeting. His disappearing back looked so pitiful: his smile would no doubt be clamped behind his clenched teeth. But a double-desk, after all, does not warrant loyalty that far...

As it happened, I did not need to worry about loneliness. Mother's come back in body to share my bed, as I once shared hers in a moment of trial. Her print dress is identical to the one I burnt. And the wild lace veil is very fetching.

Underneath, she's skinned anew, so fine and supple.

The Boy With The Bloodstained Mouth.

by W.H. Pugmire.

W.H. Pugmire was born in Seattle, Washington on May 3, 1951, and he has been part of the underground scene there ever since. I mean, who else has managed a fusion of Lovecraftian themes and punk? For many years Pugmire has been popping up in the small press with his poems and short fiction, and he continues to edit a magazine of Lovecraftian fiction. Of his latest excursions, Pugmire says: "My first collection of short stories, most of it Cthulhu Mythos bulls.h.i.t, will be published by England's Sarcophagus Press. Two of my stories are being ill.u.s.trated for a local radical underground book, Taboo, ill.u.s.trated and published by a way cool local beat artist. The cover for Taboo will be a full- frontal nude photograph of myself, surrounded by a home-made guillotine, petrified cat corpses, dead roses, and a harp."

I saw him in the smoky room, leaning against the pockmarked wall, indifferent to the noise and fumes. His thick dark gla.s.ses hid his eyes. I do not think he wore them for any reason of fashion. I think they were meant to conceal his eyes.

How I longed to gaze at those eyes. And -- O! -- how my soul trembled at what then might be revealed, there in the eyes of that dark-haired youth.

He raised those unseen orbs to me. I felt certain he had noticed me gazing at him. I was unable to turn my eyes away. He held me spellbound. Black flames of some nameless desire consumed my weary soul.

I went to him.

His hair was chaos, a mess of black and velvet rat tails protruding from the pale flesh of his scalp.

His mouth was stained with fresh blood.

That crimson liquid, gleaming in the misty blue light of the place, drove me mad.

My fingers caressed his brow. His flesh was like ice, as though he burned with death's fever. He took my hand in his. Leaning toward him, I kissed his lips.

I kissed the boy with the bloodstained mouth. I felt nothing as our lips met, no rush of desire, no sensation of ecstasy.

I backed away, filled with sudden horror. His expression had not altered, but his mouth, his clean unstained mouth, mocked me horribly.

And when I licked my lips, I screamed with ageless terror.

On The Dark Road.

by Ian McDowell.

Ian McDowell was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1958, but has spent most of his life in North Carolina -- growing up in Fayetteville and attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Greensboro, where he is currently working to complete his Ph.D. in English. His fiction has appeared in Ares, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and Fantasy Book.

When "On the Dark Road" appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the story was dedicated to the late North Carolina author, Manly Wade Wellman. McDowell explains: "After Frances Wellman and I both had stories in Fantasy Book, the Wellmans sent me a gracious letter inviting me to come up for a visit. Unfortunately, I never did, but I later met them both at Chimeracon, where Mr. Wellman and I ended up on a panel. Something he said to me afterwards eventually (several years later) resulted in this story being redrafted in salable form (years before, David Drake bounced a sketchy, truly dreadful first attempt at the same plot with the shortest personal rejection letter I've ever gotten: 'Dear Ian: I've seen worse.')." Here's proof that if at first you don't succeed...

Elias Walkingstick leaned back in his creaking rocker and sucked on his corncob pipe, the sputtering firelight limning the canyons and gullies of his seventy-eight-year-old face. "Years and years and years ago," he began, "before the war and the war before that and the war before that, there was a Cherokee woman who lived alone with her baby up on Bear Ridge.

"Her people had come back from Oklahoma, back from the Trail of Tears, and out there they'd picked up the habit of carrying their children strapped to their backs, the way the plains Indians do. One night, her baby began to cry, and when she picked it up, it seemed warm with fever. But there was no water with which she could cool its brow, for the well had gone dry that very day, and there was nothing for it but to go down the valley to the nearest spring.

"Even sick, she did not want to leave the baby alone in the cabin at night, so she strapped it on her back and started down the trail. The spring she was heading for was in a sacred place, surrounded by tall pines in a valley where no other pine trees grew. But the woman had been long in Oklahoma, and had forgotten the old ways of the hills, and so she was not afraid to take her water there. "Finally, she came to the spring, and there she filled her bucket, and when she stood up, and made to go, she felt breathing on her neck, and knew something tall was standing right behind her. And a voice, which didn't sound like anything she'd ever heard, whispered in her ear, and this is what it said: " 'Woman, you take water from my sacred place. Now I will take something of your own.'

"A white woman would have screamed or fainted or even turned around, but she was Cherokee, for all her Oklahoma ways, and more sensible than that.

Instead, she bolted like a deer, running up the trail as fast as her strong legs could carry her.

"And when she was safe in her cabin, with the door barred and the shutters latched, she unstrapped her baby and went to unwrap his blankets. And there was blood on the blankets, and she began to scream, for that was when she found that the baby's head had been bitten clean off."

Jesus Christ, thought Steve, stopping the tape and shifting uncomfortably on the hardwood floor. Beside him, Monica sat perfectly still, her elbows on her kneecaps and her eyes half-closed, the firelight shimmering off her straight black hair. "G.o.d," he whispered to her, "this is such cheerful stuff you're collecting."

As usual, she ignored him. "Bitten off? By what?"

Mr. Walkingstick smiled, exposing surprisingly good dentures. "Who can say?" He took another puff on his pipe. "Nowdays, they call the whole valley where that spring was Callie Hollow, and make like it's named after some old white woman named Callie who used to live there. Actually, Callie just comes from the old Cherokee word, Tsulkala. Maybe that's what done it, the Tsulkala."

Steve leaned back against the warm stones of the hearth wall, surrept.i.tiously running his index finger down the inside of Monica's jeans-covered thigh. Shifting her weight, she moved away from his hand. Irritated, he looked at Mr.

Walkingstick and tried to smile. "Soocallie? What's that?"