The Year's Best Horror Stories 6

by Gerald W. Page (Ed. )

  Belson gazed at the hearth, wondering. Something moved on the far side of the room, beside a draped chair, something black and bulky. Belson turned his gaze upon it.

  Only a particularly deep shadow, shifting perhaps in the light of the coals. Or a robe or coat of heavy dark fur, thrown there. Or—

  But it stirred again. It rose slowly erect, like a black bear, gross and shaggy. But not a bear either, not with that broad flat face, those glowing pale eyes. Where the nose should be was a damp blob, like soggy brown leather, with staring nostrils. The mouth was a broad cleft. Upper and lower teeth jutted, like splinters of china.

  Frozen, unbelieving, Belson looked. The glowing eyes looked back at him. Long, knobby arms lifted, spreading hands like hairy rakes. Talons glinted, as sharp and pale as the teeth. The mouth gaped, made a crooning snarl. It stepped toward him, on long flippers of feet.

  “No, you don’t!” Belson found his voice. “Stay away from me!”

  He turned to run, and bumped into Anne Belstone. She pushed him into the hall. She raised her arms high.

  “Athe, pemeath.” She was saying more strange words. “Somiatoai, haliha.”

  It stood fast, its eyes flashed pale.

  “Ah jathos noio sattis,” Belson heard her chant. “Ishoroh.”

  He ran into the hall, leaving her alone there. He scrabbled the door open and was out on the porch, gasping for breath.

  “Selu, samhaiah,” said her voice in the house behind him. “Trinu, iamensaha.”

  He clung dizzily to the back of a chair. His knees wavered. Something made a noise behind him and he looked back in terror. Anne Belstone was on the porch, closing the door. She walked toward him. Her sweet face was as pale as a pan of fresh milk.

  “Now,” she said gently. “Now you know why I didn’t want to invite you into the house.”

  “That in there,” he mouthed. “A man or an animal or what?”

  “Not man or animal.” She was precise, informative. “I told you that the Belstones were ordered to look after him.”

  “A god, is that thing a god?”

  “He used to be. Now he’s what he is. Always hungry.”

  Belson gestured. “You said words to drive him back.”

  “I told you, my parents made me learn them.” She shrugged. “I keep him here, so that he won’t plague others—plague the world.”

  Something scraped inside the heavy door. She turned that way. “Heriel aias stoch nahas,” she pronounced. The scraping ceased.

  “He’s not wholly satisfied with pieces of butcher’s meat or just rabbits or chickens,” she said wearily. “Maybe he thought you were the sort of sacrifice he used to expect.”

  He blinked at her. “You worship him,” he half accused.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Yes, I do. That way, I can keep him here. And now, you must go.”

  “Go?” He looked out at the jagged stone pillar.

  “Probably he knows you’re of the Belstone blood. That makes it bad for you, very bad. You must never come near this house again.”

  The drapes stirred at a window.

  “How can you possibly live here?” cried Belson, wondering at how steady her stance was, her voice was. “How can you?”

  “Because I’ve always lived here,” she replied. “I was brought up to live here, stay here, see that he stays here, too. It’s what I’m on earth for.”

  “No!” he fairly shouted into her calm, pale face. He seized both her slim hands in his big ones. “Come with me.”

  “Come with you?” she said after him and stared.

  “Come home to America with me, Anne. Don’t even step back inside there for anything. We’ll buy you clothes, whatever you need, in London. We’ll go back together, back home. It’ll be your home, too.” He pressed her hands. “Come with me,” he begged. “Please!”

  “I can’t. If you’ll only stop to think, you’ll know why I can’t. It’s for me to live here at Belstone and keep him here, too. Keep him here away from everyone else.”

  “But when you don’t live to keep him any more?” he prodded at her. “When you die at last?”

  “Who knows what will happen then?” Her voice rose, her hands gripped his. “Who can know that? I’ll be dead, I’ll be past knowing. But until I’m dead, I’ll stay and keep him here.”

  Strongly she dragged her hands free of his grip.

