Year's Best Horror Stories XVIII Part 5

"If you were one of those," said another from his left, "we wouldn't be here tonight."

"The law lets me do it. The Supreme Court. So don't blame me. Blame those Supreme Court justices."

"That's politics. We don't care about politics."

"But I believe in a woman's right to control her own life, to make decisions about her own body!"

"We don't care what you believe. Do you think the beliefs of a terrorist matter to the victims of his bombs? Don't you understand? This is personal!" A little girl's voice said, "I could have been adopted, you know. I would've made someone a good kid. But I never had the chance!"

They all began shouting at once, about never getting Christmas gifts or birthday presents or hugs or tucked in at night or playing with matches or playing catch or playing house or even playing doctor -- It seemed to go on endlessly. Finally the woman held up her bucket. "All their possibilities ended in here."

"Wait a G.o.dd.a.m.n minute!" he said. He had just discovered a significant flaw in their little show. "Only a few of them ended up in buckets! If you were up on your facts, you'd know that no one uses those old D and C buckets for abortions anymore." He pointed to the gla.s.s trap on the Zarick suction extractor. "This is where the products of conception wind up."

The woman stepped forward with her bucket. "They carry this in honor of me. I have the dubious distinction of being your first victim."

"You're not my victims!" he shouted. "The law -- "

She spat in his face. Shocked and humiliated, Cantrell wiped away the saliva with his shirtsleeve and pressed himself back against the table. The rage in her face was utterly terrifying.

"The law!" she hissed. "Don't speak of legalities to me! Look at me! I'd be twenty-two now and this is how I'd look if you hadn't murdered me. Do a little subtraction, Doctor: 1974 was a lot less than twenty-two years ago. I'm Ellen Benedict's daughter -- or at least I would have been if you hadn't agreed to do that D and C on her when she couldn't find a way to explain her pregnancy to her impotent husband!"

Ellen Benedict! G.o.d! How did they know about Ellen Benedict? Even he had forgotten about her!

The woman stepped forward and grabbed his wrist. He was helpless against her strength as she pressed his hand over her left breast. He might have found the softness beneath her sweater exciting under different circ.u.mstances, but now it elicited only dread.

"Feel my heart beating? It was beating when your curette ripped me to pieces. I was only four weeks old. And I'm not the only one here you killed before 1974 -- I was just your first. So you can't get off the hook by naming the Supreme Court as an accomplice. And even if we allowed you that cop-out, other things you've done since '74 are utterly abominable!" She looked around and pointed into the crowd. "There's one! Come here, honey, and show your bucket to the doctor."

A five- or six-year-old boy came forward. He had blond bangs and the biggest, saddest blue eyes the doctor had ever seen. The boy held out his bucket.

Cantrell covered his face with his hands. "I don't want to see!"

Suddenly he felt his hands yanked downward with numbing force and found the woman's face scant inches from his own.

"Look, d.a.m.n you! You've seen it before!"

He looked into the upheld bucket. A fully formed male fetus lay curled in the blood, its blue eyes open, its head turned at an unnatural angle.

"This is Rachel Walraven's baby as you last saw him."

The Walraven baby! Oh, G.o.d, not that one! How could they know?

"What you see is how he'd look now if you hadn't broken his neck after the abortifacient you gave his mother made her uterus dump him out."

"He couldn't have survived!" he shouted. He could hear the hysteria edging into his voice. "He was previable! Too immature to survive! The best neonatal ICU in the world couldn't have saved him!"

"Then why'd you break my neck?" the little boy asked.

Cantrell could only sob -- a single harsh sound that seemed to rip itself from the tissues inside his chest and burst free into the air. What could he say? How could he tell them that he had miscalculated the length of gestation and that no one had been more shocked than he at the size of the infant that had dropped into his gloved hands? And then it had opened its eyes and stared at him and my G.o.d it seemed to be trying to breathe! He'd done late terminations before where the fetus had squirmed around awhile in the bucket before finally dying, but this one -- !

