Year's Best Horror Stories XVIII Part 21

Not long after they pa.s.sed the last light pole, the road leveled out, and they were driving a fairly straight two-lane strip of asphalt that ran between dark fields and darker stands of trees. Once, their headlights picked up what Steve at first thought was a pair of Great Danes playing beside the road. As they bounded away, he saw they were baby deer.

Monica drove silently, steering past potholes. He envied her skill with the stick shift, and her ability to navigate treacherous mountain turns. Still, Mr.

Walkingstick had a point; get her in a New York traffic jam and she might not be so hot.

He fiddled with the radio dial, catching a few words amid the buzzing. "...

sinners... not saved... holy retribution...." Several times, he heard the word AIDS spoken with a particular vehemence.

"Turn it off," said Monica in a tired voice. "All you ever get up here is static and preachers."

She sounded beat. The road was fairly straight and the moon was out, making the landscape ghostly but quite visible. Even he shouldn't have any trouble driving here, he thought. He was about to ask her to pull over and let him take the wheel when they hit the pothole. The car lurched, sc.r.a.ping something on the asphalt, and bounced out the hole. Then a tire blew. They went over the embankment and into the ditch.

Monica turned off the engine. He could hear the night noises, the ever- present cicadas and the rest of the choir, even with the windows rolled up. They sat still, held fast by the seatbelts that had kept them from being thrown into the dashboard or against the doors, both of them staring straight ahead. "s.h.i.t," said Monica after what seemed like a long time.

Steve got out. The car was completely in the ditch, having slid sideways down the gra.s.sy bank. It had come to rest on almost level gravel and was pointed parallel to the road. He heard Monica's door open. "Help me with the spare," she said tonelessly.

He immediately felt irritated, like she was trying to prove something. "You can't change the tire here," he said, trying to keep his annoyance out of his voice.

She opened the hatchback and tossed out the jack. "Why not? The car's pretty level and the ground's firm enough."

"Maybe. But we can't drive in the ditch, and we won't get out of it without a tow truck."

"We'll see." She got the tire out without waiting for him to help her.

He gave in. "At least let me do that. That way I'll be the one the car falls on."

She went on jacking up the front end. "I've changed more tires than you have, city boy. Get the dry cell flashlight from the back and set it on the ground beside me."

He did, angling the bulb so it pointed at the wheel. "You always make me feel like Steve Trevor."

"Who?"

"Wonder Woman's boyfriend -- the one who always stood around and looked pretty while she bashed n.a.z.is. Or maybe what's-his-name, the guy who was always in the background holding Sheena of the Jungle's spear while she wrestled with the lion. What was his name?"

She grunted. "How should I know? You're the student of popular culture."

Standing up, she removed the flat and sent it rolling down the ditch. "And you think my degree is a worthless one."

He'd never said that, of course, but he didn't want to argue now, not when she was in the middle of her competent woman act. The car seemed to teeter precariously on the jack. He was debating the merits of saying anything when she walked toward him.

"Look, I'm sorry if I'm making you feel like a useless male sidekick. Why don't you walk down the road past those trees and see if you see any houses?" She pointed to where the road went into a bend that snaked through a stand of pines, obscuring what lay beyond.

"It's not very safe to leave you here."

"You won't be out of earshot. Now go on, while I put on the spare tire. Here, take my penlight." She pressed it into his hand. "And look out for snakes." She kissed him on the cheek.

Feeling like a child sent off to do something useful, he clambered up out of the ditch and started down the road, keeping to the shoulder even though no oncoming car could be within a mile without him hearing it. Behind him, the light of the big dry-cell flash dwindled. His loafers crunched on the gravel.

Something twisted sinuously on the asphalt, its coils black in the moonlight.

Wanting to run, he turned the beam on it. It was thin for its length, and did not have the triangular head Monica had once told him to look out for. "It's harmless,"

he told himself, several times.

