The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22

by Stephen Jones

  “I want to find out if she’s there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I haven’t seen her since the other night at QE2.”

  “Maybe she’s at her place.” He stuffed his gloves in his jacket’s pockets, unzipped it.

  “I checked there.”

  “Maybe she didn’t want to talk to you.”

  “No – I have a key. She isn’t there. I don’t think she has been since Wednesday.”

  “Of course you do,” Chris muttered. “So where is she – at her parents, which is why you want me to call them. Why can’t you do it?”

  “I don’t want to worry them.”

  Chris stared at me; I could practically hear him thinking, Or look like the overly possessive boyfriend. “It’s late,” he said, “I’m sure—”

  “Please,” I said. “Please. Look, I know – we – would you just do this for me, please?”

  “Fine,” he said, although the expression on his face said it was anything but. He hung his jacket on the doorknob and went to the phone.

  Kaitlyn’s father was still awake. Chris apologised for calling so late but said he was a friend of hers from high school who’d walked through his parents’ front door this very minute – his flight had been delayed at O’Hare. He was only in town through tomorrow, and he was hoping to catch up with Kaitlyn, even see her. A pause. Oh, that was right, the last time they had talked, she had told him she was planning to go to Albany. Wow, he guessed it had been a while since they’d spoken. Could her father give him her address, or maybe her phone number? That would be great. Another pause. Chris thanked him, apologised again for the lateness of his call, and wished Kaitlyn’s father a good night. “She isn’t there,” he said once he’d hung up.

  “So I gathered.”

  “The number he gave me is the one for her apartment.”

  “Okay.” I stood from the couch.

  “I’m sure everything’s all right. Maybe she went to visit a friend.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “A friend.”

  “Hey—”

  “Don’t,” I said. I started towards my room. “All because I stopped to help a fucking dog . . .”

  “What?”

  I stopped. “On the way to the club. There was this stray in that lot over on Central – you know, where the thrift store used to be. It looked like it was in rough shape, so I went to have a look at it—”

  “What kind of dog?”

  “I don’t know, a big one. Huge, skinny, like a wolfhound or something.”

  Chris’s brow lowered. “What colour was it?”

  “White, I guess. It was missing a lot of fur – no tail, either.”

  “Its face – did you see its eyes?”

  “From about six inches away. Turned out, the thing wasn’t that hurt, after all. Pinned me to the ground, stuck its face right in mine. Could’ve ripped my throat out.”

  “Its eyes . . .”

  “This sounds strange, but its eyes were reversed: the whites were black, and the pupils were, well, they weren’t white, exactly, but they were pale—”

  “What happened with the dog? Were there any more?”

  I shook my head. “It ran off. I don’t know where to.”

  “There wasn’t a man with it, was there?”

  “Just the dog. What do you mean, a man? Do you know who owns that thing?”

  “Nobody owns – never mind. You’d know this guy if you saw him: tall, black hair. He’s white, I mean, really, like-a-ghost white. His face is lined, creased.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Don’t worry about it. If he wasn’t—”

  “He was at the club, afterwards. Right before you arrived.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I was about as far away from him as I am from you.”

  Now Chris’s face was white. “What happened?”

  “Nothing. One minute, he was standing there giving me the heebie-jeebies, the next—”

  “Shit!” Chris grabbed his jacket from the doorknob. “Get your coat.”

  “Why?”

  “Do you have a flashlight?”

  “A flashlight?”

  “Never mind, I have a spare.” His jacket and gloves on, Chris shouted, “Move!”

  “What are you—”

  He crossed the room to me in three quick strides. “I know where Kaitlyn is.”

  “You do?”

  He nodded. “I know where she is. I also know that she’s in a very great deal of danger. I need you to get your coat, and I need you to get your car keys.”

  “Kaitlyn’s in danger?”

  “Yes.”

  “What – how do you know this?”

  “I’ll tell you in the car.”

