The Best New Horror 3

by Stephen Jones

  “No,” Papa Neeson nodded. “I’m not. Mama, she don’t understand about other people, but I do.”

  “Well, I saw them. All three. What you do to them.”

  Papa Neeson sighed, pulling over and parking at the side of the road. “You don’t understand. Don’t know if I should waste my breath.”

  Joey was in the backseat, bundled up in blankets. He yawned, “why we stopping?”

  Ellen directed him to turn around and sit quietly. He was a good boy. “I have a husband who hits children, too.”

  Papa Neeson snapped, “I don’t hit the kids, lady, and how dare you think I do, why you can just get out of my car right now if that’s your attitude.”

  “I told you, I saw them,” she said defiantly.

  “You see the threads?”

  Ellen could barely stand his smug attitude.

  “You see ’em? You know why my kids look like that?”

  Ellen reached for the door handle. She was going to get out. Fucking country people and their torture masked as discipline. Men, how she hated their power trips. Blood was boiling now; she was capable of anything, like two days ago when she took the baseball bat and slammed it against Frank’s chest, hearing ribs cracking. She was not going to let a man hurt her child like that. Never again. The rage was rising up inside her the way it had only done twice in her life before, both times with Frank, both times protecting Joey.

  Papa Neeson reached out and grabbed her wrist.

  “Don’t hold me like that,” she snarled.

  He let go.

  Papa Neeson began crying, pressing his head into the steering wheel. “She just wanted them so bad, I had to go dig ’em up. I love her so much, and I didn’t want her to die from hurting, so I just dig ’em up and I figured out what to do and did it.”

  When he calmed, he sat back up, looking straight ahead. “We better get to the junction. Train’ll be ready. You got your life moving ahead with it, don’t you?”

  She said, “tell me about your children. What’s wrong with them?”

  He looked her straight in the eyes, making her flinch because of his intensity. “Nothing, except they been dead for a good twenty to thirty years now, and my wife, she loves ’em like they’re her own. I dig ’em up, see, I thought she was gonna die from grief not having none of her own, and I figured it out, you know, about the maggots and the flies, how they make things move if you put enough of ’em inside the bodies. I didn’t count on ’em lasting this long, but what if they do? What if they do, lady? Mama, she loves those babies. We’re only humans, lady, and humans need to hold babies, they need to love something other than themselves, don’t they? Don’t you? You got your boy, you know how much that’s worth? Love beyond choosing, ain’t it? Love that don’t die. You know what it’s like to hug a child when you never got to hug one before? So I figured and I figured some more, and I thought about what makes things live, how do we know something’s alive, and I figured, when it moves it’s alive, and when it don’t move, it’s dead. So Mama, I had her sew the flies in, but they keep laying eggs and more and more, and the kids, they got the minds of flies, and sometimes they rip out the threads, so sometimes flies get out, but it’s a tiny price, ain’t it, lady? When you need to love little ones, and you ain’t got none, it’s a tiny price, a day in hell’s all, but then sunshine and children and love, lady, ain’t it worth that?”

  Ellen had a migraine by the time Papa Neeson dropped them off down at the junction. She barked at Joey. Apologized for it. Bought him a Pepsi from the machine by the restroom. People were boarding the train. She went to the restroom to wipe cold water across her face—made Joey promise to stand outside it and not go anywhere. The mirror in the bathroom was warped, and she thought she looked stunning: brown eyes circled with sleeplessness, the throbbing vein to the left side of her forehead, the dry, cracked lips. She thought of the threads, of the children tugging at them, popping them out to let the flies go. Ran a finger over her lips, imagining Mama Neeson taking her needle and thread, breaking the skin with tiny holes. Ears, nostrils, eyes, mouth, other openings, other places where flies could escape. Flies and life, sewn up into the bodies of dead children, buried by other grieving parents, brought back by the country folks who ran the bed-and-breakfast, and who spoke of children that no one ever saw much of.

  And when they did . . .

