The Year's Best Horror Stories 11

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  “You don’t know?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, my.”

  Laughter rolled from the upstairs.

  Four boys came tumbling down the steps. Three were riding pillows, one was riding the banister. They got to the bottom and started pelting one another with the pillows.

  They stopped when they saw Buckeye.

  “What happened to your eye?”

  “A vulture,” said the girl.

  There were more questions, almost identical to the girl’s.

  One of the boys took out a crayon and started drawing on the wall. Buckeye watched. The crayon made a big face with a long nose, squinty eyes, glasses—it was the old woman.

  Buckeye asked, “Won’t you get in trouble?”

  The face had big lips and a long tongue. The tongue stuck straight out, catching snot from the running nose. The artist said, “What’s she going to do to us?”

  “You ought to go upstairs,” said another. “She’s still in bed. Dying maybe.”

  “Is she your grandmother?” asked Buckeye.

  “Naw,” said another. “She’d just like to be. Silly old bag. Did you really come through the window?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then for sure you have to go up there. You’ll scare the daylights out of her, I bet. Get up real close and look at her with your eye. Can you see through it?”

  “No.”

  “Then just pretend. She hasn’t given a good yell all day.”

  Buckeye looked at the stairs.

  “Go on.”

  There was more laughter upstairs. Girls and boys.

  “I’ve really got to get my key.”

  “I’ll get it for you,” said the girl. “You go up.”

  “She won’t be mad?” he asked. “I mean, I sort of broke in.”

  “But that’s the idea,” said the boy with the crayon. “The idea is to get her mad. The old creep.”

  Buckeye looked up the stairs. The boys got behind him and started pushing. And before he knew it, he was starting up.

  The stairs were narrow and full of the same stuffy smell he’d noticed when first coming into the house. He turned on another light and saw that the stairway walls were covered with more drawings. He moved past them, stepping into the second-floor hall just as another band of kids burst through a door at the hall’s end. They plowed into him, grabbing the banister, making screeching-tire sounds as they turned, starting down. One of the kids looked at him and stopped. “Oh, we got her good this time. Boy, did we ever!”

  And then they were gone, tumbling down, spilling into the first floor, laughing, screaming, yelling.

  Buckeye looked at the open door down the hall and turned on another light. There was writing on the wall beside the door—large letters in black crayon: HOME OF THE CAVE HOG.

  He moved toward it, set his hand on the door, and peeked inside. Mrs. Halfbooger lay in bed, looking old and sick. There was a mound of dirt sitting on top of her, spilling over the bed and onto the floor. They’d gotten her good, all right.

  He eased into the room, stepping softly, coming alongside the bed. She looked even older up close, almost like a skeleton. It hardly seemed there was a body under the blankets, under the dirt. She opened her eyes and saw him. He was looking at the dirt and didn’t know she was watching until she whispered, “Which one are you?”

  He jumped, turning to look . . .

  “I didn’t bring you here,” she said.

  “No,” he said. He looked at her, afraid to say much else, looking at how her faded gray skin pulled across chin and cheeks—the facial bones looked nearly sharp enough to break through.

  At last he said, “They put dirt on you.”

  She looked down, wincing. It was as though she were seeing the dark mound for the first time. Her head trembled and fell back again, barely pressing a dent in the pillow. “From the basement,” she said. “They’ve made a mess of my basement, you know?” She breathed deep, or tried to. Her face buckled, showing an empty mouth, dark gums. “They spite me,” she said. “All I want is to love them, and they spite me.”

  “Are you their aunt, or something?”

  “No. I just brought them here. All I wanted . . . all that I . . . all that . . . What’s your name?”

  “Sean.”

  “That’s a nice name . . . nice . . . nice . . . I bought them things, you know? I would buy them things and go driving. I’d bring things home and wrap them up nice . . . and I’d go driving . . . and sometimes I’d see a boy or a girl playing alone, and I’d go talk to them. I know all about being alone, you know? All about it. I’d tell them I had presents and they’d come . . . to the car. And we’d unwrap things and sing and drive away . . . Nobody ever suspects an old woman. I’d walk away with them . . . I’d drive away with them . . . and nobody ever suspected that . . . that . . . Did you tell me your name?”

