Year's Best Horror Stories XVIII Part 23

"I can see that."

"I mean not me, I'm not anemic."

"Do you take vitamins?"

"Use to. Lots. Want to see a French film with me? I like French films. Can't see them in Dallas."

"Okay. I'll see a French film with you. Dutch?"

"I can pay."

"Wow, a real date," I said. "I thought you were poor."

"I got here with about twenty dollars in small bills in my pockets. No matter how many times I spend them, they're still there. I think they must disappear from the cash drawers and get back in my pockets. I guess it isn't honest, huh?"

"Pretty handy pockets if you ask me," I said.

"It looks as though I can spend the money forever and ever if I wanted." "If you get new pants," I said, "save me your old pockets."

I ate my dinner and we went to see a French comedy. It was about two girls and a guy. Why was it always two girls and a guy? Why not just two girls? Why not two guys? Why not two guys and a girl? The French are like that. I ate popcorn in the dark and offered some to Sam but he never took any. He held my hand for a while, a delicate touch. Then there was a really funny scene. The guy in the comedy had been locked hi the bathroom and the girls were in bed together. The guy was yelling, according to the subt.i.tles, "What are you doing out there? Why is the door stuck?" I was laughing really hard at that part. I was the only one. After the film was over, I turned to ask Sain if he liked the part about the bathroom, but he was gone. "Probably went to the bathroom," I said to myself. I waited by the exit a long time, then said, "Stupid Texan," and went to see my shot-put girl.

The two things you can't find when you need them are police officers and bathrooms. This is why so many old people s.h.i.t their pants in public. They get so frightened of the muggers and purse-s.n.a.t.c.hers and street punks, they just s.h.i.t their pants. If there were more police officers around, things wouldn't smell so bad. I'm not sure what the connection is exactly, but bathrooms and police officers are part of the conspiracy of misery. Something to do with the way the universe works. I'm still thinking about that old guy I gave bad directions to. He is probably under the viaduct at this very moment, while I tell you this story of my youthful follies. I was also thinking of the scene in the French movie. I remember almost nothing about that movie, not the t.i.tle or anything, but I remember that bathroom. Funny the things you'll remember years later.

Sam appeared in my apartment before evening.

"s.h.i.t, f.u.c.k, Sam! What are you doing in my place! How did you get in!"

I cussed a bunch more. I was beside myself. I was instantly and extremely very, very mad. Sam looked hurt that I wasn't glad to see him. But I value my privacy. I don't tell many people where I live. I don't go see many people, either.

Even my best friends, I expect them to knock on the door first. But some skinny t.u.r.d from Texas who took me to a movie once thinks he can barge right in. Boy, was I mad. By the time I could see straight, Sam wasn't there. I hadn't heard him leave. The doors were still bolted from the inside. Had I imagined him? Was I even crazier than I knew about?

Several days later he appeared in my apartment again. It must have been two or three in the morning. I rolled over on the futon and there he was, standing beside my quilts, a gawky shadow. "You a.s.shole," I groaned sleepily, feeling helpless because I slept naked. "What do you think you're doing?"

"I'm a virgin," he said.

"Get the h.e.l.l out of here."

"How can a boy just die and be happy if he's a virgin?"

"If you don't get out you'll find out because I'll kill you."

"Somebody already did."

I wasn't hearing straight. I was really tired. But Sam was weeping. I fumbled for my bed lamp but its twenty-five watts didn't light the bedroom much. In the dimness, I saw that Sam was paler and skinnier than ever, like something was wasting him away. He rubbed his eyes with long, thin fingers and tried to brace up.

He tried to put on a manly show. But he was just a stupid skinny kid. "I always wanted to come to Seattle," he said.

"Well you made it," I growled, sitting up and pulling a cover all around me.

I said, "I didn't know you were a cracked nut, Sam. You can't break into people's places like this."

"I didn't break anything."

"What would they do in Texas if you did this?"

