The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22

by Stephen Jones

  He can’t—

  My God! That hole above Ned’s grave—

  It don’t look like no ’possum could have dug it,

  For look at how the fresh black dirt is mounded

  As if it’s been pushed out! And now, what’s that—?

  A rustling in the weeds, heading this way—

  No ’possum goes like that with thin white tendrils

  Waving above the grass. No. No! It’s Ned!

  His brain’s done burrowed up beneath the sod,

  Dragging its spinal cord like to a tail,

  Waving its nerves like sorcery-poisoned stings.

  It’s coming for me—see it? It’s his brain!

  No, no, young fellow, don’t run off like that,

  Don’t leave me here to meet that thing alone!

  Come back!

  JOHN LANGAN

  City of the Dog

  JOHN LANGAN LIVES IN upstate New York with his wife and son. He is the author of the novel House of Windows and a collection, Mr Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters.

  His stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and in such anthologies as Poe, By Blood We Live and The Living Dead. More stories are forthcoming in Supernatural Noir, Ghosts by Gaslight and Blood and Other Cravings.

  “This story arose from my desire to see what I could do with the figure of the ghoul,” reveals Langan, “and as I’ve tried to indicate within the narrative, I drew inspiration both from H.P. Lovecraft (‘Pickman’s Model’) and Caitlín R. Kiernan (Daughter of Hounds).

  “The miserable years in New York State’s capital, though, were mine alone.”

  I

  I THOUGHT IT WAS a dog. From the other side of the lot, that was what it most resembled: down on all fours; hair plastered to its pale, skeletal trunk by the rain that had us hurrying down the sidewalk; head drawn into a snout. It was injured, that much was clear. Even with the rain rinsing its leg, a jagged tear wept fresh blood that caught the headlights of the cars turning onto Central – that had caught my eye, caused me to slow.

  Kaitlyn walked on a few paces before noticing that I had stopped at the edge of the lot where one of the thrift stores we’d plundered for cheap books and cassette tapes had burned to the ground the previous spring. (The space had been cleared soon thereafter, with conflicting reports of a Pizza Hut or Wendy’s imminent, but as of mid-November, it was still a gap in the row of tired buildings that lined this stretch of Central Ave.) Arms crossed over the oversized Army greatcoat that was some anonymous Soviet officer’s contribution to her wardrobe, my girlfriend hurried back to me. “What is it?”

  I pointed. “That dog looks like it’s pretty hurt.” I stepped onto the lot. The ground squelched under my foot.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I don’t know. I just want to see if he’s all right.”

  “Shouldn’t you call the cops? I mean, it could be dangerous. Look at the size of it.”

  She was right. This was not one of your toy dogs; this was not even a standard-sized mutt. This animal was as large as a wolfhound – larger. It was big as Latka, my Uncle Karl and Aunt Belinda’s German Shepherd, had appeared to me when I was seven and terrified of her, and more terrified still of her ability to smell my fear, which my cousins assured me would enrage her. For a moment, my palms were slick, and I felt a surge of lightness at the top of my chest. Then I set to walking across the lot.

  Behind me, Kaitlyn made her exasperated noise. I could see her flapping her arms to either side, the way she did when she was annoyed with me.

  Puddles sprawled across the lot. I leapt a particularly wide one and landed in a hole that plunged my foot into freezing water past the ankle. “Shit!” My sneaker, sock, and the bottom of my jeans were soaked. There was no time to run back to the apartment to change. It appeared I’d be walking around the QE2 with one sopping sneaker for the rest of the night. I could hear Kaitlyn saying she’d told me to wear my boots.

  The dog had not fled at my approach, not even when I dunked my foot. Watching me from the corner of its eye, it shuffled forward a couple of steps. The true size of the thing was remarkable; had it raised itself on its hind legs, it would have been as tall as me. There was something about the way it walked, its hips high, its shoulders low, as if it were unused to this pose, that made the image of it standing oddly plausible. Big as the dog was, it didn’t seem especially menacing. It was an assemblage of bones over which a deficit of skin had been stretched, so that I could distinguish each of the oddly-shaped vertebrae that formed the arch of its spine. Its fur was pale, patchy; as far as I could see, its tail was gone. Its head was foreshortened, not the kind of elongated, vulpine look you expect with dogs bred big for hunting or fighting; although its ears were pointed, standing straight up, and ran a good part of the way down the side of its skull. I was less interested in its ears, however, than I was its teeth, and whether it was showing them to me. It continued to study me from one eye, but it appeared to be tolerating my presence well enough. Hands out and open in front of me, I stepped closer.