  IV

  For all that I had been resident in the city for over a year, my knowledge of Albany’s geography was at best vague. Aside from a few landmarks such as the QE2 and the Empire State Plaza downtown, my mental map of the place showed a few blocks north and south of my apartment, and spots along the principle east-west avenues, Western, Washington, and Central. I had a better sense of the layout of Dobb’s Ferry, Kaitlyn’s hometown, to which I’d chauffeured her at least one weekend a month the past twelve. Chris told me to head downtown, to Henry Johnson. Once I’d scraped holes in the frost on the windshield and windows, and set the heater blowing high, I steered us onto Washington and followed it to the junction with Western, but that was as far as I could go before I had to say, “Now what?”

  Chris looked up from the canvas bag he was holding open on his lap while he riffled its contents. Whatever was in the bag clinked and rattled; the strong odour of grease filled the car. “Really?” he said. “You don’t know how to get to Henry Johnson?”

  “I’m not good with street names. I’m more of a visual person.”

  “Up ahead on the left – look familiar?”

  “Actually, no.”

  “Well, that’s where we’re going.”

  “Well okay.”

  I turned off Western, passed over what I realised was a short bridge across a deep gully. “What’s our destination?”

  “A place called the Kennel. Heard of it?”

  I hadn’t.

  “It’s . . . you’ll see when we get there.”

  We drove past shops whose shutters were down for the night, short brick buildings whose best days belonged to another century. Brownstones rode a steep side street. A man wearing a long winter coat and garbage bags taped to his feet pushed a shopping cart with an old television set canted in it along the sidewalk.

  “How far is it?”

  “I don’t know the exact distance. It should take us about fifteen minutes.”

  “Enough time for you to tell me how you know Kaitlyn’s at the Kennel.”

  “Not really. Not if you want the full story.”

  “I’ll settle for the Cliff’s Notes. Did you take her there?”

  “No,” he said, as if the suggestion were wildly inappropriate.

  “Then how did she find out about it?”

  “She didn’t – she was brought there.”

  “Brought? As in, kidnapped?”

  Chris nodded.

  “How do you know this?”

  “Because of the Keeper – the man you saw at the club.”

  “The scary guy with the weird eyes.”

  “You noticed his eyes.”

  “Same as the dog’s.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t – how do you know this guy, the what? The Keeper?”

  “Ahead, there,” Chris said, pointing, “keep to the left.”

  I did. The cluster of tall buildings that rose over Albany’s downtown, the city’s effort to imitate its larger sibling at the other end of the Hudson, was behind us, replaced by more modest structures, warehouses guarded by sagging fences, narrow two- and three-storey brick buildings, a chrome-infused diner struggling to pretend the fifties were alive and well. As I drove through these precincts, I had the se
nse I was seeing the city as it really was, the secret face I had intuited after a year under its gaze. I said, “How do you know him?”

  “He . . .” Chris grimaced. “I found out about him.”

  “What? Is he some kind of, I don’t know, a criminal?”

  “Not exactly. He’s – he’s someone who doesn’t like to be known.”

  “Someone . . . all right, how did you find out about him?”

  “Left. My accident – did I ever tell you about my accident? I didn’t, did I?”

  “Kaitlyn filled me in.”

  “She doesn’t know the whole story. Nobody does. I didn’t take a corner too fast: one of the Ghûl ran in front of me.”

  “The what? ‘Hule’?”

  “Ghûl. What you saw in that lot the other night.”

  “Is that the breed?”

  Chris laughed. “Yes, that’s the breed, all right. It was up towards Saratoga, on Route 9. I was heading home from band practice. It was late, and it was a New Moon, so it was especially dark. The next thing I knew, there was this animal in the road. My first thought was, It’s a wolf. Then I thought, That’s ridiculous: there are no wolves around here. It must be a coyote. But I had already seen this wasn’t a coyote, either. Whatever it was, it looked awful, so thin it must be starving. I leaned to the left, to veer around it, and it moved in front of me. I tried to tilt the bike the other way, overcompensated, and put it down, hard.”

