The Year's Best Horror Stories 6

by Gerald W. Page (Ed. )

  Anson looked bewildered. He dropped onto his knees in front of her and tried to grip her shoulders. She shook his hands away.

  “Marilyn, I’m sorry. I asked you to lunch because you called me Jordan, just like you let me drive you home because I resembled him.”

  “ ‘Marilyn’? What happened to ‘Miss Odau’?”

  “Never mind that.” He tried to grip her shoulders again, and she shook him off. “Is my crime greater than yours? If I’ve spoiled your memory of the man who fathered me, it’s because of the bitterness I’ve carried against him for as long as I can remember. My intention wasn’t to hurt you. The ‘other woman’ that my mother always used to talk about, even after she married Anson, has always been an abstract to me. Revenge wasn’t my motive. Curiosity, maybe. But not revenge. Please believe me.”

  “You have no imagination, Nicholas.”

  He looked at her searchingly. “What does that mean?”

  “It means that if you’d only . . . Why should I explain this to you? I want you to get dressed and take my car and drive back to your motel. You can drop it off at Summerstone tomorrow when you come to get your rental car. Give the keys to one of the girls, I don’t want to see you.”

  “Out into the cold, huh?”

  “Please go, Nicholas. I might resort to screaming if you don’t.”

  He rose, went into the other room, and a few minutes later descended the carpeted stairs without saying a word. Marilyn heard the flaring of her Nova’s engine and a faint grinding of gears. After that, she heard nothing but the wind in the skeletal elm trees.

  Without rising from the floor in her second upstairs bedroom, she sang a lullaby to the fossil child in her arms. “Dapples and grays,” she crooned. “Pintos and bays, / All the pretty little horses . . ."

  It was almost seven o’clock of the following evening before Anson returned her key case to Cissy Campbell at the cash computer up front. Marilyn didn’t hear him or see him, and she was happy that she had been in her office when he at last came by. The episode was over. She hoped that she never saw Anson again, even if he was truly Jordan’s son—and she believed that Anson understood her wishes.

  Four hours later she pulled into the carport at Brookmist and crossed the parking lot to her small patio. The redwood gate was standing open. She pulled it shut behind her and set its latch. Then, inside, she felt briefly on the verge of swooning because there was an odor in the air like that of a man’s cologne, a fragrance Anson had worn. For a moment she considered running back onto the patio and shouting for assistance. If Anson was upstairs waiting for her, she’d be a fool to go up there alone. She’d be a fool to go up there at all. Who could read the mind of an enigma like Anson?

  He’s not up there waiting for you, Marilyn told herself. He’s been here and gone.

  But why?

  Your baby, Marilyn—see to your baby! Who knows what Anson might have done for spite? Who knows what sick destruction he might have—

  “Oh, God!” Marilyn cried aloud. She ran up the stairs unmindful of the intensifying smell of cologne and threw the door to her second bedroom open. The wicker bassinet was not in its corner but in the very center of the room. She ran to it and clutched its side, very nearly tipping it over.

  Unharmed, her and Jordan’s tiny child lay on the satin bolster she had made for him.

  Marilyn stood over the baby trying to catch her breath. Then she moved his bed back into the corner where it belonged. Not until the following morning was the smell of that musky cologne dissipated enough for her to forget that Anson—or someone—had been in her house. Because she had no evidence of theft, she rationalized that the odor had drifted into her apartment through the ventilation system from the townhouse next to hers.

  The fact that the bassinet had been moved she conveniently put out of her mind.

  Two weeks passed. Business at Creighton’s Corner Boutique was brisk, and if Marilyn thought of Nicholas Anson at all, it was to console herself with the thought that by now he was back in Los Angeles. A continent away. But on the last weekend before Christmas, a Sunday, Jane Sidney told Marilyn that she thought she had seen Anson going through the center of one of Summerstone’s largest department stores carrying his samples case. He looked tan and happy, Jane said.