Christ! he remembered thinking, what if the d.a.m.n thing lets out a cry? He'd get sued by the patient and be the laughing stock of the staff. Poor Ed Cantrell -- can't tell the difference between an abortion and a delivery! He'd look like a jerk!

So he did the only thing he could do. He gave its neck a sharp twist as he lowered it into the bucket. The neck didn't even crack when he broke it.

"Why have you come to me?" he said. "Answer us first," a child's voice said. "Why do you do it? You don't need the money. Why do you kill us?"

"I told you! I believe in every woman's right to -- "

They began to boo him, drowning him out. Then the boos changed to a chant: "Why? Why? Why? Why?"

"Stop that! Listen to me! I told you why!"

But still they chanted, sounding like a crowd at a football game: "Why?

Why? Why? Why?"

Finally he could stand no more. He raised his fists and screamed. "All right!

Because I can! Is that what you want to hear? I do it because I caw!"

The room was suddenly dead silent.

The answer startled him. He had never asked himself why before. "Because I can," he said softly.

"Yes," the woman said with equal softness. "The ultimate power."

He suddenly felt very old, very tired. "What do you want of me?"

No one answered.

"Why have you come?"

They all spoke as one: "Because today, this Halloween, this night... we can."

"And we don't want this place to open," the woman said.

So that was it. They wanted to kill the women's center before it got started -- abort it, so to speak. He almost smiled at the pun. He looked at their faces, their staring eyes. They mean business, he thought. And he knew they wouldn't take no for an answer.

Well, this was no time to stand on principle. Promise them anything, and then get the h.e.l.l out of here to safety.

"Okay," he said, in what he hoped was a meek voice. "You've convinced me.

I'll turn this into a general medical center. No abortions. Just family practice for the community."

They watched him silently. Finally a voice said, "He's lying." The woman nodded. "I know." She turned to the children. "Do it," she said.

Pure chaos erupted as the children went wild. They were like a berserk mob, surging in all directions. But silent. So silent.

Cantrell felt himself shoved aside as the children tore into the procedure table and the Zarick extractor. The table was ripped from the floor and all its upholstery shredded. Its sections were torn free and hurled against the walls with such force that they punctured through the plasterboard.

The rage in the children's eyes seemed to leak out into the room, filling it, thickening the air like an onrushing storm, making his skin ripple with fear at its ferocity.

As he saw the Zarick start to topple, he forced himself forward to try to save it but was casually slammed against the wall with stunning force. In a semi-daze, he watched the Zarick raised into the air; he ducked flying gla.s.s as it was slammed onto the floor, not just once, but over and over until it was nothing more than a twisted wreck of wire, plastic hose, and ruptured circuitry.

And from down the hall he could hear similar carnage in the other procedure rooms. Finally the noise stopped and the room was packed with children again.

He began to weep. He hated himself for it, but he couldn't help it. He just broke down and cried in front of them. He was frightened. And all the money, all the plans... destroyed.

He pulled himself together and stood up straight. He would rebuild. All this destruction was covered by insurance. He would blame it on vandalism, collect his money, and have the place brand-new inside of a month. These vicious little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds weren't going to stop him.

But he couldn't let them know that.

"Get out, all of you," he said softly. "You've had your fun. You've ruined me. Now leave me alone."

"We'll leave you alone," said the woman who would have been Ellen Benedict's child. "But not yet."

Suddenly they began to empty their buckets on him, hurling the contents at him in a continuous wave, turning the air red with flying blood and tissue, engulfing him from all sides, choking him, clogging his mouth and nostrils. And then they reached for him...

Erica knocked on the front door of the center for the third time and still got no answer.

Now where can he be? she thought as she walked around to the private entrance. She tried the door and found it unlocked. She pushed in but stopped on the threshold.

The waiting room was lit and looked normal enough.

"Ed?" she called, but he didn't answer. Odd. His car was out front. She was supposed to meet him here at five. She had taken a cab from the house -- after all, she didn't want Ginger dropping her off here; there would be too many questions.

This was beginning to make her uneasy.

She glanced down the hallway. It was dark and quiet.

Almost quiet.