"Shoot me, I guess. I never liked Texas."

"Seattle's mellow, Sam, but it's not that mellow. If I had a gun, I'd shoot you too."

"But if you were a Texan, you'd have the gun. Three or four."

"Why have you come at this unG.o.dly hour?"

"To say good-bye." His expression was so sad. His eyes were like a big puppy's.

"Going back to Dallas?"

"G.o.d! I hope not. I don't know where I'm going. But I'm going somewhere, I can tell. I keep feeling it pull at me." "I know the feeling," I said.

"But I didn't want to go and still be a virgin."

"Look," I said. "In this life you get to visit Seattle once, or you get to be laid.

You can't have them both."

That made him smile. Big teeth smiling.

"Pretty subtle f.u.c.ker, aren't you? Look, would you believe me if I said I was a d.y.k.e?"

"Yes."

"You would? Why, do I look like a G.o.dd.a.m.ned d.y.k.e?"

"No."

"Good. Well, I am."

"I thought so."

"You did?" I didn't know how to take this guy. "Then why the h.e.l.l have you been following me all over the city? You got a thing about lesbians or something?"

"Yes."

There was something so painfully, asininely innocent about his reply that I couldn't even be annoyed. I had to admit I was attracted to the clown. I had Beardsley drawings on my walls, and a couple different books about his life, what there was of it. Suppose that that pathetic boy came to you in the middle of the night and said, "Look, I'm dying of consumption, I won't live long, but I took a good bath, and I'm going to die a virgin unless you help me out."

I threw back the covers. "Hop in."

He stood there gaping.

"Come on, hop in."

He fell onto the quilts like a snapped twig. "Really?" he said.

"What are friends for?" I helped him undress. "Do you know anything about this sort of thing?"

"Sure. Lots of pictures." He started nosing around my body.

He was clumsy but his touch was light, pleasant. He was skinny as a girl but sharper-edged. Was he any good? Not really. But I kept thinking his name wasn't Sam or Henry, but Aubrey. I rather liked it. To tell the truth, that bench-pressing shot-putting girlfriend of mine wasn't any worse or better. So I couldn't complain.

And he was having a good time. Afterward, he chattered on and on like I was the only friend he'd ever had in his whole miserable, boring life. He trusted me. He loved me. He poured out his soul.

In the morning he was gone, the bolts to the doors still locked from the inside.

I would've looked him up in the Dallas directory but he never told me his last name. But I guess I sort of knew all along he was dead anyway. And I'll always remember the last thing I heard him say before I nodded off to sleep that night, with him in my arms. The poor sweet boy, smiling at me in the dark, whispering, "I always knew Seattle was next to paradise."

Return To The Mutant Rain Forest.

by Bruce Boston and Robert Frasier.

Bruce Boston's fiction and poetry have appeared in Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Twilight Zone Magazine, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and in various anthologies. Most recent among his ten collections is a book of dark fantasy poems, Faces of the Beast. He lives in Berkeley, California, where he works as a technical writer and book designer.

Born in Ayer, Ma.s.sachusetts in 1951, Robert Frazier has had poetry and fiction published in Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Twilight Zone Magazine, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and in various other magazines and anthologies. Most recent among his three collections is a book of science fiction poems, Co-Orbital Moons. He lives in Nantucket, Ma.s.sachusetts.

Opposite coasts, but otherwise these two guys seem to be following in each other's footprints -- so a collaboration isn't all that unexpected. What is strange is that they're doing so in a shared poetry world, The Mutant Rain Forest.

A collection of their best such excursions has just been published by Mark Ziesing Books: Chronicles of the Mutant Rain Forest. We may all be safer with the Greenhouse Effect.

Years later we come back to find the fauna and flora more alien than ever, the landscape unrecognizable, the course of rivers altered, small opalescent lakes springing up where before there was only underbrush, as if the land itself has somehow changed to keep pace with the metaprotean life forms which now inhabit it.

