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

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  There was a silence then, broken by Hughes asking, “Is this your question, Curator? ‘Are these two pictures of the same man?’ Is that it?” Larraby said, yes, that was it. Was asked to show both slides side by side. Did so. Hughes then said he thought they might well be. “For example, that drooping - Oh, excuse me, Dr Budworth.” But Budworth told him to go on. “- that drooping eyelid. And then you observe the crease in the ear lobe. Can you see that really very slight scar on the cheekbone, on the opposite side from the drooping eyelid? And, ah, of course in the, I assume, post-mortem photo, some of the teeth are exposed, and you see that the left canine is crooked and protrudes. Of course in the one in uniform, he has his mouth closed, but there is still a slight protrusion just over where that canine would be.

  “Now, these are technical observations, though not very technical, and of course my simple guess would have been anyway that it is the same person, some years apart, though I wouldn’t offhand guess how many. Not more than ten, I’d say. Maybe even five, or a bit less, since . . . war being war, you know . . .”

  The “post-mortem” photo, a perfectly correct description, certainly, had been cropped in the copying process, and it was not evident that the head was separate from the torso. If Hughes suspected anything, Hughes was not saying. To Bagnell, trying to put aside what he knew, merely the difference in the photographic techniques, more than a century apart, was obvious.

  Preston Budworth’s comments were more technical, but he came to the same conclusion. “Of course I would want to make measurements and enlarge the pictures even more, on as close to even-scale as possible, before I’d sign my name to anything, not that I’m going to, anyway. Historical detective work is lots of fun, of course, and nobody waiting to sue you for malpractice. Well. I wouldn’t want to ask where you got that ghouly-looking one from.”

  Promptly, Hughes said, “I would. I will. Where?”

  But they did not tell him. Not yet.

  * * * *

  Military historians identified uniform coat and badges as those of the 23rd Patriot Rifles. Phone calls in all directions finally produced Charles O’Neill Sturtevant, Col., USA (Ret.), who had an enormous collection of Civil War photographs. And -

  “Mind you, young man, it’s aloan. Your balls are in bond for it.”

  “Yes, Colonel, of course, any time you like, sir,” babbled Bagnell, scarcely knowing what he was saying.

  On that red-letter day, against what awesome odds, Ed Bagnell found what he was hoping for: printed off a cracked wet-plate, though only slightly cracked, the likenesses of three young men, frozen stolid, hands on knees; and on the back the signatures -two florid and scrawly/scrolly, one awkward and crammed -Corporal W.M. Ewing. Private Elwen Michaels. Private Ephraim Mackilwhit.

  Now for the first time, there was a name.

  * * * *

  The 23rd Patriot Rifles had been enlisted in Gainsboro, as far to the South as it was perhaps possible for a Northern town to be, and there Bagnell went as fast as was consistent with speed laws, and energy consistent with small packets of crackers-and-cheese sold in gas stations. In the Gainsboro phone book he pushed a restless finger down the columns in search of people named Mackilwhit.

  He found not one.

  That is, the current one contained not one. At the public library, in the reference room: “Out-of-date telephone directories? Nooo. We don’t keep them.”

  “Oh . . .” Sinking voice, sinking feeling.

  “But I’ll tell you who does. Mr Rodeheaver does. I’ll write down the address for you.”

  Homer would have felt at home in the old room where Mr Rodeheaver worked. Bagnell felt that if he had wanted the directory for Fusby-le-Mud, 1901, it would have been there. Mr Rodeheaver perhaps collected them, perhaps compiled mailing lists, or traced missing heirs. Bagnell didn’t care. Mr Rodeheaver was getting on in years and he listened patiently; then he asked, “What’s it worth to you?”

  “Worth -?”

  “Is it worth five dollars?”

  Mr Rodeheaver began to pull down old phone books and pile them on his dusty desk; beckoned Bagnell to come look. Waited while he did. Ceasing three years before, but as far back from then, farther back than Bagnell cared to go, a Mrs Lambert Mackilwhit had lived at 269 Longfellow Avenue. Bagnell copied the address, handed the man a crumpled five-dollar bill.

  “Well, there’s lunch,” said Mr Rodeheaver.