  So here was Ellen’s last happy image in the mountain town she and her son were briefly stranded in:

  Mama Neeson kissing the bruised cheek of her little girl, tears in her squinty eyes, tears of joy for having children to love.

  Behind her, someone opened the door.

  Stood there.

  Waiting for her to turn around.

  “Look who I found,” Frank said, dragging Joey behind him into the women’s room.

  Two weeks later, she was on the train again, with Joey, but it was better weather—snow was melting, the sun was exhaustingly bright, and she got off at the junction because she wanted to be there. Frank is dead. She could think it. She could remember the feel of the knife in her hands. No jury would convict her. She had been defending herself. Defending her son. Frank had come at Joey with his own toy dump truck. She had grabbed the carving knife—as she’d been planning to do since Frank had hauled them back to Springfield. She had gone with the knowledge of what she would have to do to keep Frank out of her little boy’s life forever. Then, she had just waited for his temper to flare. She kept the knife with her, and when she saw him slamming the truck against Joey’s scalp, she let the boiling blood and rage take her down with them. The blade went in hard, and she thought it would break when it hit bone. But she twisted it until Frank dropped the dump truck, and then she scraped it down like she was deboning a chicken.

  All for Joey.

  She lifted him in her arms as she stepped off the train, careful on the concrete because there was still some ice. Joey, wrapped in a blanket, sunglasses on his face, “sleeping,” she told the nice lady who had been sitting across from them; Ellen, also wearing sunglasses and too much make-up, a scarf around her head, a heavy wool sweater around her shoulders, exhausted and determined.

  Joey’s not dead. Not really.

  It hadn’t been hard to track down the Neesons. She had called them before she got on the train, and they were not surprised to hear from her. “It happens this way,” Mama Neeson told her, “our calling.”

  Ellen was not sure what to make of that comment, but she was so tired and confused that she let it go. Later, she might think that something of the Neeson’s had perhaps rubbed off on her and her son. That, perhaps, just meeting them might be like inviting something into life that hadn’t been considered before. Something under your fingernails.

  She carried Joey to the payphone and dropped a quarter in. Joey was not waking up. She did not have to cry anymore. She told herself that, and was comforted. Things change, people move on, but some things could stay as they were. Good things.

  “Mr Neeson?”

  “You’re here already?” he asked. He sounded relieved.

  “I took an early train.”

  “Mama’s still asleep. She was up all night. Worries, you know. Upset for you.”

  “Well . . .”

  “I’ll be down there in a few minutes, then,” he said, adding, “you’re sure this is what you want?”

  “Love beyond choosing,” she reminded him. A spool of white thread fell out from Joey’s curled hands, bouncing once, twice, on the ground, unraveling as it rolled.

  ROGER JOHNSON

  Love, Death and the Maiden

  ROGER JOHNSON is a member of the Baker Street Irregulars, the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, and other Holmesian groups. A contributor to The Sherlock Holmes Journal and Baker Street Miscellanea, amongst others, he began contributing ghost stories ten years ago to Rosemary Pardoe’s “Haunted Library” publications.

  Since then his fiction has appeared in Ghosts & Scholars, A Graven Image, Saints & Relics, Dark Dreams, Tal
es After Dark, Spectral Tales, Chillers for Christmas, Mystery for Christmas, Tales of Witchcraft, two volumes of The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories, and Karl Edward Wagner’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories series.

  The story which follows was originally called “Mädelein”; however, after it was published, the author decided that the title it appears under here suited it perfectly, as you’re about to discover . . .

  I’M GETTING OLD. IT WAS SOMETHING of a shock to realise recently that it’s over fifty years since Valerie Beddoes died.

  Fifty years. Just another unsolved murder case. And of course events took place shortly afterwards that rather pushed a single death to the back of the public mind. So why raise the matter now? Well, facts that I ought to have known about long ago have at last come to my notice and made some sort of sense of the affair. Some sort. If I’m right, then the whole business is even stranger than we’d thought back in 1939.

