The Year's Best Horror Stories 6

by Gerald W. Page (Ed. )

  A dark silhouette finally floated into view and turned toward the house, pausing. Without waiting, I seized a candle and ran into the stables, which were always dark. The mares stood silently, adrift in their own dreams. Pulling myself into the wagon and sweeping off the rags which concealed the box, I was struck again by a shivering and a sense of dread expectancy of which I had never thought myself capable. The drymouthed fears of ages had stared in my face, and I had never heeded them. I was garbed in a tattered, but once elegant, housecoat which had been rescued from the decay of the grave itself. On both hands, I wore gold rings which—as I am no artisan—were nothing more than the welded teeth of fools who thought to break the ancient platitude, their shapes still sharp and individual. Clothing, jewelry, and some favored artifacts, which otherwise would have melted to mist like the loves that cemented them, had been returned to utility and normal depreciation in my house without second thought.

  In the dimness of the stable, though, the box perceptibly glowed, beyond the ability of my candle to wake response—as if filled with fire whose intensity penetrated its meteoric dermis. When I bent nearer to see whether the untouched brass carvings were not brighter than the rest, I was struck by a fetid odor entirely different from that of decay. I ran back to the window—the only one that penetrated the brown shreds of brambles that hem the house—and looked for the gaunt figure. He was not there. It had been someone else.

  The rains began again. I paced back and forth nervously. Piddling flashes of lightning preceded unexpectedly intense borborygmi in the heavens. It added to my extremity, waking horrible visions; scanning the mist again for sight of the man in black, I hurried back to the stables. Since the coffin was uncovered, it was now clearly visible in the darkness, and the mares pawed and neighed in their stalls. For their own peace of mind (whatever its cost to my own), I decided to move that spiritual millstone into the passageway.

  But the glow was uncanny, the tiny carvings almost mobile, when I tried to touch it. The increased frenzy in the stalls, however, goaded me, and I grasped its startling warmth and heaved it gratingly along the sideboard, once again enduring all the sensations of the night before. Tipping it over to the floor, I found the lid was loose, and the hyperweighted box fell from my hands and swung open as it struck, the lid restrained only by the golden chains from spilling its contents. Something horribly white was visible inside, and that noxious scent which was not putrefaction slaked the air. Badly as my fingers shook, I swore suddenly to withstand it no more; I had to know what I had brought out of that thaumaturgical earth at the behest of a stranger in black. I unloosed all of the chains but one, which carried more slack than the others, and cautiously lifted the heavy lid, with an unmuffled scream. I dropped it and hurried back to my rooms, leaning on the door with all my strength until I fell to the floor in nightmare reverie.

  The thing—in my brief glimpse—was indeed no larger than a small child. But it was no child. The shape approximated that of an adult man, but the body was stretched out with arms over the head, so that the membraneous folds connecting arms and legs were clearly visible, all worm-white, except for purplish webs of blood lining the folded membranes. I had seen only a fraction of the face—if such it was—a gaping mouth whose cobra fangs indented the lower lip, tiny eyes with the slit pupil of the cat, and expression—if such it was—diabolical beyond metaphor.

  And this thing—this thing I had dragged from a tomb untouched in over a century—was perfectly preserved, unflawed by a nibble of decay.

  When I finally regained control of myself, the rains had ceased and darkness was already mopping up black rags of shadow. The grim clouds were heavy and sooty and I knew that no moon would watch that night. In the stable, I could hear the mares whinnying desperately. As light failed by seconds, the horror grew. I searched what little of the landscape remained for the predicted form, but only the wind came to meet my eyes.

  “With nightfall,” I mused, “his time is done.” In heavy coat and muddy boots, I went down to the stable and heaved the load back into the wagon, shrouding it as before. Was there a nimbus of blue sparks, vaguer than an aurora, around the coffin? Did a pale umbilicus stretch toward the window? I resolved to keep them faint. After all their exertions, the mares only panted when I drew them out and hitched them up, but they pulled and shivered once the wagon moved.

