The Best New Horror 1

by Stephen Jones

  “The troika picked me up later that day and I rode in the safety of the other passengers, saying nothing to them but protected by their presence, or so I hoped. But on the train to Moscow, I saw him outside the window twice, pressed to the glass like a fly on a wall. Where had he gotten the strength to do this? Had he killed someone else, drained their life to pursue me? I could not—did not want to—imagine it. And each time I saw him, he was more decrepit, more horrible. He looked like a mummified corpse, like nothing living. In Moscow I tried to go back to the University, but he sat on a bench by the door, knowing somehow that I would go there. In my despair I contemplated taking my own life, jumping into the river; but I haven’t the courage.

  “I don’t know when I decided at last to go to the Yama. I think I just found myself there, wandering, and I saw the fine houses and realized that Akaky could never imagine I’d go there. It frightened me at first, but the women were kind, and understanding. Most of them had been through the same initial fears. The madam promised me that I had a cultured look that would appeal to her aristocratic clientele. I used most of my money to bribe an officer into getting me a yellow card, and the rest was, as the girls had assured me, just a matter of playing a role. I came to enjoy it. Hardly ever did I go out, but one man wanted a companion for the opera season, and I knew opera where the others did not, so the madam insisted. As I feared, Akaky found me. I saw him as I came from the opera one night, but he would not approach while the man was with me. Like a gnarled stick creature, he hobbled along behind our carriage, following it all the way back to the Yama house.

  “I escaped that night, dressed like a beggar, my clothes in a bag. No one paid me any mind and I saw nothing of Akaky. This became my refuge, a shabby room with two other whores; nights I’ve always had company, but now they’ve fled. Now I’m trapped in this pestilent hole. I must get out to work, to protect myself, but to go out is to invite Akaky to find me. I drink vodka and hope it will kill me, but it’s too weak. All it can do is keep me from dreaming. He’ll find me in my dreams. He’ll get inside me again.” She shivered. “Safety, I learned long ago, is an illusion. None of us is safe. All Moscow isn’t big enough to hide me. He’ll find me. The filth here feeds a million rats.”

  Zarubkin thought of the creatures outside in Khitrovka Market. He recalled the hideous dwarf where the sausage had been cooking. Dwarf! He sat up.

  In the street something exploded. The lopsided square of the window lit up and the shutters rattled. Zarubkin jumped from the bed. Screams echoed from below, reports of gunfire. “What’s going on?” he cried. He pressed against the glass. A few vague, scurrying silhouettes were all he could glimpse. Then came the rumbling that became hooves clopping on cobbles. Many horses. He could imagine them, the cavalry, like a wave. Shots sounded in a volley, a string of sound; and when that echo died down, it revealed a growing chant: “Bei zhidov! Bei zhidov!”

  Zarubkin hurried to the bed and pulled on his trousers. He leaned back toward the window. Lizaveta sat up as if spellbound by the chanting. “The Jews,” she said. Last night the whores, tonight the Jews. Here in Khitrovka lived all the usurers to whom so many of the soldiers owed money. The city, devolving into chaos, would take her captain from her. “No!” she cried. “You can’t go, you promised to stay!” She stretched and grabbed his arm to make him look at her.

  Footsteps pounded in the hall. Doors slammed open or closed. Zarubkin drew his pistol. A voice shouted his name—it was Vanya—and he answered, “Here!” by reflex, wishing even as he called out that he had kept silent. Lizaveta’s hand slid away and he could not meet her gaze.

  The door burst open to the whirlwind Vanya, his pistol also drawn. His wide eyes gleamed in the low light from the oil lamp; he looked to Zarubkin like a lost child. “It’s a pogrom, Sergei! Come on, they’re shooting Jews tonight. It’s worse than ever.” He glanced at Lizaveta with embarrassment. “Gladykin’s already out there, ‘for target practice’, he said.”

  Zarubkin had known Gladykin for over a year—how had he tolerated the cruelty of the fellow for so long? Lizaveta rose, naked, from the bed suddenly and charged at Vanya. “You!” she shouted at him. “Here’s a Jewess for you. Start with me.”

