The Year's Best Horror Stories 6

by Gerald W. Page (Ed. )

  When he let go her throat, there was no bruise on it. His arms ached like his teeth now, from straining to murder her.

  As he lay there, whining softly at his pains, his mind ran back to the Drom where he had found the pipe. He thought of the wood on the floor laid ready, and the emptiness without dereliction, and he wondered if some other man had been enslaved there in the same way that he now was, enslaved there till he died. Crovak thought of the spiders scampering on their threads. He thought of the pipe, and how he had blown it and it had squealed like a woman in terror or hurt, and then he took the pipe out and rolled it in his fingers.

  He had blown her into the world, if only he might blow her out, reverse the bane, be rid of her.

  In a dreadful manner, he had almost grown accustomed to her stare, and turning from her, idly, he began to pick at the ruby that was set in where the fourth hole of the pipe was not. And then, growing weary of this, Crovak set the pipe to his lips and tapped it there.

  It seemed to him, abruptly, that in her white face which watched him, there was the slightest and most subtle alteration. Crovak was undeniably insane by this season, but not with a blind insanity. Through the wreckage of his wits a strange idea came to him, and he slowly turned the pipe about in his hand, so its other end was to his mouth, and, holding it in this fashion, he blew it.

  It made a sound. Not as at the previous hour, not a squeal of distress. This time, shrill and thin, it laughed.

  The woman did two things, two things she had not done before. She opened her mouth very wide, and this was how he saw her teeth were gleaming and coal black as her eyes—which all at once she shut. Then she did a third new thing. She fell backward on the stone floor and she vanished.

  Crovak could hardly credit what he beheld this plainly. He grunted, and he shuffled in his chains, and he waited, his tongue lolling, for her to reappear. And this she did not do.

  When day came, still he looked for her, and still she was absent.

  Four whole days he waited; four whole days she did not come back. The fourth night he poked out a hole between the stones of the floor and thrust the pipe down into it, and covered it, smiling. The fifth day, Crovak went on smiling to himself, hugging himself, rattling the chain. He built up the fire. When the warriors came to feed him, he spoke to them. He told them all was well, he had outwitted the demon, but he slavered as he spoke, and they paid no heed. Yet he had a strange cunning by then, and he stole a knife from one, and when the men were gone he hacked off his thumb, which made his hand slight enough to slip from the fetter.

  He felt the agony only as a distant nudging, and packed snow on the wound, which numbed it. He followed the hoof-pocks in the whiteness the two miles back to Drom-Crovak. It was dusk and the torches burned on the gates. He came on a man there, patrolling the wall, and killed him with the knife and took his sword. After that, Crovak ran into his hold, and he laid about him with the stolen sword, and very many he butchered till he grew weary of the sport. He got a horse then, and rode away into the winter land, red with blood, and his mad eyes red, singing.

  What else then do they say of Crovak? They say this:

  He wandered the winter two months more. He lived like a beast, preying on the steadings thereabouts which once had paid him tithe. They had been in fear of him before, but now they had a better cause to fear him. Whole families he cut down, only for a loaf or a bit of meat. They say he drank men’s blood. How he lived or where, is not certain, in some ruined hut perhaps. His madness kept him alive. Bands of men from the Drom rode out to catch and kill him, but they never found him out.

  It had been a harsh unnatural winter, eager to arrive, reluctant to take its leave, but in the end the snow had gone, the ways were brown and muddy, the rivers running bright.

  Crovak strode from the forest land which was putting on its green. His horse was dead by then, and he a fearsome sight, ragged, filthy, and his rotten teeth showing in that beard half gray and knotted with the debris of the woods.

  He had forgotten much, and no longer did he reason in any form as a man does. Yet enough he remembered, and he took a perverse pleasure in his survival.

  When he came to the field he did not quite recall it. The ground was raw with earth and rank grass, but a stand of trees was at its center, and nearby a group of huts, and beyond them a track. The track he knew, it led to the Drom, down over the curving shallow hills. A girl child was playing in the field. He recollected the child.