  As never before, I cursed myself for entering such a venture, cursed my greed, cursed my whole life of such desecrations for an ungodly, unblessed profession. I cursed my blasphemy in praising myself always as an unchristened animal and an instrument of the Creed’s glorious promise. Tears of remorse were actually accompanying the sweatdrops on my cheeks when the doors flew wide and we tore out into the night, the horses caroming in the night-grimed fields as if all the fiends of hell were after them, instead of only one.

  3

  I took no thought to caution as we swept down on the cemetery. The swollen yews and saprophytic beeches threw up stygian ramparts to a sky scarcely lighter, and greeted me with the awful clenching of hollow fangs. Blackness blockaded heavens and forests, but the herbage gleamed wanly and I drove the mares into the midst of it, not caring who or what might see us, and hurried on to the gravel walk from which I would have to work.

  It was only when I jerked them to a halt next to the ancient tombs that I heard other distant hoofbeats. I was shot through with the frost of dread, but not, this time, stricken. Hitching the team to a protruding branch, I exerted myself to thrust the coffin over the wall, and followed to find that, since I had forgotten to fasten the chains again, the coffin had come open, and one slim, white arm with its trailing drapery of skin dangled out of the mortuary confines.

  I was already scoring a deep trench in the rank ground, hauling it on, when an enormous black mount galloped up, sending my own shrieking and pawing. The same gaunt figure I had awaited so impatiently all day was astride. But he had failed me, and, events transpiring as they had, I had no further concern with him. I had turned the box to an upright position, the lid clanging shut as the soft horror tumbled inside again. I went on dragging.

  “Fool!” he snarled. “Fool! What do you think you are doing?”

  The only perceptible feature of his face, which lay in the shadow of his wide-brimmed hat, was the glare of red eyes. In sudden recollection, I turned to look at the tomb, and saw it ablaze with the pulsing blue light of my nightmares. I stopped, helpless.

  With horrible agility, the other man came over the wall. “Stop!” There was an accustomed command in his voice. “I hired you to rescue this from that tomb and rescued it will be. Here’s the money—now surrender the booty!”

  He offered a jingling sack. I only stared. I wondered why, in his rage, he did not seize the thing from me, or even threaten me. Red anger and black hatred swore in his violent eyes. But I only stared.

  “Graveworm! Maggot! Corpserat! Have you become so enamored of the stink of buried flesh that you have come to despise it sweet? Is the trickling oil of rot tastier than blood? You who have blessed so many with the promised resurrection? You who have uprooted the better part of this selfsame cemetery for lust of the blush of gold, you hesitate now to liberate one more imprisoned innocent from the suffocating settle of mould—the power of deceptive decay?

  “You deny your own dreams! You defy your own destiny! I am your kindred! I too am a resurrectionist. But I aim at resurrection beyond your fondest dreams! I am your king! I shall grind the key which opens that strange eon in which death may die! In which all maggots shall pine to extinction; all cemeteries shall become desert and desolate. The fears, powers and strengths wastefully secreted in sterile soil shall burst out like fresh shoots to a peacock-tailed spring!”

  I had backed away—to the further side of fear—and croaked, “If you will have it, then take it.”

  But he stood back, straightening. “Carry it back outside the cemetery walls,” swinging the leather sack gently.

  I could not have touched it again for a mo
on of gold. Instantly the other, whose black coat was flapping around him, went into a transport of fury. He threw the sack to the ground and a dully gleaming torrent of coins spilled out. Over it he frothed, gnashed his teeth, snarled like a beast.

  Then the distant drumming of hoofbeats came pattering on my ears again. Expecting to see infernal legions pour out of the darkness, their fire-breathing hounds trotting alongside, I looked to the west, wondering how long life can endure such alien trespasses; but only one lone rider appeared over the crest of the wall, slowing to a halt The man in black glanced at him only briefly and grated to me again:

  “Move that coffin back outside the walls. Body-snatcher, you know this is consecrated ground!”

