He couldn’t do it, he couldn’t feed himself. She knew, it had been that way the last time, and before. But every time, hope made her forget, at least enough to try the old way. The way it had been years ago.
She couldn’t bear the sound of her father’s crying, and the little boy’s fearful whimper. She knew how to stop it. On the table beside the bed was the knife she’d brought up from the kitchen—that had also been a long time ago—and had left there. Her hand reached out and curled around the smooth-worn wood. Her thumb slid across the sharp metal edge.
She brought her lips to the boy’s ear, whispering to him. “Don’t be afraid, it’s all right . . .” The boy squirmed away from her, but she caught him fast, hugging his unclothed body against her breast. “It’s all right, it’s all right . . .” He saw the knife blade, and started to cry out. But she already had its point at his pink throat, and the cry leaked red, a drop, then a smearing line as the metal sank and cut.
The red bloomed on the sheets, the grey flooded to shiny wet. The boy’s small hands beat against her, then fluttered, trembled, fell back, fists opening to stained flowers.
He didn’t fight her now, he was a limp form in her embrace, but suddenly he weighed so much and her hands slipped on the soft skin that had been pink before and now shone darker and brighter. She gripped the boy tighter, her fingers parallel to his ribs, and lifted him. She brought the bubbling mouth, the red one that she had pulled the knife from, up to her father’s parted lips.
The blood spilled over her father’s gums and trickled out the corners of his mouth. The tendons in his neck stretched and tightened, as though they might tear his paper flesh. His throat worked, trying to swallow, but nothing happened. His eyes opened wider, spiderwebs of red traced around the yellow. He whimpered, the anger turning to fear. Trapped in the thing of sticks his body had become, he scrabbled his spotted hands at her face, reaching past the boy between them.
She knew what had to be done. The same as she’d done before. Her father’s bent, ragged nails scraped across her cheek as she turned away from him. She nuzzled her face down close to the little boy’s neck. She closed her eyes so there was only the wet and heat pulsing against her lips. She opened her mouth and drank, her tongue weighted with the dancing, coiling salt.
She didn’t swallow, though her mouth had become full. Her breath halted, she raised her face from the boy’s neck and the wound surging less with every shared motion of their hearts. A trickle of the warmth caught in her mouth leaked to her chin.
A baby bird in its nest . . . a naked thing of skin and fragile bone . . . She had found one once, on the sidewalk in front of the house, a tiny creature fallen from one of the branches above. Even as she had reached down, the tip of her finger an inch away from the wobbling, blue-veined head, the beak had opened, demanding to be fed . . .
The creature’s hunger had frightened her, and she’d kicked it out into the gutter, where she wouldn’t have to see it anymore. That had been a baby bird.
This was her father. She kept her eyes closed as she brought herself down to him, but she could still see the mouth opening wide, the pink gums, the tongue in its socket of bubbled spit. She lowered her face to his, and let the lips seal upon her own. She opened her mouth, and let the warmth uncoil, an infinitely soft creature moving over her own tongue, falling into his hunger.
The little boy’s blood welled in her father’s mouth. For a moment it was in both their mouths, a wet place shared by their tongues, his breath turning with hers. She felt the trembling, a shiver against the hinges of her jaw as his throat clenched, trying to swallow. She had to help even more, it had been this way the last time as well; she pressed her lips harder against her father’s mouth, as her tongue rolled against the narrow arch of her teeth. The warmth in their mouths broke and pushed past the knot in her father’s throat. He managed to swallow, and she felt the last of the blood flow out of her mouth, into his and then gone.
She fed him twice more, each mouthful easier. Between them, the little boy lay still, beautiful in his quiet.
The boy’s throat had paled, and she had to draw deep for more. The sheets were cold against her hands as she pushed herself away from him.
Her father was still hungry, but stronger now. His face rose to meet hers, and the force of his kiss pressed against her open lips.
The blood uncoiled in that dark space again, and something else. She felt his tongue thrust forward to touch hers, a warm thing cradled in warmth and the sliding wet. Her throat clenched now. She couldn’t breathe, and the smell of his sweat and hunger pressed in the tight space behind her eyes.
His hands had grown strong now, too. The weak flutter had died, the palms reddening as the little boy had become white and empty. One of her father’s hands tugged her blouse loose from the waistband of her skirt, and she felt the thing of bone and yellowed paper smear the sheet’s wet on her skin. Her father’s hand stroked across her ribs and fastened on her breast, a red print on the white cotton bra. He squeezed and it hurt, her breath was inside his hand and blood and the taste of his mouth, the dark swallowing that pulled her into him, beat a pulsing fist inside her forehead.
She pushed both her hands against him, but he was big now and she was a little girl again, she was that pale unmoving thing rocking in his arms, playing at being dead. She was already falling, she could raise her knees in the dark wet embrace of the bed, she could wrap herself around the little blind thing at the center of her breasts, that just breathed and stayed quiet, and that even he couldn’t touch, had never been able to touch . . . the little boy was there, his angel face bright and singing, her ears deafened, battered by that song that light that falling upward into clouds of glory where her mother in Sunday robes reached for her, her mother smiling though she had no face she couldn’t remember her mother’s face—
She shoved against her father, hard enough to break away from him, his ragged fingernails drawing three red lines that stung and wept under her bra. She fell backward off the bed, her elbow hard against the floor, sending numb electricity to her wrist.