  As I did, the thing’s smell, diluted, no doubt, by the rain, rolled up into my nostrils. It was the thick, mineral odour of dirt, so dense I coughed and brought a hand to my mouth and nose. The taste of soil and clay coated my tongue. I coughed again, turned my head and spat. “I hope you appreciate this,” I said, wiping my mouth. I squinted at the wound on its leg.

  A wide patch of the dog’s thigh had been scraped clear of hair and skin, pink muscle laid bare. Broader than it was deep, it was the kind of injury that bleeds dramatically and seems to take forever to quiet. While I doubted it was life-threatening, I was sure it was painful. How the dog had come by this wound, I couldn’t say. When we were kids, my younger brother had been famous for this sort of scrape, but those had been from wiping out on his bike in the school parking lot. Had this thing been dragged over a stretch of pavement, struck by a car, perhaps, and sent skidding across the road? Whatever the cause, I guessed the rain washing it was probably a good thing, cleaning away the worst debris. I bent for a closer inspection.

  And was on my back, the dog’s forepaws pressing my chest with irresistible force, its face inches from mine. There wasn’t even time for me to be shocked by its speed. Its lips curled away from a rack of yellowed fangs, the canines easily as long as my index finger. Its breath was hot, rank, as if its tongue were rotten in its mouth. I wanted to gag, but didn’t dare move. Rain spilled from the thing’s cheeks, its jaw, in shining streams onto my neck, my chin. The dog was silent; no growl troubled its throat; but its eyes said that it was ready to tear my windpipe out. They were unlike any eyes I had looked into, irises so pale they might have been white surrounded by sclerae so dark they were practically black, full past the brim with – I wouldn’t call it intelligence so much as a kind of undeniable presence.

  As fast as it had put me down, the thing was gone, fled into the night and the rain. For a few seconds, I stayed where I was, unsure if the dog were planning to return. Once it was clear the thing was not coming back, I pushed myself up from the sodden ground. “Terrific,” I said. My wet sneaker was the least of my worries; it had been joined by jeans soaked through to my boxers; not to mention, my jacket had flipped up when I’d fallen, and the back of my shirt was drenched. “So much for the injured dog.” Although doing so made me uncomfortably aware of the space between my shoulders, I turned around and plodded across the lot. This time, I didn’t worry about the puddles.

  That Kaitlyn was nowhere to be found, had not waited to witness my adventure with man’s best friend, and most likely had proceeded to the club without me, was the sorry punchline to what had become an unfunny joke. Briefly, I entertained the idea that she might have run down the street in search of help, but a rapid walk the rest of the way to QE2 showed most shops closed, and the couple that were open empty of a short woman bundled into a long, green coat, her red hair tucked under a black beret. At the club’s door, under the huge QE2 sign, I con
templated abandoning the night’s plans and returning to my apartment on State Street, a trek that would ensure any remaining dry spots on my person received their due saturation. I was sufficiently annoyed with Kaitlyn for the prospect of leaving her to wonder what had become of me to offer a certain appeal composed of roughly equal parts righteous indignation and self-pity. However, there had been a chance we might meet Chris here, and the possibility of her encountering him with me nowhere to be found sent me to the door to pay the cover.

  Inside, a cloud of smoke hung low over the crowd, the din of whose combined conversation was sufficient to dull the Smithereens throbbing from the sound system. The club was more full than I would have expected for the main act that Wednesday, a performance poet named Marius Elliott who was accompanied by a five-piece rock band, guitars, bass, keyboards, drums, the whole thing. Marius, who favoured a short black leather jacket and tight black jeans onstage, was an instructor at Columbia-Greene Community College, where he taught Freshman Writing. He was a lousy poet, and a lousy performer, too, but he was the friend of a friend I worked with, and the band was pretty good, enough so that they should have ditched him and found a frontman with more talent. This was Marius’s second show at the QE2; I couldn’t understand why the owner had booked him after hearing him the first time. While the club did feature poets, they tended toward the edgier end of the literary spectrum, in keeping with the place’s reputation as the Capital District’s leading showcase for up and coming post-punk bands. (That same friend from work had seen the Chili Peppers play there before they were red hot.) Marius wrote poems about eating breakfast alone, or walking his dog in the woods behind his apartment. Maybe the owner’s tastes were more catholic than I knew; maybe he owed someone a favour.