  Crovak moved toward the child. He had no positive intention, but a kind of malicious crazy urge to startle it. But the grasses rustled, not merely at his passage, but as if a tiny beast were rummaging there, and the child looked up and saw Crovak.

  The wild man snarled down at her, but the child exhibited no nervousness. In fact, confronting the child again, it was Crovak who felt a sudden ice in his belly. He made a guttural noise at the child, for speech did not come fluently anymore to him. After a try or two, he got his defiance out:

  “What do you see? Is she there, eh? Is she? The white sow?”

  The child shook its head.

  “No.”

  Crovak grinned.

  “No. No winter woman. I have sent her back. Clever Crovak, Crovak White-Tooth.”

  Just then the mother came from one of the huts and, catching sight of him, froze. This amused Crovak. He sucked his nine black nails. Behind him, in the rank grass, the creature rustled again, and the child gazed past Crovak, downward, and she giggled.

  “What?” said Crovak. He laughed. “Tell me, what? A fox? I have eaten foxes in the wood.”

  “See,” said the child.

  By the huts, the woman held her hands to Crovak imploringly.

  “Shall I eat you, then?” asked Crovak. "Like the fox.”

  “See,” said the child a second time. She was watching something just at Crovak’s back and somewhat to his left, in stature, a third of the distance up his calf.

  “Will she play with me?” asked the child insistently.

  Crovak did not turn.

  “She is not there,” he said, “the white woman.”

  “No,” said the child.

  Crovak would not turn. He would not think of the swollen belly which had pressed against him. He would not think of his boast of sons.

  “She is small as me. She has no clothes,” said the child, “but her fingers are red.”

  Crovak shrieked. He flung about and ran. Behind him, faintly, came the rustling of some tiny thing, which yet managed to keep pace with him. Which kept pace with him, and kept pace with him, and never slackened.

  No more is known, or said, of Crovak.

  A COBWEB OF PULSING VEINS by William Scott Home

  Is there really a writer of horror fiction who today can be labeled most controversial?—Or even, in these liberated times, controversial at all? There is. His name is William Scott Home and most of his stories have appeared in the small-press markets, particularly the horror magazine Weirdbook, where it is likely that an issue reaches 3000 readers at the outside. But despite this, Home’s stock has risen among the insiders of the field who recognize in his elaborately written, often complex, but incredibly varied stories, not only some of the most inventive writing around, but some of the most entertaining as well. This story, from Home’s first short story collection, Hollow Faces, Merciless Moons, demonstrates his skill at devising highly original concepts and working them into unusual stories. And if, at the same time, this one evokes something of the shade of Poe himself, well then that only demonstrates something of the range of Home’s writing talent.

  1

  Leaving the horses mulched in the Cimmerian shadow of a bloated yew, I eased pick and shovel out of the wagon and waded through the sodden yellow banks of weeds to a breach in the corpse kingdom’s crumbling stone barricade. A quarter-moon smeared a feverish glow on the marble slabs and dappled the trodden weeds that beleaguered them with a pale dewy leprosy; only the massy shadows which clustered around the trunks of the ancien
t oaks and beeches escaped its infection, and I crept into them. But there, where the fallen leaves had not received a dayful of cold rain, cracklings like the meshing of brittle teeth followed my steps.

  I paused and glanced around cautiously. I have many brothers I never care to meet: ours is a sacrosanct, but acroamatic, calling. The sodden quietness of this night might tempt them, but that expanded watchfulness which pulses beneath my temples convinced me I was alone. Sliding in between thickly interwoven branches of fir and ilex, I crouched between the adjoining walls of two ancient and weather-worn mausolea and lit a small candle to peer at the curious diagram I bore.

  He who had given it had sketched it from memory for me, familiar with every molehill of this graveyard. Yet so exact were its proportions and juxtapositions that I was startled to be shown this familiar ground in his firm lines as though seen from a height. Despite the ease with which I could have obtained access to the tomb, he indicated he had specified a precise and peculiar path of entry, and on my obedience was his compensation staked. Thus—the more as the northeast corner, my goal, was the most unkempt and deserted sector of this cemetery, whose harvest, to winnowers of my mode, was scantiest, and as the landmarks he offered were for the most part known to me, however well, in strangely different verbal dress—I referred carefully once more to his precise distortion, as if dousing my heartbeat on the right side.