Another shape slid from the edge of the bed and sprawled over her lap. The little boy, naked and red wet, made a soft, flopping doll. She pushed it away from herself and scrambled to her feet.
The bed shone. From its dark center, the depth of the blanket’s hood, her father looked out at her.
She found the doorknob in her hands behind her back. Her blouse clung to her ribs, and had started to turn cold in the room’s shuttered air. The door scraped her spine as she stepped backward into the hallway. Then she turned and ran for the bathroom at the far end, an old sour taste swelling in her throat.
In the dark, between the streetlights’ blue islands, she could feel the leaves under her feet. They slid away, damp things, silent; she had to walk carefully to keep from falling.
There was work to be done back at the house. She’d do it later. She would have to change the sheets, as she always did afterward, and wash the stained ones. She used the old claw-footed bathtub, kneeling by its side, the smell of soap and bleach stinging her nose, her fingers working in the pink water. He let her come in and make the bed, and never tried to say anything to her, just watching her with his blank and wordless eyes, his hungers, all of them, over for a while.
And there were the other jobs to be done, the messier ones. Getting rid of things. She’d have to take the car, the old Plymouth with the rusting fenders, out of the garage. And drive to that far place she knew, where these things were never found. She would come back as the sun was rising, and there would be mud on the hem of her skirt. She’d be tired, and ready to sleep.
She could do all that later. She’d been brave and strong, and had already done the hardest jobs; she could allow herself this small indulgence.
The cold night wrapped around her. She pressed her chin down into the knot of the scarf she’d tied over her hair. The collar of her coat had patches where the fur had worn away. The coat had been her mother’s, and ha
d been old the first time she’d worn it. A scent of powder, lavender and tea roses, still clung to the heavy cloth.
At the end of the block ahead of her, the Presbyterian church hid the stars at the bottom of the sky. She could see the big stained-glass window, Jesus with one hand on his staff and the other cupped to the muzzle of a lamb, even though there were no lights on in the church itself. The light spilling over the sidewalk came from the meeting room in the basement.
She went down the bare concrete steps, hand gripping the iron rail. And into the light and warmth, the collective sense of people in a room, their soft breathing, the damp-wool smell of their winter coats.
Where she hung her coat up, with the others near for the door, a mimeographed paper on the bulletin board held the names for the altar flowers rotation. Sign-ups to chaperone the youth group’s Christmas party. A glossy leaflet, unfolded and tacked, with pledges for a mission in Belize. Her name wasn’t anywhere on the different pieces of paper. She didn’t belong to the church. They probably wouldn’t have wanted her, if they’d known. Known everything. She only came here for the weekly support group.
There was a speaker tonight, a woman up at the front of the room, talking, one hand gesturing while the other touched the music stand the church gave them to use as a podium.
She let the speaker’s words flutter past as she sat down in one of the metal folding chairs at the side of the room; halfway down the rows, so she only had to turn her head a bit to see who else had come tonight. She had already counted close to twenty-four. There were the usuals, the faces she saw every week. A couple, a man and a woman who always held hands while they sat and listened, who she assumed were married; they nodded and smiled at her, a fellow regular. At the end of the row was somebody she hadn’t seen before, a young man who sat hunched forward, the steam from a Styrofoam cup of coffee rising into his face. She could tell that he was just starting, that this was a new world for him; he didn’t look happy.
None of them ever did, even when they smiled and spoke in their bright loud voices, when they said hello and hugged each other near the table with the coffee urn and the cookies on the paper plates.
They had another word for why they were here, a word that made it sound like a disease, just a disease, something you could catch like a cold or even a broken arm. Instead of it being time itself, and old age, and the grey things their parents had become. Time curled outside the church, like a black dog waiting where the steps became the sidewalk, waiting to go home with them again. Where the ones who had known their names looked at them now with empty eyes and did not remember.
She sat back in the folding chair, her hands folded in her lap. The woman at the front of the room had the same bright, relentless voice. She closed her eyes and listened to it.
The woman had a message. There was always a message, it was why people came here. The woman told the people in the room that they had been chosen to receive a great blessing, one that most people weren’t strong enough for. A chance to show what love is. A few years of grief and pain and sadness and trouble, of diapering and spoon-feeding and talking cheerily to something that had your father or your mother’s face, but wasn’t them at all, not anymore. And then it would be over.
That was a small price to pay, a small burden to carry. The woman told them that, the same thing they’d been told before. A few years to show their love. For these things that had been their parents. They’d be transfigured by the experience. Made into saints, the ones who’d shown their courage and steadfastness on that sad battlefield.
She sat and listened to the woman talking. The woman didn’t know—none of them ever did—but she knew. What none of them ever would.
She looked around at the others in the room, the couple holding hands, the young man staring into the dregs of his coffee. Her burden, her blessing, was greater than theirs. and so was her love. Even now, she felt sorry for them. They would be released someday. But not her. For them, there would be a few tears, and then their love, their small love, would be over.