  In his low, melancholy voice, the Smithereens’ lead told the room about the girl he dreamed of behind the wall of sleep. I couldn’t see Kaitlyn. Given the dim light and number of people milling between the stage and bar, not to mention that Kaitlyn was hardly tall, there was no cause for my stomach to squeeze the way it did. Chris wasn’t visible, either. Trying not to make too much of the coincidence, I pushed my way through to the bar, where I shouted for a Macallan I couldn’t really afford, but that earned me a respectful nod from the bartender’s shaven head.

  The Scotch flaring on my tongue, I stepped away to begin a protracted circuit of the room in quest of my girlfriend. The crowd was a mix of what looked like Marius’s community college students, their blue jeans and sweatshirts as good as uniforms, and the local poetry crowd, split between those affecting different shades of black and those whose brighter colours proclaimed their allegiance to some notion of 1960s counterculture. Here and there, an older man or woman in a professorial jacket struggled not to let the strain of trying to appear comfortable show; Marius’s colleagues, I guessed, or professors from SUNY. The air was redolent with the odours of wet denim, cotton, and hair, of burning tobacco and pot, of beer, of sweat. I exchanged enough nods with enough faces I half-recognised for me not to feel too alone, and traded a few sentences with a girl whose pretty face and hip-length blond hair I remembered but whose name eluded me. The Smithereens finished singing about blood and roses and were replaced by the Screaming Trees, their gravelly-voiced lead uttering the praises of sweet oblivion.

  At the end of forty-five minutes that took me to every spot in the club except the Ladies Room, and that left the Macallan a phantom in my glass, I was no closer to locating Kaitlyn. (Or Chris, for that matter, although I was ignoring this.) Once more at the bar, I set the empty glass on its surface and ordered another – a double, this round. A generous swallow of it was almost sufficient to quiet the panic uncoiling in my chest.

  I was about to embark on another, rapid circuit of the crowd before the show began when I caught someone staring at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought the tall, pale figure was Chris, just arrived. I was so relieved to find him here that I couldn’t help myself from smiling as I turned to greet him.

  The man I saw was not Chris. He was at a guess two decades older, more, the far side of forty. Everything about his face was long, from the stretch of forehead between his shaggy black hair and shaggy black eyebrows, to the nose that ran from his watery eyes to his narrow mouth, to the lines that grooved the skin from his cheekbones to his jaw, from the edges of his nostrils to the edges of his thin lips. His skin was the colour of watery milk, which the black leather jacket and black T-shirt he wore only emphasised. I want to say that, even for a poet, the guy looked unhealthy, but this was no poet. There are people – the mentally ill, the visionary – who emit cues, some subtle, some less so, that they are not travelling the same road as the rest of us. Standing five feet away from me doing nothing that I could see, this man radiated that sensation; it poured off him like a fever. The moment I had recognised he was not Chris, I had been preparing the usual excuse, “Sorry, thought you were someone else,” or words close enough, but the apology died in my mouth, incinerated by the man’s presence. The Screaming Trees were saying they’d heard it on the wing that I was going to die. I could not look away from the man’s eyes. Their irises were so pale they might have been white, surrounded by sclerae so dark they were practically black. My heart smacked against my chest; my legs trembled madly, all the fear I should have felt lying pinned on my back in that empty lot finally caught up to me. With that thing’s teeth at my neck, I hadn’t fully grasped how perilous my position had been; now, I was acutely aware of my danger.

