The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 10 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  “Come on, Jack. I got beds inside. Things look pretty messed up, but I still got beds.”

  Licorice and beer, cigarettes and azaleas. Taylor lifts his head and stares around the yard. Fragrance has come back to the azaleas, but was that the way they used to smell? Like garbage and exhaust and lettuce gone to black soup at the back of the refrigerator? Shadows shift across the yard and shift again, and he supposes the sun must be rising awfully fast to create such a dramatic change. Light suddenly knifes his eyes, a crack in his yellow bottle. “Jack? I can’t stay out here, Jack.”

  He rises and goes to his friend, who stares up at him with wide eyes and a nosebleed, his face more yellow than Taylor’s morning. “Jack!” His mouth is open but he doesn’t say anything. Taylor can see that his friend’s gums have been bleeding, and there’s a web of bloody vomit on the chin. “Jack,” he whispers softly, but his friend is gone into a yellow fever dream. The past is a monster, Taylor boy. “Damn, Jack. You’re number six,” he says, and staggers back. Something’s here, he thinks,something vast and old as the river.

  The house reels behind him, and when he turns around he throws his hands up over his face, sure it’s going to topple onto him. Windows swim in amber heat. Shingles flutter away like paper. Out of the door a boundless shade like a nicotine stain oozes across the missing boards and down the steps, through the weeds and out the gate, a faint hint of dead fish and stagnant water in its wake.

  “It’s slipping away, Jack, it’s slipping away!” he cries and stumbles after, hands held out like a needy child.

  But sometimes it just gets away from you. Sometimes it all just slips away. And chasing the past is like trying to recapture the breath that’s just left you, stinking of loss and regret, now floating out beyond the gate, now out on the river, making its own way to the sea.

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  * * * *

  DENNIS ETCHISON

  Inside the Cackle Factory

  Dennis Etchison is a winnerof both the World Fantasy Award and the British Fantasy Award. His first two short story collections, The Dark Country and Red Dreams, are currently back in print from EMR Books, and a new (fourth) collection is due from DreamHaven, illustrated by J.K. Potter. He has also recently compiled the art book Horror of the 20th Century for Collectors Press, and his Hollywood noir novel Blue Screen is forthcoming.

  About the following story, Etchison explains: “One evening in 1997, my wife Kris and I ran into Peter and Dana Atkins at Dark Delicacies bookstore, a favourite haunt of horror writers in Southern California. The occasion was a street fair sponsored by the local merchants along Burbank’s Magnolia Boulevard. At some point Dana and I decided to search out a shop called It’s a Wrap, featuring clothes worn only once or twice in movies and TV shows filmed at the studios nearby, much of it with expensive designer labels and offered for re-sale at ridiculously low prices. There were rumours of Armani suits for $150.

  “Before we got there, a woman with a clipboard sidled up to us and asked if we would like to attend the screening of a new television pilot. Dana had already spotted It’s a Wrap. I needed her advice about the women’s clothing inside so that I’d know whether to go back for Kris. ‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘It pays fifty dollars,’ said the woman. That sounded like a painless way to cover the cost of some Oscar-winning threads. We both signed on, and a month later I found myself in a theatre owned by a market research company. The dreary sitcom I saw that day was soon forgotten, and the cash I received was quickly squandered, but certain details remained with me. The two-way mirrors, for example. The hi-tech monitoring equipment I glimpsed on the way out. And the unreadable expressions of the young women who worked at the testing facility. What sort of person, I wondered, takes such a job - and why? Was it only for the salary? Or were there were other, more secret reasons?

  “Dana never followed up, and her husband, who is a horror writer, wasn’t offered the gig. A pity. I can’t guess what story he might have written, but I’m sure it would have been a good one, very different from mine and worth a lot more than fifty bucks. The reasons to be afraid are all around, if you make it your business to look for such things.”

  * * * *

  U

  ncle Miltie did not look very happy. Someone had left a half-smoked cigar on his head, and now the wrapper began to come unglued in the rain. A few seconds more and dark stains dripped over his slick hair, ran down his cheeks and collected in his open mouth, the bits of chewed tobacco clinging like wet sawdust to a beaver’s front teeth.

  “Time,” announced Marty, clicking his stopwatch.

  Lisa Anne tried to get his attention from across the room, but it was too late. She saw him note the hour and minute on his clipboard.

  “Please pass your papers to the right,” he said, “and one of our monitors will pick them up . . .”

  On the other side of the glass doors, Sid Caesar was even less amused by the logjam of cigarette butts on his crushed top hat. As the water rose they began to float, one disintegrating filter sloshing over the brim and catching in the knot of his limp string tie.

  She forced herself to look away and crossed in front of the chairs to get to Marty, scanning the rows again. There, in the first section: an empty seat with a pair of Ray-Bans balanced on the armrest.