  Did she still live there? Had she died three years ago? Had she just given up her phone, there being too few left alive to call her? Or, perhaps, there had been some difficulty about a bill, and she had let her listing lapse, and had a phone installed in the name of a neighbor, friend, or . . . well, probably not. But. Hurt to try? Might find a lead. Leads had been found, one after another.

  Two-sixty-nine was in rather better shape than the other houses, which had all once been neat and bright . . . long ago . . . and Mrs Mackilwhit lived in a little room on the top floor, whither he was directed by a series of ageless women in cotton house-dresses, of whom each seemed to have three children and one in utero. But Mrs Mackilwhit was not ageless. Mrs. Mackilwhit was very aged indeed, and her skin hung in heavy flaps.

  Did she know of an Ephraim Mackilwhit, who had served in the Civil War? A silence. The room smelled, rather, but of nothing worse than old people’s flesh and of cabbage, and perhaps it was only the neighbors’ cabbage. The room contained what was left of her life as it had drawn in upon itself, decade after decade; there was hardly room enough to move, although no doubt the woman who lived there had moved enough. She sat in her chair and she did not move now, and she stared at nothing which other people could see.

  Silence. Then - “He disappeared,” she said at last. “Lambert’s, my husband’s aunts, used to speak of him. He was the black sheep of the family. He went away and he never came back. Yes. He disappeared.”

  Bagnell had brought another picture along, of another group of soldiers, as a sort of control, and now he put both in her hands. “Might you recognize a family resemblance?”

  She pushed one away after a glance, but the other one she looked at long and long. “A family resemblance. Yes. The one at the end. On the right. He has Lambert’s look. Yes. He has Lambert’s look.” And, very silently, her slow tears rained along the ruined landscape of her face.

  A family resemblance. Is not Ephraim a beloved child? And what had he come to? A thing in three boxes: shrivelled, withered, broken, and foul. But now at last, thank God forever dead.

  * * * *

  Bagnell to Larraby: “When was Ephraim Mackilwhit. . . that is, where was the Paper-Man found? Come clean.”

  “Basement storeroom, in an old private girls’ school in Gainsboro, couple years ago. Mustee was picking up a little extra money there as a weekend relief watchman,” said Larraby.

  Thither went Dr Claire Zimmerman, at Bagnell’s request, to interview the headmistress, Mrs. Sidwell:

  “Yes, this is one of the oldest houses in town. It is well-preserved, and consequently required no major restorations. It has made an excellent private school building.” Mrs Sidwell stopped and thought. “Do I recall anything odd happening a couple of years ago? Well, there was a ... I suppose the word I have to use is prank. It’s difficult to say when a prank gets out of hand and becomes . . . something more. Dr Rose Bennett asked me into her Advanced English class during a morning break. She said there was something on the blackboard she didn’t like. Of course I expected what we used to call a naughty word. Are there anymore naughty words? I haven’t quite grown used to hearing sweet girls talking like sailors. Well, no, it wasn’t a naughty word. The words Nothing but Death were written on the blackboard, and the writing was odd . . . somehow wrong. The next day the same words were written on a blackboard in room A-6, and the following morning, there it was again. Security and maintenance promised to keep a close watch on room A-6, and the next day the words Nothing but Death appeared in room C-12! When that happened, everybody began to get nervous. Well, we ph
otographed the words, sponged all the blackboards, and read the riot act to security and maintenance, but still it appeared. Of course you’d like to see it . . .” Mrs Sidwell rummaged in a drawer and handed an enlarged photograph to Claire, who studied it intently.

  “Then Rose Bennett remembered that those were Jane Austen’s dying words. But the handwriting bore no resemblance to samples of Jane Austen’s, and we weren’t even teaching Jane Austen that year. So our school was being haunted by a spectre with a good knowledge of early 19th century English literature. But who?”

  “Judging from the cramped and wavering writing, it must have been somebody very sick, or very tired,” said Claire.

