The Year's Best Horror Stories 4

by Gerald W. Page (Ed. )

  And so, after three years of confinement, they had set him free, for by then he had learned to act reasonably like an Englishman. He did remain a bit of a puzzle, for no one had stepped forward to identify him, not even the mysterious Elwyn whom he asked for incessantly, and whom he continually expected to put in an appearance.

  As for this new world he found himself in, Wygiff did not like it. It was definitely not the realm where the honored dead were made to walk about hand in hand with the gods. Wygiff felt out of place. He longed to return to his people. He realized that there was only one way to return: The sacrifice had to be performed.

  If he had had the ability to make himself understood by the people on the street, he might have deduced that Stonehenge was not too distant from London. But passersby dismissed his ravings as those of a madman, and since none of them knew what "the holy place," or the "sacred stones" were, the sacrifice must perforce be performed in the city itself.

  With one of the fine shining knives of this strange place, he took to the streets of the slums at night and killed the women he found walking there. It did not matter to him that the ritual did not take place within the sacred circle of standing stones, or that the drabs he slaughtered were not virgins. Although Wygiff had learned to act like an Englishman, he was and always would be a druid priest, and the mind of the druid which was the real Wygiff had not been able to stand the shock of not finding himself in the land beyond death where Elwyn awaited him. And perhaps after all it is neither the time nor the place nor the purity of the victim which is the necessary ingredient of the spell. Perhaps it is the belief of the practitioner that gives the magic its potency.

  Yet after several attempts, none of the sacrifices had been successful. He was still in the strange place called London. So Wygiff decided to make one last desperate attempt at returning to his people before ending by suicide the growing unbearability of the contradictions that preyed upon his primitive mind.

  He would get a woman alone in a room, and there he would have time to do it properly, with knife and fire and magic. The Lord of the Portals would surely take him back to his tribe then, if ever he would.

  It was night. He threw a black cloak about his shoulders—no fox skins for an Englishman!—and took to the streets. His leather heels trod softly on the cobbles, and he moved as he did when as a boy he stalked the boar in the brush. Every instinct was submerged in the instinct of the hunter and the instinct of the priest. He was Wygiff, successor of Korich the Invoker! In him was the power to league himself with the dark forces that ruled the universe according to their own designs and fancies.

  A woman lingered in the faded glow of a gas flare hanging on a sagging brick wall. He called to her from the shadow.

  "Elwyn?"

  She turned her head. "Oi, mister—lookin' for someone? Someone of the feminine sex?"

  "Do you have a room?" asked Wygiff in his oddly accented English.

  "Yeah, I'm kippin' in a room down the way. What's yer name, chum?"

  "William."

  The whore laughed. "Come along, Master William," she said in a jolly voice. She led him to the door of No. 13.

  She waved to her roommate loitering nearby. The two drabs exchanged pleasantries, and then she went inside with Wygiff. The room was tiny, stuffy, and untidy. Wygiff noted that there was a fireplace.

  The light of the fire on her pale, cold flesh made her a golden goddess. He plunged his knife into her body many times, before or after he had lain with her, he did not remember. All he knew was this: she was Elwyn.

  And he slew her again, and again, and again.

  Because he loved her.

  So complete was the mutilation that it took skilled surgeons seven hours to piece the body together for identification. Parts of the dissected corpse were found lying around the room in "geometric patterns" (as the medical report said). The room was locked. The dead woman's roommate had been nearby all the while and had seen no one leave or enter by the room's one entrance.

  Yet the murderer was not there.

  Only seconds had elapsed for the stunned worshipers at Stonehenge. The view of the afterlife suddenly appeared once more between the columns of stone, but this time it was a scene of the interior of some hut or enclosure of strange aspect. The body of a ritual victim was clearly visible, and also a man in peculiar dress who held a bloody knife of unique design. Then the figure—was it a god?—stepped through the portals into the circle of standing stones. He raised high the weapon and cried exultantly, "Brothers! Wygiff returns!"

