The Best New Horror 1

by Stephen Jones

  “I left right away. A train took me to Orenburg, which was the closest civilized place to my new home, and that nearly a hundred kilometers away. I located a troika going into the Urals from there, a coach of odd travelers, and I secured a place on board, next to a man, a Persian I believe, just arrived from the Caspian Sea. He smelled of an alien sweetness and his Russian was terrible, but he smiled broadly, openly, with huge white teeth, whenever I looked his way. The others in the troika seemed to take offence at his presence and scorned me for befriending him even that little bit. No one spoke to me really the whole first day of the journey. I didn’t care. I leaned back and watched the incredible scenery float by—the rolling steppes, whole hillsides covered in flowers, the mountains growing always larger and more distinct. By that second day the majority of the passengers had reached their various destinations or had gotten off at a crossroad to take a different path. Only three people remained: myself, the Persian, and a man who was going with the driver to some place on the Tobol River. ‘This is old country,’ he said to me. Left alone with us, I suppose he no longer felt the need to pretend indifference. He claimed this place we traveled through belonged to the oldest civilizations in the world. Time, he said, had hardly touched the land there. He could not understand why someone such as I traveled alone in such a place. So I told him about my teaching position, my first one. Where? In Devashgorod.

  “The traveler to Tobol hadn’t heard of it but the Persian beside me was plainly disturbed by the name. His faced pinched, and it furrowed like a plowed field, and he clutched my hand, saying, ‘Must you go? Lady, must you go?’ I answered that I had to, yes, or have no employment and a bad record. From that moment on, I became the outcast and he, the dark man, avoided me while the other man laughed contemptuously and called him a ‘superstitious peasant,’ but also quickly turned to reverie. Shortly after that he feigned sleep. Eventually, the wagon deposited me and my trunk at the intersection with the Devashgorod Road.

  “A one-horse cart arrived. The driver greeted me with a great wave. He stood up in the cart, a huge man with long, shiny black hair and a heavy mustache. He had the cheeks of a Kazakh that looked set in place with a trowel. He wore a bright peasant shirt and rough trousers tucked into high boots, very worn. His name was Trifon, a curious name, I thought. As we drove to his village, he explained that he was the ataman, which is the chieftain of sorts, but with religious as well as judiciary duties. Every Kazaki village had an ataman, he informed me.

  “The road took us up into the true foothills of the Urals. Peaks still had snow on them in May. The road became a trail, barely more than two ruts in the high grass. I experienced the moment that comes upon the threshold of a new life—of fear and doubt and a tingling excitement.

  “The wagon bounced over the top of a ridge and there below me lay Devashgorod. Like a collection of dollhouses, quite lovely, colorful, it was a scene of utter serenity—or very nearly so. At the edge of the village nearest the road below us there was a great pit grown over by grass and flowers. From above I could look right down into that pit, and I found myself staring at the peaked roof of a house. It looked not very old, and I was amazed. ‘What happened there?’ I asked. Trifon replied quickly, ‘Terrible. An earthquake, the ground opened up, the house was simply devoured by the earth. Most terrible day for our village. But here, look,’ he said and pointed to a grove of fir trees nearby, where they had built their schoolhouse—no more than a shack really. ‘That is where you will teach.’ Trifon clapped his hands, just like a chieftain denying further discussion, and down into the valley we went.”

  Lizaveta paused to take a long pull from her watered vodka.

  Puzzled somewhat, Zarubkin asked her, “But how did this drive you into whoring? Did Trifon rape—attack you?”

  She laughed, dribbling a little vodka. “Oh, dear captain, no. As if such a thing would make you want more of it! I will tell you, it’s coming, but let me do it naturally, please.” She hugged against him to win his patience. Outside, someone shouted an angry string of invectives and someone else told him to shut up. Lizaveta ignored the noise and said, “Listen now. I began my teaching the next day. A local family called Shaldin took me in. They had a farm and a big house, and Trifon had prearranged everything with them. They had a son and a daughter who had each been schooled for some years. From them I learned of how my predecessor had approached teaching and some of the names of the students, the ones who were their friends. The daughter, Larissa, warned me to watch out for a boy named Akaky. He was apparently the ringleader for trouble. In all, only twenty-two students attended, a fact which hinted that there must be families who chose not to send their children, who taught them at home if at all, but who did not want them to know of the ‘other world’.