  “Good. But if he shows up here, I’m not in. If I’m waiting on a customer and he comes by, you or Terri will have to take over for me. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  But later that afternoon the telephone in her office rang, and when she answered it, the voice coming through the receiver was Anson’s.

  “Don’t hang up, Miss Odau. I knew you wouldn’t see me in person so I’ve been reduced to telephoning.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Take a walk down the mall toward Davner’s. Take a walk down the mall and meet me there.”

  “Why would I do that? I thought that’s why you phoned.”

  Anson hung up.

  You can wait forever then, she told him. The phone didn’t ring again, and she busied herself with the onion-skin order forms and bills of lading. It was hard to pay attention to them, though.

  At last she got up and told Jane she was going to stroll down the mall to stretch her legs. The crowd was shoulder to shoulder. She saw old people being pushed along in wheelchairs and, as if they were dogs or monkeys, small children in leather harnesses. There were girls whose legs had been painted with Liquid Sheers, and young men in Russian hats and low-heeled shoes who made no secret of their appreciation of these girls’ legs. The benches lining the shaft at the center of the promenade were all occupied, and the people sitting on them looked fatigued and irritable.

  A hundred or so yards ahead of her, in front of the jewelry store called Davner’s, there was a Santa Claus and live reindeer.

  She kept walking.

  An odd display caught Marilyn’s eye. She did a double-take and halted amid the traffic surging in both directions around her.

  “Hey,” a man said. He shoved past.

  The shop window to her right was lined with eight or ten chalk-white effigies not much longer than her hand. They were eyeless. A small light played on them like the revolving blue strobe on a police vehicle. A sign in the window said Stone Children for Christmas, from Latter-Day Novelties. Marilyn put a hand to her mouth and made a gagging sound that no one else on the mall heeded. She spun around. It seemed that Summerstone itself was swaying under her. Across from the gift shop, on one of the display cases of the book store located there, were a dozen more of these minute statuettes. Tiny fingers, tiny feet, tiny eyeless faces. She looked down the collapsing mall and saw still another window displaying replicas of her and Jordan’s baby. And in the windows where they weren’t displayed, they were endlessly reflected.

  Tiny fingers, tiny feet, tiny eyeless faces.

  “Anson!” Marilyn shouted hoarsely, trying to find something to hang on to. “Anson, God damn you! God damn you!” She rushed on the gift-shop window and broke it with her fists. Then, not knowing what else to do, she withdrew her hands—with their worn oxblood nail polish—and held them bleeding above her head. A woman screamed, and the crowd fell back from her aghast.

  In front of Davner’s, only three or four stores away now, Nicholas Anson was stroking the head of a live reindeer. When he saw Marilyn, he gave her a friendly boyish smile.

  THERE’S A LONG, LONG TRAIL A-WINDING by Russell Kirk

  Russell Kirk’s ghostly writings have included the novel Old House of Fear (1961), and the short story collection The Surly Sullen Bell (1962). He is a lecturer and writer on the topics of education and contemporary conservative thought, editor of the quarterly University Bookman, and writes the “From the Academy” column in National Review. He was lured back to fiction writing by the indefatigable Kirby McCauley, who used the following story to grace his anthology, Frights. And grace the book it did, walking away with a 1977 World Fantasy Award as Best Short Fiction. And no wonder . . .

/>   Then he said unto the disciples, It is impossible but that offenses will come; but woe unto him, through whom they come!

  It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.

  —Luke xvii: 1, 2

  Along the vast empty six-lane highway, the blizzard swept as if it meant to swallow all the sensual world. Frank Sarsfield, massive though he was, scudded like a heavy kite before that overwhelming wind. On his thick white hair the snow clotted and tried to form a cap; the big flakes so swirled round his Viking face that he scarcely could make out the barren country on either side of the road.