  From the folds of his cloak he took a heavy brass amulet incised with tortured hieroglyphs and grisly symbols. It glowed in the darkness, and it was an unhealthy glow without illumination, like that of the coffin itself. Behind us the blue lambence, cold as Malebolge, waxed outward.

  “What work of the devil goes on here?” suddenly rang out of the shadows; the newcomer was coming over the wall.

  “Since when is his work yours, spawn of Ptahil?” the other snarled. “Toil by day if you must, and leave the night for its own!”

  Minatory and determined he turned to me. “Do as I have instructed before the hideous fate which must be yours—” Suddenly both himself and the coffin were enveloped in a dark purple glow, or a purpurescence of blackness. Blots of glimmer seemed to pass from the amulet to the box and a mephitic amethystine mist began to well from it. I could see in the distinct fluorescence that the symbols of the amulet complimented those fixed to the coffin. With no further chance—I was beyond thought—I heard the first feeble scratchings against the lid—from within the coffin.

  The newcomer had leapt into the cemetery and was stalking toward us, the pick from my wagon in his hand. The black intensity of the glow was strengthening and I felt the last of my integrity drain through my soles when he suddenly raised the pick before him, at the face of the moving creature.

  “Demon,” he shouted, “you dare to violate the ordinations of heaven? You dare to counter the judgment of God? Then make ready to join your black master!”

  Beneath his faint tau, the swarming of blue beads slowed and dwindled; and when the desecrator turned toward it, an astonishing expression flitted across his misshapen features. I heard him gasp, “Consecrated ground!” and pushing the amulet back into his coat, he turned his body as if to dash for the wall, but seemed momentarily frozen. In that instant, the pick reversed and fell unerringly to the center of his skull. Its long handle projecting forward like a bascinet, he took several convulsive steps and collapsed asprawl.

  From the moment he had hidden the amulet, the violet light around the coffin had vanished, and the scratching had ceased. With sudden glaring bursts, the blue flicker from the mausoleum began to fade. The other had already bent over the fallen body and withdrawn the amulet, which he carried quickly to the far corner of the walls, and buried with his hands. As it touched the earth, a small jet of blue light burst up, and then he covered it over.

  “Now get this thing back into the fortress which binds it,” he said harshly, returning and helping me—it was rather his strength which seemed enormous—to push and pull the weighty coffin back into the confines of its tomb and even back to its dirt receptacle, where we smoothed over the displaced dirt. As we had first entered the still blue-flickering tomb, I had seen that the locks of hair falling over my eyes, raven at sunset, were white as the moon. But once the hideous object was concealed, the glow departed wholly from the tomb and we were grasped with darkness. It was comforting and familiar.

  As we groped our way out, the other upbraided me in a voice oddly hollow for one so deep, but not at all shaken. “This I hope will teach you the need for living by the laws of heaven. The lie in the garden assured the perpetual growth of such marble gardens as these for all the days of the earth, and that there may be justice among all created things, these seeds must be left to their proper harvesters. This time I will let you go, but if in the future, you forget to align your purposes with those of lawful beings, you will regret it. Come and look.”

  We felt our way outside and stopped by the fallen body. The clouds had thinned slightly and there was enough light to pick out revelatory points.

  Only a shattered skull, pierced by the pick, emerged from clothes rotting and invested with mould. Clots and shreds of flesh and hair still clung to it, but they were verminous with decomposition. Bones similarly leeched protruded from the sleeves and trousers.

  “This may not be the first, but will be the last time, that he has died,” he said, and with one final abjuring look from fiercely yellow eyes, he fell and began gnawing the last scraps of flesh away from the bones.

  BEST OF LUCK by David Drake

  David Drake is assistant town attorney for Chapel Hill, N.C., has a B.A. in history and Latin, was a U.S. Army interrogator in Vietnam, and is well-known for both his science fiction and horror stories which he writes slowly but with consistency, for such markets as Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Superhorror, Whispers, and Year’s Best Horror Stories—where he is now, happily, looked for regularly, and found, by our readers. This story, never before published, draws on his Vietnam experiences for its background, though we would hope that the story itself is imaginary.