  “Early in the morning, before the children would arrive, I went to the schoolhouse. There I found stacks of papers and notebooks left by my predecessor. Dust coated the stacks and the desktop. I wondered how long the children had been without a teacher.

  “While I finished cleaning off this area, the children began to file in. Most of them were shy, a bit afraid of me. Then, from outside, there came loud jeering, a teasing chorus of voices. I went to the doorway. At my appearance, they all fell silent and moved off—a dozen or so children. At first I thought they had been picking on an old man, but in a moment I saw that the old man was in fact a child, a victim of a terrible, withering disease that had made him age prematurely. I had heard of this, but never had I seen so pitiable a sight.

  “He stood in a sort of hunch, as if the disease were pulling his body in upon itself. His head seemed too heavy for his neck. The purple veins showed under his skull, which was almost hairless. His skin had that quality of transparency that an onion has. Awful. His cold, bird-like eyes glared at me, and he hobbled past, still staring at me, wheezing as he climbed through the door, his right hand crippled up and pressed against his side. I could not believe the cruelty of these children, that they could openly taunt such an unfortunate. I resolved to change that if I accomplished nothing else. Children afflicted by this disease rarely live more than ten years, and I wanted above all to let this boy enjoy what time he had left.

  “Once the children had taken their seats, I asked them each to tell me their names and how far they had advanced in their learning. When the time came for the wizened little boy, he refused to speak and just stared with his hard eyes straight ahead, as if he were deaf. I thought here was a poor victim, so harassed that he distrusted even me. I asked that someone tell me about him. Larissa Shaldin stood up. She made no sound, but the boy seemed to sense where she stood behind him. ‘That is Akaky,’ she told me in an incomprehensibly bitter tone. ‘He rejects what you teach him and will continue to, no matter how hard you try. His family even despise him for—’ she stopped and looked around herself ‘—for shunning everything.’

  “‘Why do you despise him, though?’ And, though I addressed her, it was a question to the whole classroom. Larissa became dismayed by the question and sat down. Someone more daring called out from the back, ‘You can see why—just look at him!’ This engendered snickers from around the room. I saw that I couldn’t carry the argument further without terribly embarrassing the child, so I left it at that and turned to instruction, working on their alphabets and handwriting skills. They knew barely half their letters. My predecessor had not been very qualified for her duties, it seemed.

  “That evening I knocked on Larissa’s door and went in to apologize for singling her out, which I hadn’t meant to do. She sat on her bed in her undergarments and wouldn’t look at me until I sat beside her. ‘Child,’ I said to her, ‘you can’t treat an unfortunate that way. It’s morally wrong.’

  “‘An unfortunate?’ she replied. Again virulence shot through her words. ‘Akaky? He’s everything he deserves to be, everything. Death would do us a service to take him.’ She stopped speaking but her face expressed how much more she could have said. Her eyes moistened from this contained anger a
nd she jerked her head away. ‘You’re just the same as the other one. You come here with your ideas about how things are. Everywhere is not like here. Please, I’m warning you now—let Akaky alone. Don’t try to help him.’

  “‘But that’s ridiculous, child. Why shouldn’t—’

  “‘Do houses sink into the ground in your Moscow? Does the earth open up and devour people?’ After that outburst she refused to say anything further. Her cheeks burned as if she were ashamed to have said any of this. I squeezed her hand quite uncomprehendingly and then left, thinking that her family must have put such ideas into her head. I could not imagine why. Had they branded him an outcast because of his disease? Did they think him contagious? Or were these people so backward in their thinking that they saw such physical calamity as a curse from God, a mark of evil? Questions such as that kept me awake a long time.