  “Sean.”

  “Yes. That’s right. I didn’t bring you here, did I?”

  “I came through the window.”

  “I should buy you something too, Sean. When I get better we’ll drive down to Kiddy Mart and get you . . . get you . . . whatever . . . anything you want. We’ll wrap it too, so you can open it . . . like Christmas or a birthday . . . When I’m better. When the headaches stop. Oh my, but I do get the headaches. Like battering rams . . .”

  “You don’t have to buy me things.”

  There was a crazy look on her face—a spastic, thin-lipped scowl. “I be so nice to them and they get like this. They say they don’t want to stay and I have to . . . make them . . . and they get like this. You should see the basement. Oh my . . . I try so hard and they get like this . . .”

  “Want me to push off some of this dirt?”

  “Dirt?”

  “They put dirt on your bed. Remember?”

  She looked up again. “Oh, dear me. I thought that was yesterday . . . or . . . Isn’t it something how it’s all gotten outside my head like this. Push it off for me. Oh yes.”

  He leaned over and started shoving heaped clay onto the floor. It thumped on the wooden boards.

  “You’re different, aren’t you?” she said. “I won’t have to make you stay.”

  “Stay?”

  “With me. Like a family.”

  “Never go home?” he asked.

  “This can be your home.”

  There was an awful look on her face. Buckeye didn’t like it. “I could come visit,” he said. “It’s just that right now I’ve got to leave and—”

  “No!” Her head rose off the pillow. Her yellow eyes turned ugly—like Ol’ Yeller’s eyes right before they shot him.

  And suddenly he remembered the key and the three friends waiting outside.

  “I gotta go.”

  He turned and ran toward the stairs, stopping once to see if she was following. She wasn’t. Her head had fallen back again. Her eyes were shut. But he was scared now. The woman was nuts.

  He ran down the stairs, looking for the other kids, looking for the girl who’d promised to find the key. But they weren’t in the hall. They weren’t in the kitchen, either.

  “Hey!” he shouted.

  No answer. Only his own echo in the lonely house.

  There was a door open by the stove—a door with steps leading down. They’d gone to the basement. He leaned inside the door and fumbled for a light. There was no switch on the wall. He looked around. Above his head a dirty string dangled from a bare bulb. He pulled. The light came on. And below him, at the bottom of the stairs, was another string—another bare bulb.

  He moved down. “Hey, you guys. You down here? What’re you doing in the dark any—?” He pulled the second string. The second light came on, and at first he thought the basement was empty.

  Then he saw them. All in rows. Ten neat little mounds rising out of the basement floor.

  And on one of them was the key.

  He walked toward it, head spinning. You should see the basement . . . I try so hard and they get l
ike this . . .

  He fell, dropping to grass-stained knees. What kind of crazy woman would . . .?

  His hands shot toward the key, sinking past it, clawing at the soft mound of dirt. They say they don’t want to stay and I have to make them . . .

  And then he saw.

  And then he was up, running, stumbling, falling up the stairs, through the hall. There were no pictures on the wall. No kids in the kitchen.

  He tripped and skidded into the dark living room. The moon was up, glowing thinly through the trees, through the window.

  He pulled himself up and ran. Scared. Thinking of the woman. Thinking of her coming down the stairs. Thinking of her grabbing him as he squeezed through the window, holding him with cold dead fingers, pulling him, dragging him to the basement. Oh, God, please, this is Buckeye talking. Get me out of here and I’ll be Pope . . . anything you want . . . just get me out of here!

  He was halfway through, struggling, pulling, praying he wouldn’t get stuck. And then he was falling, tumbling. The ground raced up. He hit and rolled, losing his wind, but scrambling up anyway—scrambling to his feet and running down the hill.

  The creek was cold. He splashed through the deep part, forgetting the stones.