  Vanya’s mouth hung open.

  “Don’t,” Zarubkin protested in confusion.

  “Here, you foul pig, here’s all you could possibly want, both a whore and a Jew, one shot gets you double your prize. Where’s your guts, oaf?”

  Zarubkin said, “Lizaveta,” harshly. She ignored him, closing on Vanya, who was trapped confusedly between two cogent thoughts and could not even move. She took his hand, caressing his wrist, the butt of his gun. “Help me with it,” she implored him. A moment later the gun fired. It lit up the room for an instant like a sputtering candle. Lizaveta stumbled away from the horrified Vanya. Zarubkin caught her in his arms. Her head slid along his shoulder, into the crook of his elbow. “What did you do?” Her blood darkened his hand. “Why?”

  She looked up at him and said, “Vodka’s too slow.” Her whole weight suddenly sagged against him.

  “But—my God, Sergei, she did it,” Vanya was stammering. This was worse than the deaths of anonymous peasants, this was a woman with a face and a name.

  “Yes, Vanya, I know, I know.” Zarubkin laid the body on the bed. He knelt beside her and held her hand. “God forgive her this terrible sin,” he said finally. “Give her peace.”

  Outside more shots and cries resounded. The chant bounced from building to building, a cannonade. The air in the room seemed to stir around Zarubkin and he lifted his head. A cool draught brushed his cheek, then passed across the other. It breathed his name. He could barely believe what he understood then. She was with him still. Behind her presence, however, he could feel the smaller one pressing in. She clung to him for a moment, as she had in life. Then he lost the sense of her. He wanted to reach and bring her back. Sadly, he glanced at Vanya. The hairs on his neck crept up.

  Vanya’s mouth was turned down in a bitter scowl. The gleam in his eyes was no longer that of a scared child. It had become a feverish shine of the most intense hatred Zarubkin had ever seen. Vanya saw him watching and the scowl flattened smugly. Zarubkin had seen that face before. For a moment the pistol wavered in his direction before Vanya reholstered it. Jerkily, he turned away and walked out of the room, leaving the door open.

  “Vanya!” Zarubkin cried. A shriek from down the hall answered him. Hastily, he grabbed up the rest of his uniform and charged out. Bullets filled the air like flies.

  In Khitrovka Market, the horror had barely begun.

  DONALD R. BURLESON

  Snow Cancellations

  DONALD R. BURLESON is a scholar of H.P. Lovecraft, although there is nothing of the Old Master’s style in the tale of childhood terror that follows.

  His fiction has appeared in Twilight Zone, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Horror Show, 2AM, Eldritch Tales and other magazines, as well as in the anthologies The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories and Post-Mortem. He is the author of the books H.P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study, Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe, many articles on HPL, and has even translated Lovecraft’s “The Terrible Old Man” into Esperanto.

  THE SNOW CAME SILENTLY to the window like the blind white groping hand of a mummy. Resting on his knees in bed and stretching toward the brittle panes, Jamie could just make out the vague outlines of the bird feeder on the edge of the deck, its once sharp wooden angles now muffled in white. Beyond, the pines and spruces that grew close to the back of the house were snow-shrouded ghosts waving in the wind, nodding to each other, whispering. It was going to turn out to be a big storm. Jamie liked that. Sort of. There was something nice about a lot of snow. But also something a little eerie, somehow.

  Beyond the bedroom door, Mom had the radio on while she slammed around getting breakfast ready, and getting herself ready for work; Dad had the early shift at the mill and had left some time before. Jamie, still half asleep at the time, had heard hi
m shovelling the driveway, crunching through the snow in his boots, scraping the shovel blade on the surface of the drive. It must have been snowing for a good part of the night, and the air visible through the frosted window was still a frenzy of flakes, falling thick and fast.