  Somehow he must get indoors. Racing for sanctuary, the last automobile had swept unheeding past his thumb two hours ago, bound doubtless for the country town some twenty miles eastward. Westward, among the hills, the highway must be blocked by snowdrifts now. This was an unkind twelfth of January. “Blow, blow, thou Winter wind!” Twilight being almost upon him, soon he must find lodging or else freeze stiff by the roadside.

  He had walked more than thirty miles that day. Having in his pocket the sum of twenty-nine dollars and thirty cents, he could have put up at either of the two motels he had passed, had they not been closed for the winter. Well, as always, he was decently dressed—a good wash-and-wear suit and a neat black overcoat. As always, he was shaven and clean and civil-spoken. Surely some farmer or villager would take him in, if he knocked with a ten-dollar bill in his fist. People sometimes mistook him for a stranded well-to-do motorist, and sometimes he took the trouble to undeceive them.

  But where to apply? This was depopulated country, its forests gone to the sawmills long before, its mines worked out. The freeway ran through the abomination of desolation. He did not prefer to walk the freeways, but on such a day as this there were no cars on the lesser roads.

  He had run away from a hardscrabble New Hampshire farm when he was fourteen, and ever since then, except for brief working intervals, he had been either on the roads or in the jails. Now his sixtieth birthday was imminent. There were few men bigger than Frank Sarsfield, and none more solitary. Where was a friendly house?

  For a few moments the rage of the snow slackened; he stared about. Away to the left, almost a mile distant, he made out a grim high clump of buildings on rising ground, a wall enclosing them; the roof of the central building was gone. Sarsfield grinned, knowing what that complex must be: a derelict prison. He had lodged in prisons altogether too many nights.

  His hand sheltering his eyes from the north wind, he looked to his left. Down in a snug valley, beside a narrow river and broad marshes, he could perceive a village or hamlet: a white church tower, three or four commercial buildings, some little houses, beyond them a park of bare maple trees. The old highway must have run through or near this forgotten place, but the new freeway had sealed it off. There was no sign of a freeway exit to the settlement; probably it could be reached by car only along some detouring country lane. In such a little decayed town there would be folk willing to accept him for the sake of his proffered ten dollars—or, better, simply for charity’s sake and talk with an amusing stranger who could recite every kind of poetry.

  He scrambled heavily down the embankment. At this point, praise be, no tremendous wire fence kept the haughty new highway inviolable. His powerful thighs took him through the swelling drifts, though his heart pounded as the storm burst upon him afresh.

  The village was more distant than he had thought. He passed panting through old fields half grown up to poplar and birch. A little to the west he noticed what seemed to be old mine workings, with fragments of brick buildings. He clambered upon an old railroad bed, its rails and ties taken up; perhaps the new freeway had dealt the final blow to the rails. Here the going was somewhat easier.

  Mingled with the wind’s shriek, did he hear a church bell now? Could they be holding services at the village in this weather? Presently he came to a burnt-out little railway depot, on its platform signboard still the name “Anthonyville.” Now he walked on a street of sorts, but no car tracks or footprints sullying the snow.

  Anthonyville Free Methodist Church hulked before him. Indeed the bell was swinging, and now and again faintly ringing in the steeple; but it was the wind’s mockery, a knell for the derelict town of Anthonyville. The church door was slamming in the high wind, flying open again, and slamming once more, like a perpetual-motion machine, the glass being gone from the church windows. Sarsfield trudged past the skeletal church.

  The front of Emmons’ General Store was boarded up, and so was the front of what may have been a drugstore. The village hall was a wreck. The school may have stood upon those scanty foundations which protruded from the snow. And from no chimney of the decrepit cottages and cabins along Main Street—the only street—did any smoke rise.

  Sarsfield never had seen a deader village. In an upper window of what looked like a livery stable converted into a garage, a faded cardboard sign could be read:

  REMEMBER YOUR FUTURE

  BACK THE TOWNSEND PLAN

  Was no one at all left here, not even some gaunt old couple managing on Social Security? He might force his way into one of the stores or cottages—though on principle and prudence he generally steered clear of possible charges of breaking and entering—but that would be cold comfort. In poor Anthonyville there must remain some living soul.