  “The next morning, Larissa’s father reinforced them for me. He confronted me in the hallway, blocking my way to the door. He said that, while he prided himself on doing his part for the village, there were rules in his house and one of these was that I was never to enter the children’s bedrooms. I didn’t know what to say. He went on, asking rhetorically, ‘How would it have seemed if you had gone into my son’s room last night to speak with him?’

  “I answered that such a thing would have been unseemly without a doubt, but I added, ‘Nevertheless, your son is but thirteen, sir.’

  “‘Well, and just so,’ was his reply as though I had agreed with him. ‘An impressionable age. And he is already infatuated with you. You didn’t know? He’s a romantic boy, my little Vald. He would mistake your attentions. Or he might think that he, too, had the right to pass into other people’s bedrooms at night—his sister’s for instance.’

  “I could not believe this argument. Nevertheless, I deferred. I was, after all, a guest. But Shaldin could not leave the matter there. He went on, ‘Just remember, madam, you may be the teacher in the school, but here I make the rules and it is only proper that you adjust to them. After all, what do we know of you, or you know of any of us?”

  “‘Very little,’ I replied, ‘but I know enough to see now that this is in some way connected to the incident with the child, Akaky.’

  “I had known nothing of the sort, but the urge to say that seized me. Shaldin actually blanched as if I had uttered blasphemy. Then he pushed past me and went out of the house, slamming the door. The entire family must have heard the argument. The echo of the closing door banged all around the upstairs.

  “I had no doubt now that Shaldin had forbidden any talk of the child in his house. Now I suspected there might be a blood feud between families involved. Everyone knows how strong are blood ties among the Kazaki. I’ve heard of disputes that lasted through generations, when the actual cause had been forgotten or even repaired. On the weight of that assessment alone, I determined to go see Akaky’s family that afternoon.

  “When the day’s lessons had been completed, the children went off to help with family chores. There is always work in the fields and at home. I kept Akaky after all the others had gone, and I didn’t tell him until then what I wanted of him. He did not even blink at my demand to see his family. That wrinkled mask of hatred became, if possible, more disdainful. I was struck with an extraordinary sense that all of this had happened before, that I was repeating the actions of my predecessor. The child climbed off his stool and shuffled out of the schoolhouse. I hurried after him, leaving my papers and things behind.

  “I can remember my eyes stinging from the humid heat of the day as I hiked after him. I took to holding my hair off my neck and unbuttoned the collar of my blouse. The light breeze helped somewhat. Keeping up with Akaky proved no trouble despite my lace-up boots, which were hardly designed for rough hills. We passed sheep and goats—the stink of the goats clung with a particular tenacity to the steamy air. It pervaded my clothes.”

  The captain laughed. “There’s surely no stink like it,” he agreed, and passed the bottle back to her. She rose up to take a drink, and he saw her profile against the vague light of the window—saw the sparkle of moisture on her lips. She was, he reminded himself, really very lovely. In the street below Peresylny, he heard feet clatter on the cobblestones, and more shouting—spewed cries that sounded like alarms. He climbed past her, across the beds as she had done, and stared down through the grimy window. Fires spotted the night, but except for these small enclaves he could see nothing of Khitrovka no matter how he strained. The footsteps ran on, fading away.

  Behind him, Lizaveta said, “It’s like this here every night. Sometimes you hear it and you know someone’s being murdered.”

  Zarubkin accepted that he would learn nothing from his watch and crawled back beside her. The bottle touched his hip, cold. He flinched and took it from her, took a drink, then settled back to listen to her. “You were going to his house,” he prompted.

  “Akaky’s house,” she said, “it was a hut actually. They had a large pen built on one side of it, but the animals inside were scrawny things. We had reached a rise slightly above the hut and as we descended, four people emerged from the doorway and stood in a row outside, waiting. They must have been watching for us. Akaky went up to his father and stopped. The child shrank into himself more than ever and glanced up at his father without raising his head. Then he pushed past his family and went inside. Only then did they all turn their attention to me—all staring with that same dark malignity the boy had. I tried to excuse their hostility by telling myself they must have felt cursed by his affliction. I told them who I was and that I was offering to help both the boy and them.