  “Sixteen,” she whispered into his ear.

  “Morning, Lisa.” He was about to make his introductory spiel before opening the viewing theater, while the monitors retrieved and sorted the questionnaires. “Thought you took the day off.”

  “Number Sixteen is missing.”

  He nodded at the hallway. “Check the men’s room.”

  “I think he’s outside,” she said, “smoking.”

  “Then he’s late. Send him home.”

  As she hurried toward the doors, the woman on the end of row four added her own questionnaire to the pile and held them out to Lisa Anne.

  “Excuse me,” the woman said, “but can I get a drink of water?”

  Lisa Anne accepted the stack of stapled pages from her.

  “If you’ll wait just a moment -”

  “But I have to take a pill.”

  “Down the hall, next to the restrooms.”

  “Where?”

  She handed the forms to one of the other monitors.

  “Angie, would you show this lady to the drinking fountain?”

  Then she went on to the doors. The hinges squeaked and a stream of water poured down the glass and over the open toes of her new shoes.

  Oh great, she thought.

  She took the shoes off and stood under the awning while she peered through the blowing rain. The walkway along the front of the AmiDex building was empty.

  “Hello?”

  Bob Hope ignored her, gazing wryly across the courtyard in the direction of the adjacent apartment complex, while Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore leaned so close to each other that their heads almost touched, about to topple off the bronze pedestals. They had not been used for ashtrays yet today, though their nameplates were etched with the faint white tracks of bird droppings. She hoped the rain would wash them clean.

  “Are you out here? Mister . . .?”

  She had let Angie check them in this morning, so she did not even know Number Sixteen’s name. She glanced around the courtyard, saw no movement and was about to go back inside, when she noticed someone in the parking lot.

  It was a man wearing a wet trenchcoat.

  So Number Sixteen had lost patience and decided to split. He did not seem to be looking for his car, however, but walked rapidly between the rows on his way to - what? The apartments beyond, apparently. Yet there was no gate in this side of the wrought-iron fence.

  As she watched, another man appeared as if from nowhere. He had on a yellow raincoat and a plastic-covered hat, the kind worn by policeman or security guards. As far as she knew the parking lot was unattended. She could not imagine where had he come from, unless there was an opening in the fence, after all, and the guard had come
through from the other side. He stepped out to block the way. She tried to hear what they were saying but it was impossible from this distance. There was a brief confrontation, with both men gesturing broadly, until the one in the trenchcoat gave up and walked away.

  Lisa Anne shook the water out of her shoes, put them on and turned back to the glass doors.

  Marty was already into his speech. She had not worked here long enough to have it memorized, but she knew he was about to mention the cash they would receive after the screening and discussion. Some of them may have been lured here by the glamor, the chance to attend a sneak preview of next season’s programs, but without the promise of money there was no way to be sure anyone would show up.

  The door opened a few inches and Angie stuck her head out.

  “Will you get in here, girl?”

  “Coming,” said Lisa Anne.

  She looked around one more time.

  Now she saw a puff of smoke a few yards down, at the entrance to Public Relations.

  “Is anybody there?” she called.

  An eyeball showed itself at the side of the building.

  Maybe this is the real Number Sixteen, she thought. Trying to get in that last nicotine fix.

  “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to come in now . . .”

  She waited to see where his cigarette butt would fall. The statues were waiting, too. As he came toward her his hands were empty. What did he do, she wondered, eat it?

  She recognized him. He had been inside, drinking coffee with the others. He was a few years older than Lisa Anne, late twenties or early thirties, good-looking in a rugged, unkempt way, with his hair tied back in a ponytail and a drooping moustache, flannel shirt, tight jeans and steel-toed boots. A construction worker, she thought, a carpenter, some sort of manual labor. Why bother to test him? He probably watched football games and not much else, if he watched TV at all.

  As he got closer she smelled something sweet and pungent. The unmistakable odor of marijuana lingered in his clothes. So that’s what he was up to, she thought. A little attitude adjustment. I could use some of that myself right about now.

  She held out her hand to invite him in from the rain, and felt her hair collapse into wet strings over her ears. She pushed it back self-consciously.

  “You don’t want to miss the screening,” she said, forcing a smile, “do you?”

  “What’s it about?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Honest. They don’t tell me anything.”

  The door swung open again and Angie rolled her eyes.

  “Okay, okay,” said Lisa Anne.

  “He can sign up for the two o’clock, if he wants.”

  Number Sixteen shook his head. “No way. I gotta be at work.”

  “It’s all right, Angie.”

  “But he missed the audience prep . . .”