  Two things happened almost simultaneously. The lights went down for the show, and Chris stood between the man and me, muttering, “Hello,” unwrapping his scarf, and asking where Kaitlyn was. The pale man eclipsed, I looked away. When I returned my gaze to where he’d been standing, he was gone. Ignoring Chris’s questions, I searched the people standing closest to us. The man was nowhere to be found. What remained of my drink was still in my hand. I finished it, and headed to the bar as Marius Elliott and his band took the stage to a smattering of applause and a couple of screams. Chris followed close behind. I was almost grateful enough for him appearing to buy him a drink; instead, I had another double.

  II

  In the late summer of 1991, I moved to Albany. While I swore to my parents I was leaving Poughkeepsie to accept a position as senior bookseller at The Book Nook, an independent bookstore located near SUNY Albany’s uptown campus – which was true; I had been offered the job – the actual reason I packed all my worldly belongings into my red Hyundai Excel and drove an hour and a half up the Hudson was Kaitlyn Bertolozzi. I believe my parents knew this.

  Yet even then, the August morning I turned left up the on-ramp for the Taconic north and sped towards a freedom I had been increasingly desperate for the past four years of commuting to college – even as I pressed on the radio and heard the opening bass line of Golden Earring’s “Twilight Zone”, which I turned up until the steering wheel was thumping with it – even as the early-morning cloud cover split to views of blue sky – the sense of relief that weighted my foot on the gas pedal was alloyed with another emotion, with ambivalence.

  At this point, Kaitlyn had been living in Albany for a little more than six months. After completing undergrad a semester early, she had moved north to begin a Master’s in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages at the University Centre. We had continued to speak to one another several times a week, and I had visited her as often as my school and work schedules permitted, which wasn’t very much, once a month, if that. It was on the first of those visits, a couple of weeks after Kaitlyn had moved to the tiny apartment her parents had found her, that she introduced me to Christopher Garofalo.

  He was not much taller than I was, but the thick, dark brown hair that rose up from his head gave the impression that he had a good few inches on me. His skin was sallow, except for an oblong scar that reached from over his left eyebrow into his hairline. When Kaitlyn and I met him at Bruegger’s Bagels, his neck was swaddled in a scarf that he kept on the length of our lunc
h, despite the café’s stifling heat. He shook my hand when he arrived and when he left, and each time, his brown eyes sought out mine. In between, his conversation was sporadic and earnest. Kaitlyn and he had attended the same orientation session at the University for students starting mid-year. Chris was studying to be a geology teacher; after trying to find a living as part of a jazz band, he said, he had decided it was time for a career with more stability.

  Once he had departed, I commented on his scarf, which I’d taken as the lingering affectation of a musician; whereupon my girlfriend told me that Chris wore the scarf to cover the scar from a tracheotomy. While my face flushed, she went on to say that he had been in a severe motorcycle accident several years ago, in his early twenties. He hadn’t been wearing a helmet, and should have been killed; as it was, he’d spent a week in a coma and had to have a steel plate set in his skull, which was the origin of the scar on his forehead. As a consequence of the trauma, he’d experienced intermittent seizures, which had required months of trial-and-error with different medications and combinations of medications to bring under some semblance of control. He was a sweet guy, Kaitlyn said, who was (understandably) self-conscious about the reminders of his accident. I muttered a platitude and changed the subject.

  I wasn’t especially concerned about my girlfriend having become friendly with another guy so soon; as long as I had known her, Kaitlyn had numbered more men than women among her friends, just as my circle of friends consisted largely of women. She had always had a weakness for what I called her strays, those people whose quirks of character tended to isolate them from the rest of the pack. Driving home that night, I was if anything reassured at a familiar pattern reasserting itself.

  Three weeks to the day later, I listened on the phone as Kaitlyn, her voice hitching, told me she’d slept with Chris. While I’d made the same sort of confession to previous girlfriends, I’d never been on the receiving end of it before. I moved a long way away from myself, down a tunnel at one end of which was the thick yellow receiver pressed to my ear, full of Kaitlyn crying that she was sorry, while the other end plunged into blackness. Dark spots crowded my vision. I hung up on her sobs, then spent five minutes furiously pacing the bedroom that had shrunk to the size of a cage. Everything was wrong; a sinkhole had opened under me, dumping my carefully arranged future into muddy ruin. Before I knew what I was doing, the phone was in my hand and I was dialling Kaitlyn.