  I moved on, rounding the sunken grave of William Mattix (every apprenticeship leaves its scars), the sepulchre become shrine of the poet, Joseph Ray, its bird-indexed statue angled against the heavy door. The complexity of that door’s lock, the thickness of the walls, and the costly iron of the casket, had all been in vain, but his image was projected in there still by the worshipful eyes of fame’s pale imbibers—surely a moral there for those who scorn us. Thorn bushes and dense new growths of weeds only slowed my passage through the little city of mausolea which housed the whole line of the Brilliots, but I was careful to tread directly upon that unmarked mound which had been concealed half a century before by the planting of great rose bushes, all of which had dwindled to sickly sticks.

  Most of the alleys beyond that I had never trod before. An occasional flagstone gleamed through the turf, and many of the houses and vaults were covered, not by lichens, but by tufts of dangling grass and more. Once I was among them, they seemed so uniformly disguised in the thick parget of earth, I could not be sure which was which; I was at sea in an anonymity of dying pride, already absorbed in the earth’s time-tolerant revision.

  The door of one mausoleum was long broken, swung so far inward that it was pinioned by a gout of earth to the wall behind. Spiders alone maintained its interdiction. I stepped within to scan the diagram once more. The stagnant atmosphere which dropped on me as I entered was shocking; fear is a syllable of child’s babble to those of us who cull our living from the dead, except when it faces us astride warm breath.

  When my flaring candle began to zebra the stones, I looked first at the depth of the tomb, paper-blank as my fingers. It was huge: I had not noticed from outside because the further reaches were entirely buried, earth dribbling in between the joints of the stones. The hard shelves of marble near me at the door were empty, and those at the limits of the light disdained their granite seals, were in places filled with rock. Earth had filled the tomb everywhere, and fungi-mocking grass carpeted its floor.

  Remembering suddenly that this was a particular of the edifice I sought, I glanced at the paper, and found myself confirmed. For some reason this brought a shock. I snuffed the candle automatically as if in fear of detection, chilled more than autumn night should chill me in any palace of frozen tears.

  But imagination and resurrection cannot stand face to face. I hung my heavy coat across the gaping door, and having excised the feeble light of the living, lit the lantern, leaving it low.

  The coffins at the rear of the tomb seemed to have reposed undisturbed, towering to the ribbed ceiling, for the fungi loam was crusted evenly over them. At the back was a wall of stone of waist height, beyond which was an equal quantity of loam. In the terminal wall of the mausoleum, closing down on its far side, the stonework ceased altogether, the dirt being contiguous with the outside. As for the embrasure of the consecrated walls, there was room for perhaps a dozen coffins, though there were no stones to mark any. But there I had to dig.

  Bizarre shadows leapt from behind the crowded coffins and retreated before the swinging light. A perspiration too profuse to be that only of confined sepulchres swiveled across my hands and forehead. Yet to such labors I settled as a butcher to his block, or a miller to his wheel, with the fresh slough of dawn sweet on their cheeks.

  I had been assured that there were only two coffins in this elevated parterre. The one I sought lay farthest from the outer half-wall, against the inner, and between five and seven feet from the right-hand wall. I had not laughed when he had given these figures, knowing that what he sought in such cramped confines could be no orb of bones but rather some bracketed chest, for in stately days such as those which had filled this chamber with their excreta, no dog, however beloved, shared its family’s tomb.

  I vaulted over the earth, forced to squat against the roof. With mingled feelings, I felt my feet sink ankle-deep into the moist humus, stopping only by virtue of their reaching the other coffin. Only a thin sheet of mud kept it within the rightful matrix of death.

  According to his directions, I probed the soil beyond and heard the muffled clank of metal. The usual precautions being nugatory in so ancient and unvisited a tomb, I merely began shoveling the intervening soil at hazard and bared a small object in a few minutes’ time. I realized then that I had not been adequately warned; for what I had uncovered was not a treasure box, but merely the upper (or lower) end of a coffin which stood erect in its grave. Nor was it of normal size, but only a little more than two feet square.

