The Best New Horror 3

by Stephen Jones

  He had never told Andy where he lived, but one night, coming back from putting out the trash, he heard above the sound of crickets a far away bark, burlesque, then a mingled laugh that froze him, hands clenched in the silence of sinister insect music and Andy, calling him, soft. He let them in, absurdly excited, was it time, should he set up or what. Andy cradled True’s box, its bottom bowed and soggy, some viscous fluid dripping with majestic irregularity onto the living room carpet; Andy spoke little and True not at all, and when they left he saw the Rorschach stains, horrible trail all the way to the door.

  That night he lay bedbound, staring sick and gratified, and when by dawn he did sleep woke soon after in a turmoil of arousal, behind his eyes a dream of Andy, small hairless penis and his own mouth grasping to close over it, and the fierce immediate throb of his orgasm, slick wet all over and he sat in it and wept with terror, what is happening to me. He thought of Andy’s absentee mother, a vague impression from the hallway photos, blonde hair and a worried smile, a nice woman, yes certainly, and in his delirium he thought of holding her, spending himself in her, knowing somewhere beneath that what he really wanted was to cry on her tits about her monster son and his even more monstrous pet. He must never go back there, “Never, never, never” moaning into his cupped hands, the words as thick and warm as vomit in his mouth.

  He tried, oh surely he did, was it nearly a week? True’s snicker, Andy’s cold smile: “Should I let him in, True?” and True considering, asking through the closed bedroom door how’d he liked his dreams lately, pretty wild, huh? Hands clenched on his neckstrap, Ellis sweating, I will not cry, sweating till at last Andy opened the door. “Taken any good shots?” True said, and howled, coyote scream to make his ears ring in the square hot silence of the room, banshee noise that went on and on. Finally and at once it stopped, and True, his eyes somehow a twin to Andy’s: “If you want to take my picture, you have to bring me what I need. Andy can’t do it any more.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” growl, yes, like a dog, “Andy’s just a kid. There are things a kid can’t do, shithead, don’t you know that?”

  “Like what?”

  At first, No, no I will not, I will not do these things; but he didn’t get far, did he, did he, no. Because after and above all Ellis must have that picture, must hold it in his hands, not even sure any longer why he must but feeling its necessity like a disease.

  So he did as he was told. Once, and twice, and by the fifth time it got if not easier—it could never, never be easy, as it could never be safe—then less ugly, or perhaps he was already so mad that another dollop of poison could do nothing but churn his madness to a finer boil. Perhaps part of him was hoping somehow to be caught, he told himself that, sitting at red lights with a torn paper bag beside him, or an object wrapped in plastic, wet plastic, a certain smell infused for ever in the atmosphere of his car; he woke at night with that smell in his nostrils, wondering if it was that he hated most, that smell, or what True made him do, sometimes, with the things he brought, or was it the things themselves, wet and smelly and inert, what was it he hated most? Finally he did not speculate, he found he no longer cared to and in fact did not care at all. It was ugly, yeah, and so was he, and so what. All that could bring meaning was to get that picture and in the meantime, why not just roll with it, get belly-deep and deeper, put your face in it and suck it in.—And then the mornings, weeping and gagging at the look on his own face, the smirk of the afterglow; maybe other people saw it too. What if they did?

  He asked True about it, got a laugh for an answer, and he laughed too. Because it was funny, wasn’t it, even True’s demands, the sicker they got the funnier they were. It was like feeding a throatless mouth, no end in sight, ha ha ha, wasn’t that the third time tonight he’d seen that blue Buick? Wasn’t it? He shifted, nervous on the seat, and something warm, sticky-warm, sagged against his thigh, where had he gotten that? He didn’t remember, didn’t know for sure even what was in that bag there, look at this for me please officer, I think it might be icky. Definitely he had seen that Buick before. Slewing down a side street, tricky negotiation till he saw the Buick’s tail-lights and back, fast, all the spy movie bullshit like driving without lights, he almost hit a parked car and laughed out loud. The bag broke. His ass, his legs were drenched, he stank, the car stank, he trotted stinking into the house waving the half-wrapped thing by one jaunty corner. “Hope you’re hungry,” wide chortling grin that sickened and died as he saw their faces, and when True at last raised his lip it was no smile he showed.