  “Now, this is my house,” she said, “though just now it may not seem quite like that to you. This is my house, and I must tell you to leave.”

  “I won’t leave,” he tried to argue.

  “Go this instant,” she commanded. “If you don’t, I’ll open the door and let him out here.”

  Again, a stir at the drapes of the window.

  “And you know that I mean what I say,” she told him. “Go on, go away, and don’t ever come back.”

  She pushed him toward the steps, with a power he had not expected in her slim body. He blundered down them to the gravel below.

  “Go away!” she cried at him once more.

  He walked along the driveway. As he came opposite the rock he heard a sound from it, like a sigh of wind. Its eye-patches shone suddenly, as bits of ice shine. The crack of a mouth seemed to twitch.

  He quickened his steps. Out on the road, he turned toward the village. He dared not look back. He could not have seen her, anyway. Upon him rushed a grinding sense of loss, of defeat.

  His breath shook in his throat. He felt a trickle of wet on his cheeks. He was in tears, for the first time since he had been a little, little boy.

  AFTERWORD

  “This story is in some degree a love letter to England, where I’ve been happy on a number of visits. I think the stuff about Celtic pagan beliefs is authentic. One person who read it questioned Matthew Hopkins’ witch-finding in 1643, saying he’s not on record until 1645; but since 1645 was the year he found his most witches, I figure he was at the job before that. I like 1643, since that was the year my own first Wellman ancestor came to Jamestown in Virginia—and he had to take a special oath of allegiance, too, and I've always wondered why.

  “Not that I’m Wofford Belson in this story. As to Anne Belstone, she may resemble a personable Englishwoman I know, who is very much up on folk things there.”

  Manly Wade Wellman

  THE HORSE LORD by Lisa Tuttle

  Ah, you know that name. Lisa Tuttle. Didn’t she collaborate with the phenomenal George R. R. Martin on “The Storms of Windhaven?” And didn’t she—let’s see, that was back in 1974—share a John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with Spider Robinson? How could you not be impressed with someone who has been associated with two such notable young writers? As a matter of fact, unless you follow the magazines and anthologies reasonably closely, that just might be your primary knowledge of Lisa Tuttle. Poor you! Read this story, now. Read it and discover what those more widely read in the field than you have delighted in knowing ever since her stories first began to appear. As a matter of fact, once you’ve read "The Horse Lord,” chances are good that you’ll find yourself thinking of George R. R. Martin as the man who collaborated on a story with Lisa Tuttle, and Spider Martin as the fellow who once shared an award with her.

  The double barn doors were secured by a length of stout, rust-encrusted chain, fastened with an old padlock.

  Marilyn hefted the lock with one hand and tugged at the chain, which did not give. She looked up at the splintering gray wood of the doors and wondered how the children had gotten in.

  Dusting red powder from her hands, Marilyn strolled around the side of the old barn. Dead leaves and dying grasses crunched beneath her sneakered feet, and she hunched her shoulders against the chill in the wind.

  “There’s plenty of room for horses,” Kelly had said the night before at dinner. “There’s a perfect barn. You can’t say it would be impractical to keep a horse here.” Kelly was Derek’s daughter, eleven years old and mad for horses.

  This barn had been used as a stable, Marilyn thou
ght, and could be again. Why not get Kelly a horse? And why not one for herself as well? As a girl, Marilyn had ridden in Central Park. She stared down the length of the barn: for some reason, the door to each stall had been tightly boarded shut.

  Marilyn realized she was shivering, then, and she finished her circuit of the barn at a trot and jogged all the way back to the house.

  The house was large and solid, built of gray stone 170 years before. It seemed a mistake, a misplaced object in this cold, empty land. Who would choose to settle here, who would try to eke out a living from the ungiving, stony soil?

  The old house and the eerily empty countryside formed a setting very much like one Marilyn, who wrote suspense novels, had once created for a story. She liked the reality much less than her heroine had liked the fiction.