  Here was added work. I decided finally that by opening up only one side I could haul it out laterally in little more time than it would take to section a normal grave. But as I exposed it level by level, strange aspects caught my eye and slowed my arms, and the same disquietude of my reception huddled closely at my back. The coffin was of iron and ornamented with small brass carvings of unusual intricacy; but chains of tarnished gold secured the lid to the base. Moving inadvertently between the lantern and the casket, I thought there was phosphorescence in the latter, and was able to make out the brazen decorations quite distinctly. It was only four feet in length, so I finished and pulled it forward in less time than I had set.

  The weight was thunderous. Allowing for the cumbersome metals of its make, it yet overbalanced the death cradles of the obese. It was all I could do to gouge it across the spongy earth, baring the other coffin in the process. It was likewise of iron. As I lifted one end of the metal box over the edge of the retaining wall, I caught a hissing noise, or escaping air. But my full attention eliminated it. Something, still, seemed aprowl in the lifeless crypt, and with sudden strength I eased the ponderous object well up the passageway. As the lantern was continually being obscured in these operations, I believed there was a phosphorescence in many of the surrounding boxes; foolishly, I was disinclined to extinguish my lantern to ascertain whether its reflections might not be the source of the glow.

  I had already realized I would never be able to get the box across the graveyard, and that it would be necessary to drive the horses around to the gravel walk which passed that side of the cemetery nearest the tomb—only fifty feet distant. Lest the long pause of the mares by the outer wall attract attention of the possible passerby, I would move the coffin to the wall first. Easier planned than executed. I was a long time forcing the iron cast even to the mouth of the tomb, where I extinguished my lantern and put on my coat, already crudely chilled. In the course of maneuvers, I made out with some surprise a small Byzantine cross above the door, half hidden by hanging weeds.

  Then I remembered I had forgotten my tools. Leaving the box only a few feet fro
m the door, I hurried back inside. Despite the depth and shadowing of the moon, every structure inside the sepulchre was clear and distinct to my eyes! I took neither pause nor caution in my outward flight, hauled the casket to the protection of some whispering vines shrouding a low-slung tomb some distance from the wall. Racing across the cemetery to my patient horses, I tossed shovel and pick into the wagon, unhitched and drove them from the safety of the shadows into the most open of the cemetery’s buffering fields, liberally strewn with moonlight.

  In a few minutes I was on the gravel road, by then calmed sufficiently to slow the pace of the two black mares, and seal ourselves to the ancient wall in silence. I had for a minute almost thought of abandoning the undertaking, but how with surprising speed, I heaved the iron box over the wall and lowered it into the wagon. I leapt back to the top of the wall for a quick look around. From the door of the tomb I had robbed poured a flood of pulsing blue light—a brighter and more intense glow than any will-o’-the-wisp or fungus fire could kindle. Dimly I could see details of the whole tomb bathed in its cold radiance; it pulsed and flickered faintly, but confined to the tomb, and I could see no source.

  My withered tongue clove to the roof of my mouth; my scalp soaked in needles; my clothes were soaking. For a moment, I was viperstruck, but the horses, pawing restlessly, sensed something more than I, and feeling the reins slack, started off. They broke into a gallop as I narrowly leapt into the wagon, and I sprawled helplessly, careening against the fateful casket as they ran. Too palsied to recover, I rolled there impotent, as they raced the star winds, until at last instinct took them toward that pine-buttressed stable we occupied and bore me into its black and evil-smelling, and most welcome, depths.

  2

  The following day was gray and surly with the continuous drizzle of cold rains. Toward afternoon, a heavy fog shouldered them away, sticking to the sagging trees and blanketing the house. Waking at noon, I wandered through the rooms in a sort of panic becalmed. Cold reason was at work; I sought a thousand plausible explanations of the horror of the previous night. Unfortunately, I could not find one. He, on whose mission I had been, had promised to return late this afternoon, to claim that which I had obtained; and I was anxious for him to come and remove it. I stood at a small window steadily, peering into the seething mist.