He was under the pines now; their smell was very strong. The dark branches creaked, he heard a soft "who?", and then a huge winged shaped drifted silently through a patch of moonlight. It was the first time he'd ever seen a wild owl. He kicked a pinecone into the ditch and tried to whistle, but the notes were wrong, and sounded strained and hollow and distant. A cool wind pressed the fabric of his shirt into the small of his back and caused the needles overhead to rustle. Somewhere nearby, frogs were singing, and he heard water bubbling over stones.

The pine canopy was a claustrophobic ceiling, and he was glad when he was out of it. Pausing for a moment, he looked up, at the dark palisades of the surrounding mountains and the necklace of light that was the parkway, then higher, at the stars. Up on the main roads, they'd been blotted out by sodium and neon, almost as much as they were in the city. Not so down here. He felt like he could fall up and up, the way kids are supposed to feel when they lie on their backs at night and look at the sky.

That had never happened to him in the city, but once, when he was very young, his parents had closed the store for a weekend and taken him on a trip to the Catskills. He'd slept the whole way, and when he woke up it was dark and they were at a motel and everybody was getting out of the car. The lights in the parking lot had been burned out and he'd looked up and suddenly felt sick and afraid, and had buried his face against his mother's breast until they were inside. The memory embarra.s.sed him, and he tried to make it go away.

Across the road, the untended rows of a vast field lay etched in gray and silver. Not more than a hundred yards away was the dark bulk of a house.

The gra.s.s in the yard hissed around his feet, and burrs pierced his socks. He thought of snakes again, but forged on. The steps of the porch creaked alarmingly.

Under the porch roof, the door was a black rectangle, with air moving in stale currents from within. He smelled dust and mildew and rot. The house had to be deserted. Beyond it, the road snaked on, through more trees and past further fields.

There was another dark shape that might have been a barn or another house, but no lights. Realizing that he was close to being out of earshot, and more afraid of what some trucker might say to him if the man found he'd left Monica alone than really worried about any danger to her, he decided to turn back.

He found her sitting on the hood, smoking a cigarette. The jack and the flat tire were both stored in the back of the car.

"You got the spare on okay?"

She nodded. "No problem. Unfortunately, the banks of the ditch are slick and steep, and I don't have the room to turn to make at them head on. You were right. Without a tow truck, we're stuck here."

He sat beside her, feeling oddly calm. So much for the idea that helping her record material would make for a nice restful vacation from typing his thesis. Still, maybe later they could look back on all this as an adventure.

He pointed up at the sky. "I'm not used to such bright stars. They look like diamonds on black velvet." She didn't respond to the image. "All right, so I'm a lousy poet." Thank G.o.d he'd never shown her any of the stuff he'd written back when he was an undergraduate and an English major.

"Find any houses?" she asked at length.

"One. It was deserted." He slid off the hood. "It can't be too bad a walk back up to that diner. I bet our waitress friend knows somebody with a tow truck.". She took one last puff and dropped her cigarette. "You're right. At least I'll be able to call Mom and Dad."

The embankment directly beside them was very steep and slick, but a few hundred feet back it was more gradual. No wanting to have to struggle up the rise and look foolish, he started walking along the ditch to the place where the climb would be easier. "Wait," she said from behind him. Before he could pause and look back, he tripped over something and went sprawling.

"Steve, are you okay?"

Except for a skinned elbow, he was. Sitting up, he turned the penlight on the dark ma.s.s he'd tripped over.

"What is it?" asked Monica, catching up to him.

"Just a bundle of oily rags."

She stared at it. "No," she said at last. "No, it's not."

He looked again, seeing dark cloth and then the darker stains soaking through the tatters. In the middle of the scattered ma.s.s was a loop of something that glistened. The light picked out a tennis shoe and then a pale hand. There didn't seem to be any head.

Steve scrambled backward until he couldn't control his nausea, and then doubled over to vomit. Monica bent over him and gently held his shoulder. "We must have driven right past it without knowing it was in the ditch."

"It's a body," he said unnecessarily, not really hearing her.

She held him, although he didn't want her to. "I know."

"What could have done that?"

"A truck maybe -- hit and run." Her voice was as calm as a newscaster's.

Usually, he envied her strength, but now it just made him feel weaker.

"But the head was gone." He immediately regretted saying that, irrationally fearing she might want to look for it or something.