  “Oh my, I don’t like the sound of that, though you’re probably right. I must say, the whole thing gave me the creeps. Do you think somebody very old wrote it? The writing looks so weak and old fashioned. But why would an old person come creeping in like that? I asked Rose Bennett what the class had been discussing, the day before the words appeared. She remembered that she had asked them; ‘If you could be granted only one wish, what would you wish for?” The next morning, the words began to appear: Nothing but death. Then just as suddenly, it stopped.”

  Claire examined the photograph closely. “What’s that down at the bottom of the blackboard? It looks like the letters ‘E.M.’ in the same writing.”

  “Oh yes, sometimes that appeared too. But nobody knew what it meant,” said Mrs Sidwell. And then the bell rang and she had to go.

  * * * *

  Vlad Smith and Jack Stewart were bedded down in an old-fashioned Tourist Guesthouse for the night. It was owned by Mrs Warrington, who looked like a gentlewoman in reduced circumstances. A bottle and glasses stood on the table next to a small pile of rather unprofessional-looking printed matter.

  Jack tugged a comb through his tangled molasses curls and picked one up. “Nice old guy who gave us these,” he said. “Mr Pabrocky. All these years he’s been sending you these things and then all of a sudden you turn up on his doorstep. The News Bulletin of the Atlantic Folk Lore, two words and no hyphen, very dubious usage, Club,” he read. “Volume XV, number 11, to be precise. ‘WHO’S BOSS IN YOUR WALL?’ Cute, hey? There is a story told particularly in the south eastern and south central states of a spook or specter or bogle or hant who inhabitants houses and other older, usually, buildings. He is musty and gant and lives in the walls and floors and empty rooms and is seldom seen. The description is that he is skeletal but unlike other such myths he is depicted as wearing old clothes and is afraid of cats and fires. Perhaps because he is all dried up? It is quite a task to look this subject up in indexes and bibliographies, for one thing because it has so many names and for another so little seems to have been published. So we urge our members to make inquiries wherever they happen to be. Perhaps our little amateur News Bulletin may provide some information which the learned quarterlies have not. This folk tale figure is called ‘Paper-Man’ because he lives behind the wall paper which used to be on every wall but now no longer owing to the high cost and labor and also, we assume, because of a prejudice that ‘Bugs’ breed there. This creature issues a noise which is variously described as clicking or clattering or even rustling. Hence the various names of ‘Rustler’ or ‘Clicker’ as well as ‘the Boss in the Wall.’ Another name is ‘House Devil’ and Mary Mae Subchak reports she has heard it referred to as ‘the Devil in the Wall.’ “

  Stewart next applied his lips to a glass, then said, “Well, I would give this a ... a B-minus. You, Dr Smith? Trouble with amateurs, they are always reinventing the wheel.”

  “MORE ON PAPER-MAN NAMES (CONT.)” Jack read.

  “We find that the so-called ‘Minorcan’ descended people of St Augustine, Fla., employ the name or term ‘Clicky Dicky.’ Alas for our hopes that we might find some such Spanish survival variants. Crossing the peninsula to Pensacola, we note that ‘Clicky Bizky’ has become ‘Tricky Dicky,’ a term extending as far south on that coast as Tampa. We were unable to find this legend at all in St Petersburg, Fla, an absence tentatively attributed to the Northern-Origin of so Many of The People in the ‘Winter Capital’. Mr Pabrocky has suggested, with the well-known twinkle in his eye, that it is remarkable nonetheless that neither ‘Clicker’ nor ‘Clicky Dicky’ is to be found where there are so many Senior Citizens (of whom he is one!), considering how many of them have the medically well-known condition, ‘a clicking knee-cap’! Humor apart, this does raise the QUESTION, if the ‘clicking’ attributed to the specter comes from the sound of teeth as had generally been believed or to some other source.Hmmm.” Jack put the News Bulletin down.

  Vlad sighed wearily. “Is there any more brandy in the bottle?”

  There was no more brandy in the bottle. They argued back and forth about opening another bottle. Each took both sides. Then they opened another bottle.

  “Should we read more mind-improving books now?” asked Jack.

  Vlad said he’d rather write a mind-improving book called, “The Myth of the Paper-Man Examined and Refuted. Even that title shows how far I’ve come in my thinking. A month ago I’d no more have needed to refute it than I would have refuted Dracula or Frankenstein. Household words; everybody knows about them, but nobodybelieves in them, or cowers in fear of them.”