  There was no doubt! Wygiff had returned from the afterlife! They ran to embrace him, and laughed and wept together, and he displayed his fine blade, fashioned by the gods from some shining stuff stronger than iron or stone. He accepted their awe and admiration gratefully, tears in his eyes. At last he was where he belonged. The years in the place called—absurdly—London—were only a fading dream, a vision. Yes! He had been in the afterworld and had spoken with the gods. And now he had returned to the world of living men as their spokesman.

  Elwyn's body was a lump of flesh lying upon the altar before him, just as he had left it there years ago. It was a cold thing, dead, and no longer part of him, no longer alive even in his mind. In trying to summon her back to life, he had in that final orgy of horror killed her memory utterly and completely. His love of her, his memory of her, was as dead as the separated parts of the once-human being he had left lying in a strange room in a strange place called London.

  There were other things to think about now, things pertaining to living men. The talk of battle was still in the air. Mogh Kymroch still awaited his omens, and Korich must read them. Even as the rejoicing began to subside and these weighty matters began to intrude upon their thoughts, the blazing orbs of the Portal Lord formed once more in the mist, and the Celts drew back before this unexpected apparition, and in it they saw something strange, something subtly different that could not be precisely defined.

  The Lord of the Portals spoke: Where—am—I?

  And again: I am—I am . . .

  There was agony in the words. On the brink of articulation the voice broke into a strange cry, a wail of inhuman agony and loss. The sun at that moment rested lightly upon the marker stone and prepared to take flight into the morning sky. In that moment the Lord of the Portals vanished, leaving the uncompleted message hanging in the air to puzzle them even unto the generation of their sons' sons' sons. The druid priests did not hear the cry completed, yet those words echoed down time's corridor . . .

  Down the vortex, falling, twisting, shrieking, the helpless raging scream of the falling man. Feet kick against nothing, arms flail against nothing. Vision blurs. But there are no feet, arms, eyes. In a white flash of pain he strikes bottom, collapsing into a thin film of being, a smear of consciousness, a stain of existence. And in that strange realm the cry becomes the cry of Walter Deacon who was, but who in the memory of man is no more.

  Yet Walter Deacon knew he existed, knew that somehow he had been thrust into a place, thrusting out of the one who had occupied it before him. That personality seemed to linger nearby, just within the possibility of contact, yet still moving inexorably toward the pit of extinction.

  The voice said: The farce is now over.

  Louder! Your voice fades! How may I escape—you said you'd tell me.

  The voice said: At summer solstice a man must step through the portal at the moment of sunrise. Because of the imbalance in space-time another man is taken from the era into which the portal has opened.

  You captured me like that—made me take your place in the circle!

  The voice said: Yes. You have superseded me as Lord of the Portal. Fear and pain are the sources of the energy that displaced me from my prison.

  That's why you put me through those scenes of horror. Were they real, or only dreams?

  The voice said: Before you could replace me here, it was necessary that you cease to exist as an object in space-time. Therefore I sent you back in time in the
guise of demons to kill one of your ancestors. It took three tries before you succeeded.

  The girl in Babylon! But all this suffering—you said you wanted nothing.

  The voice said: And soon shall I have it. I shall cease to exist and my torment will be over. And yours will begin.

  Your voice—it's much fainter now. Quickly, how long have you been trapped? How long before someone enters the portal at the right moment? And—who are you?

  The voice said: I have been waiting for thirty-four hundred years, trapped by the forces I unknowingly released.

  And again, it said: I am the architect of Stonehenge.

  Can that which does not exist go insane? To that question no man living can make answer. But somewhere out of space and time there is one who knows, if he retains the ability of self-contemplation and all the horror that implies. And there is one thing he surely knows: that he can scream . . .

  And scream

  And scream

  "The burial mound we excavated was right near Stonehenge. We had thought that some warrior chief of the primitive Britons was buried there. But the artifacts we found indicated that it was actually the grave of a high priest. This thing we found with the skeleton shocked me profoundly. There was no possibility of a hoax. Only my most trusted colleagues were allowed to see it. I finally disposed of the monstrous anomaly in a back room of the British Museum, where it shares a dusty shelf with a few other odds and ends that we turn up occasionally—things that, like it, shouldn't exist.