Here magnetism proves as variable as other phenomena. Our compa.s.s needle shifts constantly and at random, and we must fix direction by the stars and sun alone. Above our heads the canopy writhes in undiscovered life: tiny albino lemurs flit silently from branch to branch, tenuous as arboreal ghosts in the leaf purple shadow. Here time seems as meaningless as our abstracted data.

The days stretch before us in soft bands of verdigris, in hours marked by slanting white shafts of illumination. At our feet we watch warily for the trip-vines of arrowroot, while beetles and multipedes of every possible perversion boil about us, reclaiming their dead with voracious zeal.

By the light of irradiated biota the night proliferates: a roving carpet of scavenger fungi seeks out each kill to drape and consume the carca.s.s in an iridescent shroud. A carnivorous mushroom spore roots on my exposed forearm and Tomaz must dig deeply beneath the flesh to excise the wrinkled neon growth, which has sprouted in minutes.

We have returned to the mutant rain forest to trace rumors spread by the natives who fish the white water, to embark on a reconnaissance into adaptation and myth. Where are the toucans, Genna wonders, once we explain the cries, which fill the darkness as those of panthers, mating in heat, nearly articulate in their complexity.

Tomaz chews stale tortillas, pounds roots for breakfast, and relates a tale of the Parakana who ruled this land.

One morning the Chiefs wife, aglow, bronzed and naked in the eddies of a rocky pool, succ.u.mbed to an attack both brutal and sublime, which left her body inscribed with scars confirming the b.e.s.t.i.a.l origins of her lover.

At term, the ma.s.sive woman was said to have borne a child covered with the finest gossamer caul of ebon-blue hair.

The fiery vertical slits of its eyes enraged the Chief. After he murdered the boy, a great cat screamed for weeks and stalked about their tribal home, driving them north. His story over, Tomaz leads our way into the damp jungle.

From base camp south we hack one trail after another until we encounter impenetrable walls of a sinewy fiber, lianas as thick and indestructible as t.i.tanium cables, twining back on themselves in a solid Gordian sheath, feeding on their own past growth; while farther south, slender silver trees rise like pylons into the clouds.

From our campo each day we hack useless trail after trail, until we come upon the pathways that others have forged and maintained, sinuous and waist-high, winding inward to still farther corrupt recesses of genetic abandon: here we discover a transfigured ceiba, its rugged bark incised with the fresh runes of a primitive ideography.

Genna calls a halt urour pa.s.sage to load her Minicam. She circles about the tree, shrugging off our protests. As we feared, her careless movement triggers a tripvine, but instead of a hail of deadly spines we are bombarded by balled leaves exploding into dust -- marking us with luminous ejecta and a third eye on Genna's forehead.

Souza dies that night, limbs locked in rigid fibro-genesis. A panther cries; Tomaz wants us to regroup at our camp.

Genna decides she has been chosen, scarified for pa.s.sage. She notches her own trail to some paradise born of dream hallucination, but stumbles back, wounded and half-mad, the Minicam lost, a ca.s.sette gripped in whitened knuckles.

From base camp north we flail at the miraculous regrowth which walls off our retreat to the airstrip by the river. The ghost lemurs now spin about our heads, they mock us with a chorus as feverish and compulsive as our thoughts.

We move relentlessly forward, as one, the final scenes of Genna's tape flickering over and over in our brains.

In the depths of the mutant rain forest where the water falls each afternoon in a light filtered to vermilion, a feline stone idol stands against the opaque foliage.

On the screen of the monitor it rises up from nowhere, upon its hind legs, both taller and thicker than a man. See how the cellular accretion has distended its skull, how the naturally sleek architecture of the countenance has evolved into a distorted and angular grotesquerie, how the taloned forepaws now possess opposable digits.

In the humid caves and tunnels carved from living vines, where leprous anacondas coil, a virulent faith calls us. A sudden species fashions G.o.dhood in its own apotheosis.

The End Of The Hunt.