  The bedroom door opened to admit his mother’s face and a distant whiff of oatmeal cooking. “Jamie? Time to—oh, you’re awake, good. You’d better hurry up and get dressed, and help me listen to the radio to see if they’re calling school off. Come on, now.”

  Slipping his jeans and flannel shirt on and poking his feet into slippers that weren’t really much warmer than the hardwood floor they had spent the night on, he made a trip to the bathroom and then to the kitchen, where his oatmeal was steaming on the table beside a glass of orange juice. From the shelf over the dishwasher, the radio was blaring, turned up loud so that Mom could hear it as she moved about the house.

  “. . . a major snowstorm for southern New Hampshire and northeastern Massachusetts, with fifteen to eighteen inches accumulation possible by noon in some locations. If you have to go out, leave yourself a lot of extra time to get where you’re going this morning, friends, because it’s a real mess out there. And please drive with care, won’t you—hey, we like you, and we want you to get there safe and sound. Better yet, if you don’t have to go out, why don’t you just pour yourself another cup of that nice hot coffee and sit back and keep us company? Time is now 6:41, temperature outside our studios is twenty-four degrees. I’m Rick Phillips for Storm Center Radio, 1360 on your dial, coming to you from downtown Manchester. The cancellations are coming in, and we’ll have a complete rundown for you following these messages, so stay tuned.”

  Jamie ate his oatmeal and watched the snow through the kitchen window. Wow—maybe they were going to cancel school. He’d heard that it happened here in New England all the time. In Arizona, where they’d lived till this past year, they never, never cancelled school. Ever. The only time he’d even seen snow before was that one time in Colorado, when he was six.

  “Mom?”

  She paused in her trip past the door. “Yes, dear?”

  “What if they do cancel school?”

  She shrugged. “I’ll just call Mrs. Carter to come over and sit with you. She only lives a couple of miles from here.”

  He knew Mrs. Carter well; she’d sat with him three or four times when Mom and Dad went out. She was okay, a little grumpy sometimes, but okay. Still—

  “Mom? Maybe they’ll close up at Sanborn’s and you won’t have to go to work.”

  She shook her head ruefully. “Are you kidding? Sanborn’s wouldn’t close if it was the end of the world. I have to go in. Listen, you’ll be okay with Mrs. Carter. I’ll be home an hour early, too, because I’ll work through my lunch hour to make up the time.” She withdrew.

  Jamie worked on his oatmeal while the radio jangled its way through a series of commercials. He thought about the school building, ghostly and dark and empty of kids. Did the teachers come in anyway? He tried to imagine Miss Bouvier staying home, eating her breakfast in a house-coat and slippers with her hair up in curlers and no makeup on, but it was hard to think of a teacher that way.

  “. . . the list of cancellations that we have so far. We’ll give them again at quarter past the hour. Now, we’ve had no chance to put these in alphabetical order, so listen carefully. Here we go.” Jamie set his spoon down and listened. “Manchester, no school, all schools. Manchester Senior Center craft classes scheduled for this morning have been cancelled. Litchfield, no school, all schools. Hudson, no schools, all schools. Concord, at least a ninety-minute delay, but keep listening, they may decide to cancel. Amherst, no school, all schools. Bedford, no school, all schools. Also, Bedford Senior Center is open but no transportation. Hooksett, no school, all schools.” Come on, Jamie thought, finishing his cereal and trying not to chew too hard, so that he could hear clearly. Come on, who cares about all that stuff—what about Merrimack?

  “Derry, no school, all schools. Salem, no school, all schools. Ding Dong Bell Nursery School in Goffstown is closed today. Pelham, no school, all schools, but faculty will still meet at three o’clock unless further notice, stay tuned. This just in”—Jamie had a feeling, and held his breath—“Merrimack, no school, all schools.”

  “Mom?”

  “I heard it, Jamie. I’m dialing Mrs. Carter now.”

  He put his bowl and spoon in the sink and went to the front window in the living room, glass of orange juice in hand, and stood watching the storm. The snow was beautiful in a way, but somehow also darkly suggestive, as if saying: see, you people think you’re so smart, but I can shut you down any time I feel like it, and I feel like it right now.