  "It was a knife. A knife circa 1880, made in London, according to the stamp. It was quite rusty and corroded. It had been honed down to a sliver by some primitive whetstone. How the knife found its way into the hands of the skeleton—it's been preying on my mind, Doctor. I've been having these queer dreams about it. Maybe you can help me make some sense out of it. I hope to God you can."

  —From the lost notebooks of Sigmund Freud.

  The Case of Sir Henry Collier.

  AND DON'T FORGET THE ONE RED ROSE by Avram Davidson

  Avram Davidson: a name and, above all else, a M*I*N*D to C*0*N*J*U*R*E W*I*T*H—which he does, frequently. The conjuring is in excellent form in this story about Charley Barton and his employer, the somewhat less than admirable Matt Mungo, and that deliciously strange Bookstore owned by the Asiatic gentleman on the top floor. A gentleman who, in his own words, "have not twenty-seven times risked my life nor suffered pangs and pains innumerable, merely to sell for ordinary money these treasures." Oh no, of course not, never.

  Charley Barton was the staff of an East New York establishment that supplied used gas stoves on a wholesale basis. He received deliveries at the back door, dollied them inside, took them apart, cleaned them (and cleaned them and cleaned them and cleaned them) till they sparkled as much as their generally run-down nature would allow, fitted on missing parts and set them up in front of the place, where they might be chaffered over by prospective buyers.

  He never handled sales. These were taken care of by his employer, a thickset and neckless individual who was there only part of the time. When not fawning upon the proprietors of retail used-appliance stores, he was being brutal to Charley. This man's name was Matt Mungo, and he arrived in neat, middle-class clothes from what he referred to as his "other place," never further described to Charley, who did not venture to be curious.

  Charley doubted, however, that Mungo did—indeed, he was certain that Mungo did not—display to employees and patrons of his other place the insulting manner and methods he used in the stove warehouse.

  Besides calling Charley many offensive names in many offensive ways, Mungo had the habit of shoving him, poking him, and generally pushing him around. Did Charley, goaded beyond patience, pause or turn to complain, Mungo, pretending great surprise, would demand, "What? What?"—and, before Charley could formulate his protest, he would swiftly thrust stiff thick fingers into Charley's side or stomach and dart away to a distance, whence he would loudly and abusively call attention to work he desired done, and which Charley would certainly have done anyway in the natural course of things.

  Charley lived on the second floor of an old and unpicturesque warehouse. On the first floor lived two old women who dressed in black, who had no English and went often to church. On the top floor lived an Asian man about whom Charley knew nothing. That is, he knew nothing until one evening when, returning from work and full of muscular aches and pains and resentments, he saw this man trying to fit a card into the frame of the name plate over the man's doorbell in the downstairs entrance. The frame was bent, the card resisted, Charley pulled out a rather long knife and jimmied the ancient and warped piece of metal, the card slipped in. And the Asian man said, "Thank you, so."

  "Oh, that's all right," and Charley looked to see what the name might be. But the card said only BOOKSTORE. "Funny place for a store," Charley said. "But maybe you expect to do most of your business by mail, I guess."

  "No, oh," the Asian man said. And, with a slight bow, a slight smile, and a slight gesture, he urged Charley to precede him up the stairs in the dark and smelly hall. About halfway up the first flight, the Asian man said, "I extend you to enjoy a cup of tea and a tobacco cigarette whilst in my so newly opened sales place."

  "Why, sure," said Charley, instantly. "Why, thank you very much." Social invitations came seldom to him and, to tell the truth, he was rather ugly, slow, and stupid—facts that were often pointed out by Mungo. He now asked, "Are you Chinese or Japanese?"

  "No," said his neighbor. And he said nothing else until they were on the top floor, when, after unlocking the door and slipping in his hand to flip on the light switch, he gestured to his downstairs co-resident to enter, with the word "Do."