She kept her eyes closed, and let herself walk near the edge of sleep, of dreaming, in this warm place bound by winter. She smiled.
She knew that love wasn’t over in a few sad years. Or in centuries. She knew that love never died. She knew that her love—real love, true love—was forever.
RAMSEY CAMPBELL
The Same in Any Language
IT HAS ALMOST become a tradition in Best New Horror to include a story with a Mediterranean setting. In this volume it is the turn of co-editor Ramsey Campbell to chill our spines in a warmer climate . . .
Campbell has been described as “perhaps the finest living exponent of the British weird fiction tradition”, and in 1991 he was voted the Expert’s Expert in a poll conducted amongst his peers in the Observer Magazine.
Since first being professionally published in 1962 (at the age of sixteen), Campbell’s numerous books, stories, reviews and articles have revealed him to be a unique voice in horror fiction.
His recent novels include Ancient Images, Midnight Sun, The Count of Eleven, The Long Lost and a welcome reissue of Night of the Claw (originally published under the alias of “Jay Ramsey”). In 1992 he celebrated thirty years as a horror writer, and a bumper collection of his best short fiction, Alone With the Horrors, commemorates the event.
The story which follows is based on a visit to Spinalonga, and the final paragraph is meant as a tribute to Stephen King.
THE DAY MY FATHER IS TO take me where the lepers used to live is hotter than ever. Even the old women with black scarves wrapped around their heads sit inside the bus station instead of on the chairs outside the tavernas. Kate fans herself with her straw hat like a basket someone’s sat on and gives my father one of those smiles they’ve made up between them. She’s leaning forwards to see if that’s our bus when he says, “Why do you think they call them lepers, Hugh?”
I can hear what he’s going to say, but I have to humour him. “I don’t know.”
“Because they never stop leaping up and down.”
It takes him much longer to say the first four words than the rest of it. I groan because he expects me to, and Kate lets off one of her giggles I keep hearing whenever they stay in my father’s and my room at the hotel and send me down for a swim. “If you can’t give a grin, give a groan,” my father says for about the millionth time, and Kate pokes him with her freckly elbow as if he’s too funny for words. She annoys me so much that I say, “Lepers don’t rhyme with creepers, Dad.”
“I never thought they did, son. I was just having a laugh. If we can’t laugh we might as well be dead, ain’t that straight, Kate?” He winks at her thigh and slaps his own instead, and says to me, “Since you’re so clever, why don’t you find out when our bus is coming?”
“That’s it now.”
“And I’m Hercules.” He lifts up his fists to make his muscles bulge for Kate and says, “You’re telling us that tripe spells A Flounder?”
“Elounda, Dad. It does. The letter like a Y upside-down is how they write an L.”
“About time they learned how to write properly, then,” he says, staring around to show he doesn’t care who hears. “Well, there it is if you really want to trudge around another old ruin instead of having a swim.”
“I expect he’ll he able to do both once we get to the village,” Kate says, but I can tell she’s hoping I’ll just swim. “Will you two gentlemen see me across the road?”
My mother used to link arms with me and my father when he was living with us. “I’d better make sure it’s the right bus,” I say, and run out so fast I can pretend I didn’t hear my father calling me back.
A man with skin like a boot is walking backwards in the dust behind the bus, shouting “Elounda” and waving his arms as if he’s pulling the bus into the space in line. I sit on a seat opposite two Germans who block the aisle until they’ve taken off their rucksacks, but my father finds three seats together at the rear. “Aren’t you with us, Hugh?”
he shouts, and everyone on the bus looks at him.
When I see him getting ready to shout again I walk down the aisle. I’m hoping nobody notices me, but Kate says loudly, “It’s a pity you ran off like that, Hugh. I was going to ask if you’d like an ice cream.”
“No thank you,” I say, trying to sound like my mother when she was only just speaking to my father, and step over Kate’s legs. As the bus rumbles uphill I turn as much of my back on her as I can, and watch the streets.
Agios Nikolaos looks as if they haven’t finished building it. Some of the tavernas are on the bottom floors of blocks with no roofs, and sometimes there are more tables on the pavements outside than in. The bus goes downhill again as if it’s hiccuping, and when it reaches the bottomless lake where young people with no children stay in the hotels with discos, it follows the edge of the bay. I watch the white boats on the blue water, but really I’m seeing the conductor coming down the aisle and feeling as if a lump’s growing in my stomach from me wondering what my father will say to him.
The bus is climbing beside the sea when he reaches us. “Three for leper land,” my father says.
The conductor stares at him and shrugs. “As far as you go,” Kate says, and rubs herself against my father. “All the way.”
When the conductor pushes his lips forwards out of his moustache and beard my father begins to get angry, unless he’s pretending. “Where you kept your lepers. Spiny Lobster or whatever you call the damned place.”
“It’s Spinalonga, Dad, and it’s off the coast from where we’re going.”
“I know that, and he should.” My father is really angry now. “Did you get that?” he says to the conductor. “My ten-year-old can speak your lingo, so don’t tell me you can’t speak ours.”
The Best New Horror 3 Page 4