  The relationship that Valerie and I shared is difficult to define. It’s such a tedious cliché to say that we were “just good friends”, but really that’s about the truth of it. It was only after we’d said goodbye for the last time that some inkling came to me of why I’d been able to maintain a strong friendship with such a very good-looking girl without a sexual element in the relationship. We were—well, not like sister and brother, perhaps, but like close cousins.

  And Valerie was an exceptionally attractive creature. Tall, shapely, blue-eyed and blonde—the Aryan fallacy taken to a perfect extreme, but one could hardly blame her for the looks she’d inherited from her Saxon forebears. And since she was intelligent and well-educated, I think that occasionally she found her beauty something of a disadvantage. Strangely, as it seemed to me then (at twenty-two I was naive in many ways, but then my generation was like that), she found it hardest to get other women to take her seriously. Margaret Pennethorne, for instance.

  Playgoers under fifty are unlikely to know of Margaret Pennethorne. Even those familiar with her work may not recognise the name, since she didn’t use it professionally, but she had a considerable reputation in the thirties and forties for strong historical dramas written under the pseudonym of Richard Border. The Stone Queen was the one that made her reputation—about Eleanor of Aquitaine—and although it hasn’t been performed for years that particular play is still remembered because it also made the reputation of the young Celia Hesketh, who played Eleanor.

  I was not a regular theatregoer in 1938, but I had recently seen the revival of The Stone Queen at the Arcadian Theatre, and when my cousin Jack Fellowes told me that he’d been invited to a party at which Richard Border was to be present I begged him to take me along. I wondered at the time why his agreement seemed to hide a sort of secret amusement. When he pointed “Richard Border” out to me the reason became clear—at least, once I’d stopped looking for a man who might perhaps have been concealed in the corner behind the two striking-looking women who were chatting so earnestly together.

  Somehow I got myself introduced to the author of The Stone Queen. Striking? Yes, she was, if not in any obvious way. Aged about forty, I suppose, dark-haired and with an expression of rather disconcerting amusement in her eyes. She was some inches shorter than her companion, but gave the impression of being the bigger personality. I found her then rather overwhelming. The companion, on the other hand . . .

  The companion was introduced to me as “my secretary, Valerie Beddoes”.

  Well, you already have some idea of what Valerie looked like. After we three had chatted for a while about Queen Eleanor and her brood of kings, and my halting contributions had persuaded Miss Pennethorne that I wasn’t just a celebrity-seeker, I was very pleased when Valerie took my arm and said, “Meg wants to have a word with Dolly Tappan about the design for her next play. Come along—we’ll go and get another drink.”

  I remember trying to conceal my appraisal of her face and figure, blushing when I realised that she had caught me out. I remember joining in her delighted laughter as she said, “Like Cecily, I am very fond of being looked at. Well, by nice people, anyway. What about that drink?”

  I had recently experienced a messy love affair, ending in a broken engagement. Will it surprise you to learn that I saw the lovely Valerie Beddoes not as a possible lover but as a sympathetic friend who would listen to my troubles? It seemed strange to me only in retrospect, after Jack and I had left the party, when there was only Valerie’s picture in my mind. There was something about her presence that didn’t allow thoughts of a sexual relationship. Odd. The very idea just didn’t occur to me while we were together.

  We became, as I’ve said, good friends. There were several interests that we shared: the music of Mozart, Thackeray’s novels—other things too, including, of course, the plays of Richard Border. I visited Border’s—Margaret Pennethorne’s—house at Bray several times, though it was an experience that never quite pleased me because of the seemingly permanent sardonic amusement in Miss Pennethorne’s eyes. She was always friendly, in a way that suggested some underlying motive, and I couldn’t quite get used to the rather patronising way she would say, “I have work to do, I’m afraid. Val, why don’t you two children settle down in the sitting-room and chat?”

  Once she was out of the way, though, and we could hear the faint click of her typewriter through the study door, I felt more at ease. Valerie would produce cigarettes and perhaps a bottle of sherry, then she would sprawl elegantly on the couch while I took one of the big armchairs or walked restlessly about. I was young and full of serious ideas. Valerie, actually a year or two younger than I, somehow seemed more mature. She was certainly a wise conversationalist, able to listen and comment seriously on my profound political thoughts. I like to think that she was fond of me. I know that I’ve had no such good friends since.