  “I don’t want that,” bright bony sneer past Ellis to what he carried. “You’re getting useless, you know that? Useless,” on a growl, and Andy said, “If you can’t bring True what he needs, you can’t come here any more.”

  No sound at all, more and less than vacuum and his heart somehow gone silent too and he said, “Take me then,” and no words came out and he forced them, loud, “Take me,” and Andy’s face wrinkled, refusing pout, but True’s growl turned upwards into giggle and he said, “You finally had a good idea, asshole. Andy, pull up that shade.” And the box jiggled, its tearing sides trembling as True shook his head, hard, the way a dog shakes off from water. “Take off your clothes, Ellis.”

  A working in him like an elixir, a pulse, rich and rapid and too strong, and like a dance he stripped, stinky jeans and smelly shirt and socks stiff and thick between the toes, stood naked at last with his hands at his sides and his vision newly narrowed; no, focused, and he understood, he knew and almost cried with the knowing that he was the camera, the blinkless eye, perfect observer of his own immolation and he was not going to miss a moment, not a second’s worth as he went crawling to the box, the carpet worn and sorry on his knees, True suddenly panting and Andy smiling, there, behind the box, smiling like Christmas morning.

  ALAN BRENNERT

  Ma Qui

  ALAN BRENNERT is an Emmy Award-winning scriptwriter for the hit television show LA Law. After writing two novels (including the fantasy Kindred Spirits) and a number of short science fiction stories in the mid-1970s, he moved away to pursue a career in television.

  Between 1984 and 1986 he served as executive story consultant on the revived Twilight Zone series for CBS-TV, and admits that in the course of writing some thirteen-odd scripts for it, he “got bitten by the short story bug again”. Since then he has published two collections, Her Pilgrim Soul and Other Stories (Tor Books) and Ma Qui and Other Phantoms (Pulphouse), as well as a third novel, Time and Chance. He has also written scripts for the TV series China Beach and contributed the libretto for a science fiction musical staged in New York.

  Described by the author as “Inner Sanctum meets Vietnam”, the powerful story which follows won the Science Fiction Writers of America Nebula Award.

  AT NIGHT THE CHOPPERS BUZZ THE bamboo roof of the jungle, dumping from three thousand feet to little more than a hundred, circling, climbing, circling again, no LZ to land in, no casualties to pick up. Above the roar of the rotorwash come the shrieks of the damned: wails, moans, plaintive cries in Vietnamese. It’s real William Castle stuff, weird sounds and screaming meemies, but even knowing it’s coming from a tape recorder, even hearing the static hiss of the loudspeakers mounted on the Hueys, it still spooks the shit out of the VC. “The Wandering Soul,” it’s called—the sounds of dead Cong, their bodies not given a proper burial, their spirits helplessly wandering the earth. Psychological warfare. Inner Sanctum meets Vietnam. Down in the tunnels Charlie hears it, knows it’s a con, tries to sleep but can’t, the damn stuff goes on half the night. The wails grow louder the lower the choppers fly, then trail off, to suitably eerie effect, as they climb away. Until the next chopper comes with its cargo of souls in a box.

  What horseshit.

  It’s not like that at all.

  I watch the last of the choppers bank and veer south, and for a while, the jungle is quiet again. Around me the ground is a scorched blister, a crater forged by mortar fire, a dusty halo of
burnt ground surrounding it, grasses and trees incinerated in the firefight. The crater is my bed, my bunk, my home. I sleep there—if you can call it sleep—and when I’ve grown tired of wandering the trails, looking for my way back to Da Nang, or Cam Ne, or Than Quit, I always wind up back here. Because this seared piece of earth is the only goddamned thing for miles that isn’t Nam. It’s not jungle, it’s not muddy water, it’s not punji sticks smeared with shit. It’s ugly, and it’s barren, and it looks like the surface of the fucking moon, but it was made by my people, the only signature they can write on this steaming rotten country, and I sleep in it, and I feel at home.