  In the distance, the enormous statue of Nipper, the RCA mascot, that crowned one of the buildings closer to the river cocked its head attentively.

  “The accident itself, I don’t remember. That’s a blank. What I do remember is coming to in all kinds of pain and feeling something tugging on my sleeve. My sleeve – I’m sure you heard I wasn’t wearing a helmet. I couldn’t really see out of my left eye, but with my right, I saw the animal I’d tried to avoid with my right arm in its mouth. My legs were tangled up with the bike, which was a good thing, because this creature was trying to drag me off the road. If it hadn’t been for the added weight, it would have succeeded. This wasn’t any Lassie rescue, either: the look on its face – it was ravenous. It was going to kill and eat me, and not necessarily in that order.

  “Every time the animal yanked my arm, bones ground together throughout my body. White lights burst in front of my eyes. I cried out, although my jaw was broken, which made it more of a moan. I tried to use my left arm to hit the creature, but I’d dislocated that shoulder. Its eyes – those same, reversed eyes you looked into – regarded me the way you or I would a slice of prime rib. I’ve never been in as much pain as I was lying there; I’ve also never been as frightened as I was with that animal’s teeth beginning to tear through the sleeve of my leather jacket and into the skin beneath. The worst of it was, the creature made absolutely no sound, no growl, nothing.”

  We passed beneath the Thruway, momentarily surrounded by the whine of tires on pavement.

  “Talk about dumb luck, or Divine Providence: just as my legs are starting to ease out from the bike, an eighteen-wheeler rounds the corner. How the driver didn’t roll right over me and the animal gripping my arm, I chalk up to his caffeine-enhanced reflexes. I thought that, if I were going to die, at least it wouldn’t be as something’s dinner. As it was, the truck’s front bumper slowed to a stop right over my head. Had it been any other vehicle, my would-be consumer might have stood its ground. The truck, though, was too much for it, and it disappeared.

  “When the doctors and cops – not to mention my mother – finally got around to asking me to relate the accident in as much detail as I could, none of them could credit a creature that wasn’t a coyote that wasn’t a wolf, which caused my crash and then tried to drag me away. I’d suffered severe head trauma, been comatose for five days – that must be where the story had come from. The wounds on my forearm were another result of the accident. Apparently, no one bothered to ask the truck driver what he’d seen.

  “For a long time after that night, I wasn’t in such great shape. Between the seizures and the different medications for the seizures, I spent weeks at a time in a kind of fog. Some of the meds made me want to sleep; some ruined my concentration; one made everything incredibly funny. But no matter what state I was in, no matter how strange or distant my surroundings seemed, I knew that that animal – that what it had done, what it had tried to do to me – was real.”

  To the left, the beige box of Albany Memorial Hospital slid by. I said, “Okay, I get that there’s a connection between the thing that caused your accident and the one I ran into the other night. And I’m guessing this Keeper guy is involved, too. Maybe you could hurry up and get to the point?”

  “I’m trying. Did you know that State Street used to be the site of one of the largest cemeteries in Albany?”

  “No.”

  “Till almost the middle of the 19th century, when the bodies were relocated and the workers found the first tunnels.”

  “Tunnels?”

  “Left again up here. Not too much farther.”

  To either side of us, trees jostled the shoulder. They opened briefly on the left to a lawn running up to shabby red brick apartments, then closed ranks again.

  “So why are these tunnels so important?”

  “That concrete slab in the basement, the one that’s locked down? What if I told you that opens on a tunnel?”

  “I’d still want to know what this has to do with where Kaitlyn is.”

  “Because she – when we – all right.” He took a deep breath. “Even before my doctor found the right combination of anti-seizure meds, I was doing research. I probably know the name of every librarian between Albany and Saratoga. I’ve talked to anyone who knows anything about local history. I’ve spent weeks in the archives of the State Museum, the Albany Institute, and three private collections. I’ve filled four boxes worth of notebooks.”