  A Russian-designed .51 caliber machine gun fires bullets the size of a woman’s thumb. When a man catches a pair of those in his chest and throat the way Capt. Warden’s radioman did, his luck has run out. A gout of blood sprayed back over Curtis, next man in the column. He glimpsed open air through the RTO’s middle: the hole plowed through the flailing body would have held his fist.

  But there was no time to worry about the dead, no time to do anything but dive out of the line of fire. Capt. Warden’s feral leap had carried him in the opposite direction, out of Curtis’s sight into the gloom of the rubber. Muzzle flashes flickered over the silver tree-trunks as the bunkered machine guns tore up Dog Company.

  Curtis’s lucky piece bit him through the shirt fabric as ha slammed into the smooth earth. The only cover in the ordered plantation came from the trees themselves, and their precise arrangement left three aisles open to any hiding place. The heavy guns ripped through the darkness in short bursts from several locations; there was no way to be safe, nor even to tell from where death would strike.

  Curtis had jerked back the cocking piece of his M16, but he had no target. Blind firing would only call down the attention of the Communist gunners. He felt as naked as the lead in a Juarez floor show, terribly aware of what the big bullets would do if they hit him. He had picked up the lucky Maria Theresa dollar in Taiwan, half as a joke, half in unstated remembrance of men who had been saved when a coin or a Bible turned an enemy slug. But no coin was going to deflect a .51 cal from the straight line it would blast through him.

  Red-orange light bloomed a hundred yards to Curtis’s left as a gun opened up, stuttering a sheaf of lead through the trees. Curtis marked the spot. Stomach tight with fear, he swung his clumsy rifle toward the target and squeezed off a burst.

  The return fire was instantaneous and from a gun to the right, unnoticed until that moment. The tree Curtis crouched beside exploded into splinters across the base, stunning impacts that the soldier felt rather than heard. He dug his fingers into the dirt, trying to drag himself still lower and screaming mentally at the pressure of the coin which kept him that much closer to the crashing bullets. The rubber tree was sagging, its twelve-inch bole sawn through by the fire, but nothing mattered to Curtis except the raving death a bullet’s width above his head.

  The firing stopped. Curtis clenched his fists, raised his head a fraction from the ground. A single, spiteful round banged from the first bunker. The bullet ticked the rim of Curtis’s helmet, missing his flesh but snapping his head back with the force of a thrown anvil. He was out cold when the tree toppled slowly across his boots
.

  There were whispers in the darkness, but all he could see were blue and amber streaks on the inside of his mind. He tried to move, then gasped in agony as the pinioning mass shifted against his twisted ankles.

  There were whispers in the darkness, and Curtis could guess what they were. Dog Company had pulled back. Now the VC were slipping through the trees, stripping the dead of their weapons and cutting the throats of the wounded. Wherever Curtis’s rifle had been flung, it was beyond reach of his desperate fingers.

  Something slurped richly near Curtis on his right. He turned his face toward the sound, but its origin lurked in the palpable blackness. There was a slushy, ripping noise from the same direction, settling immediately into a rhythmic gulping. Curtis squinted uselessly. The moon was full, but the clouds were as solid as steel curtains.

  Two Vietnamese were approaching from his left side. The scuff of their tire-soled sandals paused momentarily in a liquid trill of speech, then resumed. A flashlight played over the ground, its narrow beam passing just short of Curtis’s left hand. The gulping noise stopped.

  “Ong vo?” whispered one of the VC, and the light flashed again. There was a snarl and a scream and the instant red burst of an AK-47 blazing like a flare. The radioman’s body had been torn open. Gobbets of lung and entrails, dropped by the feasting thing, were scattered about the corpse. But Curtis’s real terror was at what the muzzle flash caught in midleap—teeth glinting white against bloody crimson, the mask of a yellow-eyed beast more savage than a nightmare and utterly undeterred by the bullets punching across it. And the torso beneath the face was dressed in American jungle fatigues.