  I was killed not far from here, in a clearing on the banks of the Song Cai River. My unit was pinned down, our back-up never arrived, we were racing for the LZ where the dust-off choppers were to pick us up. Some of us got careless. Martinez never saw the tripwire in the grass and caught a Bouncing Betty in the groin; he died before we could get him to the LZ. Dunbar hit a punji beartrap, the two spiked boards snapping up like the jaws of a wooden crocodile, chewing through his left leg. I thought Prosser and DePaul had pried him loose, but when I looked back I saw their bodies not far from the trap, cut down by sniper fire as they’d tried to rescue him. The bastards had let Dunbar live, and he was still caught in the trap, screaming for help, the blood pouring out between the two punji boards. I started back, firing my M16 indiscriminately into the treeline, hoping to give the snipers pause enough so that I could free Dunbar—

  They took me out a few yards from Dunbar, half a dozen rounds that blew apart most of my chest. I fell, screaming, but I also watched myself fall; I saw the sharp blades of elephant grass slice into my face like razors as I struck the ground; I watched the blood spatter upward on impact, a red cloud that seemed to briefly cloak my body, then dissipate, spattering across the grass, giving the appearance, for a moment, of a false spring—a red dew.

  Dunbar died a few minutes later. To the west, the distant thunder of choppers rolled across the treetops. I stood there, staring at the body at my feet, thinking somehow that it must be someone else’s body, someone else’s blood, and I turned and ran for the choppers, not noticing that my feet weren’t quite touching the ground as I ran, not seeing myself pass through the tripwires like a stray wind.

  Up ahead, dust-off medics dragged wounded aboard a pair of Hueys. Most of my unit made it. I watched Silverman get yanked aboard; I saw Esteban claw at a medic with a bloody stump he still believed was his hand. I ran to join them, but the big Chinooks started to climb, fast, once everyone was on. “Wait for me!” I yelled, but they couldn’t seem to hear me over the whipping of the blades; “Son of a bitch, wait for me!”

  They didn’t slow. They didn’t stop. They kept on rising, ignoring me, abandoning me. Goddamn them, what were they doing? Motherfucking bastards, come back, come—

  It wasn’t until I saw the thick, moist wind of the rotorwash fanning the grass—saw it bending the trees as the steel dragonflies ascended—that I realized I felt no wind on my face; that I had no trouble standing in the small hurricane at the center of the clearing. I turned around. Past the treeline, in the thick of the jungle, mortars were being lobbed from afar. Some hit their intended targets, in the bush; others strayed, and blasted our own position, unintentionally. I could hear the screams of VC before and after each hit; I saw Cong rushing out of the trees, some aflame, some limbless, only to be knocked off their feet by another incoming round. By now I knew the truth. I wandered, in a daze, back toward the treeline. I walked through sheets of flame without feeling so much as a sunburn. I saw the ground rock below me, but my steps never wavered, like the old joke about the drunken man during an earthquake.

  At length the mortars stopped. The clearing was seared, desolate; bodies—Vietnamese, American—lay strewn and charred in all directions. I walked among them, rising smoke passing through me like dust through a cloud . . . and now I saw other wraiths, other figures standing above the remains of their own bodies; they looked thin, gaseous, the winds from the chopper passing overhead threatening their very solidity.

  Prosser looked down at his shattered corpse and said, “Shit.”

  Dunbar agreed. “This sucks.”

  “Man, I knew this was gonna happen,” Martinez insisted. “I just got laid in Da Nang. Is this fuckin’ karma, or what?”

  I made a mental note never to discuss metaphysics with Martinez. Not a useful overview.

  “So what happens now?” I asked.

  “Heaven, I guess.” Dunbar shrugged.

  “Or hell.” Martinez. Ever the optimist.

  “Yeah, but when?”

  “Gotta be any time now,” Prosser said, as though waiting for the 11:00 bus. He looked down at our bodies and grimaced. “I mean, we’re dead, right?”

  I looked at Dunbar’s mangled leg. At Martinez’s truncated torso. At . . .

  “Hey. Collins. Where the hell are you?”

  I should have been just a few feet away from Dunbar’s body, but I wasn’t. At first I thought the half dozen rounds that had dropped me had propelled my body away, but as we fanned out we saw no trace of it, not anywhere within a dozen yards. And when I came back to where Dunbar’s body lay, I recognized the matted elephant grass where I had fallen—recognized too the tears of blood, now dried, coloring the tips of the grass. I squatted down, noticing for the first time that the grass was matted, in a zigzag pattern, for several feet beyond where my body fell.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said. “They took me.”