  “And?”

  “I’ve recognised connections no one’s noticed before. There’s an entire – you could call it a secret history, or shadow history, of this entire region, stretching back – you wouldn’t believe me if I told you how far. I learned things . . .”

  “What things?”

  “It doesn’t matter. What does is that, somehow, they found out about me.”

  “The Keeper and his friends.”

  “At first, I was sure they were coming for me. I put my affairs in order, had a long conversation with my mom that scared her half to death. Then, when they didn’t arrive, I started to think that I might be safe, even that I might have been mistaken about them knowing about me.”

  “But you weren’t. Not only were they aware of you, they were watching you, following you. They saw you with Kaitlyn. They figured . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  My heart was pounding in my ears. A torrent of obscenities and reproaches threatened to pour out of my mouth. I choked them down, said, “Shouldn’t we go to the cops? If you’ve gathered as much material on this Keeper as you say you have—”

  “It’s not like that. The cops wouldn’t – if they did believe me, it wouldn’t help Kaitlyn.”

  “I can’t see why not. If this guy’s holding Kaitlyn, a bunch of cops outside his front door should make him reconsider.”

  We had arrived at a T-junction. “Left or right?”

  “Straight.”

  “Straight?” I squinted across the road in front of us, to a pair of brick columns that flanked the entrance to a narrow road. A plaque on the column to the right read ALBANY RURAL CEMETERY. I turned to Chris. “What the fuck?”

  He withdrew his right hand from the bag on his lap, his fingers curled around the grip of a large automatic handgun whose muzzle he swung towards me. “Once this truck passes, we’re going over there.” He nodded at the brick columns.

  The anger that had been foaming in my chest fell away to a trickle. I turned my gaze to the broad road in front of me, watched a moving van labour up it. The gun weighted the corner of my vision. I wanted to speak, to de
mand of Chris what the fuck he thought he was doing, but my tongue was dead in my mouth. Besides, I knew what he was doing. Once the van was out of sight, Chris waved the gun and I drove across into the cemetery.

  Even in the dark, where I could only see what little my headlights brought to view, I was aware that the place was big, much bigger than any graveyard I’d been in back home. On both sides of the road, monuments raised themselves like the ruins of some lost civilisation obsessed with its end. A quartet of Doric columns supporting a single beam gave way to a copper-green angel with arms and wings outstretched, which yielded to a grey Roman temple in miniature, which was replaced by a marble woman clutching a marble cross. Between the larger memorials, an assortment of headstones stood as if marking the routes of old streets. A few puddles spread amongst them. Tall trees, their branches bare with the season, loomed beside the road.

  As we made our way further into the cemetery, Chris resumed talking. But the gun drew his words into the black circle of its mouth, allowing only random snippets to escape. At some point, he said, “Old Francis was the one who finally put it all together for me. He’d found an Annex to the Kennel during a day-job digging graves. A pair of them came for him that night, and if there hadn’t been a couple of decent-sized rocks to hand, they would have had him. But he’d played the Minor Leagues years before, and his right arm remembered how to throw. Even so, he hopped a freight going west and stayed out there for a long time.” At another point, he said, “You have no idea. When the first hunters crossed the land bridge to America, the Ghûl trailed them.” At still another moment, he said, “Something they do to the meat.” That Chris had not dismounted his hobby-horse was clear.

  All I could think about was what was going to happen to me once he told me to stop the car. He wouldn’t shoot me in it – that would leave too much evidence. Better to walk me someplace else, dispose of me, and ditch the car over in Troy. He didn’t want to leave me out in the open, though. Maybe an open grave, shovel in enough dirt to conceal the body? Too dicey: a strong rain could expose his handiwork. One of the mausoleums we passed? Much more likely, especially if you knew the family no longer used it. When he said, “All right: we’re here,” in front of an elaborate marble porch set into a low hill, I felt an odd surge of satisfaction.