  They hadn’t waited. None of them. Not even Max—big-talking Max who wasn’t afraid of anything. They’d all gone home. Or maybe they’d been back there hiding, waiting for him to come through the window so they could jump out at him. Maybe they were still back there, wondering what had happened . . .

  It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. There was only running. There was only getting away from the house.

  He ran past Lanny’s tree fort and then down the hill to the highway and then across the field to home. His stomach hurt. His chest hurt. His clothes were wet from the creek and there were splinters in his hands from falling in the house.

  But he didn’t stop. He kept seeing the little face in the shallow grave. The little eyes that hadn’t closed. The little nose. The dark hair. She wasn’t so pretty after lying in the dirt all that time.

  And then he was on his street. He was turning the bend, climbing the walk. Home. The door. He fell against the screen, forgetting the key, pounding, kicking . . .

  The television was on inside. Laughter. A family show. Happy people. Happy endings.

  His mother moved toward the door. “You’ve done it this time, Sean. It’s after nine. Don’t you know there’s crazy people out . . .”

  But he didn’t hear. There was only the little girl looking at him from the dirt halo. There was only the sound of his own screams.

  ROUSE HIM NOT by Manly Wade Wellman

  Manly Wade Wellman is generally considered to be the dean of American fantasy writers. Born May 21, 1903 in the village of Kamundongo in Portuguese West Africa (now Angola), Wellman’s career seems almost the romanticized ideal of a writer’s life. After boyhood visits to London, Wellman moved to the U.S., where he attended prep school in Utah, played football for Wichita University, and received a degree from Columbia. Early jobs ranged from harvest hand to bouncer in a Prohibition Era roadhouse, but Wellman was working as a reporter in Wichita when he quit his job in 1930 to begin his career as a professional writer—moving to New York in 1934 in order to be closer to his markets. His first professionally published story appeared in the May 1927 issue of Thrilling Tales, where he was billed as “The King of Jungle Fiction.” Later that same year Wellman first appeared in Weird Tales, where some fifty of his nearly 300 stories were published. Although he is best known as a science fiction and fantasy writer, Wellman’s 75 books have ranged from mystery to mainstream, civil war history to regional history, and include numerous juveniles.

  Wellman has written a number of series centering upon occult investigators, beginning with Judge Pursuivant (1938) and followed by John Thunstoe (1943), both in Weird Tales. His best known character is John (no last name, just plain John), a balladeer with a silver-string guitar who wandered through the Southern Appalachians via the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction during the 1950s. The John stories were collected in Who Fears the Devil? (Arkham House, 1963), while the Pursuivant and Thunstone tales were gathered together in Lonely Vigils (Carcosa, 1981). In recent years Wellman has again begun to write new stories and novels about John the Balladeer, and it was inevitable that he would revive Judge Pursuivant and John Thunstone as well. “Rouse Him Not,” a new John Thunstone tale, was published in Kadath, an English-language amateur magazine from Italy. It would have been perfectly at home in an issue of Weird Tales forty years ago.

  Wellman’s seventy-fifth book, due from Doubleday later this year, is What Dreams May Come, a new John Thunstone novel set in England. He is currently at work on his seventy-sixth book, also for Doubleday, The Voice of the Mountain, the fifth of his new novels about John the Balladeer. A sixth novel in the series is under contract. Since 1951 Wellman has lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a town he now calls home. At 80 years of age and with several other books under contract, Manly Wade Wellman is himself a legendary figure—and a very active legend, at that.

  The side road in from the paved highway was heavily graveled but not tightly packed except for two ruts. John Thunstone’s black sedan crept between trees that wove their branches together overhead. Gloom lay in the woods to right and left. Once or twice he thought he heard a rustle of movement there. Maybe half a mile on, he came to the house.

  It was narrow and two-storied, of vertical planks stained a soft brown. A tan pickup truck was parked at a front corner. Thunstone got out of the sedan. He was big and powerfully built, with gray streaks in his well-combed dark hair and trim mustache. He wore a blue summer suit. In one broad hand he carried a stick of spotted wood with a bent handle and a silver band, but he did not lean on it. Walking the flagged path to the front steps, he studied the house. Two rooms and a kitchen below, he guessed, another room and probably a bath above.