  The big kitchen was warm and felt comforting after the outside air. Marilyn leaned against the sink to catch her breath and let herself relax. But she felt tense. The house seemed unnaturally quiet with all the children away at school. Marilyn smiled wryly at herself. A week before, the children had been driving her crazy with their constant noise and demands, and now that they were safely away at school for six hours every day she felt uncomfortable.

  From one extreme to the other, thought Marilyn. The story of my life.

  Only a year ago she and Derek, still newly married, were making comfortable plans to have a child—perhaps two—“someday.”

  Then Joan—Derek’s ex-wife—had decided she’d had her fill of mothering, and almost before Marilyn had time to think about it, she’d found herself with a half-grown daughter.

  And following quickly on that event—while Marilyn and Kelly were still wary of each other—Derek’s widowed sister had died, leaving her four children in Derek’s care.

  Five children! Perhaps they wouldn’t have seemed like such a herd if they had come in typical fashion, one at a time with a proper interval between.

  It was the children, too, who had made living in New York City seem impossible. This house had been in Derek’s family since it was built, but no one had lived in it for years. It had been used from time to time as a vacation home, but the land had nothing to recommend it to vacationers: no lakes or mountains, and the weather was unusually unpleasant. It was inhospitable country, a neglected corner of New York state.

  It should have been a perfect place for writing—their friends all said so. An old house, walls soaked in history, set in a brooding, rocky landscape, beneath an unlittered sky, far from the distractions and noise of the city. But Derek could write anywhere—he carried his own atmosphere with him, a part of his ingrained discipline—and Marilyn needed the bars, restaurants, museums, shops and libraries of a large city to fill in the hours when words could not be commanded.

  The silence was suddenly too much to bear. Derek wasn’t typing—he might be wanting conversation. Marilyn walked down the long dark hallway—thinking to herself that this house needed more light fixtures, as well as pictures on the walls and rugs on the cold wooden floors.

  Derek was sitting behind the big parson’s table that was his desk, cleaning one of his sixty-seven pipes. The worn but richly patterned rug on the floor, the glow of lamplight and the books which lined the walls made this room, the library and Derek’s office, seem warmer and more comfortable than the rest of the house.

  “Talk?” said Marilyn, standing with her hand on the doorknob.

  “Sure, come on in. I was just stuck on how to get the chief slave into bed with the mistress of the plantation without making her yet another clichéd nymphomaniac.”

  “Have him comfort her in time of need,” Marilyn said. She closed the door on the dark hallway. “He just happens to be on hand when she gets a letter informing her of her dear brother’s death. In grief, and as an affirmation of life, she and the slave tumble into bed together.”

  “Pretty good,” Derek said. “You got a problem I can help you with?”

  “Not a literary one,” she said, crossing the room to his side. Derek put an arm around her. “I was just wondering if we couldn’t get a horse for Kelly. I was out to look at the barn. It’s all boarded and locked up, but I’m sure we could get in and fix it up. And I don’t think it could cost that much to keep a horse or two.”

  “Or two,” he echoed. He cocked his head and gave her a sly look. “You sure you want to start using a barn with a rather grim history?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Didn’t I ever tell you the story of how my, hmmm, great-uncle, I guess he must have been—my great-uncle Martin, how he died?”

  Marilyn shook her head, her expression suspicious.

  “It’s a pretty gruesome story.”

  “Derek . . .”

  “It’s true, I promise you. Well . . . remember my first slave novel?”

  “How could I forget? It paid for our honeymoon.”

  “Remember the part where the evil boss-man who tortures his slaves and horses alike is finally killed by a crazed stallion?”

  Marilyn grimaced. “Yeah. A bit much, I thought. Horses aren’t carnivorous.”

  “I got the idea from that scene from my great-uncle Martin’s death. His horses—and he kept a whole stable—went crazy, apparently. I don’t know if they actually ate him, but be was pretty chewed up when someone found his body.” Derek shifted in his chair. “Martin wasn’t known to be a cruel man. He didn’t abuse his horses; he loved them. He didn’t love Indians, though, and the story was that the stables were built on ground sacred to the Indians, who put a curse on Martin or his horses in retaliation.”