  It was certainly unlike any of the bookstores to which Charley was accustomed . . . in that he was accustomed to them at all. Instead of open shelves, there were cabinets against the walls, and there were a number of wooden chests as well. Mr. Bookstore did not blow upon embers to make the tea, he poured it, already sweetened, from a Thermos bottle into a plastic cup, and the cigarette was a regular American cigarette. When tea and tobacco had been consumed, he began to open the chests and the cabinets. First he took out a very, very tiny book in a very, very strange-looking language. "I never saw paper like that before," Charley said.

  "It is factually palm leaf. A Buddhist litany. Soot is employed, instead of ink, in marking the text. Is it not precious?"

  Charley nodded and politely asked, "How much does it cost?"

  The bookman examined an odd-looking tag. "The price of it," he said, "is a bar of silver the weight of a newborn child." He removed it gently from Charley's hand, replaced it in the pigeonhole in the cabinet, closed the cabinet, lifted the carved lid of an aromatic chest, and took out something larger, much larger, and wrapped in cloth of tissue of gold. "Edition of great illustrated work on the breeding of elephants in captivity, on yellow paper smoored with alum in wavy pattern; most rare; agreed?"

  For one thing, Charley hardly felt in a position to disagree and, for another, he was greatly surprised and titillated by the next illustration. "Hey, look at what that one is doing!" he exclaimed.

  The bookman looked. A faint, indulgent smile creased his ivory face. "Droll," he commented. He moved to take it back.

  "How much does this one cost?"

  The dealer scrutinized the tag. "The price of this one," he said, "is set down as 'A pair of white parrots, an embroidered robe of purple, sixty-seven fine inlaid vessels of beaten gold, one hundred platters of silver filigree work, and ten catties of cardamoms.' " He removed the book, rewrapped it, and restored it to its place in the chest.

  "Did you bring them all from your own country, then?"

  "All," said the Asian man, nodding. "Treasures of my ancestors, broughten across the ice-fraught Himalayan passes upon the backs of yaks. Perilous journey." He gestured. "All which remains, tangibly, of ancient familial culture."

  Charley made a sympathetic squint and said, "Say, that's too bad. S
ay! I remember now! In the newspapers! Tibetan refugees—you must of fled from the approaching Chinese Communists!"

  The bookman shook his head. "Factually, not. Non-Tibetan. Flight was from approaching forces of rapacious Dhu thA Hmy'egh, wicked and dissident vassal of the king of Bhutan. As way to Bhutan proper was not available, escape was into India." He considered, withdrew another item from another chest.

  "Well, you speak very good English."

  "Instructed in tutorial fashion by late the Oliver Blunt-Piggot, disgarbed shaman of a Christian fane in Poona." He lifted the heavy board cover of a very heavy volume.

  "When was this?"

  "Ago." He set down the cover, slowly turned the huge, thick pages. "Perceive, barbarians in native costume, bringing tribute." Charley had definite ideas as to what was polite, expected. He might not be able to, could hardly expect to buy. But it was only decent to act as though he could. Only thus could he show interest. And so, again, ask he did.

  Again, the bookman's pale slim fingers sought the tag. "Ah, mm. The price of this is one mummified simurgh enwrapped in six bolts of pale brocade, a hundred measures of finest musk in boxes of granulated goldwork, and a viper of Persia pickled in Venetian treacle." He replaced the pages, set back the cover, and set to rewrapping.

  Charley, after some thought, asked if all the books had prices like that. "Akk, yes. All these books have such prices, which are the exceedingly carefully calculated evaluations established by my ancestors in the High Vale of Lhom-bhya—formerly the Crossroads of the World, before the earthquake buried most of the passes, thus diverting trade to Lhasa, Samarkand, and such places. So."

  A question that had gradually been taking form in the shape of a wrinkle now found verbal expression. "But couldn't you just sell them for money?"

  The bookman touched the tip of his nose with the tip of his middle finger. "For money? Let me have thought . . . Ah! Here is The Book of Macaws, Egrets, and Francolins, in the Five Colors, for only eighty-three gold mohurs from the mint of Baber Mogul and one silver dirhem of Aaron the Righteous . . . You call him Aaron the Righteous? Not. Pardon. Harun al-Rashid. A bargain."