  A slender girl in green slacks and a paint-daubed white blouse came to the open door. “Yes, sir?” she half-challenged.

  He lifted a hand as though to tip the hat he did not wear. “Good afternoon. My name is John Thunstone. A researcher into old folk beliefs. I came because, yonder at the county seat, they told me an interesting story about this place.”

  “Interesting story?” She came out on the stoop. Thunstone thought she was eighteen or nineteen, small but healthy, with a cascade of chestnut hair. Her long face was pretty. In one hand she held a kitchen knife, in the other a half-peeled potato. “Interesting story?” she said again.

  “About a circle in your yard,” said Thunstone. “with no grass on its circumference. It’s mentioned briefly in an old folklore treatise, and I heard about it at your courthouse today.”

  “Oh, that,” she said. “Here comes Bill—my husband. Maybe he can tell you.”

  A young man carrying a big pair of iron pincers came around the corner of the house. He was middle-sized and sinewy, in dungarees and checked shirt, with a denim apron, He had heavy hair and a close-clipped beard, and a blotch of soot on his nose. No older than, say, twenty-two. This couple, reflected Thunstone, had married early. “Yes, sir?” said the young man.

  “This is Mr. Thunstone, Bill,” said the girl. “Oh, I didn’t say who we were. This is my husband Bill Bracy, and my name’s Prue.”

  “How do you do?” said Thunstone, but Bill Bracy was staring.

  “I’ve seen your picture in the papers,” he said. “Read about your researches into the supernatural.”

  “I do such things.” Thunstone nodded. “At your county seat, I looked up the old colonial records of the trial of Crett Marrowby, for sorcery.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Bill Bracy. “We’ve heard of that, too.”

  “Mr. Packer, the clerk of the court, mentioned this house of yours,” went on Thunstone. “He called it the Trumbull house. And said that there’s a circular patch in the yard, and some old people connect it with the Marrowby case.”

  He looked a
round him, as though in quest of the circular patch.

  “That’s around in the back yard,” said Prue Bracy. “We’ve only lived here a few months. When we bought from the Trumbulls, they said we’d do well to leave the thing alone.”

  “Might I see it?” asked Thunstone.

  “I’ll show it to you,” said Bill Bracy. “Prue, could you maybe fix us some drinks? Come this way, sir.”

  He and Thunstone rounded the corner of the house and went into the back yard. That was an open stretch of coarse grass, with woods beyond.

  “There it is,” and Bracy pointed with his tongs.

  Almost at the center of the grassy stretch lay a moist roundness, greener than the grass. Thunstone walked toward it. The circle seemed nine or ten feet across. It was bordered with a hard, base ring of pale brown earth. Thunstone paced all around, moving lightly for so large a man. The inner expanse looked somewhat like a great pot of wet spinach. It seemed to stir slightly as he studied it. It seethed. He reached out with the tip of his spotted stick.

  “Don’t,” warned Bracy, but Thunstone had driven the stick into the mass.

  For a moment, something seemed to fasten upon the stick, to drag powerfully upon it. Thunstone strongly dragged it clear and lifted it. Where it had touched the dampness showed a momentary churning whirl. He heard, or imagined, a droning hum.

  “I did that when we first came here,” Bill Bracy said, a tremble in his voice. “I put a hoe in there, and the hoe popped out of my hand and was swallowed up before I looked.”

  “It didn’t get my cane,” said Thunstone. “This happens to be a very special cane.” He looked at Bracy. “Why did it take your hoe?”

  “I’ve wondered myself. I haven’t fooled with it again.” Bracy’s bearded face was grave. “I should explain, Prue and I came here from New York, because the house was so cheap. She paints—she’s going to do a mural at the new post office in town—and I make metal things, copper and pewter, and sell them here and there. Mr. and Mrs. Trumbull wanted to get rid of the house, so we got it for almost nothing. They told us what I told you, leave that sink hole thing alone. ‘Do that,’ Mr. Trumbull said, ‘and it will leave you alone.’ ”