  “The father snorted at me. ‘Help us?’ he said. “You wish to help us, then kill that boy. You’ll be helping the whole village and yourself, lady teacher.”

  “I couldn’t believe what I heard. The man saw this, too, but all he did was shake his head sadly. Then he told me I was like the others, and that perhaps the next one would have a chance. “Maybe by then the boy will use himself up,” he remarked. “Maybe he’ll use himself up on you.” Then he told me to go away. I turned to his wife, but she refused to look at me. His older sister—a girl who should have been married by then in that village—eyed me askance, as if daring me to try and address her. The grandmother beside her was the only one showing any sympathy in her face. Maybe she had traveled or at least understood that a world existed beyond Devashgorod. She said, “Best you should teach those who need your gifts.” I thought then, my God, she could be Akaky’s wife, he looks so ancient. The father inserted himself between us and repeated his order that I leave. What choice did I have?

  “That evening no one in the Shaldin household said more than a few words to me, and even then they would not meet my eyes. Larissa’s brother—the one who supposedly had a fondness for me—actually fled to his room when I encountered him on the stairs.

  “I lay in bed that night, finding sleep impossible for hours. When I did finally drift off, I had vivid dreams. The sunken house had been resurrected, and I was walking through it, down wainscoted hallways. Ahead of me, doors on both sides of the halls swung open and closed.

  “As I drifted along, I thought I heard a voice softly call my name. Drawn toward it, I waited for that door to open to me, then passed through it into a small room, the walls papered in burgundy, the curtains of white lace.

  “A woman stood there. I thought at first that she must be a grandmother, but oddly, she wore clothes not unlike mine, clothes that a young woman would wear. The curtain fluttered around her. “Don’t give in to him,” she said. “He’ll eat your life up to survive. Look at me.” She turned more toward me, and I saw that her blouse below the collar shone with a wet darkness and seemed to be stuffed into a depression between her breasts, a hole. She might have said more, but the curtain came to life like a serpent. It wound around her throat and dragged her off her feet. I took a step toward her, but she held up her hand for me to stay away. Then the curtain snapped and she crashed back through the w
indow. Beams of shadow, like an infernal opposite to sunlight, flooded the room. The floor splintered beneath me, and I dropped down into a pit.

  “I awoke in my own room in the Shaldin house. The bedclothes stuck to me as I sat up, and I pushed them aside. My pulse raced like a horse. I threw off a great shiver. With the lamp turned up, I sat against the pillows and thought over the dream. The woman—I knew that she had been my predecessor at the school. What had he done to her, how had she been made to age like that? Akaky’s grandmother came to mind. What if she were no older? The more I thought about this, the less it made sense to me. It was, I reminded myself, no more than a dream, which had conveniently assembled the things that were most unusual about the village into a narrative, but not a coherent reality. Feeling utterly foolish, I crawled back beneath the coves and went back to sleep; but I left the lamp burning brightly. I had no further dreams then that I remember.

  “The child did not appear at the school that day, and another of the children informed me that Akaky had been too weak to come in today. The whole of the morning went uneventfully. In the afternoon, as I as returning home, I saw Trifon. He asked me how I found my new job, and I told him that it was going well, that the children needed a great deal of assistance because the last teacher had not done her work properly. “She was a weaker vessel than you,” he replied, “but we shouldn’t judge her too harshly, should we?” It was as though he could read my doubts, or had shared my nightmare. I agreed with him. He told me, “What she forgot was that not all children need special attention, that some are made to learn, and others not. There are children who will refuse to be helped. Though they are only children. You, I believe, understand not to invite problems.” He bid me a good afternoon and went along the road. My hopes sank with that meeting, for I had expected that Trifon would give me answers where the others would not. Now I felt truly lost and a thousand miles away from the world I knew. I went to my room, closed the door, and began to cry. If anyone there heard me, they did not come to see what was the matter. Eventually, I cried myself to sleep.