  We shared an interest in certain subjects, as I’ve indicated, but her near-obsession with the supernatural was something that quite escaped me. She had little time for ghost stories of the sort that appeared in the lurid magazines, but was fascinated (the word has lost most of its true magical force these days) by supposedly true accounts of the occult and bizarre. Perhaps it was this streak that made it inevitable that, at Margaret Pennethorne’s request, Valerie should go to central Europe in search of the Bloody Countess of the Carpathians.

  At that time I knew nothing of the Countess Elisabeth Bathory, though I have learned much in recent months. I was more concerned about my friend’s safety in the uneasy atmosphere of a Europe that had so recently seen—how easily the word came to mind!—Anschluss. It was February 1939, and there was much to worry about for a sober-minded young idealist.

  None of this seemed to matter to Valerie, though, nor to Margaret Pennethorne. I remember clearly how the news was broken to me when I called at the house in Bray, full of gloomy thoughts about the instability of the Munich agreement and the weakness of Neville Chamberlain. These ideas were quickly driven from me by Valerie’s delighted smile and her words. “Darling! isn’t it marvellous? Meg’s got a new play on the boil, about a Hungarian vampire, and it’s going to be even bigger than The Stone Queen—and I’m to do all the first-hand research for it!”

  “A vampire?” I said cautiously. “Isn’t that a bit outside her usual field?”

  Margaret herself broke in here. The twinkle in her eyes seemed more metallic as she spoke: “Not really. I’ve always concentrated on the historical stuff—Eleanor, Barbarossa, Theodora—and this is really in the same vein. For heavens’ sake, boy, I really believe you’ve never heard of Elisabeth Bathory!”

  “Bathory? It—er—well, no . . .”

  If there was something not quite sincere about the chuckle that greeted my reply, Valerie seemed not to notice. She took my arm and said, “I’ll tell you about it. Come on. I’ve got coffee on the boil—and I’m sure Meg wants to be shot of us.”

  Still smiling, Margaret nodded and left. That smile seemed to be fixed onto her face.

  (Elisabeth Bathory was a monster. Not physically
, for she was held to be very beautiful, but mentally and spiritually. Her family, one of the most noble in eastern Europe, had intermarried for generations, and become marked by epilepsy, hereditary syphilis and madness. The madness erupted in this slim, dark, lovely woman.)

  “I leave in two days’ time,” said Valerie at last. “Meg’s fixed it all up. Boat-train to Dover, then Calais, Paris and across to Buda-Pesth. It’ll be wonderful to get away—to be working on my own.”

  “Two days? That’s a bit— ”

  “Oh, I’ll miss you, of course, and a few other friends, but it’s such an opportunity! And, you know— ” (she lowered her voice a little) “—I shall be so glad just to get away from Meg for a while.” She tossed a cigarette over to me, smiling at my expression. “I know it’s sudden, but I think Meg’s actually had the idea in mind for some time. You know how she likes to keep her work to herself until she’s quite sure of it.”

  “Two days,” I said again.

  “This really will be big, you know. I told her I thought that the life of the Bloody Countess would make a stunning exercise in Grand Guignol. She said, ‘Never mind Grand Guignol. This will be positively Gross Guignol.’ ”

  (Elisabeth Bathory was a sadist. She is believed to have been directly responsible for the murders of over 650 young women, having them cut, slashed or burned so that their blood flowed. She would bathe in the blood of virgins in the belief that it would prolong her youth and beauty.)

  “You’re going alone? I suppose Margaret will provide the money, but how will you manage otherwise?”

  “I’ll be safe enough. Hungary may be rather unsettled, but I’m hoping also to get into Austria and Czechoslovakia. The Germans seem to have clamped down pretty firmly on crime there. Besides, my German is pretty fluent. I’ll manage all right.”