  Gazing across the front yard through the swirling gray-white air, he had to find the mailbox, now a shapeless muff of snow standing on a post at the end of the driveway, before he could tell where the yard ended out there and where the street began. Somewhere nearby, snowplows were thundering their way through the streets, but they hadn’t gotten to this street yet. He remembered seeing a snowplow that one time before, in Colorado, a lumbering metal dinosaur with great shining eyes, nosing its way through the snowdrifts. His mom was talking on the phone now, but he couldn’t hear her over the rumble of the plow that had just swung the corner onto this street and was barreling past, pushing a sliding mountain of snow with its enormous blade.

  “Jamie.”

  He turned. “Mom! The snowplow piled snow up at the end of the drive. I’ll get my coat and boots on and go out and shovel it for you.”

  She shook her head. “No, I don’t want you out there, Jamie, not when you just got over a fever. Thanks anyway, dear, but I can do it. Or maybe I’ll just drive over it. Anyhow, what I wanted to tell you was that Mrs. Carter can’t come over to sit with you today.” Mrs. Carter has been cancelled, Jamie thought; stay tuned. “There’s nobody else I can get, so I guess you’ll have to be here by yourself. That’ll be okay, won’t it—you’re nine now, you can handle it, can’t you?”

  He shrugged. “Sure, Mom, it’s okay.” He wasn’t really sure how he felt about it. In a way it was exciting, the prospect of being on his own for the day, but then again. . . .

  He must have let his thoughts show on his face, because now she was making assurances to him. “You can watch television or play records or run your train set or do anything you like. And when you get hungry for lunch, you can make yourself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I know that’s your favorite.”

  He warmed to that idea readily enough. “Can I make more than one?”

  She laughed, but looked at him warily. “All right, but don’t you go eating yourself sick, do you hear me, Jamie Hutchins?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I mean, no, ma’am, I won’t.”

  She was pulling her overcoat and boots on. “You can make a couple of sandwiches if you want, and there’s a bag of potato chips in the pantry. And if you’re still hungry, you can have an apple. There’s a big bottle of soda too, in the fridge, for later, but you drink a glass of milk with your lunch, understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And don’t make a mess in the kitchen, and don’t fool around with the oven or the microwave. And don’t go outside in this cold.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Okay. I know you’ll be all right. Here’s my number at work”—she scribbled it on the back of an envelope and left it on the coffee table—“in case you need to call, and I’ll call you at lunchtime. I have to run.”

  “Okay, Mom. ’Bye.”

  “Bye, dear.” She was out the door, and he saw her trudging through the mounting snow to her car in the drive. He watched from the window while she brushed the snow off the car and shoveled the end of the drive. He watched as she backed the car out, watched until her taillights winked red through the windswept falling flakes and were gone around the corner.

  Then he was alone. Alone in the house, alone with the snow.

  Outside the window, the wind s
wirled into a dismal-sounding howl and rippled the snow like a curtain. Jamie stepped closer to the window, sipping his orange juice, and heard the floorboards creek faintly as he shifted his weight on them. Funny, how quiet, how empty a house could sound.

  Well. He finished the juice, deposited the glass in the kitchen sink, and went down the hall to his room. Sliding the top dresser drawer open, he fumbled through the mess of socks and underwear and uncovered his emergency supply of candy bars, taking three of them and closing the drawer. Then he went to his parents’ bedroom farther down the hall.

  Kicking his slippers off, he folded back the bed-covers and crawled onto the bed and sat crosslegged in the middle facing the snow-crusted window and arranged the sheets snugly around his legs like a bird’s nest. He had decided on this room rather than his own because this was where the other phone was. He was going to call Kevin Riley.

  He unwrapped a candy bar and took a bite and leaned across to the phone beside the bed. Tapping out Kevin’s number, he straightened back out in his nest with the phone in hand. A kid’s voice answered on the other end.

  “Lo?”