  Lisa Anne looked past her. Marty was about finished. The test subjects were already shifting impatiently, bored housewives and tourists and retirees with nothing better to do, recruited from sidewalks and shopping malls and the lines in front of movie theaters, all of them here to view the pilot for a new series that would either make it to the network schedule or be sent back for retooling, based on their responses. There was a full house for this session.

  Number Sixteen had not heard the instructions, so she had no choice. She was supposed to send him home.

  But if the research was to mean anything, wasn’t it important that every demographic be represented? The fate of the producers and writers who had labored for months or even years to get their shows this far hung in the balance, to be decided by a theoretical cross-section of the viewing public. Not everyone liked sitcoms about young urban professionals and their wacky misadventures at the office. They can’t, she thought. I don’t. But who ever asked me?

  “Look,” said Number Sixteen, “I drove a long ways to get here. You gotta at least pay me.”

  “He’s late,” said Angie. She ignored him, speaking as though he were not there. “He hasn’t even filled out his questionnaire.”

  “Yes, he has,” said Lisa Anne and ushered him inside.

  The subjects were on their feet now, shuffling into the screening room. Lisa Anne went to the check-in table.

  “Did you get Number Sixteen’s?” she asked.

  The monitors had the forms laid out according to rows and were about to insert the piles into manila envelopes before taking them down the hall.

  Marty came up behind her. “Which row, Miss Rayme?” he said officiously.

  “Four, I think.’’’

  “You think?” Marty looked at the man in the plaid shirt and wrinkled his nose, as if someone in the room had just broken wind. “If his form’s not here -”

  “I know where it is,” Lisa Anne told him and slipped behind the table.

  She flipped through the pile for row four, allowing several of the questionnaires to slide onto the floor. When she knelt to pick them up, she pulled a blank one from the carton.

  “Here.” She stood, took a pencil and jotted 16 in the upper right-hand corner. “He forgot to put his number on it.”

  “We’re running late, Lees . . .” Marty whispered.

  She slid the forms into an envelope. “Then I’d better get these to the War Room.”

  On the way down the hall, she opened the envelope and withdrew the blank form, checking off random answers to the multiple-choice quiz on the first page. It was pointless, anyway, most of it a meaningless query into personal habits and lifestyle, only a smokescreen for the important questions about income and product preferences that came later. She dropped off her envelope along with the other monitors, and a humorless assistant in a short-sleeved white shirt and rimless glasses carried the envelopes from the counter to an inner room, where each form would be tallied and matched to the numbered seats in the viewing theater. On her way back, Marty intercepted her.

  “Break time,” he said.

  “No, thanks.” She drew him to one side, next to the drinking fountain. “I got one for you. S.H.A.M.”

  “M.A.S.H,” he said immediately

  “Okay, try this. Finders.”

  He pondered for a second. “Friends?”

  “You’re good,” she said.

  “No, I’m not. You’re easy. Well, time to do my thing.”

  At the other end of the hall, the reception room was empty and the doors to the viewing theater were already closed.

  “Which thing is that?” she said playfully.

  “That thing I do, before they fall asleep.”

  “Ooh, can I watch?”

  She propped her back against the wall and waited for him to move in, to pin her there until she could not get away unless she dropped to her knees and crawled between his legs.

  “Not today, Lisa.”

  “How come?”

  “This one sucks. Big time.”

  “What’s the title?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then how do you know it sucks?”

  “Hey, it’s not my fault, okay?”

  For some reason he had become evasive, defensive. His face was now a smooth mask, the skin pulled back tautly, the only prominent features his teeth and nervous, shining eyes. Like a shark’s face, she thought. A residue of deodorant soap rose to the surface of his skin and vaporized, expanding outward on waves of body heat. She drew a breath and knew that she needed to be somewhere else, away from him.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  He avoided her eyes and ducked into the men’s room.

  What did I say? she wondered, and went on to the reception area.

  A list of subjects for the next session was already laid out on the table, ninety minutes early. The other monitors were killing time in the chairs, chatting over coffee and snacks from the machines.

  Lisa Anne barely knew them. This was only her second week and she was not yet a part of their circle. One had been an editorial assistant at the L.A. Weekly, two were junior college students, and the o
thers had answered the same classified ad she had seen in the trades. She considered crashing the conversation. It would be a chance to rest her feet and dry out. The soggy new shoes still pinched her toes and the suit she’d had to buy for the job was damp and steamy and scratched her skin like a hair shirt. She felt ridiculous in this uniform, but it was necessary to show people like Marty that she could play by their rules, at least until she got what she needed. At home she would probably be working on yet another sculpture this morning, trying to get the face right, with a gob of clay in one hand and a joint in the other and the stereo cranked up to the max. But living that way hadn’t gotten her any closer to the truth. She couldn’t put it off any longer. There were some things she had to find out or she would go mad.