  His mittened hands clutching his red ears, Sarsfield had plodded nearly to the end of Main Street. Anthonyville was Endsville, he saw now: river and swamp and new highway cut it off altogether from the rest of the frozen world, except for the drift-obliterated country road that twisted southward, Lord knew whither. He might count himself lucky to find a stove, left behind in some shack, that he could feed with boards ripped from walls.

  Main Street ended at that grove or park of old maples. Just a sugarbush, like those he had tapped in his boyhood under his father's rough command? No: had the trees not been leafless, he might not have discerned the big stone house among the trees, the only substantial building remaining to Anthonyville. But see it he did for one moment, before the blizzard veiled it from him. There were stone gateposts, too, and a bronze tablet set into one of them. Sarsfield brushed the snowflakes from the inscription: “Tamarack House.”

  Stumbling along the maples toward this promise, he almost collided with a tall glacial boulder. A similar boulder rose a few feet to his right, the pair of them halfway between gateposts and house. There was a bronze tablet on this boulder, too, and he paused to read it:

  Sacred to the memory of

  JEROME ANTHONY

  July 4, 1836—January 14, 1915

  Brigadier-General in the Corps of Engineers,

  Army of the Republic founder of this town

  architect of Anthonyville State Prison

  who died as he had lived, with honor

  “And there will I keep you forever,

  Yes, forever and a day,

  Till the wall shall crumble in ruin,

  And moulder in dust away.”

  There’s an epitaph for a prison architect, Sarsfield thought. It was too bitter an evening for inspecting the other boulder, and he hurried toward the portico of Tamarack House. This was a very big house indeed, a bracketed house, built all of squared fieldstone with beautiful glints to the masonry. A cupola topped it.

  Once, come out of the cold into a public library, Sarsfield had pored through a picture book about American architectural styles. There was a word for this sort of house. Was it “Italianate”? Yes, it rose in his memory—he took pride in no quality except his power of recollection. Yes, that was the word. Had he visited this house before? He could not account for a vague familiarity. Perhaps there had been a photograph of this particular house in that library book.

  Every window was heavily shuttered, and no smoke rose from any of the several chimneys. Sarsfield went up the stone steps to confront the oaken front door.

  It was a formidable door,
but it seemed as if at some time it had been broken open, for long ago a square of oak with a different grain had been mortised into the area round lock and keyhole. There was a gigantic knocker with a strange face worked upon it. Sarsfield knocked repeatedly.

  No one answered. Conceivably the storm might have made his pounding inaudible to any occupants, but who could spend the winter in a shuttered house without fires? Another bronze plaque was screwed to the door:

  TAMARACK HOUSE

  Property of the Anthony Family Trust

  Guarded by Protective Service

  Sarsfield doubted the veracity of the last line. He made his way round to the back. No one answered those back doors, either, and they, too, were locked.

  But presently he found what he had hoped for: an oldfangled slanting cellar door, set into the foundations. It was not wise to enter without permission, but at least he might accomplish it without breaking. His fingers, though clumsy, were strong as the rest of him. After much trouble and with help from the Boy Scout knife that he carried, he pulled the pins out of the cellar door’s three hinges and scrambled down into the darkness. With the passing of the years, he had become something of a jailhouse lawyer—though those young inmates bored him with their endless chatter about Miranda and Escobedo. And now he thought of the doctrine called “defense of necessity.” If caught, he could say that self-preservation from freezing is the first necessity; besides, they might not take him for a bum.

  Faint light down the cellar steps—he would replace the hinge-pins later—showed him an inner door at the foot. That door was hooked, though hooked only. With a sigh, Sarsfield put his shoulder to the door; the hook clattered to the stone floor inside; and he was master of all he surveyed.