She heard tiny little sc.r.a.ping noises, tiny movements, so soft that she would have missed them if there had been any other sound in the building. The sounds seemed to come from the first procedure room. She stepped up to the door and listened to the dark. Yes, they were definitely coming from in there.

She flipped on the light... and felt her knees buckle.

The room was red -- the walls, the ceiling, the remnants of the shattered fixtures, all dripping with red. The clots and the coppery odor that saturated the air left no doubt in Erica's reeling mind that she was looking at blood. But on the floor -- the blood-puddled linoleum was littered with countless shiny, silvery buckets.

The little rustling sounds were coming from them. She saw something that looked like hair in a nearby bucket and took a staggering step over to see what was inside.

It was Edward's head, floating in a pool of blood, his eyes wide and mad, looking at her. She wanted to scream but the air clogged in her throat as she saw Ed's lips begin to move. They were forming words but there was no sound, for there were no lungs to push air through his larynx. Yet still his lips kept moving in what seemed to be silent pleas. But pleas for what?

And then he opened his mouth wide and screamed -- silently.

The Pit-Yakker.

by Brian Lumley.

Born in Harden, Durham on December 2, 1937, Brian Lumley began selling short fiction in the late 1960s, and throughout the 1970s he was chiefly known for a series of books based on the Cthulhu Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft: The Caller of the Black, The Burrowers Beneath, Beneath the Moors, The Transition of t.i.tus Crow, and others. While Lumley still likes to muck about with the Cthulhu Mythos, during the 1980s he concentrated on ma.s.sive novels of contemporary horror, most notably his Psychomech and Necroscope sagas. Lumley's latest novels include The House of Doors and Necroscope IV: Deadspeak. He has just completed the fifth and final Necroscope novel, Deadsp.a.w.n, and is now putting together two collections of his short stories, "to be t.i.tled Fruiting Bodies & Other Fungi, and (some other silly t.i.tle)." Tor Books will be bringing out Psychomech I and II as a single volume, to be followed by Psychamok.

Retired from the army after twenty-two years, Brian Lumley now lives with his wife, Dorothy, in Devon. Like "Fruiting Bodies" in last year's Year's Best Horror, "The Pit-Yakker" makes strong and effective use of the sort of English locales that won't be included in your tour package.

When I was sixteen, my father used to say to me: "Watch what you're doing with the girls; you're an idiot to smoke, for it's expensive and unhealthy; stay away from Raymond Maddison!" My mother had died two years earlier, so he'd taken over her share of the nagging, too.

The girls? Watch what I was doing? At sixteen I barely knew what I was doing! I knew what I wanted to do, but the how of it was a different matter entirely. Cigarettes? I enjoyed them; at the five-a-day stage, they still gave me that occasionally sweet taste and made my head spin. Raymond Maddison? I had gone to school with him, and because he lived so close to us we'd used to walk home together. But his mother was a little weak-minded, his older brother had been put away for molesting or something, and Raymond himself was thick as two short planks, hulking and unlovely, and a very shadowy character in general. Or at least he gave that impression.

Girls didn't like him: he smelled of bread and dripping and didn't clean his teeth too well, and for two years now he'd been wearing the same jacket and trousers, which had grown pretty tight on him. His short hair and little piggy eyes made him look bristly, and there was that looseness about his lips, which you find in certain idiots. If you were told that ladies' underwear was disappearing from the washing-lines, you'd perhaps think of Raymond. If someone was jumping out on small girls at dusk and shouting boo!, he was the one who'd spring to mind. If the little-boy-up-the-road's kitten got strangled...

Not that that sort of thing happened a lot in Harden, for it didn't. Up there on the northeast coast in those days, the Bobbies on the beat were still Bobbies, unhampered by modern "ethics" and other humane restrictions. Catch a kid drawing red, hairy, diamond-shaped designs on the school wall, and wallop!, he'd get a clout round the earhole, dragged off home to his parents, and doubtless another wallop. Also, in the schools, the cane was still in force. Young people were still being "brought up," were made or at least encouraged to grow up straight and strong, and not allowed to bolt and run wild. Most of them, anyway. But it wasn't easy, not in that environment.