  Jack slipped a cassette of Buxtehude’s Misa Brevis into his lil ole cassette player. His movements made goofy shadows on the wall. “That nice?” he asked.

  “More than nice, it’s ravishing,” said Vlad sleepily. “When it’s over, play it again, Sam.”

  Perhaps Sam had played it again, but now it was not playing. A shadow was playing on the floor, which goofy would not describe. It looked like the shadow of an enormous four-legged spider gliding upside down across the floor. Whatever it was looked horrible. Dear god, would he forever be seeing horrid and impossible things?

  Jack was sitting up in his bed with his face gone ghastly. Then he leaped out of his bed and out of their room, and went roaring and running down the hallway. “Where did it go? Did yousee it, Vlad? It ran along the ceiling!” Jack dragged a table and chair into the hallway and started to climb on it.

  Mrs Warrington appeared, with her hair in a gray-streaked braid, and a man’s bathrobe over her nightgown. She stretched out her hands and called, “Mr Stewart! You must stop this now!”

  “Miz Warrington! Where did it go? Where did it come from? What lives in this hallway?”

  Many expressions passed rapidly over her worn face, but now they settled into one expression: a gentlewoman in reduced circumstances. “Mr Stewart,” she said in a quick but firm and level voice, “I am very sorry that you had a bad dream, but I will not be shouted at in my own house, and I refuse to hold a conversation with a strange man in his underwear. Please take the table and chair back, sir!”

  “No I won’t, Miz Warrington, not yet. Please excuse me ma’am,” said Jack, as he climbed onto the table and chair, and began to examine the imperfect surface of the ceiling.

  Mrs Warrington was actually wringing her hands. “What is he doing? Can’t you make him stop, Professor Smith? You have terrified me with those awful yells, and now this! What is it?”

  Jack said in doleful tones, “It didn’t rattle or click, but I know what it is, ma’am, and I reckon you know too.”

  The woman’s face seemed to collapse in upon itself, and she tottered and leaned against the wall, for just a moment, then sprang away as though it were red-hot. Her voice was now trembling but fierce. “This guesthouse is all I have to live on. I don’t know who you are, but I want you to get out right now. I don’t want your money, please go!”

  They went as soon as they could dress and pack. Without discussion they left money on the table. Then they got into the car and drove in silence, with Vlad behind the wheel. His sallow face was weary, and his blue-gray eyes were troubled and gray.

  “What did you see?” Vlad finally asked.

  “I woke up and saw this thing scuttling across the ceiling. Something like a man, but ho
rribly bony and filthy, and utterly nasty in some way I can’t describe. You?”

  “I just saw the shadow,” said Vlad. “I never heard of one on the ceiling.”

  “It was clinging by its long nails to the tiny gaps in the plaster, and the flaps of torn clothing swayed, and that vile body swayed too. I don’t know where it came from, or where it went to. There’s no window or hatchway, only a little ventilation slit that maybe a rat could get through, but not a man.”

  Eventually they stopped at the brightest and newest motel they could find, with walls too thin for even a roach to hide.

  * * * *

  Mr Pabrocky’s News Bulletin led Vlad and Jack to a privately-endowed art museum. They were repeating a list of names to the “museum lady”, and the list had begun to seem very tiresome and, indeed, loathsome. “. . . or the Boss in the Wall. . .?” Vlad finished the list, and a look of great surprise came over her face.

  She said, “Of course. Hobson’s Ghost. You know that all institutions have their skeletons in the closet. That one is ours. Long ago we bought what is known as a ‘primitive’ portrait, meaning it was painted by a self-taught, itinerant artist. It showed a woman sitting in a room. Evidently something was painted into the picture which wasn’t apparent. Something was painted over, and then the over-paint sloughed off. It rose to the surface like a ghost, and it was ghost-like, and quite famous for a while. But finally we had to take the picture off exhibition because parents complained that it scared their children - and it probably scared them. On the old acquisition slip is written Hobson. We aren’t sure if that’s the subject or the artist, and faintly penciled in is Boss in the Wall. Whatever that means. Would you like to see it?”