"Dogs could have been at it," she continued clinically. "Even a bear."

He stiffened at the word. With a bear, you didn't need a hit and run to explain what had happened. He thought of the grunting black things that begged food by the trailer camps, slow and greedy and calm as big dogs. He thought of the reservation, where some loophole in federal law allowed the animals to be kept under even the most cramped conditions, and every service station and rest stop had its own LIVE BEAR sweltering away in a chain link cage with an asphalt floor. If one of those panting brutes ever got loose, it might well want to do something like this. He thought of watching Gentle Ben as a kid and how the big, whuffling bear, supposedly as friendly and loyal as La.s.sie, had terrified him, so much so that he had begged his parents to change the channel.

Monica suddenly stood up. "Steve," she said softly, her hand firmly grasping his and pulling him upright, "let's start walking slowly the other way. Be calm and don't look back."

He walked and didn't look. "Why?"

"Something big crossed the road back there. Keep walking."

They pa.s.sed the car. Why didn't they just get inside? He started to say something, then thought of being trapped in there while something large and hairy snuffled against the windshield. The pines loomed ahead.

They were in the resin-scented shadow when Monica let go of his hand.

"Run," she said.

They bounded over the gravel, past the whispering, untended field. He meant to point out the bulk of the house, but, ten paces ahead of him, she'd already seen it. Her speed increased as she plunged into the tall gra.s.s. He panted, nearly tripping over something metallic, and strove to catch up. The porch stairs groaned under her pounding Nikes. Pausing, she leaned out of the darkness and urged him on.

Almost sure he heard something ploughing through the tangled weeds behind him, he stumbled on, his heart roaring. One of the rotted steps actually cracked under his feet, but he was off it and on the porch before it gave way.

Monica was at his arm, first pulling him toward, and then pushing him into, the blackness.

The door to the house must have been open rather than missing as he'd first supposed, because there was a slamming sound behind him and then he couldn't see a thing. He switched on the penlight. It caught peeling wallpaper, holes in the floorboards, Monica's hand's fumbling beside the door frame. Finding a bar, she slid it home, then turned toward him.

He held the penlight on her face. "What was out there?"

She pushed the light away, taking him by the hand and turning off the beam.

"Nothing." The darkness rushed in, heavy with mold and something else. What was she doing?

"Monica?" "I'm not Monica," she said gently. "That was Monica in the ditch beside the road."

The hand holding his began to grow.

Narcopolis.

by Wayne Alien Sallee.

As I mentioned earlier with his story, "Rail Rider," Wayne Alien Sallee has published over 800 poems and stories. Here, then, is one of his poems. In addition to his having sold his first two books in 1989, the year was doubly exciting for Sallee, as he managed to be run over by a car. As Sallee puts it: "Update on my life: Hit by that all important '87 Dodge in March & for two months had a scarlet sponge for a brain and my left arm was a skin baggie of Kibbles 'N Bits. No scars from my many stays at Holy Cross Hospital, overlooking beautiful vermin-ridden Marquette Park, but still have recurring nightmares any time I see the Smothers Brothers's YO-YO MAN video." This, for those of you who ask writers: "Where do you get your ideas?"

I. CITY LIMITS.

Nicotine grey town of snot-ringed corridors thriving behind a billion jellied eyelids, each chance visit slivers our existence: name your poison, or the house special, at the bar beneath the elevated h.e.l.l

II. THE ROAD FORKS AT SUICIDE.

as an eager man in a ridiculous tie puts gun to teeth and sleeps while cameras voice their soothing purr.

Drink deep but don't crowd, big as you might be

III. WITNESS THE TOWN CLOWN.

loved by all; the r.e.t.a.r.ded killer prances misunderstanding the shrieks of each night's degradations before curling around a dull corner

IV. PRETTY IN PINK.

the grey is alive with daddy sounds guttural and snorting: her mouth a scream -- ing window, storm pains intact.

Whenever daddy sleeps fetal (on the couch so plump) after his little french death, she dreams the s.p.a.ce shuttle explodes in creamy white smiles

V. INNER CITY FANTASIES.