Harden lay well outside the fringes of "Geordie-land" -- Newcastle and environs -- but real outsiders termed us all Geordies anyway. It was the way we spoke; our near-Geordie accents leaped between soft and harsh as readily as the Welsh tongue soars up and down the scales; a dialect which at once identified us as "pit-yakkers," grimy-black shambling colliers, coal-miners. The fact that my father was a Harden greengrocer made no difference: I came from the colliery and so was a pit-yakker. I was an apprentice woodcutting machinist in Hartlepool? -- so what?

My collar was grimy, wasn't it? With coal dust? And no matter how much I tried to disguise it I had that accent, didn't I? Pit-yakker!

But at sixteen I was escaping from the image. One must, or s.e.x remains forever a mystery. The girls -- the better girls, anyway -- in the big towns, even in Harden, Easingham, Blackhill and the other colliery villages, weren't much impressed by or interested in pit-yakkers. Which must have left Raymond Maddison in an entirely hopeless position. Everything about him literally shrieked of his origin, made worse by the fact that his father, a miner, was already grooming Raymond for the mine, too. You think I have a down on them, the colliers? No, for they were the salt of the earth. They still are. I merely give you the background.

As for my own opinion of Raymond: I thought I knew him and didn't for a moment consider him a bad sort. He loved John Wayne like I did, and liked to think of himself as a tough egg, as I did. But Nature and the world in general hadn't been so kind to him, and being a bit of a dunce didn't help much either. He was like a big scruffy dog who sits at the corner of the street grinning at everyone going by and wagging his tail, whom n.o.body ever pats for fear of fleas or mange or whatever, and who you're sure pees on the front wheel of your car every time you park it there. He probably doesn't, but somebody has to take the blame. That was how I saw Raymond.

So I was sixteen and some months, and Raymond Maddison about the same, and it was a Sat.u.r.day in July. Normally when we met we'd pa.s.s the time of day.

Just a few words: what was on at the cinema (in Harden there were two of them, the Ritz and the Empress -- for this was before Bingo closed most of them down), when was the next dance at the Old Victoria Hall, how many pints we'd downed last Friday at the British Legion. Dancing, drinking, smoking, and girls: it was a time of experimentation. Life had many flavors other than those that wafted out from the pit and the c.o.ke-ovens. On this Sat.u.r.day, however, he was the last person I wanted to see, and the very last I wanted to be seen with.

I was waiting for Moira, sitting on the recreation ground wall where the stumps of the old iron railings showed through, which they'd taken away thirteen years earlier for the war effort and never replaced. I had been a baby then but it was one of the memories I had: of the men in the helmets with the gla.s.s faceplates cutting down all the iron things to melt for the war. It had left only the low wall, which was ideal to sit on. In the summer the flat-capped miners would sit there to watch the kids flying kites in the recreation ground or playing on the swings, or just to sit and talk. There was a group of old-timers there that Sat.u.r.day, too, all looking out across the dark, fuming colliery toward the sea; so when I saw Raymond hunching my way with his hands in his pockets, I turned and looked in the same direction, hoping he wouldn't notice me. But he already had.

"Hi, Joshua!" he said in his mumbling fashion, touching my arm. I don't know why I was christened Joshua: I wasn't Jewish or a Catholic or anything. I do know why; my father told me his father had been called Joshua, so that was it.

Usually they called me Josh, which I liked because it sounded like a wild-western name. I could imagine John Wayne being called Josh. But Raymond occasionally forgot and called me Joshua.

"h.e.l.lo, Raymond!" I said. I usually called him Ray, but if he noticed the difference he didn't say anything.

"Game of snooker?" It was an invitation.

"No," I shook my head. "I'm, er, waiting for someone."

"Who?"

"Mind your own business." "Girl?" he said. "Moira? Saw you with her at the Ritz. Back row."

"Look, Ray, I -- "

"It's OK," he said, sitting down beside me on the wall. "We're jus' talking. I can go any time."