  Marilyn shook her head. “Some story. When did all this happen?”

  “Around 1880.”

  “And the barn has been boarded up ever since?”

  “I guess so. I remember the few times Anna and I came out here as kids we could never find a way to get inside. We made up stories about the ghosts of the mad horses still being inside the barn. But because they were ghosts, they couldn’t be held by normal walls, and roamed around at night. I can remember nights when we’d huddle together, certain we heard their ghosts neighing . . .” His eyes looked faraway. Remembering how much he had loved his sister, Marilyn felt guilty about her reluctance to take in Anna’s children. After all, they were all Derek had left of his sister.

  “So this place is haunted,” she said, trying to joke. Her voice came out uneasy, however.

  “Not the house,” said Derek quickly. “Old Uncle Martin died in the barn.”

  “What about your ancestors who lived here before that? Didn’t the Indian curse touch them?”

  “Well . . ."

  “Derek,” she said warningly.

  “OK. Straight dope. The first family, the first bunch of Hoskins who settled here were done in by Indians. The parents and the two bond-servants were slaughtered, and the children were stolen. The house was burned to the ground. That wasn’t this house, obviously.”

  “But it stands on the same ground.”

  “Not exactly. That house stood on the other side of the barn—though I doubt the present barn stood then—Anna and I used to play around the foundations. I found a knife there once, and she found a little tin box which held ashes and a pewter ring.”

  “But you never found any ghosts.”

  Derek looked up at her. “Do ghosts hang around once their house is burned?”

  “Maybe.”

  “No, we never did. Those Hoskins were too far back in time to bother with, maybe. We never saw any Indian ghosts, either.”

  “Did you ever see the ghost horses?”

  “See them?” He looked thoughtful. “I don’t remember. We might have. Funny what you can forget about childhood. No matter how important it seems to you as a child . . .”

  “We become different people when we grow up,” Marilyn said.

  Derek gazed into space a moment, then roused himself to gesture at the wall of books behind him. “If you’re interested in the family history, that little set in dark green leather
was written by one of my uncles and published by a vanity press. He traces the Hoskinses back to Shakespeare’s time, if I recall. The longest I ever spent out here until now was one rainy summer when I was about twelve . . . it seemed like forever . . . and I read most of the books in the house, including those.”

  “I’d like to read them.”

  “Go ahead.” He watched her cross the room and wheel the library ladder into position. “Why, are you thinking of writing a novel about my family?”

  “No. I’m just curious to discover what perversity made your ancestor decide to build a house here, of all godforsaken places on the continent.”

  Marilyn thought of Jane Eyre as she settled into the window seat, the heavy green curtains falling back into place to shield her from the room. She glanced out at the chilly gray land and picked up the first volume.

  James Hoskins won a parcel of land in upstate New York in a card game. Marilyn imagined his disappointment when he set eyes on his prize, but he was a stubborn man and frequently unlucky at cards. This land might not be much, but it was his own. He brought his family and household goods to a roughly built wooden house. A more permanent house, larger and built of native rock, would be built in time.

  But James Hoskins would never see it built. In a letter to relatives in Philadelphia, Hoskins related:

  "The land I have won is of great value, at least to a poor, wandering remnant of Indians. Two braves came to the house yesterday, and my dear wife was nearly in tears at their tales of powerful magic and vengeful spirits inhabiting this land.

  “Go, they said, for this is a great spirit, as old as the rocks, and your God cannot protect you. This land is not good for people of any race. A spirit (whose name may not be pronounced) set his mark upon this land when the earth was still new. This land is cursed—and more of the same, on and on until I lost patience with them and told them to be off before I made powerful magic with my old Betsy.

  "Tho’ my wife trembled, my little daughter proved fiercer than her Ma, swearing she would chop up that pagan spirit and have it for her supper—which made me roar with laughter, and the Indians to shake their heads as they hurried away.”