  “What?” said Martinez. “The VC?”

  “They dragged me a few feet, then”—I pointed to where the matted grass ended—“two of them must’ve picked me up, and taken me away.”

  “I didn’t see anyone,” Dunbar said.

  “Maybe you were preoccupied,” I suggested.

  Prosser scanned the area, his brow furrowing. “DePaul’s gone, too. He went down right next to me—we were near the river, I remember hearing the sound of the water—but he’s gone.”

  “Maybe he was just wounded,” I said. At least I hoped so. DePaul had pulled me back, months before, from stepping on what had seemed like a plot of dry grass on a trail, but what revealed itself—once we’d tossed a large boulder on top of it—as a swinging man trap: kind of a see-saw with teeth. If not for DePaul, I would’ve been the one swinging from it, impaled on a dozen or more rusty spikes studding its surface. DePaul had bought me an extra few months of life; maybe, when I’d run forward, firing into the treeline, I’d done the same for him, distracting the snipers long enough for him to get away.

  “Hey, listen,” said Dunbar. “Choppers.”

  The mop-up crew swooped in, quick and dirty, to recover what bodies it could. The area was secured, at least for the moment, and two grunts pried loose Dunbar’s mangled leg from the punji beartrap and hefted him into a bodybag. The zipper caught on his lip, and the grunt had to unsnare it. Dunbar was furious.

  “Watch what you’re doing, assholes!” he roared at them. He turned to me. “Do you believe these guys?”

  Two other grunts gingerly disconnected an unexploded cartridge trap not far from Martinez’s body, then scooped up what remained of the poor bastard—torso in one bodybag, legs in another—and zipped the bags shut. Martinez watched as they loaded them onto the chopper, then turned to me.

  “Collins. You think I should— ”

  I turned, but by the time I was facing him he was no longer there.

  “Martinez?”

  Dunbar’s body was hefted onto the Huey, it hit the floor like a sack of dry cement, and I could almost feel the air rushing in to fill the sudden vacuum beside me.

  I whirled around. Dunbar, too, was gone.

  “Dunbar!”

  The Huey lifted off, the branches of surrounding trees shuddering around it, like angry lovers waving away a violent suitor, and I was alone.

  Believe it or not, I enlisted. It seemed like a good idea at the time: lower-middle-class families from Detroit could barel
y afford to send one kid to college, let alone two, and with my older sister at Ann Arbor I figured a student deferment wasn’t coming my way anytime soon. So I let myself swallow the line they feed you at the recruiter’s office, about how our real job over here was building bridges and thatching huts and helping the Vietnamese people; they made it sound kind of like the Peace Corps, only more humid.

  My dad was a construction foreman; I’d been around buildings going up all my life—liked the sound of it, the feel of it, the smell of lumber and fresh cement and the way the frame looked before you laid on the plaster-board . . . I’d stand there staring at the girders and crossbeams, the wood and steel armatures that looked to my eight-year-old mind like dinosaur skeletons, and I thought: The people who’ll live here will never see, never know what their house really looks like, underneath; but I know.

  So the idea of building houses for homeless people and bridges for oxen to cross sounded okay. Except after eight months in Nam, most of the bridges I’d seen had been blown away by American air strikes, and the closest I’d come to thatching huts was helping repair the roof of a bar in Da Nang I happened to be trapped in during a monsoon.

  All things considered, enlisting did not seem like the kind of blue-chip investment in the future it once had, just now.

  For the first few days I stuck close to the crater, wandering only as far as I could travel and return in a day, searching for a way back—but the way back, I knew, was farther than could ever be measured in miles, and the road was far from clearly marked. I tried not to dwell on that. If I had, I would never have mustered the nerve to move from my little corner of hell. I wasn’t sure where the nearest U.S. base was in relation to here, but I remembered a small village we’d passed the previous day, and I seemed to recall a Red Cross Jeep parked near a hut, a French doctor from Catholic Relief Services administering to the villagers. Maybe he would show up again, and I could hitch a ride back to—the question kept presenting itself—where? What the hell did I do, ask directions to the Hereafter? With my luck, the Army was probably running it, too.